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abernard102@gmail.com 2015-12-31

Summary:

"‘To me open access means free access to the results of scientific research that has been publicly funded. It is also good that universities and institutes with less money benefit from this access.’ Dirk-Jan Scheffers is Assistant Professor of Molecular Microbiology at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences of the University of Groningen. He works in a multidisciplinary environment: his research also touches upon aspects of biochemistry and biotechnology, for example. He is author of numerous publications. What does Dirk-Jan Scheffers think of open access as a method of publication? Scheffers thinks that in general open access is successful, but he can also see negative developments. He sees three barriers to publishing open access: predatory open access journals, that publish literally anything for payment, form the first barrier for less experienced academics. The second barrier is the astonishingly high Article Processing Charges (APCs) that some journals expect authors to pay. As publishers know that some funding bodies require the open access publication of the research that they fund, they promptly jack up the prices. Scheffers is fully aware that publishing costs money and that these costs must be covered, but he does think that the fees need to be in relation to the benefit that the journal represents. In some cases this benefit is not clear at first sight. A third barrier is the increase in ‘triple dipping’: when a publisher charges both APCs and subscription fees, while making use of academics who edit and assess articles for free. Scheffers fears that the worst will have to happen before things change here. Dirk-Jan Scheffers Scheffers is all too familiar with open access. As one of the editors of PLoS ONE he has the formidable task of assessing new manuscripts, selecting reviewers for these and making sure that everything runs smoothly. Scheffers edits about 12 new articles a year, and these appear on his desktop at least twice, so all in all it is a lot of work. But he sees this as part of his job as an academic, and says that above all he finds it very interesting and learns a lot from it ..."

Link:

http://www.rug.nl/bibliotheek/services/openaccess/oa-nieuwsbrief/2015-10-interview-scheffers

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.plos oa.gold oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.interviews oa.journals oa.people

Date tagged:

12/31/2015, 09:45

Date published:

12/31/2015, 04:45