Open access means business: Pay-to-publish approaching same impact factor as subscription journals

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-07-17

Summary:

“Open access journal BMC Medicine has added scientific rigor to the debate about open access research, by publishing an article which compares the scientific impact of open access with traditional subscription publishing and has found that both of these publishing business models produce high quality peer reviewed articles. The debate about who should pay for scientific publishing, the reader or the scientist, is of continuing importance to the scientific community but also to the general public, who already pay for the research though their taxes and are also affected by the results. Scientists currently rely on publishing in peer reviewed high quality journals to show that their research itself is of good quality, is of importance to their field of research, and consequently improves their chances of obtaining funding to continue their work. One way of measuring quality is by impact factors calculated from citation data - how many times other scientists have mentioned the research. Bo-Christer Björk from Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, and David Solomon from Michigan State University compared the impact factors of 610 open access journals and over 7,000 subscription journals... Bo-Christer Björk explained, ‘The open access debate has included accusations from some traditional publishers and their lobbyists that Open Access publishing implies low scientific quality and endangers the quality assurance function of the peer review system that the academic community and publishers have built up over decades. If you take into account the journal discipline, location of publisher and age of publication the differences in impact between open access and subscription journals largely disappear. In medicine and health, open access journals founded in the last 10 years are receiving on average as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same time.’ David Solomon continued, ‘It is easy to see why scientists might be sceptical of electronic, open access journals – after all they have their reputation to maintain. Open access journals that fund publishing with article processing charges (APCs), sometimes called gold open access, are on average cited more than other OA journals. Since the launch of professionally run high quality biomedical journals in 2000 gold OA has increased by 30% per year and many of these are on a par with their subscription counterparts.’”

Link:

http://www.sciencecodex.com/open_for_business_open_access_journals_reaching_the_same_scientific_impact_as_subscription_journals-95035

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.peer_review oa.impact oa.quality oa.prestige oa.fees oa.lay oa.bmc oa.jif oa.citations oa.biomedicine oa.studies oa.debates oa.journals oa.metrics

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

07/17/2012, 21:33

Date published:

07/17/2012, 22:22