Open access all areas? - Science Omega

“A study published last week in BioMed Central’s open access journal BMC Medicine comparing the scientific impact of traditional subscription-based journals with open access publishing has shown that both models result in high quality, peer reviewed journals with similar levels of impact. This, argues the researchers, gives the lie to the accusation – or sometimes assumption – that the open access business model produces journals of a lower quality. The analysis was based on citation data for 610 open access journals and 7000 subscription journals, with the citation rates for the latter being overall 30 per cent higher... ‘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,’ explained co-author Professor Bo-Christer Björk from Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki. ‘In medicine and health, open access journals founded in the last ten years are receiving on average as many citations as subscription journals launched during the same time...‘ Although there are many arguments for open access ... there are more complicated underlying issues, such as those challenged by this research. Some of these were addressed in a session at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) 2012... the majority of those in the science and scientific publishing community have accepted that ... open access is both beneficial and inevitable... ‘I completely support the mantra that if the public paid for this research they should have access to it, but that is a slightly sweeping statement when you ask what the public actually want access to,’ pointed out Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature. ‘What they want is a good presentation of the research; a presentation that is selected for them to a degree, a presentation that is edited so that it is not only consistent within itself but conforms to standards so that somebody who understands the field can relate it to other papers. Incidentally, they also want to be able to access it at all.’ Professor Maria Leptin, Director of the EMBO, also maintained a distinction between the various motivations for requiring or wanting access to journals... saying: ‘There’s a difference between the man in the street who wants to find out about the disease that is afflicting his mother-in-law, and scientists who want to reuse and reassess the data that have been published by their peers.’ Speaking also on behalf of the ISE... of which she is President, Professor Leptin formed her argument from the perspective of learned societies and scientific organisations within Europe, many of which derive a large share of their income from the publication of journals. Many learned societies fund training, travel and scholarships, and organise conferences and other networking or educational activities. ‘Importantly, these groups are grass-roots, self-organised units within science,’ she stated... ‘Publishing does not exist in an economic vacuum,’ Professor Leptin continued... Campbell agreed... ‘I think what is absolutely inevitable on quite a short timescale is that green open access will become the minimum requirement from many funding agencies including the EU,’ he said. ‘Whether gold open access where you have money to pay for that immediate access will become a requirement is much less clear... Dr Alma Swan, Director of European Advocacy for SPARC .... expressed the belief that ... open access will enable individual researchers to be assessed on their own merit rather than by proxy measures such as the reputation of the journal in which their work appears. Dr Swan also stressed the need for improved business models if open access is to reach full potential. ‘I think we have to start looking at moving the money right to the front end of the system... ‘One of the things publishers say they add value through is the peer review process, and I agree. They should be paid for this rather than for the filtering process...’”