Language Log » The open access hoax and other failures of peer review
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-10-05
Summary:
"To start with, Science is definitely not an open-access journal — to read most articles, you need to be a member of the AAAS (at relatively modest prices ranging from $75/year for students to $151/year for "Professional Member" status), or have access to a library that subscribes. Like other society-centered journals, Science is suffering from attrition in its membership rolls due to the simple fact that most potential members can get access through their university or company library, and would just as soon not pile up paper copies that clog their recycling bins. And like other non-open-access journals, Science is suffering from the moral and political assault of the open access movement, which variously argues that publicly-funded research reports should be accessible to the public, and that authors (who are not paid for their contributions) benefit from broader access to their writings, and (sometimes) that access to digital information should be priced at its marginal cost of reproduction, which in the case of scholarly and scientific publication is essentially zero. Journals like Science have done several things in response. They've tried to keep down subscription prices — especially in comparison to the sometimes-exorbitant prices charged by commercial publishers like Reed Elsevier ; they've tried to offer additional value to members; they've allowed various forms of limited or delayed open access; and they've made anti-open-access counter arguments, of which the Bohannon article is an extreme example. There are some non-trivial anti-open-access arguments. For example, there are non-zero costs associated with editing and managing a journal, which are on the order of $1,000 per published paper. The commonest 'open access' method to raise this money is the 'Author Pays' model, in which the journal charges would-be authors a fee, usually if the paper is accepted for publication, but sometimes at the time of submission. (The range of such fees has been about $400-$3500 in cases that I've encountered.) And there are two potential problems with the 'Author Pays' model. First, for authors who don't have grants or slush funds to pay such fees, the cost can be a problem. There are fields where productive researchers expect to publish five to ten articles per year, so cumulative publication fees might easily exceed $10,000 a year. This is essentially a problem in politico-economic restructuring — the billions of dollars now spent by libraries on journal subscriptions are the obvious place to look for the needed funds. But of course, this kind of restructuring is extremely hard to arrange. Second (and in my opinion more important), the 'Author Pays' model is an invitation to chicanery and fraud. Starting more than a decade ago, we saw the proliferation of 'spamferences' — ad hoc international conferences, organized by ad hoc international organizing committees, whose goal seems to be to persuade gullible researchers to pay substantial registration fees to present their papers, usually in resort locations (or places that sound like resorts, at least). The structure and the cash flow of these spamferences are not at all distinct from the annual meetings of reputable organizations — but there is nevertheless a difference. See '(Mis)Informing Science', 4/20/2005, and 'Dear [Epithet] spamference organizer [Name]', 10/6/2010, for some discussion. It has to be noted that traditional paid-access journals are always motivated to some degree by the desire for money: a modest (but intense) desire on the part of the staff of scientific and technical societies, and a more expansive and rapacious desire on the part of companies like Reed Elsevier. And regular readers of Language Log will have noticed that some pretty bad papers get published by non-open-access journals. This includes Science, where, alas, it's hard to think of any decent-quality linguistics papers that have appeared in recent years, and easy to think of several deeply embarrassing ones… But the bad papers published in journals like Science typically present exciting-sounding results with fundamental conceptual or experimental flaws — they're not meaningless sham papers created by random substitution of names of languages, phonemes, lexical categories, etc., into typed slots in a 'Mad Libs' framework. So there's definitely a problem here. And the problem is compounded by the f
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