Challenges are 'signs of success' for OA advocates - Research Information

"The key problem with academic publishing in the global North, according to Heather Joseph from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), is that ‘we publish to get points - citations to get grants to get promotion to get tenure - not to share the work.’ She was speaking to around 70 students and early career researchers from 35 different countries at a satellite conference to November’s Berlin 11 conference, hosted by the Max Planck Society and the Right to Research Coalition. Joseph also spoke about the challenges for advocates of open access [OA]. ‘We can map progress, and there has been a lot of it recently, but issues seriously threaten the progress and ultimate impact of OA.’ One of these issues at the time of the conference, was the so-called ‘Bohannon sting’, an article published in the journal Science by the journalist John Bohannon who had experimented with – and in many cases been successful at - contributing a bogus paper to OA journals. Joseph urged Berlin 11 Satellite Conference participants not to be defensive about the sting and to help tackle the collective quality issue. Another problem that she noted is publishers guiding authors to use more restrictive Creative Commons licences such as CC-BY-NC, which she says are still so poorly understood by authors ..."