Three things open access is not | Scholarly Communications @ Duke

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-17

Summary:

"Lots of news stories and emails flying around about open access in the past few weeks, and as I tried to think what theme might bring them together, I realized that I wanted to talk about three things that open access is not.  Here they are: First, open access is not more prone to abuse than other types of publishing.  We hear a lot about 'predatory' open access journals, and recently we have also heard a lot about fraud and retracted articles from traditional journals.  We need to connect the dots and realize that both systems can be abused, just as all systems devised by human agents can be. Consider, for example, this story from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a researcher who apparently faked nearly 200 scientific studies.  The journals he published in were not top-of-the-line, but they were respectable, traditional subscription-based journals that libraries all over the world pay for.  The principal journal mentioned in the article, Anaesthesia, is published by Wiley-Blackwell and is part of the journal package that my library buys.  Were we the victims of a predatory subscription journal, or just of an increasingly slipshod system that often fails to live up to the claims made for top-notch editorial work? ... Indeed, reform of the system by which scholars are evaluated and rewarded is exactly the recommendation of this New York Times article about the rise in scientific retractions, and that accords nicely with some of the changes OA journals can facilitate... The second thing that open access is not is just one thing.  Recently I have seen a lot of debate about what is and is not open access.  Much of this debate has centered on the Finch Report in the UK, which recommended a rapid transition to open access publishing of research results, but put a heavy emphasis on gold OA, and specifically that subset of gold OA in which publishers are supported by article processing changes paid in advance of publication... Note that I said that charging article processing fees is a subset of gold open access.  Much gold OA happens without such fees.  Some fully OA journals are simply supported by organizations, whether those are published by scholarly societies, by libraries (Duke’s are here) or by major funders such as those that support eLife.  Also, the new journal PeerJ is trying a different experiment in gold open access, financed by memberships.  Finally, the recent announcement about the SCOAP3 effort to flip the financing for all of the prominent journals in high-energy physics shows that radical new experiments somewhat different from those on which the Finch Report was focused can succeed... The third thing that open access is not is just a business model.  In all the debates about which form of OA is best and how each form can be financed, we can lose sight of the fact that more than how we divide up a pot of money is at stake here.  Open access is also a statement about the values of scholarship; an attempt to introduce more transparency into the process of research and to encourage greater participation in its creation, financing, and evaluation..."

Link:

https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/10/16/three-things-open-access-is-not/

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.policies oa.comment oa.government oa.uk oa.impact oa.quality oa.sparc oa.wiley oa.funders oa.fees oa.memberships oa.recommendations oa.scoap3 oa.elife oa.credibility oa.altmetrics oa.finch_report oa.peerj oa.total-impact oa.impactstory oa.metrics oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/17/2012, 12:08

Date published:

10/17/2012, 08:08