When your opinions conflict your employer’s position on open access | SpotOn

"My open access (OA) problem is between mine and my employer’s interests. I work at the Museum für Naturkunde – Leibniz-Institute for Research on Evolution and Biodiversity at the Humboldt University Berlin(MfN). A name like a tape worm, and it already contains the root of the problem. The museum is a member of the prestigious Leibniz Gemeinschaft –  (sorry, their home page is in German only, please see Wikipedia’s entry.) As a member, the museum is evaluated every seven years (or more often). At worst, it can be kicked out of the WGL, a total disaster as it would theoretically leave the museum with no funding at all aside from what the State of Berlin would cough up. One of the most important criteria for the WGL is excellence in research, which is measured via publications, especially ISI listed peer reviewed publications, and among these especially top-quartile journal publications...  Obviously, Nature, Science, PNAS and similar journals are especially desired, because of their prestige, IF, and interdisciplinary coverage. Thus, there is a strong motivation to publish as 'high' as possible, leaving other considerations aside...  There are many journals in my field that are highly regarded, such as Paleontology, Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and so on. However, many journals cover a wider range of topics, and are thus considered to belong to less specific fields, where they have many competitors covering disciplines with many more people working and publishing in them. Thus, the IF of these other journals is boosted by non-vertebrate-paleontology to levels that vertebrate paleontology alone can never manage. Getting into top tier journals for my field is one thing, getting into the handful of them that is top tier in wider fields is much harder. Additionally, because there are few such journals, finding OA journals among them is hard ... I decided long ago to publish OA whenever I could. I am no radical, and would never swear to never publish in for-pay journals!  Imagine being invited to co-author a paper that goes into Nature or Science, a key career advancer. I would never refuse such an opportunity! In fact, I stumbled across an important principle in my discipline, and am now preparing a manuscript that I will submit to Nature. However, if I have a choice between a for-pay journal and a near-equal OA venue, I will pick the latter – and near-equal takes much more than supposed “impact” into account. There are, in fact, a number of excellent paleontology journals that offer green OA or gold OA publishing... So by now you can see the conflict: on the one hand, there are the lower-IF OA journals I would like to publish in, on the other hand there is the need for my employer to boast as many high-IF publications as possible. I would like to provide them, not only because they would have a positive effect on my career – I firmly believe that a preference for OA instead of IF will not really hurt me on the whole – but the MfN is in my opinion massively underfunded and suffers from an atrociously under-maintained and decaying building. I can only laud the museum regarding the support I have experienced and the goals that the museum as a whole and its employees as individuals have, thus I would prefer to do my best to help fix the problems. My best, though, would obviously be punching out high-impact publications by the dozen. Palaeontologica Electronica’s impact factor has risen this year to 1.4 – a very respectable IF for a palaeo journals, but utterly insignificant compared to journals from many other disciplines we are being compared to..."