Old age and open access

Please read this. I would very much value comments on some of the issues. Also, you might sometime find yourself in a similar situation.

I had a bit of a shock this week, bringing home to me that I am indeed getting old.

Last year, a good journal (just outside the top 5% on Scimago, if you believe such things) invited me to contribute a paper to a special edition. I was very happy to do so. I wrote the paper, it was refereed, revised, resubmitted and accepted.

It has just gone into production. Such are the wonders of AI, I had an email from the publisher’s robot asking me who the corresponding author was (in fact I was the only author). The email also invited me to choose subscription or open access, since the University of St Andrews has an arrangement with this publisher. Of course, I chose open access. To my surprise, it came back quite promptly saying the University had refused my request.

On further investigation, I found two things. First, the owner of the journal had decided that, if authors for the special issue didn’t have access to funding for the APC, then they would pay. So the immediate problem was sorted. Also, the rules for the agreement were that the author must be a current member of staff or a current student at the university, and that is why I didn’t qualify. So Emeritus doesn’t count. Also, I was led to believe that this was a recent change in the rules, and I don’t recall being notified of it.

Now in fact, since my retirement, I have written some of my best and most substantial papers, on diagonal groups, synchronization, the universal and exponential transversal properties, the lattice of invariant partitions of a transitive permutation group, graphs on groups, to name a few. I believe there are some more to come, such as the Road Closure Property. But my options for publishing are significantly reduced. Gold open acccess journals will be barred to me unless I have coauthors who qualify; for my own papers it will be either subscription model or diamond open access. Since I am very much in favour of open access, I will choose the latter. On the Scimago list, they mark open access journals (there are rather few among the top journals, but do not say whether they are diamond or not (and most of them are not).

So I contend that this is ageism. I am so old that the authorities do not expect me to do research of any great significance any more, so they can write me out of the story. If I believe that all the beancounters judging research would do so purely on the quality of the papers, I would not be so concerned; but I don’t think this is the case.

But there is a further issue, about which I am not quite sure.

If the university is not prepared to support me to publish in journals near the top of the list, am I justified in refusing to allow it to count these papers for the REF? Almost certainly the answer to that is No: although the fight to persuade the University that I am still here and still doing good stuff seems not to be finished (after bruising encounters with HR and IT Services), the School of Mathematics and Statistics have been extremely supportive, not only in these battles but also in allowing me an office and library and network access necessary for my reseearch.