UKSG eNews -- ‘Cultural change’ and ‘reductions in cost’: Promises of the Finch Report and the realities of its implementation

Use the link to access the full text article opneing as follows: "I was invited to write this article because of a recent post entitled 'Squaring open access with high impact' that I put on a number of JISCMail listservs. In the course of promoting my open access journals Social Sciences Directory and Humanities Directory, I had attended a number of meetings with librarians and academics at British universities. These had begun to coalesce in to a pattern. By and large, the librarians would recognise and support the need for an affordable, open access solution, but always with the caveat that their academics remained intractable on the need to publish only in journals with high impact factors. However, this does not appear to square with the Finch report’s recommendations and RCUK’s guidelines on open access publishing of British research, nor actually with trends in user behaviour. It has long been a contention of mine that it is unreasonable to expect either publishers or academia to reform the broken and unsustainable industry that is scholarly publishing. Publishers have a stranglehold on key, high impact titles, for which they command huge subscription fees. Academics’ tenure and promotion, and the funding of their departments, is tied to publication in those same journals. Who is going to willingly adopt change? It is expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas. It will take legislation and mandates of the sort recommended by the Finch Report to make 'a clear commitment to support the costs of an innovative and sustainable research communications system'. Sadly, having made that bold decision, what appears to be happening is simply vested interests finding ways to circumvent changes and carry on as before. Within the constraints of a flawed system (the REF), many academics’ concerns are understandable, though sometimes contradictory: they don’t want to be ‘told’ where to publish (ie in open access journals) yet universally try to publish in journals with the highest impact, creating a captive market, massive rejection rates and publication lead times that can stretch to years. In whose interest is any of that? During a recent webinar it was stated that 90% of the scientists that have ever lived, are alive today. Put simply, the exponential growth of worldwide research is going to continue and the chances of getting in to the niche group of top ranked journals is going to diminish, not increase. Ally that to the notion that journals are increasingly anachronistic anyway (see below) but costing billions of pounds to pay for globally, and you have an enormous need for reform. I did some elementary research which suggested that OA journals with equivalent prestige and impact to their toll access cousins simply do not exist in many fields, which means that there will be a problem with implementing the Finch Report mandate after 1 April 2013. The Eigenfactor (http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess), a scale that measures a number of OA journals by their cost and relative merit, appears to confirm that, for many disciplinary areas, open access journals have not yet been widely adopted. A solution is creating new, low cost OA journals, such as Social Sciences Directory and Open Library of Humanities, that also facilitate better financial management. In the short term there would be a ‘gap’ until new journals achieve citation, impact and ranking, but what a wonderful opportunity to bring about the 'culture change' and 'fundamental shift in how research is published and disseminated' that is proposed in Finch ..."