Genomics, Open Access, and China | MassGenomics

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-05-18

Summary:

“The associate editor of the journal Genomics has resigned, stating that he can no longer work for a system that puts profit over access to research. In an article in The Guardian, Winston Hide announced his resignation from ‘system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings.’ The system he’s speaking of is Elsevier, one of the largest publishers in the world... In his article, Hide is not openly critical of his former employer. Instead, he highlights the problem of performing research in developing countries where access to for-profit journals is scarce. Having worked for 10 years at a university in South Africa, he notes that researchers are often forced to devote big chunks of their budgets to purchasing a single subscription. When this isn’t possible, their mode of operation is the e-mail request, ‘Will you please send me a PDF?’ ... Elsevier defended its position in February this year with its open letter to the research community. This was in response to an online petition that was ‘putting forward some serious negative judgments about Elsevier...’ There are a few tidbits in Elsevier’s letter that I find interesting. First, they tout their eight open-access journals as evidence of their commitment to research access – but that’s 8 out of 2,000 journals, or 0.4%. Second, they write that ‘Being criticized by even one researcher, let alone all the signatories of the petition, is difficult for a company whose reason for being is to serve the research community.’ I thought that their reason for being was to make money. Indeed, Genomics has fallen somewhat from prominence; the articles seem to have narrower interest every year. Basically, it’s the place you can publish your obscure model organism’s draft genome. Intriguingly, Hide mentions in his article that the majority of manuscripts he saw at Genomics now come from China. Are these submissions that have been turned down elsewhere? Or, and I think this may be more likely, are most biomedical journals being gradually overwhelmed with submissions  from the Middle Kingdom? A colleague of mine said that Hide’s actions probably won’t change anything. Big companies like Elsevier are in business to make money. The concept of open-access, while a noble idea and lauded by many, has yet to really take hold in the research community. There must be some middle ground, though. It seems foolish that the U.S. and other western nations donate billions of dollars in foreign aid to the developing world, yet our massive corporations seem unable or unwilling to offer any special treatment to the struggling researchers who work there. They need to take a lesson from Google: it is possible to make money without doing evil.”

Link:

http://massgenomics.org/2012/05/genomics-open-access-and-china.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.medicine oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.google oa.impact oa.quality oa.prices oa.africa oa.biomedicine oa.budgets oa.china oa.south_africa oa.resignations oa.south oa.asia

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

05/18/2012, 11:59

Date published:

05/18/2012, 12:08