Despite flaws, open access is worth the price | The Daily Texan

"Open-access journals haven’t had an easy go of it lately. In its current special issue, the esteemed journal Science has published an article detailing how Harvard biologist John Bohannon duped more than 100 of the freely available online scientific journals into accepting a completely bogus study that should have been thrown out by any competent reviewer. Bohannon’s implication is clear: Traditional print is still superior to open access. However, there are several flaws with Bohannon’s experiment, the most glaring of which is that he didn’t submit his study to any traditional print journals like Nature or Cell. Without a control group, how can Bohannon say that open access journals are any more likely than traditional ones to let junk science slip through the cracks?   Even if Bohannon had found a statistically significant difference, it wouldn’t change our view that open access represents an important step forward for the greater dissemination and democratization of knowledge.  Open-access journals certainly aren’t perfect, but there are good reasons to support their growth. The most obvious of these is the ballooning subscription fees of traditional print journals. According to data provided by Susan Macicak, interim collection development officer for UT Libraries, EBSCO, the University’s serials agent, posted price increases of at least 20 percent across all disciplines from 2009 to 2013. Even more distressingly, a report put out by EBSCO on Oct. 4 predicted a continuation of this trend, with an expected increase of 6 to 8 percent from 2013 to 2014. According to Macicak, UT has seen similar price increases in recent years ... While open-access journals certainly suffer from their own problems, the benefits outweigh the risks and official measures should be taken to promote their growth. Such initiative must start at the university level, where the vast majority of scholarly output originates. Many American universities, including theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of North Texas in Denton, have adopted official policies in favor of open access. UT-Austin has a digital repository where student and faculty work is stored.  Curt Rice, a UT alumnus and current professor in the department of languages and linguistics at theUniversity of Tromso in Norway, recently wrote an article for The Guardian in which he criticized both the methodology and conclusions of Bohannon’s experiment.   Rice expanded on his views in an email to the Daily Texan editorial board on Wednesday by offering some ideas for how open-access journals could entice more researchers to publish in their pages ... 'One strategy [to enhance the prestige of open-access journals] would be to try to get some of the high prestige traditional journals to switch to the [open-access] model,” Rice said. “Then the prestige of that journal would just be exported to the [open-access] domain, and people would still want to publish there. Another strategy is that people who are fairly far along in their careers start using more [open access] ... But these are all on the ‘carrot’ side of the equation ...' Admittedly, some open-access journals still need to make improvements before they can attract the sort of work that will bring them up in esteem. As Rice said, it’s going to take a carrot-and-stick approach to solve this problem. Someone is going to have to give researchers that initial nudge to make the switch. Luckily, there are events here on the 40 Acres that are helping to further that effort. Open Access Week 2013, which is being put on by UT Libraries later this month, attempts to '[promote] the movement for unimpeded accessibility to scholarly research.' Hopefully,  through this and other similar efforts, open access can find the acceptance that it needs to thrive."