<em>The Scientist</em> considers open access and scientific publishing's future | Science and the Media - Physics Today

“The August issue of The Scientist ... features articles on ‘Debating the Future of Science Publishing,’ focusing almost entirely on open access. Here are some highlights.  Under the headline ‘Predatory Publishing,’ Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, warns that ‘overzealous open-access advocates are creating an exploitative environment, threatening the credibility of scholarly publishing.’ He warns that ‘bogus publishers’ with ‘unethical practices’ are threatening to ‘erase the line that divides science from nonscience’ and that they ‘use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it.’ The problem has been fostered, he writes, thanks to ‘a very low barrier to entrance into the learned publishing industry. To become a scholarly publisher, all you need now is a computer, a website, and the ability to create unique journal titles.’ He observes that under author-pays arrangements, authors ‘become the publishers' customers,’ creating ‘a conflict of interest: the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns.’ He complains that many ‘academic librarians and other open-access advocates have promoted open-access scholarly publishing across the board, without limiting their promotion to the few worthy open-access publishers.’  On the positive side of open access, an editorial highlights new OA journals, including: [1] GigaScience, an open-data journal with articles containing huge amounts of data. [2]  F1000 Research, with post-publication peer review. [3]  PeerJ, which researchers can pay a fee to join. [4]  eLife, which ‘will publish only high-impact articles.’  The August cover story ‘Whither Science Publishing?’ observes that ‘academic publishing has morphed into a sprawling international industry that ... rakes in revenues of more than $19 billion in its scientific, technical, and medical segment alone’ and includes a ‘constellation’ of ‘nearly 8,000 OA journals,’ though ‘open access and other newer publishing modalities are still dwarfed by the traditional subscription-based model.’  The cover story includes extensive comments from prominent "publishers, researchers, information scientists, and others."  The Berkeley scientist Michael Eisen offers his usual outspokenness: ‘If the entire publishing industry disappeared tomorrow, science would be immeasurably better off. It might take us a few weeks to recover and build a new system optimized for modern science and electronic communication. But if we did it right, it would not retain any features of the current system...’ Patrick Taylor of Harvard Medical School worries that articles under the present system merely ‘land in readers' laps, like an unalterable consumable product, rather than with the dialogue of 17th-century Royal Society proceedings or a vivacious contemporary conference.’ He also worries about what he calls ‘decontextualization,’ with research publication ‘still mainly considered apart from the larger public ecosystem in which understandable and valid discoveries, engagement and public support for knowledge, and scientific methods are all intertwined.’ This leads, he says, to ‘narrow discussions about business models for publication, or to benchmarking problems as lapses from a recent status quo.’ Scientists should instead ask, ‘What would a robust, imaginative, future device for encouraging pertinent inquiry, and validating and disseminating scientific knowledge to peers, policy-makers, and public, optimally look like?’ ...”