Open Access: credit where credit is due | @GrrlScientist | Science | guardian.co.uk

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-10-29

Summary:

"Amongst the many "books that you absolutely have to read" for scientists is Bruno Latour's Laboratory Life (which is basically his PhD thesis). In this book, he documented the process of doing science as seen through an anthropologist's eyes. One of his insights is that a lot of what we do as professional scientists is try to accumulate credit: we want our work to be read and cited, and discoveries (like biochemical pathways) to be named after us. Whether we like it or not, this is an important part of being a career scientist: building up a reputation for doing good work, which is recognised by our peers who will then judge us for promotion, getting grants, being invited to speak at meetings etc. And one way this manifests itself in science nowadays is in the choice of journal we try to publish in. We try to publish in journals that make us look better, i.e. those that have a better reputation, so we accumulate more credit when we list these in our talks and CVs... One downside of this is that we scientists are eager to get our papers published in good journals so we submit to these good journals in the hope that they see our obvious brilliance... But what of open access (which is, after all, in the title of this piece)? I think some of the issues surrounding open access and how it is evolving are impacted by journal reputation, and how this is being traded against other concerns, like making open access financially viable. Because open access journals can't charge for reading papers, they instead charge (when they do charge) the writer for publishing their paper. The monetary incentive for author-pays journals then focuses on accepting as many papers as possible -- which conflicts with the reputational incentive of only accepting 'good' papers...  So how do non-predatory open access publishers make money? Their strategy has been to take a slightly different approach to publishing what is considered a "good" paper: it doesn't have to be important, only technically well done. This means they can accept more papers because they don't have to judge one aspect of quality, so more money comes in, and it's easier to support themselves financially.

Now, being technically good isn't good enough if you want to be a successful scientist...  If your paper is rejected by that journal, then you move down the reputational ladder. Because open access works better when it ignores one aspect of quality, these journals will tend to be lower in the repuational hierarchy (it's worth noting that although Public Library of Science -- PLoS -- have journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS Genetics that use importance as a criterion for acceptance, these journals are not themselves financially viable: they have to be supported by PLoS One).  This is creating a structure with high impact journals at the top and middle tiers of science publishing, with open access journals acting as buckets, catching anything that is allowed to fall through after having been deemed not important enough.  The traditional publishers have, of course, noticed all of this. A couple of years ago Springer bought out the open access publisherBioMedCentral, and now both Elsevier and Wiley are launching a range of open access journals.  I have been keeping a bit more of an eye on Wiley ... Wiley also publishes several other journals in this subject area so they have a "Manuscript Transfer Program": if one of the other journals in the programme rejects a paper, they can suggest it be transferred to Ecology and Evolution. The reviewers' comments are also automatically transferred, so the manuscript can be judged quickly, and the process of re-submission and re-evaluation is thus sped up. One of the effects of this programme may be to encourage researchers to tie manuscripts to a single publisher if it becomes easier to shuffle a manuscript between journals in one publishing stable rather than sending it to another journal (this, presumably, is what Wiley are hoping will happen: they want to take away PLOS One's market share by making it easier to publish in a journal with a similar profile)..."

Link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/grrlscientist/2012/oct/26/2?newsfeed=true

From feeds:

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

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.plos oa.impact oa.quality oa.prestige oa.wiley oa.fees oa.bmc oa.bealls_list oa.credibility oa.springer oa.altmetrics oa.economics_of oa.metrics oa.journals

Date tagged:

10/29/2012, 08:05

Date published:

10/29/2012, 04:05