{"id":57854,"date":"2021-06-22T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2021-06-22T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=57854"},"modified":"2021-06-21T19:45:52","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T23:45:52","slug":"open-access-at-no-cost-just-ditch-academic-journals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/open-access-at-no-cost-just-ditch-academic-journals\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access at no cost? Just ditch academic journals"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Plan S<\/a>\u00a0is clear: science must be public and publicly funded research must be accessible by anyone. Like many colleagues, I am keen to see this happening.<\/p>\n

How to make it happen is, however, a different story. In an effort to liberalise the market, Plan S asked the publishers to disclose the price for open access publication of an article. Once the market becomes transparent, it is assumed, competition and new business models should bring prices down.<\/p>\n

So, recently, Springer Nature has candidly responded \u2013 just give us\u00a0US$9,500 per open access article<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cMy brother bought a used car for $10K. What a fool, he could have been published open access on Nature\u201d was probably the best response I saw putting things in perspective.<\/p>\n

My problem is not even Springer\u2019s selling price. As a for-profit company, their goal is to squeeze as much money out of people and organisations as they can.<\/p>\n

My problem is that many of us are ready to buy it and may even consider it a fair price. OK, Springer journals are the iPhone of academia but for someone who runs an open access journal on a budget of less than $5K a year (a refurbished old phone, in comparison), that\u2019s quite some money. The same can be said for academics from countries where $10K is their annual salary.<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, Open Science is moving at two speeds with scholars based in Austria, UK the Netherlands, in Sweden and the like being much\u00a0more likely to publish open access<\/a>\u00a0than the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

All this at a time when scholars are encouraged to publish more. Ironically (or not),\u00a0profit margins by commercial publishers<\/a>\u00a0are similar to\u00a0those declared by Apple<\/a>\u00a0ranging around 30-40%. So, exactly as with iPhones, those who can afford it will say \u201cYes, it\u2019s expensive. But we can\u2019t wait to get more of that\u201d.<\/p>\n

The hidden variable<\/h3>\n

Are there alternatives? The\u00a0Open Library of Humanities<\/a>\u00a0pools article production costs to reduce them and make them\u00a0affordable through membership fees<\/a>. This is economically viable but depends on who agrees to participate.<\/p>\n

In the humanities, economic interests are lower but for medicine or life sciences, if the top journals in your field are not available, would you send your manuscript to a journal considered \u201cgood\u201d knowing that it might not be taken into account towards your annual evaluation? Or knowing that someone might get the grant you applied for because they had papers in more prestigious journals?<\/p>\n

In Estonia and Finland, for one thing, core funding to public universities depends on the number of \u201chigh quality\u201d articles (and books) produced by that university over a given period. Here \u201chigh quality\u201d merely refers to whether a journal is included in\u00a0Scopus<\/a>,\u00a0Web of Science<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0ERIH PLUS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a similar fashion, some donors may pledge to ignore\u00a0Impact Factor<\/a>\u00a0and look at the quality of the publications of the applicant. But how many reviewers would give a higher score to a candidate with publication in lower Impact Factor journals over someone publishing only in top journals?<\/p>\n

If you are\u00a0Krugman<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Fukuyama<\/a>, you can publish on a restaurant serviette and people will still read you. Until you get there, though, your value is defined (to some extent) by the journals you publish in. Early career researchers thus domesticate themselves into\u00a0targeting the most prestigious journals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0what is prestige<\/a>\u00a0if not the perception of a certain percentage of the people who will assume your article is good\u00a0simply for having been published there<\/a>? Prestige does not necessarily mean quality. On the contrary, in some cases, more prestigious journals have higher article retraction rates. But prestige is what counts in academia and it is distributed unevenly.<\/p>\n

The cracked tank<\/h3>\n

If the monopoly of prestige stays with the usual journals, there is no way for emerging alternatives to compete. Not in the short term, at least. So, Plan S sounds to me like \u201cboss, there\u2019s a crack in the tank, shall I keep on pouring to keep water at a decent level?\u201d.<\/p>\n

No. In my view, you should replace the tank.<\/p>\n

In New Zealand, the estimate spending on journals subscriptions for 2016 was between\u00a0US$30 and $45 million<\/a>. This means $3-4.5K each for the\u00a010,000 academic staff<\/a>\u00a0employed in the country. In Canada, for the same year, the amount is\u00a0$260 million<\/a>\u00a0or $5.5K per staff on a population of\u00a045,666 scientists<\/a>\u00a0.<\/p>\n

If all journals were managed by universities (university press model<\/a>), a fraction of the money paid out would return to the university, thus reducing expenses for article access. A recent model proposed by the platform\u00a0F1000Research<\/a>\u00a0is based on pre-review publication, transparent review process, relatively low costs for publishing and open access of all published articles. Things seem to be going in the right direction but the platform must still co-exist with the more prestigious journals and their exploitative strategy, who retain the monopoly on academic prestige. An even more radical step would be to completely ditch academic journals and decentralise everything so that:<\/p>\n