The case of the disappearing journals - open is not forever

"erasing" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by mbanere6

Printed documents from hundreds of years ago are still accessible and stored in museums and library archives. Digital resources can simply disappear forever if the site is taken down and no-one has thought of making a copy. This includes many scientific articles according to a new article, Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Open access publication has significantly widened access to scientific research articles and offered alternative channels for many researchers around the world. However, open access journals are often run on a low budget within universities or by organisations with little funding but high levels of enthusiasm and dedication. Unfortunately, some of these organisations eventually run out of steam and have to close down, leaving their journal unprotected and vulnerable. This study has examined the fate of these journals.

We found 192 OA journals that vanished from the web between 2000 and 2019, spanning all major research disciplines and geographic regions of the world. Our results raise vital concern for the integrity of the scholarly record and highlight the urgency to take collaborative action to ensure continued access and prevent the loss of more scholarly knowledge. We encourage those interested in the phenomenon of vanished journals to use the public dataset for their own research.

The authors claim that there are over 1,000 open access journals today that are inactive and whose material risks disappearing if nothing is done and this trend is likely to continue. Journals published by scholarly societies or research organisations are at most risk since they operate on low budgets. There are a number of international preservation services that save copies of journals but the article shows that a large number are not preserved and the risk is that if a journal closes down then all articles are lost.

If there is no general agreement whose responsibility it is to preserve electronic resources, no one will be responsible, and we risk losing large parts of the scholarly record due to inaction. Exactly how much digital journal content has already been lost is unknown since the data needed to assess the gravity of the situation is not collected anywhere, which also complicates assessing the risk of journals vanishing in the future.

Presumably there are similar concerns for the many repositories of open educational resources that have been established, often thanks to project funding. If the responsible organisations close down what will happen to these collections? I wonder if there are schemes to preserve even OER collections. The article closes with a plea for more collaboration.

As we have highlighted throughout the discussion, open is not forever, and so we close with a note on the urgent need for collaborative action in preserving digital resources and preventing the loss of more scholarly knowledge.

Reference
Laakso, M., Matthias, L., Naiko, J. (2020) Open is not forever: a study of vanished open access journals. Cornell University. arXiv:2008.11933.

The lies are free

"Fake Watches Look Real" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Dick Thompson Sandian

In theory the internet could give everyone access to all the knowledge of humankind. Access to information would be a basic human right and there would be structures to support this in terms of compensating those who create the content. However, that concept is only a dream since so much valuable content is locked away behind paywalls and copyright restrictions. We have the illusion of access to everything, but once you start digging you soon run up against the walls. 

Quality content requires skilled authors and time-consuming investigation, and that costs money. Thus we have tabloid newspapers, full of biased and misleading content, on sale for free or at a trivial cost (subsidised by a multi-billionaire), whilst quality journalism is forced to charge for its content in order to survive. If you want a more balanced view of the world based on scientific evidence rather than opinions you will often have to pay for it and often it is much harder to find than the vast quantities of lies and nonsense that is available for free and often turns up high on your search list. This is the topic of an excellent article by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs, The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. 

... it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Current Affairs is a magazine that offers investigative journalism but of course depends on subscriptions to survive. The revenues from web advertising can't cover the costs for such publications so an increasing number of quality news channels are forced to set up a paywall. This in turn reduces their ability to attract new readers. In the last few years, I have begun subscribing to several magazines and newspapers (including the printed versions) but there is a limit to the number I can afford to pay for. Some have simply disappeared from my view. There are, of course, exceptions to this in the form of all the independent bloggers and journalists who publish for free but they all have bills to pay and there is a limit on how long they can afford to continue working for no reward. It's hard to compete against "free".

In the academic world we have the major scientific journals who still dominate despite significant inroads from the open access movement. If you don't belong to an institution that can afford to pay the high subscription rates you cannot access the latest research. This is a major handicap for researchers from developing countries who cannot read the relevant research in their field. 

Robinson tries to imagine what the internet could be like if it was run for the common good rather than for profit. Just imagine this!

In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence.

That was indeed one of the visions put forward in the early days of the internet but then the corporations took over. The article argues that such a universal database is technically possible but some mechanism is needed to fund it and also to compensate the content producers. Taxation could be way of dealing with this in the same way as some countries offer free or cheap healthcare but at the same time paying the doctors and nurses. Content providers would be compensated according to how many people access their work. Utopian indeed, but sometimes we need to question the system we have. 

But we are working on it. We are a long way from the world in which all knowledge is equally accessible. Hopefully someday our patchwork of intentionally-inefficient libraries will turn into a free storehouse of humanity’s recorded knowledge and creativity. In the meantime, however, we need to focus on getting good and thoughtful material in as many hands as possible and breaking down the barriers we can.

 

Combating academic spam

CC0 Public domain on Max Pixel

One of the week's most interesting stories is the disappearance of Jeremy Beale's (University of Colorado at Denver) excellent watchdog site on predatory journals and publishers. According to an article in Inside Higher Ed, No More 'Beall's List', the site was suddenly taken down and replaced with a notice "This service is no longer available" and since then Beale has not been available for any comment, leading to speculation in social media and news sites. According to an article in ScienceInsider:

Beall declined to comment. But a CU Denver spokesperson told ScienceInsider that Beall made a “personal decision” to take down his list of low-quality journals that charge authors a fee to publish, often with little or no review or editing. The spokesperson says the blog was not hacked, nor was it taken down as a result of legal threats, and Beall will remain on the school’s faculty. The spokesperson could not confirm whether the blog's removal is permanent.

Beale's list has become an important monitor of publications that spam academics, offering publication at a price and falsely claiming to use peer review, as well as a myriad of bogus conferences that invite academics to contribute (at a price) and then at best only offering a token event. Academic spam is a major issue and it can be hard for many to tell between the serious journals and conference organisers and the bogus ones. I'm not a very significant name in the academic community but even my in-box receives several academic spam mails per day offering me the chance to publish in some obscure journal or an appearance at a conference on a theme that I don't even work with. The extremely long list of so-called open access publishers in Beale's lists could be seen to discredit the open model but at the same time there are thousands of serious peer-reviewed open access publications. Whenever new models are tested there will be people who will try to exploit new freedoms and therefore it is vital to have watchdogs and whistle-blowers who can expose the less serious actors.

According to some reports, the site and its related Facebook group has been withdrawn due to pressure or threats, though there are no precise details on this. Anyone providing such a watchdog service risks the fury of those who are blacklisted and Beale has certainly had to put up with considerable opposition over the years. At the same time there is always the risk of accusing an innocent party. This is a major undertaking and is simply not sustainable if it is run by an individual, not matter how dedicated. A better solution would be an international organisation with high credibility to take over the role but more in terms of quality assurance rather than as whistle-blower. A colleague of mine suggested that the list could instead be one of approved journals and conferences and that a quality assurance framework and certification could make it clear which journals were serious and which were not. We need to build on and promote internationally recognised quality labels for open access publications to make it easier to spot the fraudsters.

Not surprisingly Beale's list has now been republished on a number of sites but such measures are only a temporary solution. The list must be continually updated and reviewed and it is also essential that those on the list are given a fair chance to improve and be taken off the list. Jeremy Beale has done a great job over the years but one pioneer cannot keep such a service going. Which organisation can step up and take over?

A detailed chronicle of this story is given in this blog post, What Happened to Jeffrey Beall’s List of (Allegedly) Predatory Publishers?

Credit for peer review

"365: day 141" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Nick in exsilio

As researchers gain more visibility by publishing articles in open access journals and expand their networks through social media and research communities it's time the reviewers also received more public recognition. Peer review is the foundation of all scientific research but those who do the work get little reward for their efforts apart from a thank-you e-mail from the publisher. Being asked to review for a scientific journal is a considerable merit but it has so far been difficult to show publically. Reviewing is a demanding and time-consuming unpaid task often squeezed into reviewer's evenings and weekends. Can peer review be made more open and can reviewers get visible credit?

One solution to this that has been in operation for a few years now is called Publons. This is a community of over 50,000 reviewers who can register their verifiable peer review assignments and make their experience visible in their profiles (so far 281,239 reviews in 16,192 journals). Publons' aim is to allow members to:

Record, verify, and showcase your peer review contributions in a format you can include in job and funding applications (without breaking reviewer anonymity).

Most reviews are of course anonymous and cannot be published publically except when all parties agree and such cases can be read on Publons. Otherwise the service is based on the recognition e-mails from the publisher which are also verified in cooperation between Publons and the major publishers. Registered reviews can also have their profiles automatically updated if the review for a publication that is a Publons partner. The result is that reviewers have a verified profile that can be used in funding applications or when applying for a new position. You decide how your information is presented and the level of detail.

Services like this are giving long-awaited recognition to the vast amount of previously invisible work that lies behind every published article and even if there are still no financial rewards at least reviewers have reliable evidence of their expertise. 

Read more about Publons in an article from Nature, The scientists who get credit for peer review.

Closing thoughts on #OCL4Ed

 by matthew.morgan95

As I write this post I realize that I have finally completed a MOOC after many attempts (Open Content Licensing for Educators). I have written several times about why I and thousands of others find it hard to stay the course so it's better to reflect briefly on why I completed this one. Firstly the subject is directly relevant to my work at present and I realised that although I know quite a lot about copyright and Creative Commons there's always more to learn. Secondly the length of course was not so daunting, a mere two weeks. Surely I could fit that into my life. Thirdly, I promised myself that this would be the one I'd complete. In other words the ideal combination of internal and external motivation plus the availability of time.

What have I learnt then? 
Online education is virtually impossible if you fully respect copyright laws and the complexities of working in an all-rights-reserved environment are too complex for teachers and students to understand. If full copyright applies a resource is simply locked and without explicit permission you should just link to the resource. The course has confirmed all my suspicions and confusion about copyright and made me even more convinced that as educators we need to show the world what they can and cannot do with our work by marking them clearly as CC.

I also thought that Creative Commons was a user-friendly enhancement and clarification of copyright but I have learnt that it too has its controversies and ambiguities. The main problem area has been the non-commercial condition. I first became convinced that it was a barrier to openness and that the share alike condition would suffice, since it is hard to make money with a resource that you have to share freely. Iam on the verge of changing the CC license on this blog to simply BY-SA. However my course colleague John Edmonstone made a good case for keeping NC by listing a number of valid objections, one of which was:

Any essentially commercial activity is outwith the bounds of the OER community - someone creating materials for profit is not going to share these openly. Therefore the principle of sharing all combinations of OER materials could not be adhered to.

Are we being a little blue-eyed in believing that only responsible educators will be interested in our content and not unscrupulous types out to make a fast buck or two? I fully support the idea that someone, say, in a developing country can earn a little money by repackaging my material (eg making print copies that can be distributed) but the idea that some opportunist could exploit the sharing culture of OER to make a fast profit does not appeal.

I take up these problem areas mostly because I discuss them almost daily at my university with colleagues who have genuine concerns about openness that I can't always answer. I got a question today, for example, asking which CC license would be best for an open access scientific journal. If it doesn't include NC someone could take an author's work and include it in a book without that person getting any royalties.Would a share alike condition be able to prevent this? My colleague argued that maybe a scientific article is such a coherent work that it should not be remixed therefore a stricter BY-NC-ND license would be appropriate. The article may be copied and made freely available but not commercially and only in its original form. Wouldn't remixing a scientific article amount to plagiarism?

The non commercial license has either to be redefined and fully clarified as to exactly what the term means or it should be withdrawn and possible replaced with a less ambiguous restriction. Another post on the course forum refers to a 2012 article by Richard Stallman, On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license, in which he argues why CC licenses using NC are flawed. The problem is that almost open licenses such as BY-NC and BY-NC-SA allow derivatives but not in a commercial context. This can lead to many adaptations over the year and then maybe someone wants to use one of these works commercially. Even with NC you are perfectly entitled to approach the author and ask permission; the rules of regular copyright apply here too. But if the work has been remixed several times, who do you ask?

What happens if you would like to use one of those works commercially? How could you get permission? You'd have to ask all the substantial copyright holders. Some of them might have contributed years before and be impossible to find. Some might have contributed decades before, and might well be dead, but their copyrights won't have died with them. You'd have to find and ask their heirs, supposing it is possible to identify those. In general, it will be impossible to clear copyright on the works that these licenses invite people to make. This is a form of the well-known "orphan works" problem, except exponentially worse; when combining works that had many contributors, the resulting work can be orphaned many times over before it is born.

Maybe what is needed is a selection of pedagogical examples for each CC condition that demonstrate when each condition is useful and when it is less so. A number of case studies that demonstrate in practical terms some of the trickier complexities. Could the Creative Commons website develop an interactive game giving educators the opportunity to test their interpretation of CC with recognizable case studies and interactive multiple choice questions. The gaming element could be built in by letting you move to more advanced levels and then some kind of Khan Academy style badges when you succeed. The more CC can be linked to the practical everyday problems faced by teachers the more likely they are to see the benefits.

Quality and openness

 by California Avocados

An article in Inside Higher Ed, Puzzling peer reviews, highlights supposed dangers of open access publications. John Bohannon of Harvard University wrote a deliberately flawed biology article using a fictitious name and non-existent institution and submitted it to over 300 open access publications. It was accepted by about half of them (read a longer description of the experiment can be found in Science, Who's afraid of peer review?). The article was written as part of a survey to see how much peer review was involved in the rapidly expanding open access journal market and the results cast a serious shadow over many of them. It contained serious scientific flaws that would be obvious to any academic in the field so the journals who accepted it had clearly not carried out any sort of serious peer review. Interestingly it was not only obscure journals that failed the test, even journals run by the big academic publishers fell for the trap.

"Acceptance was the norm, not the exception. The paper was accepted by journals hosted by industry titans Sage and Elsevier. The paper was accepted by journals published by prestigious academic institutions such as Kobe University in Japan. It was accepted by scholarly society journals. It was even accepted by journals for which the paper's topic was utterly inappropriate, such as the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction."

This is clearly unacceptable, though I find it hard to believe that so many people would fail to at least check the credentials of Ocorrafoo Cobange of the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. The basic principles of Howard Rheingold's Crap detection seem to have been overlooked here (Is this a credible source? What other publications come from this person/institution?). But does this mean that the open model is inherently flawed and that the traditional closed journal system is more credible?

All journals, open or closed, rely on peer review for the credibility of their publication. In neither model do the reviewers get paid for their services so the crucial factors must be the integrity and experience of the reviewers and the rigour of the process. Those were clearly lacking in the journals that accepted this fake article but I wonder what the success rate would have been if submitted to a large number of traditional journals. I suspect that even there there are some whose quality assurance processes are inadequate.

This is not really an openness issue but more a quality issue that can affect any publication open or closed. Those whose peer review and editing routines are not sufficiently rigorous will lose credibility. The reason so many open access journals seemed to fail this particular test could be because there are so many new journals on the scene who are still trying to establish themselves and have not developed quality assurance routines in their peer review processes. There are of course many extremely dubious publications out there, often based in developing countries but with titles that begin with "The American Journal of ...". These offer publication at a price and often succeed in luring academics into paying for publication. These deserve to be named and shamed as they are in Jeffrey Beall's List of predatory publishers 2013.

However it is important that we are not be tempted into thinking that openness means poor quality. The two are simply not related as David Wiley points out in an article, On quality and OER. Copyright or a price tag are no guarantees of good quality, whether we're talking about educational resources or academic publications. There are excellent open resources and excellent proprietary resources and their excellence depends on quality assurance routines and professionalism.

"Because quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status, neither traditionally copyrighted educational materials nor openly licensed educational materials can exclusively claim to be “high quality.” There are terrific commercial textbooks and there are terrific OER. There are also terrible commercial textbooks and terrible OER. Local experts must vet the quality of whatever resources they choose to adopt, and cannot abdicate this responsibility to publishing houses or anyone else."

Open or closed?

 by Traveller_40

There's a fascinating interview with Harvard professor Clayton Christensen in the Economist that I would like to quote as food for thought, Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive. Christensen is the man behind the concept of disruptive innovation from his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma and has some radical views about the role of universities in the post-MOOC world. It is not the technology that is disruptive it's what they enable people to do with it. MOOCs are opening up educational opportunities for millions of people who would otherwise be excluded from higher education. Technology is making mass education possible and affordable and will inevitably affect enrollments at traditional universities. Christensen claims that we are likely to see universities going bankrupt in the near future as competition increases.

However the part of the interview that interests me most concerns research, the main focus of the academic world. In a world already drowning in content we keep producing more and for increasingly small audiences. Christensen questions universities' investment in research which seldom has much impact outside the confines of a narrow research community.

"We are awash in content that needs to be taught, yet the vast majority of colleges give a large portion of their faculties’ salaries to fund research.
The problem is the research that most of them generate isn't useful to anyone except other academics. In business there are five ‘A’ journals in which you have to publish to get promoted to tenure. In one of those five the average article is read by 12 people. If only one in every five research universities stopped doing research, society wouldn't be impaired in the least."

Harsh words there and many will object. But for me the main point here is the dangers of the closed academic system producing ideas and results that remain behind the walls of copyrighted academic journals. In such silos research becomes an exclusive commodity for a restricted audience. However he also offers the promise of increasing openness in education, enabling wider participation and stimulating more meaningful research.

"Almost always great new ideas don't emerge from within a single person or function, but at the intersection of functions or people that have never met before. And most universities are organised so you don't have those intersections. They are siloed. Universities think people come up with great ideas by closing the door. The academic tenure process, where you have to publish to journals which are very narrow, stands in the way of great research."

Read the article: Clayton Christensen: Still disruptive.

Why aren't open educational resources being used?

  by  edtechie99

I've been involved in spreading the word about open educational resources for several years now and although I meet many teachers who are enthusiastic about sharing resources very few actually do so. In Sweden there is still a great deal of suspicion about using other teachers' or other university's resources but even in countries where OER have become more accepted this reluctance remains.

This is evident in an invitation to discussion in the Guardian, Talk point: Why don't more academics use open educational resources? It is a reflection after a seminar on OER which demonstrated the richness of resources available today and then raised the issue why they are not being sufficiently exploited.

"So in this talk point, I'd like to explore these claims: why are many so reluctant to share teaching resources? Is it for fear of not being properly credited? Are academics (and management) worried about the time constraints or that, with no mechanism to measure how much your resources are downloaded, amended and used, OER have little benefit in performance review?"

The irony is that whereas most academics are now quite prepared to openly publish articles according to Open Access principles the idea of openly publishing teaching materials is still not fully accepted. It's a complex problem but for me the main reasons behind the reluctance to use OER are the following:

• Tradition. My course, my class, my classroom, my way. Teachers are proudly independent and proud of their courses and teaching methods. Using another teacher's material may feel rather second rate. In the past the teacher's knowledge was central and so course material was exclusive. Today knowledge is everywhere as is good course material. Using OER means a redefinition of the teacher's role and very little will happen unless institutions tackle this question. More incentives for pedagogic innovation rather than focusing on lecture hours would help a lot.
• Concern about openness. Many are worried about digital rights and have been brought up to believe that you must protect your own work from theft. The idea of putting your work on the open web is worrying for many, especially with frequent media scares about identity theft, scams and net harassment. More information about copyright issues, Creative Commons, security and general digital literacy is essential to provide a more secure foundation for a culture of sharing.
• Lack of official approval. Even if many teachers are highly self-sufficient there is still a great respect for authorities. If OER are officially sanctioned from the top with high quality repositories, clear guidelines for use and clear incentives for teachers to share and use the resources then acceptance will take off. This is what open educational practices is all about. Open Access would not have become accepted without an EU directive. Grass roots enthusiasm must be met by approval from above.
• Trust. Linked to all the above but many teachers are uneasy about the trustworthiness of material found on the net. There's a perception that anything that's free on the net can't be very valuable and that printed material with a price tag is automatically more credible. We need quality assurance and some kind of faculty peer review to build trust.

From resources to practices

The concept of open educational resources (OER) has been around for ten years or so and has gained a foothold in most countries' educational systems. However the abundance of free educational resources available today has not resulted in  mainstream acceptance by schools and universities who are tightly bound to closed, proprietary publishing traditions. Principles of open access (free access to research articles) and the sharing and reworking of teachers' content threaten established and profitable business models as well as challenging the fundamental traditions of the academic world. So it's no surprise that the OER movement meets with resistance and skepticism.

It's not enough to simply amass vast silos of resources; we need strategies and policies for how they can be accessed, assessed and used. After years of grassroots enthusiasm and creativity it's time to address the decision makers and find a top-down approach to match the bottom-up creativity. We are now moving from open educational resources to open educational practices (OEP) and that's the focus of an important new publication Mainstreaming Open Educational Practice - Recommendations for Policy by my colleagues from EFQUEL, Anthony Camilleri and Ulf Daniel Ehlers as part of the OPAL Initiative.

This short publication (only 10 pages so you've no excuse for not having a quick look) identifies a number of challenges facing the mainstream implementation of OER/OEP and makes recommendations as to how these challenges might be resolved. The main challenges are in the following fields:

• Enabling legislation to facilitate OEP - changes needed in copyright legislation to facilitate sharing of educational resources as well as incentives to teachers/authors to make their work freely available (with some rights reserved)
• Empowering learners to take up OEP - making it easier to find and access resources and establishing ways of recognizing informal learning.
• Strengthening the evidence base of OEP - studying the effects of OER/OEP to find scientific evidence that the concepts are sustainable.
• Culturing innovation through networks - creating a European lead-organisation for "openness" and encouraging collaboration between all educational levels.
• Improving trust in OEP - Moving from pilots to operational activities, demonstrating that community peer review and open citation can challenge the established closed systems for academic performance.

The bookless library - good idea but there's a catch

Continuing on the theme of e-books (see earlier posts Why students don't use e-books as much as expected and Library extreme makeover) I'd like to return to the subject of bookless libraries. We've already got banks that have no cash and the paperless office is fully feasible though seldom seen. So what about the bookless library? As sales of e-books and varieties of tablets, e-readers and iPads increase the need for libraries to be filled with books becomes questionable. So let's move out the books and journals and create the library of the future.

But is there a catch here?

There is a problem and that becomes clear after reading an article by Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed called The myth of the bookless library.The problem with collections of e-books and e-journals is that the library has to pay a hefty yearly subscription to gain access to them. If you stop paying you lose the collectiuon. Instead of winning freedom by going digital the library commits itself to often extortiate annual fees to maintain its virtual collection. The books you used to buy were not cheap but once they were on the shelf you knew what you had. Not so with much e-literature.

"When you know that a subscription you’ve been spending tens of thousands of dollars on will vanish if you fail to pay the rent, you trim where you can, and for the past thirty years, that’s been the book budget, which is more discretionary than those demanding subscriptions. No wonder university presses and other scholarly book publishers are banding together to license digital book collections by subscription. It seems the only way to guarantee your product will get into libraries is to charge a lot for something that disappears if you stop paying."

Interestingly there is no sign of print book production falling despite the hype. We've never printed as many books as we do now so they won't be disappearing any time soon. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing all digital resources as free. Yes there are plenty of open educational resources and open access material out there but the publishing industry is busy remodelling its business for the digital market and there's a lot of money being made out there still. The transition to the bookless library will not be such a smooth one.

Photo:
by quinn.anya 

Why is public research not public?

Public money often funds research. That research is carried out by publically employed university researchers. The research findings are then submitted for publication and are peer reviewed by other university professors to see that the research is good enough for publication. Fine so far but here comes the catch that is attracting increasing controversy. This public research is then published in scientific journals that charge often very high subscription rates. University libraries then pay a large chunk of their budgets to get access to these journals so that students can read them. So more public money is paid to the publishers to see articles written with public money but which is inaccessible to the general public. Amazingly the researchers and reviewers get paid very little for their efforts. The reward for the researcher is of course academic reputation but the cost to public funds is unacceptably high.

In the last few weeks there have been several highly critical articles on this theme, for example Steve Wheeler, Sharp practice:

"For a long time I have felt very strongly that some academic publishers are operating a sharp practice by exploiting the goodwill of scholars. Large groups of lecturers and researchers act as journal authors and reviewers without payment, and then the publishers sell this content on to other academics at grossly inflated prices. Other highly knowledgeable academics give up their time, also for no payment, to review and advise editors on the content, and this can be painstaking work - read this by Martin Weller on the real cost of 'free reviewing'. This is not sustainable and must change."

The answer is of course the now widespread principle of Open Access where articles are published in open journals and are free to all. These journals have not yet achieved the academic status of the traditional publications but they are run by the academic community for the academic community. The peer review process is just as rigorous and the articles are available to the world. Many traditional journals now allow parallell publication whereby the article is also published in an open access journal, often 6 months after initial publication. However many journals still own exclusive copyright, effectively locking away public research from the public.

Last week the academic heavyweight Princeton University made a highly influential move in favour of open access by preventing staff from signing away the copyright to their articles to for-profit journals and insistig that articles also be made avaiable as open access. Exceptions to the rule must be first approved by the university. If Princeton can do this then many other prestigious universities may well follow suit. Read the details of this in an article in The Conversation, Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals.

In that article the significance of Princeton's announcement is summarised as follows by Professor Simon Marginson (University of Melbourne): 

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions.”

If university libraries did not have to pay millions of dollars/euros to pay for access to articles written by university faculty maybe they would be able to use that money to fund more important work like providing better support to students and faculty. Let's hope more universities take a stand like Princeton and work out a new way forward for scientific publication.

Steve Wheeler has posted a list of recommended open access scientific journals in a new post, The open case.



Photo:

 

  by  maolibrarian