Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:12 PM, Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> wrote:
> On 19/03/2014 15:05, Raymond Wan wrote:
>> I can't say this is true for all open access journals but for journals
>> like BMC Biology, which is an open access journal, the author pays an
>> article processing charge:
>>
>> http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbiol/about#openaccess
>>
>> For this journal, it is $2,580 USD per article.
>
> Which apparently covers
>
> 1 Immediate, worldwide open access to the full article text
> 2 Developing and maintaining electronic tools for peer review and publication
> 3 Preparation in various formats for online publication
> 4 Securing inclusion in CrossRef, enabling electronic citation in other
> journals that are available electronically
>
> 2 I can grudgingly believe (although the software is there now; it's a sunk
> cost), 4 means "we get you a DOI", which is free, and as for 1 and 3,
> obviously the LaTeX license and the web hosting fees are pretty substantial in
> the States.


Hmmmm...I'm not particularly against the cost itself.  Quite frankly,
I don't know what cost is right for the "services" they provide.

I'm more worried that the "open" in open access journals is not quite
the same as open source software.  Open access journals have simply
shifted the cost from the readers to the authors.  Under the old
model, it is quite possible that most papers never become popular and
are thus not generating any money for publishers.  Open access
journals have solved that problem by charging at fee up front.
Whether a piece of work is good or bad, it has made them money.  It's
very easy for someone armed with a spreadsheet and numbers for profit
and "acceptance rate" and fiddle with the dial to see how many papers
they should accept to make money.

With closed source software, users pay for it.  What if for open
source software, all developers have to pay Sourceforge (for example)
and are unable to release it themselves on their own web site?  The
analogy is not quite the same but still a bit close.


> Or, just possibly, it's a racket run by publishers trying to shore up an old
> business model made obsolete by the web.


Yes, like http://arxiv.org/, which is apparently more accepted in Physics.

Well, one "good" thing that publishers still do is quality control.
At least the well-known publishers can give readers and potential
authors some confidence since they are presumably concerned about
their reputation.  And if something ends up being wrong, they'll
hopefully act quickly to retract the work.  With the web, that's
difficult to do.

Also, as long as people's careers depend on where work is published,
journals (and conferences) will probably have a place in academia.  I
can't see how the web could take over this role completely in the near
future...

Ray