Should the authors pay for the research they do for the profit of the publishing companies. Is there any alternative models one can think of for open access publishing that ensure high quality review with no cost to readers and authors.
The Open Access policy for publication will probably need to get some re-thinking soon, however, the idea is quite interesting.
The resources most of us use come most of time from public (governmental mostly) funding, and publishing the results in journals that are not available to the public sound un-fair to my ears. However, someone has to pay the costs of high-quality scientific publication; it may the authors or it may be some specific agencies as well, but it will come from funding agencies as well.
One may not forget that what makes a scientific paper interesting is the number of people that is impacted by it, reflected, for example, in the citations the paper gets. In this sense, publishing in a journal that is free-of-charge to be read may give an interesting boost in the impact of a paper. So, one important issue is how to give the essential visibility to the free-access journals, if they may have very limited resources?
Hi, Alex,
I think that it is horrible when the authors pay for the research they do for the profit of the publishing companies. In general, the Institutions pay for which the Authors work, but not Authors. However, not all research Institutions have a support, for instance, from a corresponding government. For instance, I have created a new Institution called the International Institute of Zakharenko Waves (IIZWs) which has no financial support. However, working for the IIZWs I have discovered half-hundred new waves!!!
Have a nice day!
Best wishes,
Aleksey
Not only is it horrible that they have to pay as Aleksey said, but there is a bigotry involved that can keep the material from making its way into the eyes of the public that need it the most. I know that this video might be off topic for the kind of research that you may be alluding to, but I think it is still worth noting.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html
Hi, Ram,
there are some very famous Journals like Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters which get money from Authors (Institutions) but provides no open access. Also "Through participation in Author Select, authors may choose open access for their published article. By supporting both publication and archiving costs through payment of an $1800 fee, authors may instruct the journal to provide free online access to the published article, in perpetuity, to any online user."
Have a nice day!
Best wishes,
Aleksey
Related to the dissemination of knowledge we have aleáis the market
Because knowledge has value Probably many diferents offers will be available for the clients......
I like the idea of Open Access. We use lots of resources by re-doing studies because papers are not available. I think that it would be possible to make "world wide research center" where many countries are "collaborators" (give funding). The idea of this center is that it only take care of publishing latest results for everyone. Today, publishing an article is not as expensive as before. The costs of the center can be quite moderate.
The Open Access policy for publication will probably need to get some re-thinking soon, however, the idea is quite interesting.
The resources most of us use come most of time from public (governmental mostly) funding, and publishing the results in journals that are not available to the public sound un-fair to my ears. However, someone has to pay the costs of high-quality scientific publication; it may the authors or it may be some specific agencies as well, but it will come from funding agencies as well.
One may not forget that what makes a scientific paper interesting is the number of people that is impacted by it, reflected, for example, in the citations the paper gets. In this sense, publishing in a journal that is free-of-charge to be read may give an interesting boost in the impact of a paper. So, one important issue is how to give the essential visibility to the free-access journals, if they may have very limited resources?
Actually I think that key resource is high-level reviewers. All the other things are just technical and quite easily automated. Maybe a key for success of open access, will be changing of hidden anonymous review process somehow more rewarding to reviewer? Maybe some ID system for reviewers, that everyone can see how "high-ranked"-reviewer have accept OR reject the paper. I think that it is even possible to make a system anonymously but still reviewer can check his/her "scores" officially and use it on CV. What you think?
I agree with Mr. Tuovinen above: the quality of peer-reviewing is another essential requirement for the success of a Open Access publication; the rewarding system based on reputation would be an interesting addition to the system, for sure.
We could list now several of those requirements: quality and steady funding (both from authors or specialized funding agencies); quality of the papers sent for publication; a highly renewed editorial board; advertising of the journal to the scientific community; high-level reviewers; and, maybe, a change in the way to judge a paper (actual impact in the community instead of 'where have it been published')
It is interesting noticing that those requirements apply for any scientific journal. I believe the question that remain is: who is going to pay the bill? I would indicate public funding for publications, but this would not suite many areas, as the strongly technological, in which bureacracy in funding would hinder any real impact.
I know that some scientific societies publish their journals and keep them Open Access (see, for example, jbcs.sbq.org.br , the website of a journal by the Brazilian Society for Chemistry), but the amount of publications that can be mainteined is limited.
The main question lies in the economic value of the published material.
Economics in Open acces is problem for Publisher! For the authors, if they do not pay, this is positive method of more wide distribution of his papers!
I have a exciting experience with that!
Publisher In Tex from Croatia publish a book "Lithography" in which was included two Chapters on "Computer simulation of exposure and development processes in electron and ion lithography" writen by me and my colaborators! For me was very interesting to see statictics, made by Publisher, about distribution of these Chapters between readers of too manu countries!!
Such wide distribution is not possible by printed Journal distribution!!
Here is an interesting video, which ideas I totally agree.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1533
I also completely agree with the video above on phd comics. I feel that open source journal is the way to accelerate research. Researchers who work hard should be paid in some ways when their research is implemented for economical reasons. A payback mechanism need to be added to researchers for this open access journal system which will encourage people to work hard on their papers to make it easy to understand for readers.
Agreeing with the above, I strongly recommend checking the approach of this journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/. Apart from being open access, they also apply a completely open review process, i.e. the reviewers' details and their comments are public. I reviewed several papers in there and very much appreciate this approach.
I am against Open Access publication as it is set up now
1) When authors are charged for publication in Open Access the publisher is interested to accept more papers of any quiality.
While In traditional system publishers (with a help of editors and reviewers) are mre interested to pulish hight quality papers.
2) From the author's point of view paying for publishing is discouraging from publishing as it is too expensive and project money can be spent in a better way.
Yes, I vote for open access journals. A researcher, who wants his or her work viewed and read by his/her pals for the benefits of humanity, requires open access for his/her work. Most publications in the past have this close-in operations. That is, they open published articles mostly to their localities or to certain restricted areas, so you don't know what goes on in their regions - this single action retrogresses development and calls for self-centred-ness of the first order. Open access publications, as we come to experience, are more subjected to peer reviewing than the close-in thing. Of course I keep on asking this question : Which reputable journal does not request for token fee from Authors - whether by sponsorship or direct contribution, commission or omission. Most journals based in Professional, Association or Higher Institutions that require "no-fee" seem to take up to 1 or 2 years to publish a paper (Author's token is by "omission". And by the time the paper is published, ah, some of the facts are already surpassed and outdated (not obsolete). There should be no mistaking "open" for "social" in publishing industries. The question here is not that the open access journals are to be encouraged, but should be more patronized.
Right, and by the way, not all open access journals require authors to pay. In other cases, the amount are quite moderate and you might foresee some according budget if you are preparing e.g. a research proposal. In this sense, I believe that we are on the right track!
I fore it. It helps improvement for those who do not have access to information at the moment. Progress is always admirable.
I wonder that if there is hard to find resources in open access publishing, could it be possible to find a middle way solution. We have apple store's and similar systems where cost of games is approximately 1.5-5 euros. Previously, cost of a one game was 25-50 euros. Today, cost of one single scientific paper is about 25-30 dollars (depending on journal).
Games and papers are a like, you don't know what you get before reading (or playing). Why we haven't "research web store" where single researcher can buy (read) the single article in moderate prize ? Of course, from point of view of editor, you have to sell lets say 10 times more, but in practice, this could be possible because risk to buy "wrong paper" is smaller (using 100 euros, you will have 50 articles, and it is more than good beginning for the study). There might be great potential in this kind of systems. And we have lots of experiences that world goes that way (compare with music or games).
The other possibility would be that open access journals launch the system where publishing pays, lets say 1000 euros for researcher and every citation gives 20 euros back. After 50 citation, the article have paid himself. The editor wins, because impact increases and researcher wins, because valuable material is not sold as "free" (citations after 50 would be profitable). Of source, those papers which are not cited, will be "bad business", but frankly speaking, they are that in many sense.
Yes. As it encourages the reader to get high quality research output for free. However, the author should not be burdened by the publisher with too high processing fee. This is killing the poor researchers.
Well M M Noor, I would you to note that, open or close journal, your article published in any of the two is reaching the whole world of your folks. Paid on non-paid journals, your published paper is what counts, not only to you but to your readers. On the issue of quality of article publication - remember I asked a question, regarding ISI-IF and H-Index modes of publication assessment , in which one goes for JOURNAL and the other goes for INDIVIDUAL ARTICLE - there was no question of paid or no-paid here. You, the author, can easily identify quality of publication, just by the way a journal assessed your paper - Peer-reviewed or Pal-reviewed? I am sorry but strictly speaking, an honest author - old or young - can identify a quality journal that produces quality articles. So be it!
No... unless everyone has equal funds its obviously unworkable and encourages extreme disparity.
Yes. Open journal should not kill the 'poor' scientists in order to help 'poor' readers. In view of knowledge propagation process, I still vote for Open Journal. But I insist the publisher not to put high processing fee as they only involve in a very small part in this research discovery and knowledge propagation process. On the discussion on journal quality, Open Journal has nothing to do with that! It's the scientists who is wise enough to choose whether he wants to cheat himself for promotion, or not.
I very much welcome the open access publication with absolute no cost involvement; of course it should be of good quality so that everybody gets access to it, read and cherish
I feel that open access publication should be encouraged but with curb on reproducing content by the user of information. So more software applications
should be developed to check such duplication..this will also improve innovation
Yes there should be an open access to all articles published in journals or else it could not solve the basic vision of publishing the journals.
@Abraham Paul: Yes, the reproduction of the already published content has to be fully eliminated. It is the responsibility of both authors, editors and publishers.
Dear Ahmad Azar, How clearly can one define "Unknown publisher" from "Known" ?
While it is difficult to do seperate unknown/known publishers there are generally accepted good publishers in most fields. For example, in Computer Science, there is the ACM, the IEEE, and then there's Springer LNCS and cryptography papers, and some people also consider certain Elsevier journals to be of reasonable quality. Then there's a lot of low quality open access journals that publish things that I personally wouldn't publish as a technical report.
Unfortunately there is no strong move in 'our' research community towards open access publishing, although I hope that will change in the near future.
In general, the advice I hear from others is to rely on the judgement of your collegues and/or supervisor (if you're a Master/PhD student). That should make it easier to select conferences and journals to publish your work in.
Nalam : I agreed that reproducing of the paper is not correct. However, I want to note that many times could be useful to publish your results in Journals of different audience, like computational science paper in Biology journals etc. It is reproducing in sense that practically same methods have been used and there are only minimal changes in data. However, Biologists don't actively follow papers of scientific computing and they maybe don't have an access to papers of different fields. Actually for this reason the multidisciplinary research gets best benefits if, in the future, all the papers are open access.
Open acces is acceptable for authors, because they wish more big distribution of published papers.
Open acces is nor acceptible for publishers from fimancial point of wiev. There are a opposite wishing, because they hope to sell papers and to get money
Open access publications need to be encouraged. There is a misconception that open access publications are generally of lower standards.However, the reviewers need to evaluate the papers more critically and professionally so as to retain the standards of quality papers. The facilities that we acquire in this age suggest that the traditional approaches of journal publication in terms of review durations is quite annoying.
I do welcome the question and do believe open access publication worth encouragement for sure. Only, the peer-review process, methods applied have to be of good standards to ensure perfect quality research paper publication.
Of course, for that to happen, we need to rethink and re-plan the INS and OUTS of it.
In my opinion, there should not be any reservation regarding the encouraging 'Open Access Journal' . I strongly recommend to encourage the publication in them taking into consideration the quality of the work. There are pretty good number of Bentham Group journals which are refereed and reputed journals. Researchers are advised to search them in accordance to their fields of interest.
We may start the culture from the university scope. All univerisities should have a kind of publication repository. From which the existing works can be accessed for all. At the moment, Inter library loan is not easy as our own library collection. IT, in the respect of information disseminarion, has been overused for comercial purposes and been exploited by the existing main players and publishers.
There have been some other discussion threads on these. See the first relevant one (that I know of) at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_ResearchGates_promotion_of_user_author_self-archiving_help_or_harm_the_cause_of_open_access_publishing: here open access publication is widely discussed, and in the end the discussion ended up in talking about the review process. Since the two topics are closely intertwined: the main reason for publication in "respected" journals is the review process, which---when mastered---allows us to publish among a select set of "excellent" papers. Or else we could just put the paper on our homepage!
So the second, relevant, discussion thread discusses this at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Time_to_change_the_peer_review_process.
To me, the issue is clear: open access publication is the only reasonable alternative, but must be combined with open peer review.
Open access publications are an interesting idea. The question is who pays for the open access publication? Every journal has an editorial office and (surprise, surprise) they do not work for free. The only ones working for free are the referees...:-)
If you want quality papers you need a quality editor, and assistant editors. Before a paper gets to be reviewed it is first viewed by one of these people who may decide that this journal is not for you. In general, I would personally like all the journals to be 'open access' but I don't want the internet to kill yet another area of publications.
Why the editors and assistant editors need a salary? because any such endeavor requires a lot of time. There can be an open access journal that charges the authors and not the readers, but then authors from disadvantaged countries would be disadvantaged...In short, unfortunately despite the Internet, time is still money and even Wikipedia conducts a continuous fundraiser. Yes, things like servers, software, technical support and editors require money. And if everything is open access and nobody pays we go to the Wikipedia situation. Why are they asking for money? I believe they do that because operations cost money even if some activities are free. So let's come off the tree of free access. There is no such thing.
We term our age as Knowledge age having a characteristice of open access to publication. Therefore, let us accept openly the open access. Many journals charge to authors (is it a good business?) but no remuneration to referees. Some journals do not pay anything to authors and referees as well but the publication turns to be a property of publisher, a good business. No doubt the functioing of Editorial Office will be cost based to obtain marginal profits to owners. There could be a system where editorial office services to be charity services, social obligations as done by many NGOs. The bare exopenses can be recovered through accepting advertisements, grants from governments and donations from public, making the publication non-profit services. Knowledge is the property of Human race and must be available fee to one and all who needs it. Certainly we can make it open and free to the advantage of Human Race.
Yeah ofcourse it should be encouraged, as it can widen the thoughts of researcher who is working on the same field with least time spending for locked ones.
To Prabhatar: If you know of a journal that pays the referees, please let me know...:-) Authors are required to pay page charges in many publications of American societies; Elsevier journals (and probably other publishers as well that I am not sure about) do not charge fees from the authors and survive only from subscriptions. The American societies that charge page charges are non-profit organizations but they keep their staff and admin from these fees. In all cases the copyrights are transferred to the journal as part of the publication process. If as an author you have no money to pay for publication, in science and engineering you can find many journals with good impact factors that do not charge the authors. So if you have the opportunity to publish in an open-access journal or in an Elsevier journal with no fees, why should you not aim for the established journal? Also, as I said in an earlier message, eventually someone has to pay the expenses of the open-access journal. For this reason open access publications will struggle to get decent papers. My opinion, of course.
1) a few facts.
Ever heard of arXiv? At no cost for the users, and the impact is higher than that of any journal. See also https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~kurtz/kurtz-effect.pdf for the relationship between citing and availability of a paper---though one might argue that the conclusions put forth in that paper may have been true for 2004, but are no longer true in a global society we are faced with now.
Oh, associate editors do not get paid (at least not the ones I am or was editor of). Second, the cost of publishing is not related to the quality of the journals. Another good example: frontiersin,org. Or what about plos one? A young journal, open access, with a tremendous impact factor. Why bother with the old-fahshioned behind-paywall journals if we can give away our articles to our readers?
Many journals, esp. Elsevier, only sell their journals in packages. Buy three good journals, you have to also purchase two B or C journals. Another nasty fact: if a library purchases access for a certain number of years and then cancels the subscription, the (online) available articles are then no longer available. These are reasons for many European institutions to boycott Elsevier.
In Horizon 2020, the next funding programme of the EC, steps have been taken to remove publication in pay-per-view journals.
2) a plea.
Please realise that we *must* change publication practice. For me, working for a university which can afford to pay hundreds of thousands per year to get access to journals, the effect is minimal. But others? Indeed, paying to publish may be argued to be more problematic: the costs, between 1000 and 3000 per published paper, can only be afforded by rich institutions.
Both systems are not really acceptable. The existing, old, approach, since papers are hard to get by, subscription fees are too high, and the closed review process is too subjective to work well (we see that all the time!) The "new" approach, paying for open access, reduces publication possibilities to a few happy countries, leaving out publication possibilities for many poorer ones.
Probably the only approach left is to set up a self-ranking system (google, here's a task for you) where author accreditation, somewhat along the lines of what RG implements, number of paper downloads, etc. leads to search rankings, and search rankings add up to impact factors. Papers should only be stored on publicly accessible servers.
Patrick, you address many issues here, but I will address only one. I know the review process is not perfect, and sometimes revolutionary papers are knocked back whereas ordinary papers get through. (It is of note that Gamow's theory on the Big Bang was not initially accepted and only eight years later, when some experimental data was found the discoverers received the Noble, but Gamow was already dead...)
But 'subjectivity' is actually needed sometimes and it might even be right, if the paper one reads deals with the same thing the same reviewer published ten years ago but the young authors did not look that far back... Who if not the people who work in the field would know that?
I do not mean to ditch reviewing. But with, usually, only two reviewers per paper, the chances are small that one gets a good reviewer, one who really knows the field. Why not give everyone the chance to review? Stephan Harnad demonstrated this approach in Behavioral and Brain Sciences ("BBS"), it worked well: commentaries could be written by all accredited members of the journal---which was completely free, and back then perhaps this was too much for the publisher.
When I read a paper (which, admittedly, I rarely do when not for a review :-/ ), it would certainly help me to find what peers think of it. Open discussions on papers will add so much more information, in which the author can, of course, rebut. In current reviews, often reviewers make good points, but always only half of them; the rest are a result of careless reading (or writing, of course). So must we always please a single reviewer?
I do not have clear-cut answers. I have, however, been in the field long enough to realise that the current system does not work anymore; there are simply too many papers, and it has become too easy to publish a bad paper!
Patrick, I don't understand the method you say was tried: a paper gets published online with no review and then people comment on it? And this would prevent the publication of poor papers? Let everybody vote? How would this improve the process? Btw, it seems to me that the discussion has deviated from the topic, but perhaps this is a good thing...:-)
Publications must be only after proper review but it must be having open access without any charge by the publisher.
By paying the standard of publication will definitely goes down and sub standard..
So in my opinion good work must be recognized by the reviewers in the consent field of research to sustain quality of publication and at the same time it must have open access without any charge.
Rafael, the arXiv system is completely open (yes, you need a peer vote for you to get an account, but that's it). A review is nice, sometimes. But it is often biased. I have the problem myself when reviewing: in 80% of the cases, I know the authors of the paper I am asked to review. I will automatically have an opinion of the people or the labs. That makes my judgement coloured, no matter what---even if I try to be impartial, I will have a feeling w.r.t. a certain lab and that makes an objective review, as if I did not know the author, really difficult. Of course, blind does not help.
I, as a reviewer, would rather have a discussion with the author about the paper. But then why not make it an open discussion, publicly visible? Surely, when a paper is interesting, more peers will want to discuss---as, for instance, this discussion, in which we talk about important scientific management issues. If a paper is boring, there will be little need to discuss. How is that for a "rating" of a paper? Uninteresting papers will fade in oblivion soon enough.
Patrick, for some reason I did not receive notification about your reply, so I am a bit late. I am not sure that having more than two-three people read the paper before acceptance is a good idea. Suppose the paper is really weak. Then only a very small number of people will know about it and the 'shame' is contained. If the paper is good, it will be released to the community and then others can react. At every stage the paper reflects the authors' views, even if referees made comments. If 100 referees make comments, there is no doubt the paper will be good, but the authorship will be "diluted". Often referees make constructive comments and sometimes the contribution might even constitute substantial help. The authors want their papers passed, so they implement these comments, but actually this is an intellectual contribution of the reviewer and a sort of a free gift to the author.
I actually think that despite the flaws that you mention, it is still preferable to limit the number of referees to 2--3. If you try to be honest, the fact that you know the author might perhaps influence you not to reject a weak paper, but suggest major revision instead. But the paper will still me improved. In any case, regarding open source publications, I don't object to anything that is free if the method works and people are happy.
The open access publications should be encouraged, if and only if the page-charges to be paid by the authors be exempted.
To Faramarz: I guess you don't mind having commercial ads popping up while you are reading the paper...It's wishful thinking, but it cannot work: How can you have a free publication that is not supported financially by the readers or by the authors? Someone needs to look after the website, to take care of the server, to provide services. Someone needs to design the website, to buy the software, to maintain the site and update the programs. And the trouble is that people like to be paid for services...
The idea of work without monetary benefit is nice, but is not applicable in the modern world...What I do agree is that the publishers should not have a one-price-for-all policy but vary their prices from country to country to allow poorer countries access to the latest knowledge.
@ Rafael, I cent per cent agree with you as far as the expenses are concerned, and your idea of different policy for different walks of life. My fear is that the promotion of science will be confined to well-to-do parties who can afford to pay for publications, whereas once we call papers for a publication, the domain of research activities should not be limited to some particular regions of the world that are arena of commercial forum, that is not fair. Those who are merely after money-making should walk into some other types of market places. For instance, I give my own example, which may be case of so many researchers. I am a faculty member, teaching at university with a salary equivalent to page charge of well-known open access journal. And I don't have fund for publications of my research work done with my students. Please do remember all faculty members are not always lucky enough to win a research with a pre-defined funds! Is not that my right to propagate my research activities in the scope of the scientific world of today. I believe this opportunity from different countries will be in danger of negligence and majority of research workers will be deprived of the international forum of awareness. There are lots of new ideas in science and technology which are flourishing at each corner of the scientific world.
To Faramaraz,
I am not sure that you know that even American journals that charge the authors
usually wave their fees if there is a good reason. Open access jourmals
could perhaps do that as well, but they need income from somewhere...
Firstly open access journal is always a good idea. The only concern is how to bear the costs involved. But then comes the question why are so many costs involved? One of the reasons is related to a manual system of refereeing. The second is print copy. You may always recover some costs by selling hard copy, and one should try to recover completely that way. But the authors should never be asked to pay any processing charges- after all it is their product.
As regards refereeing, I find that we have to evolve out of this blind 2 or 3 reviewer system. I often find reviewing and submitting a report a function of several factors (I admit - I dont do a good job all the time). In this email era you tend to delay the review till a reminder is received and then you struggle to locate the paper you want to review and recover passwords etc. Not only that because of deadline pressure, you tend to finish the job very quickly. I end up doing this not really satisfied.
We also have to ask ourselves who are we to accept or reject a paper which may be not well understood by us? Of course there is stuff coming up sometimes which is very poor, barring that judgement on majority of papers is biased and based upon the profile of the authors and the institutions. This is because as a referee you do not want to risk your reputation.
A better method will be to involve discussions with the authors and thus blind refereeing is avoided. Another way is to improve this arxiv system- not bad but it should be a two step process. The paper should lie at level 1 till it is voted by at least 10 reputed authors over a span of 2 months time who have shown the curiosity to read. One may take care to put in place that these authors are not localized in one area or institute. Then it should be raised to level 2 and be considered as peer reviewed.
To Jindal
You raise an interesting point in having discussions with the authors. I am sure this would improve the paper. However, it might create a situation where the 'tips' you convey to the authors actually make you eligible for authorship. I find quite often that I disagree with some of the explanations the authors give for effects observed. As a referee I can say that I disagree, but I also tell them what is a better explanation. Discussion of results actually falls in the responsibilities of authors, so if they knew who is giving them the advice they should actually list me among the authors, or at least in an official acknowledgement. Nowadays I run a special editing service, which---unlike similar services---also advices on content, not only on English, and it is intended to help authors with poor English pass the editorial process. And btw, without wishing to generalize, I surprisingly find that authors from India sometimes have problems with proper technical writing in English. I am saying surprisingly because to my knowledge English is the only common language among all States in India (please correct me if I am wrong).
In other words, perhaps a better way of publishing would be the Wikipedia style: everyone can contribute to improving the paper. I am sure the paper would be much better, but who would be the author?
To all,
I disagree that any referre reads and make comments on a paper , yes even the suggestions or better way of saying, make them probably eligible to be an authorship for the paper. It is not any different than discussing your results in the hallway or in the cafeteria. We are scientist and we need to critisizewithout expectation and or suggest to one another. It is a kind of global learning platform. This is my 2 cents thougts :=)
To Rafael: Sir, let us not go around a circular path of repeating the words after words regarding the present topic. In my opinion, let us categorize the authors into "haves" and "have nots", Those in first category who can afford for the page-charge, let them go ahead. And those in second category, let them enjoy their status of getting waived off the charge. Long Live!
Rafael, you have a point in seeking authorship for an advice which puts weight, quality and quantity to a paper and I am only worried that in such a process some referee may drag it to a point to be an added author. But I liked Patrick's comments on arxiv based publications and I would appreciate if comments could be received on my suggestion to peer reviewing arxiv papers which are open access no cost publications but without peer review.
Let readers decide if a given arxive content is worth upgrading to get a status of peer reviewed as suggested in my earlier posting some hours ago.
As regards your comments on quality of English from Indians, I do feel that the quality of language has gone down over the years because much less emphasis is being paid to grammar and reading and writing. I do not know if this is universal or India specific. Presumably, we should agree to allow somewhat poor language as long as sense is conveyed - after all there are so many languages and we are losing quality in this era of "computer language" and fields filling forms.
To Faramarz: That's exactly what I suggested,i.e., that the fees for 'have-nots' s be waived. This is commonly done. Moreover, authors are asked to pay only after the paper was reviewed. At that stage if you decline payment your paper will still be published but will be delayed a bit (up to six months to my knowledge).
To Jindal: What I said about the referees making valuable contributions is a fact. I do it quite often and of course I do not identify myself and do not ask to be added to the authors' list. I was just mentioning the fact that reviewers are important and often the feedback is valuable. If this was a person working in your lab who has read the paper so carefully and raised a few points that need to be added, you would probably say that such a contribution deserves some mention, or at least an open acknowledgement. In any case, I was not familiar with arxhiv, and after a brief browse I am still not familiar with it. I see that some of the papers there have been published in regular journals and are put there for open access, but I am too unfamiliar with the system to comment more than what I said. And importantly, I noticed some sponsorships on the page I looked at. So the cost are carried by somebody.
Regarding the question of quality of English in publication, it is a very complicated issue. In my view, in principle, if the reader can understand what the author is saying it should be enough. However, poor English unfortunately does affect the impression of the reviewer (if the reviewer is from an English-speaking country).
It is therefore preferable to have a decent presentation, so that the criticism---if there is any---addresses real issues and not language. If the language is poor, this can bring a poor review because the reader can't understand exactly what the author wants to say.
You have correctly assessed arxiv, Rafael, but not concluded completely. This is at the moment an open access repeat of Journal articles if they are published but also a platform for a contribution which remains unpublished in peer reviewed. I suggest make t peer reviewed by voting it up from peers- let the paper lie at level 1 and raise it to level of peer reviewed after a couple of months of positive assessment by readers.
To Jindal: What I understand from Arxiv Publication is that, there the already-published papers are re-published. And no papers are hanging there for any final reviews by any parties. Actually, the finality of authorship once for all should be announced at a time by a publisher whether open-access journal or otherwise. It should not be hanging up for readers to decide, as suggested by some people.
@ Faramarz E. Seraji and V K Jindal: Your interesting discussions would certainly be relevant and brain-storming to all concerns. if an individual goes across the above discussions cautiously, and debate appropriately on this open platform, may provide new insights to further update the relevant forum.
One if the main question is the económic sustainability of these kind of open journals.........
The main problem of open access publication is economy of the journal. Interest of authors is to increse the access, but open access journal ask usually a tax. The authors in all cases not receive any money from distribution, and thiss super tax is not acceptible. Open access journal get better impact factor and in this way get respect and more readers.
The authors should SPEND mental energy to produce scientific reports (Articles) and then SPEND money to announce (Advertise) his/her product(!) for the benefit of those who don't do an iota of the work........ That is not fair,
I highly recommend to go for open peer reviewed publication,which will bring scientists working in common field of research and the publication must be with out any processing fees.
It used to be painful during our undergraduate days when huge amount of money was demanded by publishing companies to have access to some useful full length journals whose only abstracts were shown on the internet. Few open publications on the internet paved the way for us and we gave bunch of prayers to the writers for the gesture. Today, I have up to two open access journals online and other three under processing to be published freely online. Therefore, for continuity, open access publications should be encouraged.
Some of the paid open access journals are out there to siphon or milk intended authors of their meagre earning, but this doesn't not suffice to say that all open access Sophos are fraudulent or of low quality. My opinion is that all open access journals should be registered and controlled by what I called the "the open access journals management board (OAMB)". In this way, excesses of some of the fraudulent ones would be monitored and controlled. However, some known open access journals have already existing integrity that surpass majority of unpaid journals. It is pertinent for an intending author in an open access journal to sample papers published in the journal, which would to an extent reveal the quality of the journal, before sending manuscript for a review.
what kind of re-thinking is required I could not understand as mentioned by Mostafa.
I find confusion amongst the followers after a note by Ogheneruona Diemuodeke. It should be understood that open access only means open for any reader to view or download. Payment for publication may or may not accompany open access. Whereas open access of all journals is a good step, question is regarding how to maintain this facility if no body pays. Naturally for open access the only person who can be asked to pay is the author. That is also not fair. Therefore if we can generate services like arxive where hardly much costs are involved, but if refereeing or peer review becomes possible by pooling in dignified reviewers then this will be sustainable open access. We all can pool in to start a new arxive where automatic peer review in a transparent way becomes possible by random selection of two of a select panel which does not involve very much manual service component, I am sure it can be made sustainable. We can always find some resources coming by optional payments.
In fact I continue and suggest ResearchGate to start the open access journals with a peer review process with the help of members of RG having some reasonable score. I would like to use this forum to look for volunteers who can maintain and create journal sites owned by Research Gate in all fields. I am hoping in due course RG Open Access Journals will be of high quality because of its data base and RG rated peer review so planned through reasonable automated uploading and review process with some paid staff whom w could pay out of voluntary contributions. I am ready to offer my services at the organizational level and creation of journal sites etc.
The core issue with an approach like the RG Open Access Journal would be that such a journal is not necessarily supported by the research community. First off, the majority of the researchers I know (admittedly not that many) are not on RG. Secondly, the RG Score (like many other metrics) is computed independently of field*. This has the unfortunate result that if I would write or review a theoretical physics paper, I would be valued equally to physicists with my score. Of course that's not the whole story (we have peer review, after all), but it is definitely an obstacle. Personally I feel that journals should be organised by prominent authors within the research community. In theory at least, these people are the most qualified to be editors and reviewers.
* Note: I'm not saying this is a bad thing, and its probably a necessity.
Open access papers is absolutely better for authors, because more researchers will read and use scientific results. For Journal this is a problem, opening good increase of impact factor and a rising of economy of publishing, which usually the Publisher compensate wits additional payment of authors. To use archives as RG platform is a way the authors to increase access to scientific community, by an ignoring the Journal access by payment the electronic copy of the old papers.
The great scientist J. Watson (Nobel prize 1962) has used an open access journal for publishing an article that takes several years working. The article is controversial. Perhaps for this reason it has now been published in the new journal "Open Biology". This fact makes me think that a journal in which it is easy to publish can output many mediocre articles, but also other great articles that more selective journals would not dare publish. In other words, a very restrictive journals have no uninteresting papers, but lacks in revolutionary or unorthodox articles.
I think that open access publication should be encouraged, because researchers who are not working at university or lecturers of courses who are working for businesses need access to good research literature to offer high quality of their work. And as we know theoretical research and the use of the this research in practice are to sides of a medal.
And I want to stress the point which was mentioned before. Being to strict or restrictive as a journal kills unorthodoxy and with that new creative solutions will lack.
I corrected a spelling mistake.
We need to change the standard of evaluations like we have some journals who demand for referees from the authors, the authors wrote the name of their friends. And the friends as reviewer do not comment critically and in this way, low quality work is published day and night in the journals of lower grade.
There are many poor researchers who cannot afford to access paid journal or may not have suitable infrastructure to access it.Apart from India ,many country suffer due to the above reason .Therefore ,we lose quality works from a qualified people.thus,loss in technological advancement.
Open access journals are evident in present days research context.
The payment for open access papers is asked by journal. This is additional of authors who doing concrete research. To publish an open access paper is not equal to publish bed paper-there also has reviewing, which could be good or bed. So-the all responsibility for quality of paper and for additional need of money is for Journal publisher.
Incidentally I am now involved in editing an entry for Wikipedia. If there is open access website, it should be like Wikipedia: anyone can read, anyone can contribute. However, they have a system of volunteers who check quality and delete inappropriate material. Also, of course, anyone can edit. But the system is actually bad. Wiki also has a set of rules of what is OK and what isn't...except that the people in charge of the rules apply them arbitrarily....and fighting them is very difficult.
I am afraid that the universality principle cannot work. At the moment people pay to place their work as open access. But it's actually not money from your pocket, it's money from research grants or other sources, and only wealth groups do this. I understand that open access is good for the author and for the reader, but I am now disappointed with the processes at Wiki that I can't trust any system that works by itself. (What I mean is that the people in the Wiki system, all volunteers, can apply any rule they please and the user would find it extremely hard to argue. Who would you argue with in a totally open-access journal? Who is in charge of placing a paper or rejecting it? Someone needs to supervise the traffic. I know it's a nice idea, but unless some organization takes such a publication over and appoints people that report to someone and can be replaced if they don't perform, I don't see it working.
I am involved with The Open Mineral Processing Journal, an open access one (http://www.tompj.org) from Bentham. We peer review papers. Apart of the money part, i.e. large publishers are selling to libraries while open journals take some fee from author's grants, the major difference consists in the impact factor which is not assigned to Open Journals. Secondly, the number of accepted papers should not fill a certain number of pages per year.
Otherwise, the quality of the papers should remain high and plagiarism is severely avoided.
In my opinion, Open Journals, should count as any other paper, since these may be read and cited.
Concerning the wikipedia, I believe they are using there an unfinished dynamic application (similar to blogs, guestbooks and bulletin boards), while stable software may be found freely at http://www.sourceforge.net.
Because unfinished software, anybody may enter other's material. The so called administrators (moderators in case of bulletin boards) have not an honourable identity, but just nick names, as "Killer Chihuahua" or "Red Pen of the Doom". They explicitely state that your scientific profile and background does not matter but their "rules"., like in computer games, where no qualification is required.
So wikipedia is just a net GAME, which many may confuse with a serious professional contribution. What scientific quality could have an article written by a dog and reviwed by a zombie ?
The voluntary and "free" character of the contributions may be however assigned to other initiatives , mostly in software (GNU, Sourceforge).
Peer review for scientific journals is also anonymous, voluntary and "free", but assigned by editors with publicly known scientific profile.
For the wikipedia, involvement of amateurs in the peer review process is of course not serious. What peers should be "Killer Chihuahua" or "Red Pen of the Doom"?
Yes, it helps opening our knowledge. Our goal should be developing the field as much as we could.
Prof. Ciurchea, you are right of course regarding wiki but...it has become an uncontrollable monster. I found some dreadful entries in humanities and social sciences. In science Wiki is OK I think, because of the lack of ambiguity. In biographies Wiki is a disaster, and the main reason is that everybody can edit. I am sorry that the discussion on Open Access has deviated to Wiki, but I think that the academic community can learn from mistakes. Some people have suggested and open and transparent review process for open access papers. This really sounds like a good idea: what is better than a transparent process? Well, I can look at the implementation of such a process with the example of what happens at Wikipedia. I strongly prefer a scenario where the criticism is not open to the public.
Hi dr. Manory, you are right. An "open, transparent" review is a shield for amateurs and incompetent, mean people to interfere in the peer review without control. Competence should be proven first.
Open Accesss Journals have peer review, editorial board, editor in chief, but these journals are integrated in the publishing bussiness differently. General laws concerning etiquette and public image are respected.
Biographies are a distinct classification item in the Universal Classification Index (nr 9. Geography, Biographies. History). The rule is that the biographer is known (Plutarch is the author of the biography for Theseus in his work "Lives"). I haven't heard that someone is interfering in the Plutarch's work anonymously
There are complications, including legal, when someone anonymous or not interferes in somebody's biography and staints the image of the biographer or of the biographee., and this is not good for the bussiness and also is detrimental for the systematic intent of the synthesis approached.
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