Regarding to the last two questions asked by Sam, I think that researchers should target journals (open access or not) based on the journal's scope and potential audience/readers, in other words we should put our paper in the most appropiated outlet. Funding agencies, academic employers are using impact factors (and many other metrics) to jugde the quality of the research performed by a person or research team. In my opinion that is wrong, because the impact factor is just a measure of the popularity of a given journal, but by no means reflects the quality of a given investigation.

Hi Sam! Last decade has seen profitability for journals on the basis of impact factors. Many high impact journals have attempted to take benefit of this by multiplying the journals topic and subject-wise. Access to such journals was also made at a heavy price. Many Society based journals then made their access free on line and improved their impact factors. Many new journals have come up for free access, but at more than reasonable cost to the author or author's institution. Also, many websites host the published articles free of cost. This has fluidized the equations of impact factors. Internet has done great service to mankind in that benefits of research are practically available to interested user, anywhere-anytime, which is conducive to fast research and development activities globally. Thanks are also due to ResearchGate, for making a giant contribution in this direction.

In these days I found myself thinking about open access journals, something like that: "Open access journals are good because everybody can access to their content, but are bad because are close access, in terms of possibility to publish in them: do you have money? You can publish, don't you have money, you can't publish there. It's a journal for rich researchers"

Am I wrong in this kind of thoughts? Are there any data about who publish with open access journals?

Regarding to the last two questions asked by Sam, I think that researchers should target journals (open access or not) based on the journal's scope and potential audience/readers, in other words we should put our paper in the most appropiated outlet. Funding agencies, academic employers are using impact factors (and many other metrics) to jugde the quality of the research performed by a person or research team. In my opinion that is wrong, because the impact factor is just a measure of the popularity of a given journal, but by no means reflects the quality of a given investigation.

I have the same doubts of Mattia. Open journals are for rich resaerchers.

If you think a moment about the situation of scientific journals, you will find the situation very intriguing. For years and years we published on journals (that we should buy to read....) for free (sometimes by paying a fee related to the number of pages, pictures etc...). Normally if you contribute to a (not scientific) journal people is paying you for your articles. Now the trend is changed ..... the publishers offer free access (but at the same time publicity on their web pages) and ask us to support them by paying something for the electronic publication and depository........... the situation is always the same ...... they have something to publish because of us, and in addition ask us to support them!

Firstly, to my level of understanding i want to say scientists do not need to pay for their research works to be published . I am presenting the result of my research work to the world for the profitability and benefits of mankind, so i see no reason why i should pay for the work to be published. But the reverse is the case now due to the trend in 'open access journals'. This has also led to the maxim that "pay as yo go" now.

Secondly, I think the issue of IF is not helping scientists at all. Institutions and Societies crave for journals with high IF. But I want to put forward my mind that there are some new journals that are yet to be popular, probably with no or small IF and still are competitive with these high IF journals. Should we say because of their low IF, we should not patronize or publish in them since the current mentality now is "high IF". Kindly shed more light to these.

Regards

Dear all, I agree with much of what has been said. Open access is ideal but expensive. Open access is also populated by a large number of vanity journals that are primarily in it for profit. Whether those journals really review any papers is uncertain. One has to be careful with these journals. But there are also many good journals offering open access. If you can afford it and you want maximum distribution then paying for open access in a good journal might be a way to go. On the other hand--as has been mentioned previously it is also possible to archive a pdf of the article on researchgate or other server where everyone will have access to it. This is also a way to make the articles available to everyone.

Jim White

Rutgers University

Journals such as PeerJ have pushed the price of open access so low that if you can afford a computer you can afford #OA (i.e.

For

@Adeloju, I want to ask that must scientists pay in order for their research findings be made public for the benefit of mankind? I cannot see any sense in paying for your precious findings to be made useful for the entire populace when you have kept vigil for several days and months to carry out the research. And after successfully completing it, you are now billed these exorbitant amounts of dollars/euros for the work to be made useful for people by publishers, no matter the level of IF of such journal. Science world should see to this anomaly pls

Clement, I agree with you. I DO NOT publish in journals where I am required to pay unless they are prepared to waive the fees because I am doing the publishers and the public a service. In fact I have published in some journals in the past where I was actually sent a cheque payment for my contributions and that is the way it should really be. Not the way it is now with most journals. The good thing STILL is that there are several choices of journals that do not require you to pay to publish. These are the journals most people publish in. With these journals, even OA is an option, so you still do not have to pay for OA if you cannot afford it. Unfortunately, the real issue is that TOO many people are willing to pay to get published to the extent that many publishers now see this as a lucrative business rather than a service. This is why new journals are popping up everywhere, almost everyday and most have no academic integrity - They are simply there to TAP IN to the DOLLARS.

I have also had several invitations to write papers or chapters for books where the publishers/editors ask me to pay for the production. In all cases I REJECT their invitations and let them know that approaching me because of my expertise and asking me to pay is an INSULT. In fact, I could have called it other unpleasant things, but still one needs to be professional about these things.

Clement & Sam, I'm interested in your perspective. Many people promoting open access assume that scientists in countries like Nigeria would welcome open access, because otherwise the cost would exclude them from reading scientific literature. How do you afford to read closed access journals? As a scientist in Europe I can't afford it, does your university pay for your access?

I agree with the answer of Sam, and I have the same behavior, reject all the invitations (99% are really very bad journals or publishers) and dont pay for publishing my results. For the question of Quentin, well my University is paying a lot of money to have a large access to several journals from main editors. Each years we have to fight with the administration to preserve part of these journals. In any case, there are several way to access papers in journals that are not in our availability. Simply .... ask by email the paper to the leader author and receive in a few days the pdf by mail.

My academic career is now very long, but this was normal in former times ..... someone remeber the Current Contents system? Each week we were reading a booklet collecting all the indexes of journals in Life Science or other topics, sending a postcard to the corresping author, and receiving the paper few weeks after. Now everything is easier with emails and pdf .... but I receive only a few requests of pdfs. So I would encourage people to use this alternative way, instead of paying fee for open access, at leat at the level that these fees have in high ranking journals.

Quentin, there are 2 perspectives to the OA discussion. The one that Clement was referring was largely the author's perspective where you pay to publish. The other is the reader's perspective and you are correct in saying scientist from Nigeria and, in fact, other countries will benefit from access provided by OA. So from readers perspective, they would welcome OA, but not from an author's perspective. I guess if scientists from those countries can publish without journal fees and gain access to OA, it would be a win, win situation for them and this is already possible.

As for access to journals without OA, the cost is very expensive and most people cannot afford $30-50 or more per journal article. However, I must admit that, as a staff of one of the best institutions in Australia and in the World, my university pays for my access - This is essential if researchers are to keep up at the cutting edge of their research. The other way to gain access to journal publications without paying lots of money is through RG. Most members now upload their journal papers for others to read. I have already uploaded about 90% of my journal publications on RG and I am thrilled to know that members are gaining access to these.

Thank you Prof. Adeloju, You indeed have spoken my mind in relation to author's perspective. Concerning the question of Quentin, most universities in Africa are now enlightened about providing access to journals for their staff. For instance, in my institution, there are subscriptions to several journals through AGORA, OASIS, PUBMED etc which had provided channels for researchers to search and get access to most recent journals that are not even OA. I am not against open access system, but am not too comfortable about this expensive cost of publishing in most of these so called "high IF" journals.

Thanks for your responses. Although I work in Europe, the institution I work for cannot afford many journal subscriptions, nor can it afford to pay for OA. I regularly contact authors to get hold of PDFs, though this is not always successful. Often people break the terms of their copyright agreement with journals to do this. You don't always have the right to upload papers to RG.

One of the main reasons OA is promoted is because the funders (often the tax payer) are both paying for the research and then paying again to read the results of the research. Meanwhile, the large publishers have profit margins close to 50%.

I don't think it is right to charge researchers $4000 to publish OA, but if PeerJ and others can publish papers for

PS: In Sam's original question he mentioned impact factors. IMHO impact factors are a red-herring. They tell you nothing about the quality or citation rate of an individual paper. The sooner we start ignoring them better.

This is perhaps a good place to plug DORA, The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (http://am.ascb.org/dora/).

The original question has several points that should be discussed. the first is the IF of journals. This is an index illustrating the number of citations that the journal received in the last two years compared to the number of papers that were published. This index is something that inform us about the extention of the audience reading that specific journal. Becuase of its semplicity this index became very popular and it is currently used to judge the importance of a journal. However, even in the very first studies on IF, this index is valid only when comparing journals in the same area (i.e. neuroscience or environment), Therefore, the best way to use the IF is the relative IF, i.e ranking journals in the same field, not to compare among different fields. Many other indexes have been developed in the years, but no one reached the same popularity of IF. For very recent papers the IF is, at the moment, the most used index to judge the quality of the paper itself..... After a period, different from area to area, the number of citations obtained by the paper is,t o me, the best index of the importance of the paper. It is possible that you publish a paper in a journal with 10 of IF, this means that your paper was good, well written and fitting the aims of the journal..... but, if after 1 year you had only 3 citations (instead of 10), this essentially means that your paper has not reached the good target, essentialy it has been ignored.

Back to the original question, I believe that the iF is not the only parameter to choose the right journal. Your study should interest the readers to be quoted, so the audience of the journal is also important to promote your paper.

For the open access, again is a complex situation. It is optimal to have free access to journals, but, in many cases, you have to pay, sometines to pay a lot (2-3,000 euro!). People that is in the management of important publishers told me that they believe that in a few years all the journals will be open access and that the correct fee will be around 3,500 dollars (!). This is a very high rate, but nothing new under the sky ........ 10-15 years ago journals were asking you to buy a certain number of reprints (in many case it was mandatory) and the price was, more or less, comparable to the open access fees.

For the pdf given to the authors from the publisher they cannot be uploaded to RG, but the author has the right to send them to other researcher for free (not to sell!).

Giancarlo, just a point of correction. The right to 'self archive' on ResearchGate varies with publisher. Not all copyright transfer agreements allow it. In my opinion using this work-around to get free access to publications is the worst solution. Someone has to pay for publication. However, we should pay a fair price.

I agree with Giancario's views on the correct use of journal IFs. There is not only a need to emphasize relative IFs for different disciplines, but to judge the quality of published research work correctly, there must also be a link between IF and citations. Surprisingly, many papers that are published in high IF journals have little or no citations. Evidently, publishing in high IF journals alone is not a useful indicator of quality, it must also be supported by number of citations. So, I agree that the focus should not only be on IFs of journals, but also on relevance to the associated discipline(s). In other words, as researchers, we need to think both about the quality of the journals we publish in and also the relevance/appeal of our published work to the audience. Ultimately, if the work is good, it will be cited many times over.

I agree that someone has to pay for publication, my point is that the amount of requested money is, in general, too high. This is true in this particular historic period. When all the journals will be open access, then the Universities will have a consistent reduction of the budget for the libraries and, probably, we could have a system in which our institution will pay for quality publishing (a dream??).

The cost of publishing in the open access form is simply too high for me at present. Why pay thousands of dollars when I can publish for free? If I am going to use the OA route then I will have to add that cost to the grants I write.

I believe RG will be a good help to this respect, especially if they are not racially sentimental.

I am sure that RG computer program in factoring is race independent.

The error in the impact factor syndrome is that many failed to remember or realize that the journals with high IF started from somewhere as research in the 19th and 20th centuries cannot be compared with the 21st century. However, this IF syndrome is affecting both the researchers and publishers.

Ojo, I am not sure what you mean about your comparison between 19/20 century and 21 century research. Perhaps you could elaborate on this.. Not all journals with high IF is old. In fact there are many new ones in various fields that have high IF.

Highly cited & IF journals are okay and encouraging but my view about the assessment of researchers based on high IF journals may not give a true picture of the research itself. Many of these journals or publishers started on a small note and gradually gain popularity of been adjudged with high IF (how this was achieved could be a set up policy by the organization). However, every journal or publisher should be given the opportunity to develop so long as the standard for accessing articles received for publication are not compromised.

I agree that the standard of assessment of manuscript submitted for publication is critical and can make or break a journal because researchers will only cite or refer to high quality publications. This is an area where many of the new journals have to lift their games if they wish to be taken seriously by researchers.

By the standards of other authors--e.g. writers of novels, short stories and articles (on science or other subjects) for general readership magazines--we scientists have gotten ourselves in a ridiculous situation. The publishers PAY those other kinds of authors for their written work. In contrast, we either (a) relinquish rights to our written work or (b) pay to have them published. The latter situation would be seen by other authors as akin to "vanity press." I doubt we scientists have the ability to organize and act in concert to correct the situation. If we could, the logical thing to do would be to go "on strike": What if we all (or a group in a particular field) refused to submit papers unless we were paid for our submissions? The publishers would moan and groan. Some would fail. Some would find away to build author payment into their business plans. Ultimately, we have the content, and we should receive some of the reward for providing it.

I just don't submit my papers into a Journal, which charges for publication. They can not do business on me.

It is inconceivable that the author of a scientific work has, in addition to developing it, to pay for the publication of his/her work in a specialized magazine, work which can be very useful for the international scientific community in other countries. As a matter of principle, authors of scientific papers should not pay for the publication of their works, and specialized magazines should seek alternatives to finance their productions, as it has been done so far by many of them. In addition, the authors of published works should receive a share of the profits obtained by the sale of the specialized magazines where his/her work is published.

I quite agree with A.U, Jorge and Amir. Many of us as researchers especially in developing countries have to spend a lot in our scientific studies, yet be compelled to pay a high sum for publishing and signing the copy right agreement form to the publisher, who eventually make profit out of it without any due benefits to the researcher unlike in other magazines. The irony of it all is that the published work is not accessible to other researchers who might want to take a cue from the study, thus reducing the citation rate of such published work or journal. There is a need for us to begin to speak out this anomaly.

I advise you, Ojo, not to publish in jouranals, which charge authors for publications.

I avoided them during 50 years of my professional experience, even journals publishing free of charge are making money on us. But that is their business.

I chuckled when I read that some of you want to wanted to be paid to publish scientific papers. You perhaps don't know how much it costs and how few readers the majority of papers have.

If you think your science is so good that it will sell hundreds or thousands of copies then do publish it and enjoy all the money it brings you. However, if you want your writing to be available to everyone at no cost, for the benefit of mankind, then work with a reputable Open Access journal who will promote your work to the widest audience.

I agree with Quentin, the expectation or suggestion that researchers will get paid for work published in journals is a PIPE DREAM that will never be realized. Although it has happened in few cases but only for exceptional and outstanding researchers or special journal/magazine. Let's not forget that good journals also have costs they have to meet for production, marketing, etc. The real ideal we all want, as Ana said, is to be able to publish without paying fees and for our work to be accessible in OA mode. This is the WIN, WIN situation we should be striving for.

I agree also with Ojo that lack of accessibility to published work can have serious impact on citation and even on h-index derived from citations. This is an area where publishers need to give more consideration. Locking up published work for access by payment only has meant over the years that some published work were favored more than others. Think about it, if you have to pay for access, would you pay for access to the work of a well known researcher or for that of a relatively new/unknown researcher? When it is user pay for anything, there is always a criteria we develop for spending money, especially if the available funds are limited. On the other hand, researchers who have no funds will miss out on access completely. This issue is overcome by OA which provides access to all published work.

The other issue that must be addressed is that there has been far excessive proliferation of new journals in recent years, often of poor quality. It seems almost every time someone sneezes, a publisher is introducing a new journal. The ridiculous thing about this is that the practice is not only confined to new/small publishers, even old/established publishers who should know better are doing the same. This is creating a GLUT of journals in some disciplines and, more seriously, creating an unnecessary spread of research in some fields to several multiple journals, making it more difficult to check the novelty of published papers. This issue can no longer be let to go unchecked, it must be addressed. There is, in my view, now a GOOD CASE for CULLING some of these journals out of existence.

Sam, creation of journals in various disciplines is to identify with those areas of specialization that seems voiceless as compared to the notable ones. Culling them out of existence means we locking up diversity in the field of science. Many of this big publishers receives hundreds of articles for publication but only accept a few/fraction of it. Many of them boldly refer to this on their website as a means of rating their journals high or making researchers to feel their journal is more important than others. However, the overall effect of numerous turn down articles is frustration if there are no other publishers where you can send your articles to. I stated earlier that new journals need to be encouraged to grow. Most of the so-called big journals or publishers today started some day with developing policies that became an established policy for implementation today. I passionately disagree with Quertin, though we might not be expecting to be paid like the novelist or poets but researches in science has fostered development in different countries not novel, it has increased life expectancy of human populace thus increasing the per capital income of any nation with increase in industrial and technological advancement. Like Babchin rightly stated, those publishers still make money out of us else they wont be in the business. But my worry is that some of them pretend to publish free or might not state it on their author centre or anywhere on their webpage, only for them to bill you a ridiculous amount after the stress of writing your article based on their format with the acceptance of same. I need free journal sites to publish (that are actually free). For Ana, not every research has grants benefits. What then happens those research you don't have grants on. How do you publish them?

Ojo, I can see why you want to have many new journals, but the issue of quality cannot be ignored. Take it from me, as someone who has been publishing in journals for more than 30 years, the worst thing you can do for your research career is to publish in poor quality journals. Papers published in those journals are usually not taken seriously internationally in their respective disciplines. Those poor quality journals are the ones that I am suggesting that should be culled out. I appreciate that you may not agree but that remains my view.

There are many good journals you can publish in without paying a cent, but the quality of your work must be good to be accepted. Rejection does not necessarily reflect badly on the journals. From my experiences, it is often a reflection on the quality of the work submitted. As can be expected, the reviewers for good quality journals are tougher and that is good because that's how they build reputation. We need reputable journals, not just journals that adds no value to the published work.

Also I think you miss Ana's point on institutions paying for OA so that individuals will not have to pay. Some top journals are already doing this. She also made a valid point that some OA journals waive fees for those who cannot afford to pay.

My honest advice is whenever you wish to publish your work, do not compromise on quality. Better to do more work to raise the quality of your work than to publish in low or poor quality journals.

A core question we have been batting around somewhat indirectly is:

Who should pay the cost of getting a paper published in a journal?

I think that is absurd for individual researchers working for an academic institution to be responsible for finding the money to pay journal publication costs on a case-by-case basis for each paper they try to publish. If an institution hires someone whose job description includes publishing his/her work in journals, then the person's employment package should include a modest annual budget for his/her publication costs. This person can then decide how much of his/her budget to spend to get a particular paper published in a particular journal.

The further core problem is that scientists tend never to think about such things as "what should comprise their employment package"--beyond wages and customary benefits. We are generally too optimistic that somehow, the institution will treat us right.

Respected Dr. Sam Adeloju, question asked by you is really worth while to discuss at this stage, as per my is view is concerned, publication in highest impact factor is not only the measure to decide the research work, there is also measure of H-Index, if our research work is worth while to read that would attract wide range of researcher to refer and cite our article, automatically that would help in enhancing the H-Index of the author.

Jayachandra, I totally agree with you that citations and h-index are very important considerations for publishing research work. But as you may also know citations are linked with the IFs of journals. In other words, the more papers from journals are cited the higher their IFs.

The other good point you make is about the worthiness of research work. So it follows from there that if a research is really worthy it can be and, in fact, should be published in good quality journal. That is why I indicated the need not to compromise on quality.

I would like to keep the exact topic suggested by Sam.

In my opinion, Open Access in the form in which it is placed at the moment, does not serve well both publishers and authors. Indeed, due to various factors (including financial) Open Access became "necessary evil" for a number of scientific institutions and the authors. They must somehow accept otherwise would have a problem with access to scientific literature.

I think, that this situation will not change by simple operations on Impact Factor, H-Index, or any other parametric values​​, which transparently showing the quality of the individual magazines, as well as prestige of individual authors.

It seems, however, that better solutions (ideas) at the moment we are not able to come up and that is why we accept what is.

So I think that Open Access will continue to grow in current form, because access to scientific literature is crucial for the researcher.

You are right Andrzej. Access to scientific literature is crucial to all researchers but most of these literature published in the IF journals are being locked up for others to view, analyze methodologies and results and cite the journals. This therefore, will reduce the citation index of those journals. There is a need to reduce emphasis on IF and look for other means of assessment.

I think most people who have responded to my question agreed that OA is beneficial in providing wider access to published materials. Also there are now many alternate ways of meeting the charges required for publishing in these journals.

However, I have also noted from some responses that there is some confusion about the use of IF to indicate journal quality and its perceived reflection on the quality of individual published work.

From my perspective, it is only natural that where there is more than one journal in a particular field, the question of quality will come up. Like it or not, IF still represents the easiest way to gain an indication of journal quality. Whatever other way we choose to develop a new quality criteria will need to include rating of editorial board, review assessment quality and criteria, publisher quality, etc. The problem with employing such broad based criteria approach is that it is difficult to establish a truly objective assessment measure for each one. That is why the use of IF will remain for some time until someone can come up with a similarly simple way of more thoroughly assessing journal quality.

Having said that I agree with DORA that it is wrong to use IF to judge the quality of a researcher's work. I think we need to be clear about this to avoid further confusion. It is better to judge the quality of such work by individual assessment which may include citations and other disciplinary criteria. Although citations are reflected in journal IF, individual citations gives a better measure of the quality of a researcher's work and it is not dependent on the IF of the journal. Unfortunately, some organisations still place more emphasis on journal IFs rather than on paper quality as reflected by citations and other disciplinary measures.

Two thoughts on this:

Re IF: we all know that the quality of a single paper is not necessarily related to the IF of the journal. Also there is clear evidence that the correlation between the IF and the impact of a single paper (in terms of citations or so) has decreased in recent years. As bibliometric measures search committees etc are more and more looking at the citations to the publications of a researcher rather than to where these have been published.

Re Open access: the prices for the open access version is quite extreme for many publishers. If one wants to publish with Open Access, which I think is a good way to go, I would recommend to go for a open access journal like HESS for hydrology (to be honest, there the costs are also significant, but not as ridiculous as the OA option offered by some publishers)

The direction towards open journal by the researcher will be the reason for the shift of impact factors towards open journal. Because, in developing countries like India and china (highly populated nations), researchers utilized articles available in open access journals for their studies. But at the same time, for getting good impact factor, researcher want to publish their article in the subscription based journals.

But the recent shift will encourage the researcher to publish their articles in open access journals. It will be a good sign for the researchers of developing countries for publication.

I prefer reaching the right audience.

Sorry for the late entry here for my take. I have not yet read all the answers, so if I duplicate someone's answers, I apologize.

My take on it is this. We have to ask first why we write those articles and why we publish.

There is no such as the "right audience" since then you might as well just write to yourself. The nearest colleague in the same field of research is your biggest competitor and is not the "right audience" at all. I will never forget how it took me a year to prove a very famous paper wrong (I proved it mathematically) and the then "Nobel awaiting" economist (he received it since) wrote back to me by email "You are right but keep it silent". Is this what you mean by the "right audience"?

Specifically: "Do we publish to advance science or to advance our own careers?"

If we want to advance science, it needs to be open for all to read since paying for science publication will only advance the science within its circles that can afford or gets the publications free. Multidisciplinary work is less likely. Furthermore only scientists can read it. This creates a black-box effect and science stagnates without any public awareness (as my Nobel winning economist example above shows). This also lowers the chance for getting funding and grants by the way! So think of priced publishing as a two sided coin!

If we make publications free to all for reading, it can open up interests and eyes of people who did not even know that such research or advancement existed. It can open up funds that are both private and governmental because there is a public interest that is clearly visible.

In the black box of priced-publications: 90% of my personal medical doctors have no access to new research unless they pay for the journal subscription. Hence I find them prescribing treatments and medicines that are 10-20 years old.

Is this really what we want?

I now go to my doctor armed with piles of printed research so they can see that what I am saying is right and what they are saying is wrong. I am not a medical doctor but a research scientist, and now have people coming out of the woodwork asking me for treatment recommendations before they visit their doctors! Is that where science should be heading to?

If you say "yes", I completely disagree with you because so many people die each year from the wrong treatment! If you say "go open publication" I say "thank you!".

I have all but one publication in open and even the one that is published in a for-pay publication I posted on SSRN free for all to download and read.

I honestly don't care about journal rankings. What I personally care about is how many people have access to read my paper and with open access I am way ahead!

I agree with your feelings Phillip and I know what you mean.

Yes, I had to pay for the publish of one of my dissertation articles (actually my adviser and/or school did) for publish in PLOS One. But that article since then has brought it fame, several interviews with papers from all over the world, several invitations for lectures all over the world, etc. Had it been published in a journal article that only scientists of certain kinds have access to, 80% of my interviews and lectures would have not happened, since these were to groups outside of the direct field of Neuroeconomics.

The actual payment for the publish of the article was less than 1/10th of the costs of all the trips that were paid by others for me for the lectures and interviews. So on the big picture scale, one is better of with an OA article. If one is looking at the impact of a single article, one is also better with an OA article as a result that comes from the Impact Factor (IF) increase of OA journals.

I have another point to add. Closed Access for Pay (CAFP) and OA journals both have reviews and may or may not make it through to be published. The IF of the journal appears to be independent from it being OA or CAFP but the IF depends purely on readership and citations. An OA article actually has a higher rate of readership and citations--as I noted earlier, I have a CAFP publication that is never cited but its SSRN free OA version often is cited! So on the short and long run, OA is better for your career.

I think that while there is a cost involved out of pocket--for now--on the part of the researchers (or their institutions), it need not be so in the future if the institutions come to their senses to realize that hey can get more out of their buck by paying for the publication of their faculty rather than for the subscriptions of the journals!

The cost is the same.. the questions is which they spend the money on: to further their employees' recognition through OA or to further the recognition of the journals they subscribe to regardless if their faculty have publications in them or not! (This is a very important point that most institutions do not see yet!)

You say "Would you still have the same view of OA if your organisation imposed a rationing of your publication output on cost grounds or told you that the impact of your publication was not worth the cost of publishing, and where grant awarding bodies refuse to cover these costs in their awards?" Yes I would since it applies to both OA and CAFP publications today equally, only one is more evident and visible to you than the other. And here is an example how that rationing goes.

It was not too long ago that I had to fight for over a year to get subscription to a journal at my institution where I worked at the time--I never got it because they said it was too expensive even to get a photo copy of a particular article--I ended up purchasing it on my own (it was really not THAT expensive). So even if I had published in that journal in that very article, no one in my institution could have been able to read it!

Does that make any sense to you? It is also true that if I cannot read a journal, I cannot publish in it since I don't even know it exists perhaps and I definitely have no clue what it is about. Will that affect my grant and fund requests? You bet!

It will also affect if I will be tenured or not.

I still stand by my point that OA makes more sense for the sake of science as well as for the individual and the public as a whole.

I think it started as a fab idea, but unscrupulous publishers are trying their best to hijack it for their own commercial benefit...

I agree with Morris. Most of us working in underdeveloped or developing countries just can not afford to pay the huge cost of OA journals.

Great point Robert, the rapid push for commercial benefits by unscrupulous publishers is not only raising concern about the cost of publishing, but also about the integrity and quality of many new journals. It is bad enough to be burnt by paying to publish in a journal and even worse if the publication is not read or value because of the poor integrity or quality of the journal. Publishers with self interest and focus only on commercial benefits should not be supported.

A simple answer is that researchers should care about their credibility and only publish rigorous, relavent and seminal contributions: if they did this , the mode, process and journal type wouldn't matter because it is about the diffusion of data and knowledge that we al seek from publications with sometimes the fame that comes with seminal papers. The real world is not this way of course and data manipulation, poor lab methods, etc are more apt to occur in these quick to publish journals. There are several papers in peer-reviewed journals that show the high rates of data problems (as high as 70% in pharmaceutical research).

Dear Neil

I agree with you on an issue that our ideas about how should look the scientific investigations and access to their results (on the one hand), and how it is in reality (on the other hand) - are very different.

Maybe, in this case, instead of wondering whether Open Access is good or bad, or whether it is better to publish articles in reputable journals or generally available, it would be better to think about it, whether such a system to spread of scientific achievements what we have now, is exactly such as we really want.

In one of the earlier entries Robert Insall rightly concluded that the idea of Open Access is correct and interesting, but again the "big" publishing market want control of its, seeing their own profit.

Neil

you write about the symptoms of dishonesty of scientists, in the credibility of their studies. There are a very bad symptoms.

On the other hand, I can point to some signs of bad behavior of reputable publishers who at all costs want to maintain their dominance, and sometimes in arbitrary manner are unwilling to publish in their journals of works writting by researchers from academic institutions in the so-called. developing countries.

Faults are "on both sides of the science".

If I had on the end to refer to the basic thread of this topic, which is the importance of Open Access, I would say that this system is good also because it forces on the reputable, but conservative publishers to be more flexible. For the future of science this is a very good solution.

I have an observation that I just noticed and which leads to a very serious question. There seems to be an ill connection in the view of many of the academicians: that there MUST be a difference between an open access journal and a "reputable" journal in the quality of the papers published in them.

Are you suggesting (and believing) that "open access" is synonymous with "not reputable" and "paid for journals" as "reputable"? I honestly don't see that to be the case.

I have served--and still serve--on the review panels of several paid for and also open access journals. My review process doesn't change based on the journal. I refuse all articles with shady or incorrect statistics (80%+) regardless which type of journal I review for.

I think it is demeaning (to the reviewers as well as to the authors) to suggest that open access means lesser quality articles than what you find in paid for journals. If you truly understood that the reviewers are of the same caliber academicians applying the exact same rules, this thought would never enter your mind.

This has been a misconception from the start. While there certainly are ill reputed open access journals, there are just as many ill reputed paid for journals. Reputation of this sort is purely based on perception and I can tell you from my experience with both types of publications as a reviewer that your perception is incorrect.

I think there should be open access for everything in peer review journals, and that the authors should not have to pay anything, except maybe for color pages, and possibly editorial and administrative fees. And there should be a sliding scale so that no one should be denied publication because they can't pay.

My feeling is why should publishers collect fees when everything is electronically done now. So the journals should be non profit.

even if non-profit, if they charged as little as say $1 per article, most people could and would pay for that. But like I posted above which seems to have gone past without a word is that if institutions paid for the publications of their faculty instead of subscriptions of all kinds of journals, it would cost nothing to the author and all papers and articles would be accessible to anyone free. Why not do that?

I think the key is that with the subscriptions, money is made by the journals, ie profits. And I don't know if any journals would exist if profits weren't made.

they would get the profits but after the academics article was accepted; like on OA journals.. the academic institution pays for the publisher to be published. So the publisher still gets money

I like your idea except what would you do for institutions that don't have the money or lots of money? Sliding scale?

Some OA journals are extremely expensive. I could not even think to publish there.

As can be easily seems from the debate, there are a variety of opinions about this subject and also a variety of solutions.

I do not think that we can reach a unique solution that could take care of all possibilities that were mentioned in the debate. A combination of some of the ideas and suggestions mentioned in the debate could include some possible solutions in order to take care of the majority of the scientific community concerns.

Perhaps we can promote that the scientific institutions in most advanced countries pay the publication of papers prepared by their own scientists if its content could benefit the institutions in one way or another. Perhaps in some cases the proper scientist wishes to cover the fee in order to disseminate its work to the scientific community, particularly those working to develop countries' institutions. Perhaps the biggest and most important publishers can offer a reduced fee or a free fee for the publication of scientific papers prepared by scientists working in developing countries institutions. Perhaps journals publishers by the own scientific institution could assume the cost of publishing good papers from scientist working in developing countries institutions and so.

Marcia, the publication of a single article in a high quality OA is less than the annual institutional subscription for a single journal. An institution could pay for the publication of about 15-30 of its academicians' articles in OA for the annual subscription (we are talking institutional subscription not individual) for a SINGLE journal.

Having the institution pay for subscriptions of journals that few read makes little sense. I found many such journals hanging around in the institutions where I worked.

It would be an interesting exercise to analyse using a statistics and pure counting of institutional subscriptions versus readers... what percent of the journals subscribed to by institutions, for how much, and how many articles within those journals are of interest to the academicians at those institutions. I would suspect that about 30-40% of the journals are subscribed to because higher rank institutions also subscribe even if no one is really interested in them and about 50% of the articles in the journals subscribed to are not read in nearly any journal by anyone in an institution.

This sort of research may get the message through!

Jorge, totally support your argument!

Elsevier journals have established a strategy for covering the cost of publishing in OA journals by establishing funding body agreements with some organisations:

http://www.elsevier.com/about/publishing-guidelines/policies/funding-body-agreements

I am sure other publishers are doing (or will do) the same. So, the message that authors do not want to pay excessive amounts to publish their research in OA journals is getting through!!!

This is a good information. I do hope that other publishers will do likewise. This will encourage research and publishing same.

Phillip, Yes you are right that it is about compliance with OA policies of funding bodies. But, most of the funding bodies are now recognizing the need to help researchers meet the costs of publishing in OA journals. So my point is that, through reimbursement by funding bodies, cost of publishing in OA journals will be covered for authors. As some funding bodies are already doing this, other will eventually follow, i hope!!

As more and more research funding bodies are demanding researchers to publish by OA to increase accessibility, another publisher has introduced a new scheme for publishing in OA mode at no direct cost to authors:

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/librarians/goldforgold.asp?

What do you think about this approach? Will it work at your institution or organisation?Are other publishers likely to follow suit?

This is a good approach that would have positive benefit on the authors but my fear is that most institution or organization will not want to incur any additional expenses that will benefit their academicians and promote the institution. Most Universities rather spend their income generated fund on frivolities than on research and publications. The questions on whether other publishers will follow suit is based on individualism, which will also depend on the pricing from publishers.

Phillip, I agree that this will involve using library funds in some cases, but may also involve using research funding support from Departments, Schools, Faculties or the University at large. Whatever, the source, the ability to use this scheme will depend on how well off financially your institution or organisation is. It will definitely disadvantage researchers from developing countries where even normal research funding is limited or unavalable. Even if there are funds within an institution/organisation to do this, there may not be enough to do this for all staff, especially as the demand for such support increases. The real danger in that situation is that the scheme may favor some staff than others based on criteria such as journal IFs, reputation of publishers, etc. In the long term, the whole thing may turn into a game where staff publish in certain journals to get OA support from their organisations. If this happens, it will be a backward step and challenge the notion of "academic freedom" in a way not expected.

Notwithstanding how well or not this sort of scheme might work, there is clearly an emerging trend that funding bodies are increasingly pushing for OA to increase access to published work. On the other hand, this raises a question of why many journals have been able to get away for so long with locking up volumes of published work on a fee-for-access basis. While I appreciate that some of the publishers are trying to recoup their costs, but locking up a publish work for 5, 10 or 20 years or more on a fee-for-service basis is UNETHICAL and does a huge DISSERVICE to the author whose work may not be read or cited even if published in high IF journal and this will have huge negative impact on the author's h-index. Furthermore, it is a WASTE of huge public and industry funding that have gone into producing those published research work. For these reasons, I think it is time for us to call for the REVIEW of the fee-for-service policies used by journals and DEMAND that it be mandated that, where necessary to charge those fees, it should cease and the published work be made available free of charge for OA after 2 years.

Two articles published in Science and Guardian this week discussed some of the issues surrounding OA publication along the lines of responses provided to my question on RG. Notably, these two articles highlight the need for thorough review of manuscripts to avoid publication of poor quality research. The Science article gave some examples of how easy to publish ill-conceived work even in high quality established journals. The articles also raised questions about cost and profit made by journal publishers, as well as concern about the proliferation of illegitimate open access journals. It would be good to know what you think about these two articles:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access

I think that the peer review system is here and is going to stay for very long. Of course is not perfect, but it is the system we must trust. The problem is that we are not trained for peer reviewing scientific cheating, In fact, there is very little (not formal) training on peer review duties. I think that what is expressed in those links is a natural response on what research mainstream is impossing "the more you do the better you are". While I think that we must do our job properly, I also think that the system is putting everybody in a race for more funds, more published papers, more citations, more impact factors, more collaborative work, and so on. In this crazy race for getting more and more, those unscrupulous journals (and authors) may find a window of opportunity, specially if profit is involved. We have to take care of ourselfs and our work but foremost we must not forget the very reason of our work "the uninterested discovery of the true".

Well said Aldo, the rat race for more and MORE is driving so many bad behaviours and practices.

Hi great scholars, we need to be careful about all these open access journal. Kindly go through this link discussing about the frauds and unprofessional ethics of open access journals.

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access

And this also.

http://scholarlyoa.com/2012/11/30/criteria-for-determining-predatory-open-access-publishers-2nd-edition/

@Clement Ogunkunie, thanks for those two links! Yes, we have to be much more than careful!!!

Regards,

Ljubomir Jacic

Clement, I agree with your sentiment. The two articles from Science and Guardian which I included in my comments last week highlighted this view. Also comments made earlier to this question by me and others has indicated that the proliferation of dubious OA journals is a major issue and that many of these must be boycotted and scrapped.

OA PUBLISHING DEAL: Here is your opportunity to grab a free open access publishing opportunity for a limited time:

http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/open-access-week-2013

Other journals/publishers may be offering similar opportunities as we approach the end of the year. Look out, there may be an OA DEAL happening near you!!!.

Hi Sam, thanks for your information and taking us through this topic. I searched through the url provided but not in my field (Microbiology). I will be on the look out. Open access to published articles has helped increased research findings than when those information were locked up.

Another way to get free OA for 2011/12 journals for 2 weeks:

http://tandf.msgfocus.com/c/1jfTUzK64ywsXrHO6ljMuQSAQ

Yet another good opportunity to get FREE ACCESS to recent 2013 journals in science and engineering areas:

http://tandf.msgfocus.com/q/1HrYShrlA8iU0rgy9VEHl/wv