OPEN ACCESS: the concept of open access to scientific and educational content is becoming more and more popular. Probably one of the sources of this growing popularity is the fact that publications in open access journals are statistically more often read and quoted than those placed in traditional magazines published on a commercial basis. Do you agree?
It is very helpful to be able to enjoy the benefits while looking for articles on a specific subjects. But is it the best, most needed solution?
What's the big challenges facing open acces now?
Do you believe that in a near futere open access science would dominate?
I think all of journals should be open access as the aim of spreading knowledge is our goal!
Scholars in the developing countries mainly benefited from this. Therefore open access publications are very important.
It is a boon to researchers and a bane for the scientific publishing journals, who were all along harping on Impact factor and minting money.
Open publishing is an outcome of technology revolution, when a revolution happens, things change drastically.
Hi Joanna,
OPEN ACCESS: Yes, I do agree that "probably one of the sources of this growing popularity is the fact that publications in open access journals are statistically more often read and quoted than those placed in traditional magazines published on a commercial basis."
Signatures are very expensive to professors to pay alone, and universities prefer to pay just for the biggers. So, many research works would be e invisible.
I do agree with this too. I believe that "It is very helpful to be able to enjoy the benefits while looking for articles on a specific subject." And I don´t see any other solution that could be better than this. Do you?
What're the big challenges facing open access now?
I believe that are the predatory journals, most of them open access. Difficult to identify and difficult to stay out.
Do you believe that shortly open access science would dominate?
In a broader sense, yes I do believe. But we should never forget the part of science that is done to make money. It´s not a "sin," although it´s not the way we usually work on academic projects. Science to make money will ever dominate the science within on applied science, while pure science may dominate open access.
My best wishes.
Aurelio Hess
"This type of publishing method has pros and cons, the most prominent advantages of this method are:free for all, increased readership, access for researchers in developing countries. While its main disadvantages are lack of quality control and poor sustainability of publishing articles."
I think all of journals should be open access as the aim of spreading knowledge is our goal!
Dear Dr Joanna Gocłowska-Bolek , you have raised an interesting issue that is bothering me in all the times. thank you so much.
I definitely and totally agree with Dr. Parisa Ziarati and so that we all get uptodate information online and with no financial and related complications that we are facing in some of the journals currently. The other important thing we have to consider is that, papers published on open access journals are of good quality and even some of them are even better.
Open access scientific publishing is a good thing in science and help in improving the scientific research.
I like to discuss two different types of open access journals.
One is commonly known as ”predatory journals” and these journals promise a quick peer review process. They are published by not very well-known publishers. In many times they commonly publish articles without rigorous peer reviews, and these journals exist to charge an expensive author’s publication fees. In other words, they are more interested in making money than publishing a good quality article. As a result, the quality of articles in these journals is highly doubt-able.
The other type is open access option by publishers with a good reputation, and these journals offer a rigorous review process to ensure the quality of an article that may take a few months. These publishers also charge an expensive publication fee (as low as several hundred dollars and as high as several thousand dollars), and it is hard for an individual author to pay it without his or her institution‘ help.
In short, IF a journal conducts a rigorous peer reviews and much lowers the publication fee, the open access journals may be a good idea to expand readership.
Thanks.
Don
Hello,
In my idea open acces journals are the good method for improving the people knowledge, recently. Because, all of the people can share their ideas to each other, simply.
As a result, I agree with this method.
Thanks,
Sharing knowledge via open access is a revolutionary publishing agenda; the creative commons should remain open, i.e. not commercialized by the old monopolies. In the case of some open repositories, however, I can observe a clear tendency to monopolize cyberspace, in gradual steps, by the 'traditional' publishing industry, i.e. the old players are buying into open access, e.g. for the reason of growing popularity, concerning citation and circulation. The game is not over; it just started to capitalize.
Education can be a public good in the sense that its consequences are widely shared by other members of a community. Global issues are positive affected by the sharing of knowledge. The disadvantages between educated and less educated people lead to hostility. I think that at least those that have head been educated well with public founds should give back to the public open access to scientific publications.
Open access is an excellent way to spread knowledge. The main problem is to keep it out from predatory publishers as most of my fellow colegues said above. Unfortunately the Bell's list of possible predatory publishers is not being updated any more. In this sense I think that Researchgate and all our scientific community can do something. For example we can create update mechanisms for Bell's list.
Other possibility is creating a scientific commitee with well recognized people in their fields of expertice that may follow the list with a case by case analysis.
A few basic issues to keep in mind:
Predatory publishers do not have an easily identifible address. They lack indexing in Pubmed. The editorial board is filled with unkwnon names.
Sometimes their address is fake. Of course there is no perr review. But that is more difficult to find out.
If a manuscript is admitted for publication without any further comentaries or observation, probably the publisher is a predatory one.
Could the best way to make money from science be to give it away for free?
Jack Stilgoe
Go for quality free journals and not those requiring money to publish your work.
Thank you Joanna, for your important question.
I have my very own divided opinions.
In personal philosophical terms, I should feel that every scientific publication should be free of charges and "open-access"/accessible to all. Aren't we all committed to communicating our scientific research to the broader audiences ? This includes our commitment to teach, with daily enthusiasm, even when we feel underpaid...
In this sense, in an ideal perfect society, every honest scientist should feel happy to communicate to broader audiences, free of charges, and accessible to all.
Nevertheless, we also thrive for quality standards, as we communicate our works. we should take care not to share our works with the modern predatory industry of science, that pollutes journal publishing. I agree with Amir that we should not pay to publish our work.
We must decide on quality, over quantity. One should not perish when not publishing.
But I have confidence that soon there must rise new order on honest free publishing, with quality standards. We deserve this.
Open Access bridges the dearth of resources availability for research between poor and affluent students. Students from developing countries gain access to rich research papers for their studies.
It is the best thing that happened to the scientific world recently. Information is now accessible by the poor developing world. They now have access to the same journals with the first world and therefore stimulating publications from these previously disadvantaged part of the world
The advantages are clear. People get easier access to open access journal.
The disadvantages are difficult to capture. At the end of the day, someone needs to pay. Advertisement? Fees? The money has to come from somewhere to make the peer review process useful.
The major problem that I see with open access is that the current system follows some format of a Gold Open Access. This is where you pay to make something open access vs. the alternative form of Green Open Access where the author is allowed to self-archive a publication which is what see with publications that go into PubMed Central. Because most open access journals are some format of Gold, they basically operate on a fee for service model. Unfortunately, this means that they are strongly incentivized to push out papers and we now have a proliferation of predatory journals that basically take your money to put things online. Given the credence academia puts on publications, you have this terrible feedback loop where desperate authors are willing to buy publications to increase their chances of getting a job or tenure.
What happens if you’re not willing to pay? I never got publications partially because I didn’t have inexpensive avenues to publish my work. Does this arbitrary shift the burden of costs on labs that can’t pay to publish? Of course, they are spending that money on subscriptions anyways but will the money that they save on subscriptions necessarily translate to money for publication? The costs of open access isn’t trivial. [1][2][3]
Nothing good can come from this. There are too many concerns about academic fraud now and without Journals performing their job as gatekeepers, the system falls apart. The subscription based journals in Cell Press and NPG earn their subscriptions by ensuring high quality and are rewarded for being gatekeepers rather than reviewing in volume. At the same time, they are equally susceptible to academic fraud due to their emphasis on gathering views. In a scientific era where people are more willing to confirm facts, the need for these gatekeepers lessen.
I largely think that the Open Access debate is a lot more complicated than replacing evil publishing companies with online paper pushers. There should be a strategy that can get the best of both models rather than the zero sum game of one or the other.
Footnotes
[1] Does the price paid to publish in PLOS make up the cost of open access?
[2] What is the annual subscription cost to universities for scientific journals?
[3] If publicly funded scientific research was made available for free, who would pay for the peer review process?
1.4k Views · View UpvotersUpvotes14Downvote Promoted by JetBrainsTry a code review tool with IntelliJ IDEA core, by JetBrains.A code review tool with static code analysis and code navigation for Java, PHP, and JavaScript.Download at jetbrains.com Duncan Koerber, Author of Clear, Precise, Direct: Strategies for Writing, Oxford UP, 2015Answered Mar 24, 2016Originally Answered: What are the advantages and disadvantages of publishing in open access journals?
Some advantages of publishing in open access journals include:
Some disadvantages of publishing in open access journals include:
The full picture of open-access publishing won’t be known for some time, as the evidence accumulates. Many academics have advocated for open-access publishing for many years, and it’s only now coming into being.
The problem, of course, is that open-access doesn’t restrict publication as rigidly as for-pay journals do. Bad papers can more easily sneak past editors and reviewers. Journals publish enough junk results as it is; relaxing the standards would only exacerbate the problem.
It has strong advantages, however. Journal subscriptions have become a huge expense and cash-strapped researchers are often hobbled when doing lit searches. Too, good research often goes unpublished in major journals only due to bias or incorrect selection of reviewers.
One big improvement with great promise is researchers publishing their data instead of just aggregating it. Many researchers do a poor job of analyzing their own data.
Dear Borden
Lets clear one thing: you are right if the open access journal has a high quality standard. But if it is a predator journal you will not know how reliable is the information you are receiving.
Would you spent many years investigating on things based on unreliable information?
There open access journals of highy quality but unfortunately there are others that would publish any nonsense if you pay their APC (which is the new name of the amount they charge for publication).
Last hope for students and young researchers in the developing developing countries.
Scientific publication should be free to all readers, whether specialized or interested. The open access system democratizes information. We should only take care of the correct choice of those responsible for this publication and also how it will be sponsored. The important thing is that advertising costs are cheap for authors or related educational institutions.
It's pointless to list the advantages of "free" things, whatever they are, without explaining the business model. It's easy to list the advantages of, or rationales for, "free" things. For instance, I think that food should be free, because everyone needs food to survive. Even poor people. Therefore, food should be free.
But I haven't said anything of value.
Journals supported by advertizing? That's one business model. And there are those who complain bitterly about advertizing. Or, no peer review? Even there, you still have to cover other expenses, even if the publication is only online. So you still need money, and the journal may end up being of low quality anyway, without that peer review.
University pays the publishing fee? That makes some sense too. After all, universities build their reputation based on how much research they conduct and publish. Maybe mix in some advertizing too, and everything works out. Then again, the university would have to create such a fund, which will impact other spending plans.
My suggestion is, the advantages of "free" are too obvious to bother stating. The real issue is to propose credible business models. Business models that explain how those with money to spend accrue a benefit in spending this money, in support of research and the spreading of knowledge, so that the reader will not have to spend the money.
Open access journal help in spreading the knowledge.However, some of these journals published a low quality Articles for financial reasons.
I like to give you a real life example of the publication in the open access predatory journal.
I know a junior level professor who has been rejected for the publication in traditional journals. He found himself that his tenure is in jeopardy because of lack of his publication record.
One day he told me that his paper has been accepted as it is only a few days later he submitted. He told me the journal title that I have never heard of so that I conducted internet search. The journal was one of listed predatory journals. A predatory journal does not give an author a chance to improve the quality of his or her paper, while the journal just takes an expensive publication fee. The predatory journal claimed that they go through peer-review process; but I did not see much signs of peer reviews.
I advised the junior faculty. Probably, many universities do not give a credit for the publication in the predatory journals for tenure and promotion. Actually, it work against the candidate, if the candidate's publications mostly come from the predatory journals.
Open Access journals are great because they give wider publicity to publications
OA is the future (and also the present) of scholarly publishing. But it seems that there are some myths about OA:
- open access does not mean that anybody uploads anything without quality controll. It's not OA verssus etstablished journals, its established journals going OA. The model of quality controll (peer review) remains the same.
- predory publishers can be find in OA as well as in academic (printed) publishing, The renomation of a journal of publishers does not depend on OA or not, bit on a list of criteria (peer review, listings, DOI etc.)
- OA is not a subversive agenda, it is the official policy of the European Community for publishing funded research:
http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/open-science-open-access
OA is just another business model, publishers will and are finding ways to finance their work, be it with advertising, public funding or something else.
OA will be seen differently, when more and more respected journals will be published this way. Within the humanties this is an ongoing process and a lot of interesting, high quality research can be found in projects like the Open Library of the Humanities:
https://olh.openlibhums.org
https://www.openlibhums.org/journals/
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
Dear Claus
The problem is not open access. The problem are predatory publishers. The OA way of financing publications is more prone to fell victim of predatory models. That is all the point.
If some safeguards can be established to keep predatories out of the game, OA is good for the science world.
Presentation Journal Impact Factors, Researcher h-index, How to improve r...
Presentation "CiteScore vs Impact Factor", narrated by: Asst. Prof. Dr. E...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313750336_IF_YOU_WANT_TO_by_Asst_Prof_Dr_Emad_Kamil
Regards, Emad
Dear Tomas,
there are enough predatory publishers in closed access, printed media as well.
Open access is a way of disseminating research articles in digital form, free and in compliance with copyright.This is a golden opportunity to gain free, open and immediate access to research results on an international scale. It's the best choice for science .
Open Access publishing comes with its merits and demerits. Some of the merits includes:
- 1.Higher citation impact. Open access publications are more oftenly cited because of their higher publicity and availability to anyone.
- Higher availablity and visibility. Open Access publishings are freely available and downloadable at full text on the internet. ...
- Lower publishing costs.
- Shorter publication processing time.
I believe that open access is a good idea.
However, there are some obstacles. One of them is an expensive publication fees as well as predatory journals. Authors make tremendous efforts for several months or even years to publish an article, and I do not think it is fair to make authors pay an expensive publication fees. According to one information source (the link below), the average publication fee for open access journals is $2,000-$3,000. Institutional support (e.g., university or government research grants) is necessary, but I am not sure how many universities help their professors' publication costs. If they do, how much do they help?
In conclusion, we must resolve the issues with the publication fees so that everybody can enjoy open access journals.
Please click the link below for some selected publishers' authors' publication charges:
https://osc.cam.ac.uk/open-access/open-access-policies/paying-open-access/how-much-do-publishers-charge-open-access
I totally agree with the conclusion of Dr. @ Don Soo Chon: " In conclusion, we must resolve the issues with the publication fees so that everybody can enjoy open access journals."
But I could not let without notice the clear comments of Dr. @ Claus Tieber, Dr @ Musleh and Dr. @Manfredi. And Dr. @Tomas Koltai.
I favour to open access journal will help researchers, learners, teachers and scholars to have access to all kinds of information for more in depth study.
Thank you all for your such valuable answers and comments!
The diversity of opinions and the inconsistent approach to the issue of open science contributes to reassuring me that this issue is more complicated than it looks at first glance. And it would not be easy to reach a general consensus in this aspect.
Best wishes to all of you!
Joanna
I strongly recommend a trusted and indexed open access journals for example, please visit this link:
https://doaj.org/
Regards,
Emad
Dears, as I said before, I am on the side of supporting trusted open access journals. However, care should be taken not to be cheated by fake journals. The benefit of choosing to publish in open access journals includes but not limited to:
1. The article will be often is released faster, since the publishing process is streamlined.
2. High possibility of getting wider audience as readers do not need to have paid or institutional access to the journal through their libraries.
3. Many open access journals are new and publish fresh content on new topics. Older print journals may not want to publish your fresh and new topic and may expect traditional approaches.
The advantages are clear. People get easier access to open access journal.
The disadvantages are difficult to capture. At the end of the day, someone needs to pay. Advertisement? Fees? The money has to come from somewhere to make the peer review process useful.
Regards
The major problem that I see with open access is that the current system follows some format of a Gold Open Access. This is where you pay to make something open access vs. the alternative form of Green Open Access where the author is allowed to self-archive a publication which is what see with publications that go into PubMed Central. Because most open access journals are some format of Gold, they basically operate on a fee for service model. Unfortunately, this means that they are strongly incentivized to push out papers and we now have a proliferation of predatory journals that basically take your money to put things online. Given the credence academia puts on publications, you have this terrible feedback loop where desperate authors are willing to buy publications to increase their chances of getting a job or tenure.
Publishing is some of the commercial journals is very expensive for researchers in developing countries. Open access journals also provides easy access to research and facilitates wide spread coverage of research outcomes since people all over the world now have unrestricted access to knowledge. For me I prefer open access journals
Dear Joanna,
as clearly emerged from the many interesting comments, the question you raised does not have a simple solution.
A further point that could be of some interest is to measure the open access studies research impact respect to those of another types in order to assess some kind of economical value of open access regime in publishing.
This kind of evaluation could present recursive problems in modeling, and moreover the choice of the metric appears not trivial (Impact Factor, other).
However, maybe some kind of evaluation of the relative economic value of the different ways in publishing could help.
Best regards,
Marco
Dear @ Marco Rao,
Thanks a lot! You have raised a very important topic that could help in reaching a certain agreement in the scientific community (taking into account different priorities):
"A further point that could be of some interest is to measure the open access studies research impact respect to those of another types in order to assess some kind of economical value of open access regime in publishing."
Does any of you know the results of research in this aspect?
What do you think about the attempt to measure the economic value of open access publishing?
Open access is good and relevant for all categories of researchers however, unregulated process may be dangerous.
Not all works are maturely prepared and ready for clamoured visibility and accessibility while many works are also relevant and useful but cannot fulfill the conditions of payment to make them accessible and visible.
These are research works that you received no grant for and the publications are not sponsored either. Yet some of the known reputable journals financial policies request so much high amount of money in dollars and pounds that when converted to your indigenous currency, the amount could be a great fortune!
So many credible work may be rejected on the basis of inability to pay the bill to make it open access.
And patronizing predatory journals is like putting the work deliberately in the grave. They are interested in your money and won't give the work necessary publicity.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Publisher