Free flow of knowledge exchange process especially in health science to take care of the public health.

Most of the research across globe is undertaken on public money, given this fact public has got every right to have free access to research output or research results. Besides, most of the closed access journals do not fulfill the ultimate purpose for which research is undertaken, since public being the end users and beneficiary of every research activity as such should have free access to such information. OA helps to create more visibility of research results and ultimately more execution and more benefit. there is no point in having undertaken a good research with poor benefits for the want accessibility

How has publishing in OA affected the reception of your research among colleagues and non-academics? Are there drawbacks? If so, how might they be remedied?

I believe open access is rather much beneficial process as it makes the research available to each and every researcher who seeks to read or follow it. Overall its good for the scientific community at a large.

Only drawback which I see is the charge which is imposed for publication of such papers by the respective journals. Otherwise also it is very nice to have the research available with you at just a click of the mouse.

Hi all,

I guess you are all OA-convinced, but for those uncertain of benefits, "how to", and most importantly "WHY" publish via Open Access, the EC has just funded a project that will provide training to reseacher on how to best integrate Open Science into the daily workflow in order to strengthen ones personal profile, but also make your research more accessible, usable and hopefully cited.

www.fosteropenscience.eu

The project will kick off Feb 2014, but for those interested, I am happy to provide group discussion on any Open Science issues.

Regards

Ivo

Hi Ivo,

I like the idea, but when I went to the link you posted, I found a picture of girl with a finger over her lips and the sentence: "Sign up and we'll make sure you don't miss a thing!" with a place to enter your email. If you want to reach a wider audience, I think this website should contain some kind of information about the project, otherwise it looks like you are phishing.

Absolutely! Unfortunately funders and lawyers dictate how much information can be released about a project before the contract is signed, hence the scarce information.

We are free to disclose fully in this forum however, so I would encourage any Graduate Schools and/or individuals, willing to explore option for constructing Open Science training courses as part of postgraduate training on science communication (how to publish a paper, how to deal with controversy and the media, how to disseminate and optimize impact of research), to keep this conversation going here, or contact me directly.

(1) Factors that influenced your decision to publish in OA journals.

In mid-2012 a colleague and I were keen to get the results of a survey we had done disseminated as quickly as possible and to as wide an audience as possible. So we deliberately chose an OA journal: Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Since the article's publication a year ago, it has had 4640 downloads and 3 citations (all verifiable). So my co-author and I are very pleased that we made that decision.

(2) Which type do you prefer - green, gold, or hybrid? Green. Hybrid is certainly not favoured here in Australia because of the ability of the publisher to "double dip", i.e. charge twice for the same article.

I don't have much experience with OA journals, but would not mind publishing in one.

I am far more concerned about the quality of the specific journal. Non-OA journals usually try to maintain a high standard because lowering the latter would result in fewer quality submissions and lower income from subscriptions (which is their main source of income).

On the other hand, OA journals rely only on page charges for income (except the few OA journals financed with public money). Newly-established OA journals in the past few years have become the domain of questionable publishers ready to accept anything that even remotely looks like an MS, as long as the author is willing to pay the page charges and/or the "optional" charges for fast-track publishing. This of course does not apply to _all_ OA journals. I am only saying one should choose well where to publish.

Hi Enrico,

The concern about quality is very valid one, but your generic fear of OA journal is little too unwarranted. There are definitely bad OA journal running just for profit, but there were many "wrong" Nature and Science papers, and definitely many documented cases of plagiarism before text scanning techniques were standard. That does not imply that all papers in thos journals are subject to those critisisms.

The bottom line is OA does not equal bad quality, bad journals equal bad quality, and as before OA journals appeared, one has to use good judgement when choosing a journal.

One thing however is for certain: OA will not go away. Open Science is the underlying pronciple for most funders, whether private publishing houses like or not, and savvy researchers that seek OA and non-OA journals in their field that offer the right impact and quality, are best placed to make the research publishing transition.

All the best

Ivo

I signed up for the www.fosteropenscience.eu although the website is very offputting. I would be interested in developing online tutorials for health professionals in "how to publish a paper", I've done a few on e.g. "how to conduct a literature review", some on product specific tutorials e.g uptodate, cinahl. I should add one about OA as there seems to be a lot of misinformation out there about it. Please see some postings on this valuable Library Blog. http://www.libfocus.com/2013/07/advocating-for-open-access.html

Dear Aoife,

Thank you for your article http://www.libfocus.com/2013/07/advocating-for-open-access.html?m=1. I agree with you that the "WHY" argument for most funders and knowledge managers is now settled (cf the Berlin 11 conference program) but the "HOW" is still in discussion.

What we hope to achieve with www.fosteropenscience.eu is to integrate the "WHY" and "HOW" at the very place where research data and research of the near future will be generated ie the Graduate School. We also aim to built capacity at research institutions to maintain that dream long term, and key OpenAIRE (www.openaire.eu) partners are partners in FOSTERopenscience.

You are right that our web page is not informative (yet) as we legally do not exist until Feb 2014, but we are too enthusiastic to wait that long. I hope you understand and on behalf of the consortium thank you for your patience.

I am happy to continue the conversation on engaging Grad Schools in the meantime.

Ivo

The discussion is very interesting but it refers just to the European reality. In Latín América we have Latindex (www.latindex.org) a Scientific Journals System that qualifies the journals and selects from them which are for best Journals to publish. The whole world could have a similar system in orden to help the authors to choose the better open access Journal to publish. Also SciELO and REDALyC help to advice in this sense and all these systems are OA. Maybe DOAJ could also help in this sense.

Here are some considerations on green vs. gold from a global perspective: http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss3/3/

I publish in Open Journals so that my research can be available to all regardless of where you are or how much money you have. Many times you publish and article in a journal and researchers are not able to see this because they do not have the money to purchase. If I have done the research I would like persons to see the results and the best way is putting the article in an open source journal or other space.

May be one way to deliver the discussion here to a political level is the recently announced Science2.0 public consultation by the European Commission.

Their background paper covers well most pro-s and con-s, and our opinions will influence the way future beneficiaries will be expected to deal with data, publications, code, and even communicating our research to society in general.

Have your say, the consultation is open until 30 Sept and only takes a few minutes (link below)

http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/science-2.0/consultation_en.htm

We wish to publish in OA journal simply for the reason that it provide both increased visibility and easy access of our work. But we must certainly choose the journals having established peer review system and indexing. 

open access publishing increase visibility of your work