Open Access and the Power of Editorial Boards: Why Elsevier Plays Hardball
governancexborders.com
governancexborders.com
Everybody in science knows that the quality of papers has degraded over the last 10 years, just the amount went up enormously.
I dream and hopefully get this project into development that takes a different route. First, instead of letting 1-2 people decide if a paper is ok, everybody can test and classify it. Math or logic errors are obvious once, but also a dependency tree is required. Which methods are used, which tools etc.
Each user will then have the possibility to follow others and accept their view, which means, their trust in a particular method as well as trusting in methods itself.
To give an example: One may trust in classical logic, but not mathematical logic (yes, there is a huge difference). When a paper uses a statistical method that requires mathematical logic, this paper does not have a truth value for you, but maybe for someone else who believes in it. Or you don't accept method xy, or a specific apparatus.
You may also say: you accept all papers that got reviewed by at 10 people somewhere in your web of trust.
censorship in science does happen and it helps nothing. Every great scientific change in thinking sounded nuts or at least strange in the beginning and very often reviewers are not open minded and don't let math and logic rule but their feeling.
Since I found a physical model that requires only classical logic not a mathematical one, I'm not so sure if I should accept anything that requires mathematical logic at all (outside of a purely mathematical space). It's nearly impossible to go through all the details in a paper and found their chain of proves to check what requirements a paper has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...
The traditional publishers no doubt see open access as a threat to their dominance and economic survival. However in the era of increasing public and government demands it seems inevitable that open access is going to continue to grow.
It's important to understand the implications of open access re: nature of funding. The model is inverted, with costs of publishing falling on the author (or institutional backer) rather than the reader. Traditionally, the cost burden was on the subscriber, with open access it falls on the creator of the content.
Perhaps that's not more "fair" a distribution of burden, but there's value in ability to share research widely. Scientific knowledge is only as meaningful as the degree to which it is available to anyone who wants to learn about it.
Which costs are you referring to? Are the editors paid? If not the only transfer in costs seems to be hosting a website for downloading static documents?
Previously submission by the researcher and subsequent publicaiton is effectively free; the real cost is paid by subscribers such as university libraries as well as commercial entities.
Under the open-access model the researcher pays the publisher directly for each submission and this can vary from hundreds to thousands of dollars. PLoS one currently charges US$1495 for each publication.
https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/
The exact burden depends on the subject, STEM may be better funded, but this is still not a sum that one can just shrug off. Often grant money also come with strict stipulations on exactly what expenses can be paid with them - publication fee is usually not provided.
In 2002 the required payment was $500, probably about equivalent to current author fees. Presumably it offsets the administrative costs involved in running the journal website and overseeing the peer review process. I don't have first hand knowledge regarding costs of publication or profit margins, but the expense must be paid by someone, generically authors or readers.
I was willing to pay because I regarded wide exposure of the data I was reporting as important, my contribution to the benefit of the community at large. In retrospect, I guess the fact that the article has been viewed several thousand times (and cited by numerous subsequent reports) is a much greater readership than it would have garnered behind a steep paywall.
In both cases it is typically the university which pays. In one model the library pays, in the other it might be an academic department, research office or the library which pays.
Gold open access [the pay to publish model] is distinct from Green open access [where no payment is required].
Many publishers, like Elsevier are adopting a 'hybrid' model where they charge both to publish , and to read.
While there are costs to publishing one they don't justify teh huge fees [and profits] that Elsevier make. One would have to assume that the major, technical infrastructure Elsevier etc implement is to keep their texts inaccessible.
A new OA publisher, the Open Library of Humanities is trying a new model, where neither reader not author pay. Instead the suite of journals is funded by an international consortium of libraries.
Or, some kind of hybrid system where its free to non-affiliated readers but universities are expected to pay subscription on honor system and at fair price rather than Elsevier pricing.
There's an argument that since currently funding for subscribing to HSS journals comes from the university library there is clearly money there for HSS, and that somehow we just need to redirect the subscription cost toward publication costs. But that's not an easy nut to crack, and it's also not clear why the library should even be involved in the publishing process in that way.
A per-article subscription/purchase model would be more appropriate if we consider that the cost of peer-provided knowledge is a hard cost similar to reagents and buffers.
But I personally agree with Open Access advocates, cost should be as close to free as reasonably possible.
The landscape may have changed in the intervening years, with blanket institutional subscriptions making paper subscriptions irrelevant.
I also suspect that, much like with albums and music, nobody actually reads a journal cover to cover these days, instead they are consuming the papers they want in a random-access fashion as a collection of PDF's.