Researchers Band Together To Force Science Journals To Open Access

This might as well be the only social/economical problem, which manages to make me angry. Not, because of the money wasted, which was supposed to go to education and research. Governments have invented all kinds of worse ways to blow money. Not, because of my believe that access to science is supposed to be free and open to everyone. There are more essential things like human rights and access to clean drinking water, which should be universal, but still they are not.

What makes me angry about it, is that it is such an unnecessary problem. It is just such a bad instance of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone recognizes what a bad situation it is, but no one feels they are in the position to do something about it.

Imagine the top 100 universities in the world, or even just the Ivory League, sat together and signed an agreement, that they would prohibit their staff to publish in non-free journals and that they would stop subscribing to them. I think this problem would sort itself out instantly. Same thing if the funding agencies of the EU and US would sit together.

Anyway, it seems like finally something happening about it, which is great.

As a hard-science researcher, I've long thought that scientists should fight for the right to publish their findings (report, data...etc) to an open source github-like service, in addition to the scientific publications they already submit their work to.

By open-sourcing knowledge, humanity benefits. However, publishers prestige currently has everyone locked in a vicious cycle of publishing under-any-circumstance for the sake of career recognition. Is that really the end goal of scientific discovery?

The online pledge is at: http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Please do sign if you are in any way connected with academia/academic publishing. Your fellow researchers thank you.

Here are some thoughts that came up during a private conversation about Elsevier a few weeks ago...

The question is, why is open access publishing so expensive in many journals? From what I understand, it's because of the need to pay the technical staff (technical editors, sysadmins, etc.) - costs that in traditional publishing are paid by your library (i.e. spread out as a tax across all faculty's grant overheads+taxpayer money). These costs can be driven down by consolidating the journal publishing platforms (i.e. providing a service for people to organize their own journals and a market for technical editors to provide their services to the content editors).

And critically, there needs to be a way to incentivize authors to drive down the total cost of publishing. A big part of the reason big old publishers continue to exist now is that there is an open loop in the incentives: the authors don't bear the costs that they incur to the universities, and there is no direct feedback from the audience that is shut out by this cost. If authors are given an idea of what it really costs to read their article, and the breakdown of who bears that cost, the journals will have to compete on that total cost.

But this will not be very effective until university libraries start breaking down the cost of subscriptions to individual users. So one way to approach this is by providing university libraries with a system to estimate the individual cost of each article view (i.e. crudely, if a subscription costs X and Y users view Z articles, then each user will have incurred some cost that is X/Y on average). Then start discussing what to do about who carries the cost burden from the users who are outliers on top. This is the first step toward closing the incentives loop.

I agree that there are too many journals, but unfortunately there will need to be even more before the ones with the right combinations of cost and editorial structure will win out. Going back to the common platform for publishing and editorial services that I mentioned: the real kicker will come when the platform is integrated with a social network (where nodes can be organizations as well as people). In other words, once you provide an easy and trusted way for editors to write down their web of trust, display that web to others, and act based on it, you will have put online the informal web of trust (reputation) that underlies publishing. This opens really powerful possibilities.

In the meantime, traditional publishers are holding on for dear life and using increasingly desperate tactics (like buying legislation, in Elsevier's case) to hold on to their money funnel. This is holding back science by artificially restricting access to publicly funded research. (And don't get me started on the textbook business... although good things are coming to that because Apple will disrupt it from the bottom.)

If this is successful it would be one of the best things to happen to science in decades. It is ridiculous that open scientific collaboration is hindered by paywalls.

These journals have nothing to do with the scientific discoveries that they publish. But they seem keen on trying to take a large slice of the pie.

Scientific discoveries must and should be open to the public. After all, it is the public that funds these studies.

I still have problems with this idea. The all-funded-research-should-be-free thing is a problematic perspective to hang on to. One could argue, that consequently everyone working in Academia should be obliged to give away the books they write, the documents they provide, the presentations, the exams - for free because over here Universities are funded by taxpayer money. Enforcing this would most likely have an adverse effect, i.e. departments trying to get private funding in order to avoid disclosure.

in regards to the Journals it comes all down to the rankings. So far I did not find a single ranking were Open Access journals were performing well. Might be more of a soft sciences problem, but I can not see a reasonable motive why someone should publish in an open access journal if they research holds up to the standards of well ranked "closed" journal.

The only aspect could see is "to take a stand", and at least on my list of things I am willing to stand up for, the budgeting of the library department is relatively low on priority.

"force"?

noun: "coercion or compulsion, esp. with the use or threat of violence"

They are not using force. If they did it'd be awful. But because they are doing this peacefully, with no force, it's good.

Making a free, voluntary choice a trade or contract -- whether to accept or to decline -- is the epitome of not using force.

Not using any force is one of the things that makes them legitimate. They should emphasize that instead of talking about it in terms like, "But the fight for open access is just getting started."

It's not a fight. Don't pretend you're fighting, that just makes you look bad. Especially when you aren't even fighting! Don't use metaphor to make your side look worse.