One Graduate Student's Commitment to Open Knowledge | Hacker News Reader

One Graduate Student's Commitment to Open Knowledge

alexleavitt.com

33 pointstibbon12 comments

You may also want register with other, already ongoing, efforts like the Elsevier boykott [1], that already have considerable momentum behind them. See [2] for the reasoning behind it and why one publisher was picked as a starting point.

For others considering this but who might find the OPs approach to radical in that it may easily harm their own career: The Elsevier boykott sends a strong message, while not interfering to much with ones career prospects.

[1] http://thecostofknowledge.com/

[2] http://gowers.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/elsevierstatementf...

What will you do when your PI refuses to pay for open access on a publication?

Or when your not-yet-tenured PI thinks you have something really exciting, and wants to publish in $(BIG_NAME_JOURNAL) to improve her tenure prospects?

To be fair, the OP is in a Communications and Journalism grad program, so there may not be a PI equivalent role. However, my impression is that most academic publishing by volume is in the sciences, where there is such a model.

It would seem to me that there's little reason that there can't be a high impact factor, well respected journal, that is also open in its publication.

Yes, there need to be people working to format articles, review papers, etc... but as we've seen in the FOSS community, there are alternative ways of making money, using modern technology to assist in reducing costs (printing paper? seems wasteful, expensive and silly).

Also, most of these higher impact journals charge significant fees to the authors to publish openly with them. $5000 for Nature. Sure, that's a lot of money- but I'd to imagine people would still send papers to Nature even if they made that the requirement for all their papers. Also- is high of a fee really needed? I mean there are costs, sure.. but it seems to push people away from open publication, not toward it.

As it stands, a lot of the peer-reviewed for-profit/pay-only journals basically get the reviewers to review the submitted papers for free. There are obviously some number of employees, but as it stands, they already get a ton of 'free' work done for them (so far as I understand it).

That's the same with open access journals too, though. The difference is, who pays the costs the publishers face? Traditional publishers are funded by subscriptions. Open access publishers are funded by charging authors big fees to publish in their journals.

I was just clarifying that not all of the work that goes into the journal is a cost for paid-for journals. I'm not claiming that there are no costs.

Only some open access publishers work that way. Some charge no fees. Some --- including the best known open access publisher, the Public Library of Science --- will waive their fee upon request. I am told by people who've used the waiver that it went ahead with no questions asked; they simply indicated that they were not in a position to pay.

Who charges no fees? How do they survive?

And PLOS will waive their fee, but in practice that's rare. If all the people currently paying little/nothing to submit to non-open access journals instead submitted to PLOS and waived the fee, PLOS would be fucked and they'd have to change their policy. After all, they have to pay a lot of salaries: http://www.plos.org/about/people/staff/

The concept of PLOS waiving the fee is interesting to me- as it establishes a bit of a "pay what you want" thing on an institutional level.

There are lots of examples of various people in other fields (music, indie video games, restaurants, etc) charging a 'pay what you can' strategy. But not many institutional ones.

A detailed answer to the question "Who charges no fees? How do they survive?" may be found here:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-06.htm#n...

Note also the linked studies. Summary: the majority of OA journals don't charge fees.

"in practice [PLoS fee waivers are] rare": well, among the people I've spoken with, 100% who asked for a waiver got one. So at present it's apparently not difficult to get a waiver. And when you say "they'd have to change their policy" that simply does not follow. What is true is that they'd have to figure out some way of funding it. Eliminating fee waivers is just one approach. But there are many other ways it could be funded. What would matter in that instance is how committed the people running PLoS are to the waiver.

is [that] high of a fee really needed?

Possibly. Here's a table of costs for different publishers http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h... but keep in mind that it is way more expensive to run a highly selective journal like Nature because they reject the vast majority of papers that get submitted.

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