MIT To Make All Faculty Publications Open Access 164
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."
Computer Science (Score:4, Informative)
I always thought that this is the standard also in other disciplines. What is the publication standard in other disciplines?
Re:Darned Liberals (Score:5, Informative)
irony of growing "closed stack" research libraries (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unanimous? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Computer Science (Score:3, Informative)
It's the same in Mathematics. You'll usually find a selection of "preprints" of a lecturer's most recent work, along with copies of his or her best-known papers.
Typically, in order to lay claim to anything they're working on, an academic will upload a paper to ArXiv.org as soon as they possibly can. ArXiv is a site which allows access to preprints in maths, computer science, physics, dynamical systems etc...
It isn't peer-reviewed though, so it's still necessary to publish in a journal.
econ (Score:3, Informative)
This is the same in many other disciplines. In economics, for example, this kind of story is non-news.
For the past 10+ years, even most "old fashioned" journals allow you to post your paper, as long as you post some blurb acknowledging that you passed copyright to the publisher. That arrangement worked out just fine. As an academic, who cares who has the copyright; just give me the paper!
Even for journals that did not offer this, authors would blatantly post their paper anyway. Yet I never once heard of a publisher going to an economist and asking them to alter their personal web page. (Yeah, yeah, insert "nobody reads the paper anyway" joke here.)
More recently, the field of economics has seen open-access e-journals popping up everywhere. The writing is on the wall, as to the future of access.
Finally, our school is in negotiations to make all publications open-access. This isn't just some faculty declaration; we're working on actually doing it. I imagine other schools are doing the same. So like I said, this is non-news to an insider.
Re:Computer Science (Score:3, Informative)
Simply processing it in a different stylefile and removing any mention of the journal it's actually published in is sufficient to address this concern, meaning a "preprint" style formatting is perfectly acceptable to publish on your own page, or somewhere like arxiv.org (a point some of them explicitly acknowledge - and even seem to encourage somewhat).
If this is the status quo elsewhere, this isn't really as dramatic a step as MIT would like to make it out to be.
This is going to hurt smaller research groups a lo (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Free to boot (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare [mit.edu] for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
Re:Good arguments against open access? (Score:3, Informative)
While all of that is technically true, I was under the impression that in almost no circumstances are academic journal editors or reviewers paid for their work. Rather, to sit on the editorial board of a prestigious journal is considered its own reward.
From what I have heard, even the publishers don't present it that way. Publishers (Blackwell Synergy, Wiley, ScienceDirect, etc.) aren't editors. Editors are academics. The publishers argue that journal costs pay for the actual cost of distribution, as well as the cost of organizing all the editors, reviewers, etc.