Harvard: Journals Too Expensive, Switch To Open Access 178
New submitter microcars writes "Harvard recently sent a memo to faculty saying, 'We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called "providers") to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.' The memo goes on to describe the situation in more detail and suggests options to faculty and students for the future that includes submitting articles to open-access journals. If Harvard paves the way with this, how long until other academic bodies follow suit and cut off companies such as Elsevier?"
Re:Amazing (Score:3, Interesting)
This has nothing to do with universities being reasonable, it's just business. And the scientific community cares more about visibility and prestige, therefore if a professor can publish one or two papers in Science/Nature/Cell/whatever rather than five papers in open-access journals with lower impact factors then you can bet he'll take it. It's the university that pays, anyway, the academics get the prestige, which is measured by the impact factor, among other things.
Re:Peer Review (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't one of the primary functions of a journal to facilitate the peer review process?
I seem to remember it goes something like this: Paper is submitted, editors evaluate, if it's not complete garbage, they send it to other scientists in that field, they provide feedback, decision to publish is made.
In the general case, the editors and peer reviewers work for free. AFAIK all the publisher provides is the stylesheet, some higher-level organization, and the printing/distribution.
In the internet age the traditional publishers are easily bypassed, and a lot of efforts are being made. I don't know whether there have been any big successes.
(Are the PLoS outlets open access?)
Re:Amazing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Peer Review (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate skeptics have a much worse history of trying to manipulate the peer review process:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-peer-review.html [skepticalscience.com]
Re:The system must be changed (Score:4, Interesting)
When you publish a paper, you are expected to transfer the copyright of that paper to the publisher. However, publishers like IEEE allow you to post the accepted version of your paper on your own website. See the full policy here [ieee.org]. This is in contrast to the published version, which contains all the journal specific markup like headers and page numbers. IEEE also allows you to publish the accepted version of your paper to any funding agency repository to comply with free-access requirements. I don't know how it works in other disciplines, but in engineering, IEEE is the place to publish and it works like this in pretty much all our periodicals. I take an extra step and on my website and add a note that all articles posted are for timely dissemination of information and all work is the property of respective copyright holders and may not be reposted without explicit permission. But the links point straight to the fulltext of the research.
This policy is pretty permissive, and I've never seen the need to submit to an open access journal of lesser quality when I can submit to a top journal and be assured my research will be just as accessible.
Re:microseconds (Score:4, Interesting)
This process can be sped up immensely by simply having universities or their libraries publish their own journals. There is really no excuse for not doing this, and little excuse for the minimal costs to be borne by either the library itself or the relevant department.
The costs of hosting an academic journal online are by now practically non-existent, and will disappear entirely once some standard journal management open source software is developed and included in main repositories. The cost of actually printing journals probably pales in comparision to the present print budget of most universities anyway.
I'm aware of at least one journal which is printed in this way. While not the most famous of publications, there's nothing wrong with the model whatsoever.