“Right to knowledge: I think most people would agree people have more of a right to clean water, shelter and food than the latest academic knowledge. Yet you have to pay for these.”

The difference is that whilst water, shelter and food are *finite* commodities, knowledge is anything but.

The more people know, the more we all know. If you give away water you end up with less water, if you give away knowledge you end up with more.

Reminds me of an old school hymn about a magic penny….

This may raise some hackles, but with the number of journals/publications rising exponentially, does anyone actually think that paying to publish would be a good thing because it might actually restrict the amount published?

During my PhD research I often found myself exasperated by the sheer amount of literature on some subjects. Many times I found essentially the same material published by essentially the same authors in several different journals. I presume this may be done cynically to increase the author’s papers-published count (although I understand the publishing difficulties of interdisciplinary research).

Many academics admit they simply do not have time to keep up with the literature. In order to be able to “see the wood for the trees” shouldn’t a way be found to try and focus on quality instead of quantity?

If all publishing was free OA and available electronically it would have been easier for me to quickly eliminate the dross and the irrelevant. If I had been paying for literature myself from my own pocket I would have thought much of it poor value for money, yet felt obliged to do it for the sake of academic rigour.

Finally do people think OA might help contain plagiarism?

Sounds really impressive until you realise it’s 30-odd-year-old tech that MS and Apple have only recently started catching up with.

Not that open source software is a reason not to have open access journals, though…

Andrew.

The open access after 6 months (or 3 months or whatever) would seem to be a compromise that would be good enough for the public (and undergraduates and academics) to access most things, while reducing the burden on researchers to pay to publish. However, would it be any use to someone like Ben, who would really need access to current issues (and the online early articles) to write for a national newspaper? Of course, most science reporting seems to be based on press releases rather than actual journal articles and even for research that is to be published, the press release normally pre-dates the publication date.

As a reader (consumer??), open access would be great for trying to write a thesis, dissertation or paper at home – no need to go into work/uni because there’s one paper that requires an institutional IP address at 3 am the night before.

But, as another PhD student myself, I agree with you that finding the money can be pretty hard or impossible even if you’re from a developed country.

Fortunately for me, the only journal in my field that was suitable for the paper I’d written is open access, so I used those grounds to lobby the college to pay on my behalf. Basically because it would have been unpublishable otherwise, at least without some pretty serious decimation of the content.

Andrew.

Another tendency which exacerbates “reciprocally citing friends” is the likelihood that those cited will be referee-ing your next grant proposal. This was always seen as one reason American papers in American journals tend to cite disproprotionately American papers in American journals, as those cited will odds-on be the NIH reviewers of their next grant.

not having published yet myself (keep a look out people!!!) i’m not up on the ins and outs of which journals to submit to etc, but i’m going to try and make sure that when i do publish it’s gonna be to one that people can read and access easily.

glad i got that off me chest.

If I say Prof. E.T.R anyone know what I’m talking about?

The phenomenon has recieved some attention, see:

Lancet. 2004 Aug 28-Sep 3;364(9436):744. “As we said..” .Sharp D.

Of course, some people cut out the middle man and cite themselves – a decade ago one group famously wrote a programme called Selfcite to insert references to one’s own work into one’s papers.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/313/7072/1659

I reckon a good rule of thumb is that if more than 20% of the refs in the paper are to the author’s own work, they are either a field-leading genius or a blinkered egotist, although I suppose they could be both.

The phenomenon has also been discussed under the grand-sounding German term “Eigenlob” (“self-praise”):

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/full/20/8/1039

All the innovation — unlimited space for graphics, no charges for colour, space to host supplementary materials alongside the article, reader feedback, transparent (signed) peer review, etc. — seems to be coming from the OA sector.

Andrew.

‘The phrase “Hall of Mirrors” springs to mind for some reason.’

Perhaps it should exclude citations from your mates…

I know someone who was building an in-house search engine for a pharma company that could rank retrieved papers according to their impact. They discovered that when they excluded citations in papers that shared authors with paper X from the impact calculations for paper X, the rankings became much useful and realistic. Go figure…

Andrew.

“Amoebic — I was discussing that with a colleague the other day. In this age of online publication, Google Scholar, ISI etc., we were wondering how long it will be before people start showing actual citation counts per paper on their CVs?”

Have you come across the h-index, Andrew?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsch_number

At least one influential FRS I know has argued (in print) that this should be part of whatever metric assessment replaces the RAE, and our Head of Dept was going around about 6 months ago asking everyone if they knew what their h-index was.

The phrase “Hall of Mirrors” springs to mind for some reason.

The pay-to-publish model is not a panacea – for a start, it gives industry a tremendous advantage over struggling third-world researchers (and I’m one of those evil medical writers you may have heard about, so I know whereof I speak!).

One of the benefits of the subscription model is that the power is in the hands of the readership – the journal will aim to publish a selected number of papers of the greatest importance, because readers won’t pay to wade through mountains of flannel and third-rate research. There are a lot of downsides too, but at the end of the day subscription journals will only survive if they provide a service worth paying for – if you don’t think they’re worth it, then don’t subscribe!

There is a case to be made that govt-funded research should only be published in open-access journals. After all, one way or another the government pays (either paying to publish, or paying for subscriptions. But in this case the target of your ire should be the funding bodies, not the nasty publishing industry.

So the real controversy, as far as I can make out from Ben’s article in the Grauniad, is that the publishing industry has hired a PR agency to make its case. Whoop de do! Imagine that – a company hiring a PR agency to handle its public relations!

If the pay-to-publish model worked out to be more profitable, then the publishers would take to it like ducks. The problem is that a lot of the criticism is naive and ill-informed – hence the need for them to make their case, before we all rush to judgement.

As a researcher, how is there any less pressure on me to innovate and improve because people don’t have to pay to see my papers? I can’t for the life of me see how you got to that conclusion. If anything, the (theoretically) faster publication pipeline of online journals cranks up the pressure.

Andrew.

I reckon it might still be as a bit, well, cheeky, until enough people do it and it becomes the norm. After all, popular journals publish really duff papers surprisingly often, and sometimes a really obscure publication can make it big.

Andrew.

I agree that the public have a right to benefit from the research for which their taxes have paid, but that neither needs to be free nor unmediated. I contend that a patient talking to a doctor who has paid to read The Lancet or the BMJ or the NEJM gets on average more from his or her consultation than that same patient attempting to read the self-same papers him or herself.

The fundamental issue is that scientific research and hence publications has risen exponentially in the 60 years, and library budgets have been more or less flat. That gap is systemic, but has been quite well-addressed by web access in the conventional model, because the article supply market is competitive.

I also catch a whiff of US xenophobia about this. Groups like the staggeringly well-funded National Institutes of Health seem to be upset that the world’s major journal publishers – outside important US societies – are European – Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell, Taylor & Francis – with just Wiley representing the US. Throw in some Soros billions and you have a not-for-profit sector that can take on all comers and disrupt a previously efficient and effective market, all in a high moral tone.