open access publishing – EHSLibrary http://library.med.utah.edu/blog/eccles Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library Blog Wed, 29 Mar 2017 15:51:22 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.3 Who can and should have access to research? http://library.med.utah.edu/blog/eccles/2012/04/30/who-can-and-should-have-access-to-research/ Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:13:32 +0000 http://library.med.utah.edu/blog/eccles/?p=1902 Open Access logoIn a recent article in The Economist magazine, it makes the argument that “When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge.” The article goes on to point out the huge profits (and increases in profits) by publishers, and how scientists are making this possible by providing their research free-of-charge in exchange for publication.

This is not a call to break up or bring down big-name publishers. They provide services that libraries have come to depend on. But if research is funded by public funding — gathered through taxes or charitable contributions — then the public should have complete and prompt access to its results, good or bad.

Publishers counter with (among many claims):

  • Their work provides added value to the research, and
  • The current one-year embargo is not enough time to recoup the investment made in adding value.

In testimony before Congress, one publisher argued

“The cutting-edge research in psychology published by APA is rarely obsolete within a year and may have a shelf life of five to 10 years or more. Furthermore, only 16 percent of the eventual ‘lifetime’ usage of APA journal articles—in the form of downloads—occurs within the first year after publication.”

The best rebuttal to this argument actually came in the form of a comment on the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education: publishers “neither pay for the intellectual content they publish (authors get no payments including no royalties), nor do they pay for the intellectual effort of the peer-reviewers – all of that professional/academic expertise is given to them for free.”

In addition, is the “added value” anywhere close to the prices publishers charge for access to this information? Now there is an area ripe for research!

One argument for open access is seldom, if at all, being made, and for this author, it is the most compelling: lives may hang in the balance. Some people cannot wait one, five or ten years for the publication of research that will lead to life-saving medical advances. Loosely described, building up collected knowledge of research is like arranging a box of dominoes so they are all standing on end, and next to one another. Arrange them all in the right way, and a single tap will send them all cascading into one another, until all are knocked down.  Researching and determining steps to treatments to take down conditions such as diabetes, various cancers, treatment-resistant diseases, and a myriad of other maladies should occur promptly, and benefit the many, not be delayed for the profit of a few.

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The Dark Side of Open Access Publishing http://library.med.utah.edu/blog/eccles/2011/04/28/the-dark-side-of-open-access-publishing/ Thu, 28 Apr 2011 22:13:48 +0000 http://library.med.utah.edu/blog/eccles/?p=761 Open Access logoA few weeks ago I received an invitation to create a book chapter proposal for a company called “InTech – Open Access Publisher.” Upon further investigation, I found that this company appeared to be based in Croatia, and in order to get my chapter published I would have to pay a fee of 475 Euros. Needless to say, alarm bells started ringing in my head, and I posted a question on the LITA-L listserv asking if anyone else had heard of this kind of arrangement. In response, Jeffrey Beal sent me a link to an article he wrote for the Charleston Advisor titled “‘Predatory’ Open-Access Scholarly Publishers,” a comparative review “of nine different Open-Access publishers that use the ‘author pays’ model for supporting their publishing efforts.”

Beal reviewed nine such publishers that utilize this “author pays” model of publishing, describing their work this way:

These publishers are predatory because their mission is not to promote, preserve, and make available scholarship; instead, their mission is to exploit the author-pays, Open-Access model for their own profit. They work by spamming scholarly e-mail lists, with calls for papers and invitations to serve on nominal editorial boards.

Beal goes on to claim that the content of these publications are not quality, peer-reviewed work, but are low-quality research that have been rejected by other publishers. Setting up a website for such content is quick, easy, and will result in an avalanche of journal articles in search results. “This abundance will make it harder for scholars to keep up with re- search in their fields, and it will cause online searches to be filled up with links to low-quality research.”

What do you think? Is Beal correct in his assessment that this will create an overabundance of poor-quality research? What should the scholarly side of OA publishing do to respond? Tell us!

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