Open Access on Michael’s Domain

The 12-month embargo falls

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Under Barack Obama, the 12-months-rule was instituted, which demands that any research that is using US-federal funding must become freely accessible to the public at the latest 12 months after its publication ( https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-unveils-long-awaited-public-access-policy ). A new executive order by Joe Biden is now getting rid of the 12-month-rule requiring immediate availability starting at the latest on December 2025. Other notable improvements of this executive order concern the requirement for machine readability, metadata annotation, and raw data availability. Furthermore, these new rules do not only affect journal articles but include from now on also book chapters and conference proceedings ( https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/26/23322194/white-house-ostp-open-access-federal-research-policy-update ).Many for-profit publishers object because their license to print money is slowly eroding. What they do not mention is, that the highest-skill work done in the whole publishing business - namely article writing and peer review - is still done entirely for free by academics around the world. If publishers would need to pay market prices for authors’ and reviewers’ working time, they would - without exception - all go bankrupt within a year. Every academic spends a significant amount of working time on writing and reviewing other academics’ manuscripts WITHOUT ANY REIMBURSEMENT. In fact, many of us do this job in the evenings and on weekends, because we are fully booked with grant application writing, administration and teaching during our regular working time. Many of these manuscripts are then published by for-profit publishers, which go on to monetize the results of research write-ups and the peer review process, which has been paid by taxpayers’ money.Some for-profit publishers do a valuable and fantastic job to improve the accessibility and quality of their authors’ works. Others seem to be in it mostly for the money. Among the latter are unfortunately also many Open Access journals . The elephant in the room is SciHub. Even though my university pays for access to most journals I need, the access is so obfuscated and temporarily dysfunctional, that I frequently have to resort to Sci-Hub in order to get a PDF article from a journal, to which my university subscribes. Alternatively I have used ResearchGate and #icanhazpdf to get electronic reprints, but SciHub is by far the fastest and most reliable option. More about Sci-Hub: https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/sci-hub-effects-academic-publishing/ .

The battle between the big publishers and the scientific community

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I participated in last week’s Townhall discussion Mikä on avoimen tiedon hinta? (“What’s the price to access knowledge?”), which was precipitated by the recent discontinuation of Finnish universities’ access to journals published by the Tyler & Francis group. Mikael Laakso introduced the audience to the open access issue and the problems of rising prices, and Arja Tuuliniemi reported about the ongoing negotiations with Tyler & Francis and the Wiley group. While publishers like to portrait themselves as the researcher’s friend and ally, fact is that most of the scientific publishing industry is owned by big multinational stock market-listed corporations, which primarily answer to their share holders and researchers needs play a secondary role in the best case. While one would think that electronic publishing is driving down the prices of publishing and accessing published material, the reality shows exactly the opposite.In the current situation, where many Finnish universities are struggling with shrinking budgets, these millions of Euros could be spend better and the FinElib consortium is constantly trying to negotiate fair deals with publishing giants like Elsevier, Springer, Tyler & Francis, Wiley and SAGE . If the negotiations do not yield results before the old agreements expire, Finnish universities are sometimes cut of from access to some journals. This has happened now again (after a similar crisis in 2016). At the beginning of February this year journals published by the Taylor & Francis group have been inaccessible for Finnish researchers. Plans S (i.e. the initiative of the European Research Council to mandate open access for all state-funded research by 2020) is certainly strengthening the negotiation position of the FinElib consortium, because all European customers are essentially lining up their requests according to the Plan S requirements. However, it is still unclear how Plan S will affect smaller, not-for-profit publishers like scientific societies ( https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/06/why-society-and-not-for-profit-journals-are-worth-preserving-better-economic-and-continuing-value-for-the-community ). My personal opinion is that there is no reason to panic. A similar shutdown of Elsevier access happened at the beginning of this year (2019) at all Max-Planck-Institutes and and seems to be tolerated by scientists quite well. Even though I might not be able to instantly access all content, this situation should be rather viewed as an opportunity. You can still access all the content that you need (perhaps with extremely rare exceptions).

Predatory publishing - where to draw the line?

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Zinni It seems that many researchers recently received an invitation to join the editorial board of the new open access journal ContROL (“Continuous Research Online Library”). The sheer number of invitation might be already a bad sign as the choice of the editorial board is a delicate one and mass emailing is arguably not a good method to assemble a high-quality editorial board. I get frequently similar requests, and when the e-mail message doesn’t clearly identify such a request as spam, I used to have a look at Beall’s list to see whether the publisher or journal has associated “red flags”. Some red flags are easy to identify. If you are an expert in the field but have never heard of the scientists who are supposed to do the expert work. One also could look at the publication record of the people to evaluate their previous work. However, nobody has the time to do that and that’s where Beall’s list came in handy.However, Beall’s list has disappeared this January from the internet. It was last updated on January 3rd 2017, but soon after that, all content was taken down. The January 3rd version is - thanks to great work of the guys at the Internet Archive - still available from here , but obviously it is not updated anymore. Nobody knows exactly why Beall took down all the content, but rumors have it, that Beall himself got threatend by parties which have a vested interest in predatory publishers remaining unnamed (read more e.g. here: http://retractionwatch.com/2017/01/17/bealls-list-potential-predatory-publishers-go-dark/).There are lot of “new” publishers out there who want to participate in the lucrative business of scientific publishing. It doesn’t really matter whether they use the open access model or not (when they are open access, they can e.g. earn on hefty “article processing charges”). Getting enough sufficiently qualified reviewers for the peer-reviewing process is hard work for the established journals and thus the peer-reviewing process of many new journals is more often than not less than rigorous.I also do not like it if it’s unclear who is behind a new open access journal. I feel an ethical dissonance if someone advocates open access, but all information about the journals background remains closed. In my opinion, there is at the moment not much need for more (open access) journals. Instead, most serious and reputable open access advocates are rather trying to improve the existing ones. One could conclude, that the relative amount of predatory journals among all newly established journals is steadily increasing and Google Trends support this notion. How can I figure out whether the ContROL journal is legit or not? I have checked out a few of the people from the Advisory Board and they appear to be real scientists with real track records of various quality. However, even reputable scientists occasionally end up on the editorial board of such journals (sometimes with and sometimes without any action on their part). That said, there is no clean demarcation line between predatory and honest publishers. Even some of the “reputable” publishers engage occasionally in some shady and controversial practices. That’s why Beall’s site lists “potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals”.Beall’s list has been criticized, but much of the criticism can easily be dismissed. An especially low-level attack on Beall’s integrity is e.g. the site http://scholarlyoa.net (note the similarity of the URL!), where some unnamed person(s) engage in ad-hominem attacks, logical fallacies and exaggeration in order to discredit Beall’s work. I myself doubt that the people behind this site are true friends of Open Access publishing. Throwing dirt does not do a favor to Open Access publishing. Maybe this site could even be a misguided, under-cover action by proponents of conventional publishing to discredit Open Access. There is valid criticism of Beall’s work , but none of it challenges the concept that somebody needs to monitor Open Access publishing (in the same way people are monitoring and criticizing the big commercial publishers). Maybe I should ask the publisher of ContROL a few questions. Mainly, why they still see the need for a new OA journal. ContROL promises in addition to the journal some kind of associated scientific social media and promotion platform. However, also that territory is already covered (by ResearchGate and Mendeley ). I was perplexed by the hefty “membership fee” that you need to pay in order to use their services ( https://control.zinianz.com/membership ). But unless you publish several articles per year, it seems to me overpriced. Even though they mention that they have waivers from the Article Processing Charges, I could not find any details. Why would they hide this information? Researchers from financially challenged countries need to know the costs upfront! Such lack of transparency is exactly the opposite what open access needs to achieve. The “membership fees” might also prevent the associated services from succeeding. Getting traction with a scientific social media site is difficult (even if your services are free and backed by the most powerful publisher in the world). Likely, the promised benefits won’t become reality.