{"id":168,"date":"2008-08-04T12:19:16","date_gmt":"2008-08-04T12:19:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/08\/04\/why_do_all_blogs_turn_into_open_access_oa_discussions\/"},"modified":"2008-08-04T12:19:16","modified_gmt":"2008-08-04T12:19:16","slug":"why_do_all_blogs_turn_into_open_access_oa_discussions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/08\/04\/why_do_all_blogs_turn_into_open_access_oa_discussions\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do all blogs turn into Open Access (OA) discussions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jenny<\/a> says that ‘most people’ reckon the average cost to produce a peer-reviewed article in an online-only journal is around $3,000. Which means that the publishing houses now charging around that amount of money to make your article ‘open access’ are actually offering a pretty good deal.<\/p>\n

\nNow, I know we’ve done this to death (example<\/a>) but bear with me just a minute. I used to live in a village near Cambridge that happened to house Sigma’s oligonucleotide manufacturing facility. We could call them up, say “Ho good yeoman, I’ll have 40 nanomoles of your finest CATATGTTTCCCCGGAAGGAAAGCGC: bill my grant” and they’d deliver within about 48 hours, and often earlier if you asked them to get in a taxi and bring it to you.<\/p>\n

\nOf course, with an oligonucleotide synthesizer and the right chemicals and a technician and a bit of luck and swearing you could make CATATGTTTCCCCGGAAGGAAAGCGC yourself. But these days you’d be mad to. Sigma ran a service<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\nSurely that’s what we do with journals? Rather than organizing reviewers ourselves, typesetting and marketing and everything else, we pay PNAS<\/em> or Nature<\/em> or whoever to do it all for us. We produce knowledge, and we contract out one part of that process.<\/p>\n

\nAbsent a Star Wars<\/em>-style economic model, any business that provides services and materiel to scientists is going to attempt to run at a profit. There is, in fact, a moral obligation to do so.<\/p>\n

\nIt is my opinion that we should recognize this as soon as possible. The current model is a mess, because journals tend to charge the end-consumer for the product, which seems to be deeply unsatisfactory for a number of reasons that I’m not going to go into here (and yes, here the analogy with Sigma breaks down. I can’t think of a better one right now \u2014 actually, try this: in the UK we pay taxes that cover such things as police, dustbin lorries, schools, hospitals and the armed services. Imagine calling out your local bobby because some hoon has nicked the Sex Pistols plaque from Cromer National Park, and after apprehending the miscreants Sergeant Dixon turns round and says “Right guv, that’ll be \u00a3342.56p”. It breaks the model). <\/p>\n

\nNow, Jenny rightly points out that many journals don’t charge the author: but some do, some charge both ends, and some (*cough* Elsevier cough<\/strong>) charge exorbitant subscription fees and rely on the goodwill of the scientific community for editing<\/strong><\/em> (and have broken web access to boot). <\/p>\n

\nHowever, let’s pretend that all libraries simultaneously said “We’re not going to subscribe to any journals anymore. You should all charge the authors” \u2014 what would happen? Would it work? If not why not? Who would be upset? Would Nature<\/em> still have News & Views and Futures<\/em> (which, after all, are the main reasons I read it)?<\/p>\n

\nWhatever happens, someone’s going to feel hard done by. Perhaps people might argue that scientists from poorer countries, although they’ll suddenly have all the access<\/em> they can eat, can’t afford to publish. But subsidy mechanisms already exist under the current model so I don’t see that there’d be a huge problem. Maybe we’d have to redefine the “smallest publishable unit”? If it was suddenly expensive<\/em> to publish would we see more thoughtful and thorough papers (because believe me when I say there is a lot of crap<\/strong> in the literature). Would, perhaps, only the rich labs publish: in which case maybe the entire edifice would fall (is that a bad thing? I don’t know) and we’d see Universities and Institutes starting up their own journals, organizing peer review etc. (after all, those made redundant from the traditional publishers would need to find jobs somewhere).<\/p>\n

\nMaybe it’s time to stop tinkering with the engine and buy a new car; or, alternatively, shove some more gas in the tank, stop whining and just get on with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenny says that ‘most people’ reckon the average cost to produce a peer-reviewed article in an online-only journal is around $3,000. Which means that the publishing houses now charging around that amount of money to make your article ‘open access’ … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}