Open Access Journal Debate

Original Email

Dear all,

I'm writing because my adviser (Barbara Sarnecka) and I have been discussing whether we want to make our lab one that only submits work to open access journals.

Two things seem true:

1. Most academics agree that the old journal system is out dated, exploitative, and bad for science. A model that gives the public open access to the articles, allows researchers to retain copyright, pays its reviewers and editors for their work, and is not for profit would be much better than the current system.

2. Moving to this model involves risk, especially to graduate students and nontenured faculty.

Although in the past there were simply not enough open-access journals to publish in, this is currently changing. Importantly, a huge factor about whether this change is sustainable is the willingness for graduate students and faculty to send their good papers to these journals. (For example, Collabra is a new journal with a great model, and MIT is starting a new journal in the fall). Its easy to say that only tenured faculty should shoulder this burden, but the reality is that tenured faculty rarely publish alone.

The difficulty for me, as a graduate student, is quantifying the risk involved. There is clearly risk, but its difficult to tell how much.

I'm very curious to hear what this community thinks about this. Specifically, I'd like to hear your opinion on the following topics:

1. How much risk is involved for graduate students? How much do you pay attention to the places a person publishes and what type of impact does publishing in 'good' journals make?

2. How strongly to you feel about switching to not for profit open access models? Would you be willing to publish in only open access journals?

3. Can a graduate student attenuate some of this risk by explicitly stating their support for open access journals on a cv or in a cover letter?

Thanks very much!

Ashley Jo Thomas

Her follow up email

Hello Everyone,

First, we want to express our deep gratitude to everyone who responded to the original post. It was very helpful and eye-opening for both of us.

Many people have asked to hear a summary of responses we received.. But we also got a lot of general questions about this topic, and we thought those answers might be of general interest. The most common questions were: (1) Why would you even consider publishing everything open-access? Aren't those journals just for papers that don't get accepted other places? (2) What do you mean by open-access, non profit? and (3) What about the money? Our answers to these questions are below the summary of responses we received to our original question.

SUMMARY OF RESPONSES WE RECEIVED: Although many people responded in support of open-access non-profit journals, most people felt that there is a considerable amount of risk associated with publishing in them, and that the risk is not worth taking for graduate students, post docs and to some extent non-tenured professors. To be honest, the most common piece of advice I (Ashley) got was to always try and publish in the most prestigious journal. That being said, those respondents who also feel passionately about the open access/non profit model commonly advised a compromise position, publish some papers in traditional journals and others in open-access non profit journals. It seems that this is working for people.

GENERAL QUESTIONS

1. WHY OPEN-ACCESS AND NONPROFIT? Because we think it’s the right thing to do. UC Berkeley biology professor Michael Eisen explained it well, in a talk he gave in 2013:

“[Journals] didn’t come up with the idea. They didn’t provide the grant. They didn’t do the

research. They didn’t write the paper. They didn’t review it. All they did was provide the infrastructure for peer review, oversee the process, and prepare the paper for publication. This is a tangible, albeit minor, contribution, that pales in comparison to the labors of the scientists involved and the support from the funders and sponsors of the research.

And yet, for this modest at best role in producing the finished work, publishers are

rewarded with ownership of – in the form of copyright – and complete control over the finished, published work, which they turn around and lease back to the same institutions and agencies that sponsored the research in the first place. Thus not only has the scientific community provided all the meaningful intellectual effort and labor to the endeavor, they’re also fully funding the process.

Universities are, in essence, giving an incredibly valuable product – the end result of

an investment of more than a hundred billion dollars of public funds every year – to publishers for free, and then they are paying them an additional ten billion dollars a year to lock these papers away where almost nobody can access them. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically insane.

To appreciate just how bizarre this arrangement is, I like the following metaphor.

Imagine you are an obstetrician setting up a new practice. Your colleagues all make their money by charging parents a fee for each baby they deliver. It’s a good living. But you have a better idea. In exchange for YOUR services you will demand that parents give every baby you deliver over to you for adoption, in return for which you agree to lease these babies back to their parents provided they pay your annual subscription fee.

Of course no sane parent would agree to these terms. But the scientific community has.”

(7/26/2015 The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1346 4/12)

Because journals receive their content and quality control for free, scientific publishing is an extremely lucrative business. Check out these profits (as a percentage of revenue) for commercial scholarly publishers in 2010 or early 2011 (from http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/)

Similarly, look at Elsevier's profits throughout the 2000s, including during the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008 onward, during which time many of our universitys' budgets were slashed. The cost of these subscriptions goes up every year and is ultimately passed on to our students, who now carry huge debt burdens.

Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36% Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9% John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42% Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4% 2002: £429m profit on £1295m revenue – 33.18% 2003: £467m profit on £1381m revenue – 33.82% 2004: £460m profit on £1363m revenue – 33.75% 2005: £449m profit on £1436m revenue – 31.25% 2006: £465m profit on £1521m revenue – 30.57% 2007: £477m profit on £1507m revenue – 31.65% 2008: £568m profit on £1700m revenue – 33.41% 2009: £693m profit on £1985m revenue – 34.91% 2010: £724m profit on £2026m revenue – 35.74% http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/)

This is why over 15,000 researchers have joined the boycott against Elsevier at (http://thecostofknowledge.com/)

2. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY OPEN ACCESS/NON PROFIT? We mean rigorously peer-reviewed, nonprofit, open-access journals. Some that we know about are: Collabra (http://www.collabra.org/) Barbara is an editor at this journal sponsored by the UC Press, which has a really great model. The Journal of Numerical Cognition (http://jnc.psychopen.eu/index.php/jnc) AERA Open (Partnering with Sage Publications, but fully open-access and sponsored by American Educational Research Association . . . http://www.aera.net/tabid/14896/Default.aspx) PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/) (for neuroscientists) eLIFE (http://elifesciences.org/about) PNAS is also not-for-profit and makes its material open access after 6 months.

3. WHAT ABOUT THE MONEY? Some respondents said they objected to paying Author Processing Charges, which are often required by open-access journals. Authors without grants can ill-afford to pay these charges, and the legitimate journals are sensitive to this. (Note: there are a lot of bogus, predatory open-access 'journals’ out there, just trying to make a buck. Here’s a list of them: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/)

The good journals handle the money problem in different ways. Some don’t charge authors anything (e.g., Journal of Numerical Cognition). Others charge low fees and have subsidies available for authors without funding, or for students, or for scientists from low-income countries (e.g., Collabra charges $875; AERA Open charges $400 for members, $700 for nonmembers; both have subsidies or waivers available for scientists who can’t pay those fees.)

And frankly, we think it makes more sense for the funders (through the grants) to pay the real costs of distribution directly, rather than forcing our university libraries (and ultimately our undergraduates) to shoulder the cost of publication, PLUS huge profits for the publishers.

Again, our sincere thanks to everyone who took the time to write such thoughtful responses.

Best,

Ashley Thomas & Barbara Sarnecka

The debate continues

Many thanks for raising this issue. I think it's really important, all the more because many author-journal practices are implicit, as opposed to the need for ethical approval for work or specification of conflicts of interests over funding etc.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I am editorially involved in the Journal of Numerical Cognition, a fully OA and free to publish journal. I am also Secretary of the Experimental Psychology Society, whose Journal, QJEP, is a traditional journal generating revenues that go back to the Society and are used to fund graduate conference travel around the world, study visits for early career researchers, small pump priming grants to members, etc. As a Society journal, we maybe also have more opportunity to develop more liberal journal practices over copyright etc. So I can see different perspectives on this.

I remember a distinguished psychologist telling me some years ago that they only ever reviewed for Journals that were linked to a Society. They felt is they were going to volunteer their time to help a journal, then they did not want to do so for a Journal project that was (only) profit related. I thought that was an admirable, principled stance, but it was a personal one (they didn't shout it from the rooftops) and this was a senior figure - they could afford to pick and choose!

But, yes, it is surely possible to tack a principled stance about publishing practices. The CostOfKnowledge group that refrains from working with Elsevier Journals, because of their perceived publication injustices, is one example. Whether that principle is effective or justified, the point here is that some (again, maybe those who are in a position to do so) do make decisions about where to find a home for their work.

A phd student I am working with (James Stone) has recently published a paper in the Journal of Open Research Software, an OA journal. The paper describes software tools for doing psychological research including online and remote testing. We wanted the software to be as widely available as possible, so an OA journal made sense. Moreover, the software is open source - so if someone wants to adapt or develop the code to get the programs to do different things, beyond the built-in-flexibility - they can. For all these reasons, the journal seemed the appropriate, positive choice to make, and having a medium term "take up" from a publication seems a key consideration. If the work is useful and available to others, then this advances the standing of the person (James) who was primarily responsible.

In the case of the Journal of Numerical Cognition, then there is a body of work that is likely to be of interest not only to other scholars, but also to educators, teachers, even parents etc. Imagine a hypothetical paper on children's math anxiety, and stereotype threat, and theoretically driven manipulations designed to inoculate against these... One can see I hope why an OA journal would be a positive choice because it would facilitate the dissemination to a wide audience, outside of psychology and outside of University.

(In the case of JNC, because it is free to publish, then there are no financial barriers for students, who may not have the same access to servicing Article Processing Charges that more senior academics have, and because there are no charges there is less reason to suspect commercial imperatives affect publication scheduling in journals of this type.)

Imagine you have a paper that you feel is an important replication / extension / dismantling of an existing published work. It seems to me to make sense to consider the same Journal as the original paper. The Journal has already a track record of publishing in that area, and the original paper has created an 'audience' and 'market'... So again this would seem a positive choice for publishing in a particular Journal.

What I've tried to do is advance some (but not all) of the positive cases that might be made, to counteract your justifiable concerns about the perceived risks of an OA publication. If you have a principled publication strategy, whether that is about OA or about some other dimension of publication, I can see no real harm in articulating this in a letter, because it at least shows you have an explicit strategy and explanation for the contents of your cv. And make yourself aware of evidence for example that OA articles are more widely cited than others

Old and new, subscription and OA journals vary on all sorts of dimensions... Perceived reputation, acceptance rates, review lengths, default number of reviewers,etc, and the dreaded Impact Factor. But we know IF is a very distorted metric because it is so heavily skewed by a small minority of highly cited publications... In the same way ultimately what matters to you is not the journal average reputation, but the quality of your article, though yes in the short term the journal stands as a proxy for what is not yet known about it.

I hope this helps give you some food for thought.

Good luck! John Towse

One question I have had for some time about the open access approach is how the work of copy-editing and preparing the pdf is handled. Is this done on a volunteer basis? Or is it paid, and is this why there are often author fees? The software is available to handle every other aspect of manuscript receipt, handling, publication, and distribution, it seems to me.

Martin John Packer

I have had three concerns about the open access journals:

1. Rejection rates. I had heard from 4 or 5 associate editors at the open-access journals that the publishers provide pressure for the AEs to accept all of the submitted manuscripts. This is because the publishers are dependent on the author fees for their revenues. This expectation has a negative impact on the rigorousness of the publication process. Whereas the regular journals have rejection rates between 70% and 85%, the open access journals appear to have extremely low rejection rates. Does this concern anyone?

2. Copyediting. As Martin mentioned, the copyediting process is unclear. Having been an associate editor at 3 journals I view this as a very important step in the publication process. I have come across a number of typos, grammatical errors, and missing table headers, etc. when I have read open-access articles. I worry about whether low quality data are being published.

3. Review solicitation. I receive a request to review for open access journals about 5 times/ week. The topics are all over the place. Even after filling out the profile for one of these journals (to narrow the topics sent to me) what I am asked to review is still way out of my areas of expertise - about 80% of the time. Is this good for the authors?

These observations have led me to advise graduate students and early investigators to publish in the regular journals until these potential issues are worked out. We may get there but I don't see it happening yet.

Best, Melanie A. Killen

I don't want to hog this discussion, others I'm sure will have useful contributions to make, so I shall try not to comment on many more threads, but since you asked....

For PsychOpen journals, they themselves note:

"PsychOpen is operated and funded by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information in Trier, Germany.

The Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information (ZPID) is a research support organization. Its objective is to provide a comprehensive, sustainable, and professionally based documentation and communication of information in the field of psychology focusing on the German-speaking countries. It is a nonprofit organization co-funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and the German States and a member of the prestigious Leibniz Association."

PsychOpen have a small professional team working on journal maintenance, copyediting and article formatting. They pay DOI fees and associated indexing costs as part of their budget. They use OJS (open journal systems) which is a free, open source publishing package (in contrast to many manuscript workflow systems which are commercial and charge journals for each submission handled). Authors are asked to make their accepted articles as "format-ready" as possible but what publisher doesn't?

Another OA publisher is Ubiquity Press. They have a figure on the following page that provides some transparency in terms of "where the money goes"

http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/publish/

which does potentially make you wonder about other publishers where APCs are much higher...

So no single answer, but hopefully some insights.

John Towse

Thank you. I agree. Not all OA journals are the same; nor are all regular journals.

My pitch is that we keep our eye on the issue of high quality for all journals, and that includes rejection rates, copyediting procedures, and reviewer solicitation decisions.

Importantly, I am extremely concerned that we would expect graduate students, post-docs, and early investigators to pay large fees to publish their articles. This seems to both undermine the promotion process, and negatively penalize those at the lower ends of the pay scale in academia.

Best,

Melanie Killen

Hi Melanie:

I’m totally with you on this. I think there is going to be a large negative effect of these “journals,” which is likely to have a greater impact on junior people—those who will be most hurt by it.

Judy DeLoache

Bravo Melanie!

Roberta Golinkoff

Hi,

I would like to add a different thought. The current model of big-profit publishers (on our labor) and fire-walls to journals is ending and open-access is beginning --whether we individually like it or not. The evidence is everywhere:

(1) University administrators are demanding a change in the system because the library costs charged by traditional journals are staggering; (2) Funding agencies --NIH, Welcome -- demand that the work they pay for is open. Indeed, NIH is going beyond this with their new rules for their Biosketches. When you apply for a grant, your previous work --whether funded by NIH or not --only gets to count on your bio if it is openly available to everyone on a website; (3) Citations for open access journals are increasing while impact and citations for traditional journals are falling. Scientists (across sciences) are increasingly submitting papers to open access journals because they want other scientists to read and cite them. The meteroic rise in citations for the PLoS family of journals has been noticed by the traditional journals (see 4 below). The PLoS journals are outstanding and were developed by leading scientists to change the the way we publish; (4) Perhaps because of the PLoS rise, open access journals are being added by the best publshing houses --Nature, Science, now Elsevier, and more. Even the APA journals now offer this if you pay. (5) The scientific fraud and non-replication (across all the sciences) associated with the high rejection rates of the most elite journals is troubling science administrators, granting agencies, journals and scientists and their are arguments that lowering the stakes would be better for science overall (that the key to good science is replication, open data, data sharing, not gate keepers at a journal).

I do not think we can stop where this is going. Instead, we should think about how to shape it -- through our universities and through our professional associations.

Linda Smith

Re: Linda This is the most sensible and constructive assessment of the situation so far. Thanks

Annette Karmiloff-Smith

Hi all,

I completely agree with Linda’s points. Open access is an important step in increasing the accessibility of the scientific literature, and pretty much everyone in the publishing industry agrees that it is coming. What’s more, moving to open access accelerates science by increasing the audience for published work and speeding dissemination, especially to scientists and interested parties who are not affiliated with a major research institution. In addition, graduate students should know that open access work on the whole tends to be cited more.*

That said, the transition is rocky right now. Many open access journals do not yet have the knowledgeable editors and reviewers that the traditional journals do, and the hierarchy of outlets hasn’t yet solidified so there are many new outlets whose quality is unproven. This flux sometimes results in the poorly calibrated review requests that got described earlier in this thread.

Societies like CDS have an important role to play in this process - if a society moves to an open access journal then the society’s leadership of senior scientists will be the ones editing and reviewing and then quality will remain high. We don’t need to focus only on mega-journals like PLOS. There are also many quality society journals that are completely free and open access - Judgment and Decision Making and Semantics and Pragmatics both come to mind.

One major barrier to societies moving to open access is the large amount of publication revenue that societies receive from publishers. Essentially, our schools’ library fees to T&F, Elsevier, etc. are subsidizing our conferences. But publishers take a big cut off the top as well. So one option is to stick with the publishers until we’re forced to move. But another option is to be forward thinking about looking for new sources of support for our societies, and move to create the kind of high quality, open access publication outlets that we want our graduate students to publish in.

all the best,

Mike C Frank

As a minor note, Canadian granting agencies are also moving to a requirement of open access for all grant related publications. Currently this is being set up through university library systems, but publishing in OA journals will fulfill this obligation as well.

Mark A. Schmuckler

Hello all, Since Mike brings up the open-acces journal Semantics and Pragmatics (http://semprag.org), I thought I would jump in to the thread, since I am an Associate Editor for S&P (as we call it). This is now one of the two official flagship journals of the Linguistic Society of America, alongside Language. (The LSA also has a number of newer publications, which are online sections of Langauge, such as Phonological Analysis.)

At S&P, our editorial board and AEs are experts in the fields of Linguistics, Philosophy, and related disciplines. We are constantly adding new members to the board, as submissions demand it, and confer with each other about possible additions. We work extremely hard to maintain a very fast turnaround time without sacrificing quality of publication. Our aim is a decision within 60 days of submitting, and we usually ask reviewers to submit reviews within 4-5 weeks time. Although we ask for short, to-the-point reviews, reviewers and AEs frequently provide extensive high-quality feedback. The AEs and Editors in Chief work together throughout the process, and I think this improves decisions and manuscript quality immensely. I confess that I do not know specifics about the copy-editing process beyond knowing that we do have someone who works diligently with the Editors on the conversion and editing process. (Authors are encouraged to use Latex, although this is not mandatory.) Authors do not have to pay a fee to be published. We most certainly do not have a high acceptance rate.

It is important to keep in mind that revenue generation is indeed important to scholarly societies, and the fact that the other lead journal, Language, is still in print, helps the LSA a great deal. (In fact, this may even be an understatement.) This issue was a large part of our strategic planning discussions in recent years. It is indeed important to be forward thinking where this topic is concerned.

Although the journals I mention above are not strictly 'developmental' journals, papers reporting research on language acquisition and development and psycholinguistics are welcome! Feel free to contact me (off of this thread) or one of the other editors if you have any questions for you or your students!

Best,

Kristen Syrett

I think there are some misunderstandings about OA journals that merit correction.

The first concerns costs to publish for graduate students and others without enough funds. People have said that it’s unfair to expect grad. Students to pay the hefty fees. I agree. That’s why good OA journals will usually grant a substantial or even complete fee waiver to graduate students. In the case of Frontiers, one of my students found the fee-waiver application process to be easy and straightforward (I was not a co-author so there was no way to pay for it out of grant funds). If there is no provision for fee waiver, it’s likely to be a predatory journal and should be avoided.

Second, it’s important not to lump all OA journals together. The progress that can be made with good OA Journals may be hindered because they are being lumped-in with predatory journals. OA does not mean the same as predatory. It’s not all-or-none.

Third, we must realize that the traditional publication model also hurts lots of folks too. For example, by restricting access to those who have access to a good university library, we are privileging a relatively small percentage of the possible audience for our work. We take for granted our ability to look online, find an article, and download a pdf from our university library. Most people in the world can’t do that now, at least not legally. OA journals make the work accessible to anyone with access to the Internet and thus give us a real chance to “give our science away” (to paraphrase George Miller). If we want to reach the world beyond the ivory tower, or even less well-off ivory towers, then we must have a way of making this access easy and inexpensive.

Finally, there needs to be a place to publish replications and studies that need to get “out there” but some people may not like. OA journals are good for these. I would not encourage a student to publish his/her best work in an OA journal, but sometimes an OA journal is just right and it does make a potentially important contribution the field.

To be clear, I do not think that CDS should shift to a fully OA model. Taylor and Francis has been very supportive of the Society, and we are thankful for that support and will continue to need and benefit from it substantially. That being said, it also would be worth considering whether the publishers that we support could also consider more ways of making the work they publish available to those who may find it difficult to access.

David H. Uttal

Thanks to Linda and David. This is very helpful and I have learned a lot already today. I didn’t know about the waiver of fees option. Very important.

My experience has been hearing stories from colleagues as AE at OA journals where the publishers refuse to allow authors to revise their manuscripts in order to keep the process moving forward. This seems to be a problem. Clearly it’s limited to a few journals but this should be discussed more broadly.

This discussion is about working together to move the field forward. I am on board.

Best,

Melanie Killen

On 30 Jul 2015, at 23:31, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:

Martin

Since you asked....

For PsychOpen journals, they themselves note:

"PsychOpen is operated and funded by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information in Trier, Germany.

Another OA publisher is Ubiquity Press. They have a figure on the following page that provides some transparency in terms of "where the money goes"

http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/publish/

which does potentially make you wonder about other publishers where APCs are so much higher...

So no single answer, but hopefully some insights.

John Towse

This is something of an aside. I was struck by the fact that rejection rates lower than 70% to 85% might be cause for concern about the quality of the published work. I wonder whether rejection rates that are in the 70 - 85% range might be cause for concern about the quality of graduate training and prevailing work? Do we work in a field where 70 - 85% of the work submitted for publication should be rejected? Is that a little strange? Just a thought.

Richard S. Bogartz

Linda,

You couldn’t have said it better.

Dr. Nancy L. Stein

I would like to add to this thread on OA journals. I believe that one should not discriminate against all OA journals. Just like traditional journals, there are great OA journals, mediocre ones, and of course bad ones as well. I can easily name several great OA journals. For example, PNAS articles are OA after 6 months. Nature Communications are totally OA, and the new Science Advances is also OA. I would love to publish there and I encourage all early career researchers to try to publish there. I believe that OA journal should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis just like traditional journals.

Best,

John Smith

Thank you. I agree. Not all OA journals are the same; nor are all regular journals.

My pitch is that we keep our eye on the issue of high quality for all journals, and that includes rejection rates, copyediting procedures, and reviewer solicitation decisions.

Best,

Melanie Killen

Bravo Melanie!

Roberta Golinkoff

Excellent discussion and one to continue to have as we move in this direction. As noted, there are still issues to deal with and be concerned about regarding OA but also some big payoffs to our science.

Best,

Pamela Davis-Kean