Contents

Contents................................................................................................................................................................1 Germana Barata 30th July 2012 15.37 .............................................................................................................1 Richard Wiseman 21st July 2012 14.19...........................................................................................................2 Jrgen Burchardt 26th July 2012 13.04 ..........................................................................................................2 Martin Counihan 19th July 2012 15.26 ............................................................................................................2 Matteo Merzagora 19th July 2012 10.48 .........................................................................................................3 Fabienne Crettaz von Roten 19th July 2012 10.40...........................................................................................3 Gerhard Samulat 19th July 2012 10.21 .......................................................................................................3 Patrick Sturgis 19th July 2012 10.21 .............................................................................................................3 Susanna Priest 19th July 2012 17.52.............................................................................................................4 Alessandro Delfanti 19th July 2012 09.46....................................................................................................5 Martin Bauer 19th July 2012 08.59...............................................................................................................5 Susanna Priest 19th July 2012 00.12 .............................................................................................................6 Martin Bauer 18th July 2012 09.43 .............................................................................................................7 Cecelia Rosen 18th July 2012 12.56 .............................................................................................................8 Rick Holliman 18th July 2012 12.56 ..............................................................................................................8 Toss Gascoigne 17th July 2012 00.13..............................................................................................................8

Germana Barata
Dear all,

30th July 2012 15.37

I think the Brazilian experience can help us think about open access journals, free of charge for authors and public. Brazil has probably the biggest open access library in the world. Since 1998, the SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online: www.scielo.org) has indexed almost 385,000 papers on 960 journals. It has just been included in the Web of Knowledge. SciELO has published around 40,000 papers per year on 900 different journals. It has started as a Brazilian data base, yet today it has included other 10 Portuguese or Spanish speaking countries (and South Africa), and it has registered an average of 38 million downloads in 2011. SciELO represents the main data base among Brazilian scientists and also its standards to index journals has worked as a parameter of quality for journals and authors. http://www.bv.fapesp.br/namidia/noticia/70907/thomson-reuters-spotlights-emerging-research-centers-additio/ In Brazil, the journals are also mainly financed by governmental agencies, therefore, neither authors nor the public pay for their access to papers. This does not mean that journals don't face difficulties to improve their quality, for example the staff is mainly composed by volunteers and the approval process can be quite long. But SciELO is investing mainly on the principle that scientific knowledge should be public and it has worked successfully. WoS through Thomson Reuters has recognized the role and the impact of SciELO in the science production in Latin America and other developing countries. This partnership will increase the visibility, access and citation of the papers indexed in SciELO as well as strengthen open access journals.

Best regards, Germana

Richard Wiseman
Hi, I am a huge fan of open source journals.

21st July 2012 14.19

We have just published a paper debunking claims associated with Neuro-Lingustic Programming and lying, and it has been viewed over 23,000 times (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi %2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040259). I suspect that lots of these views will be from those outside of academia, and so this approach represents direct 'scientist to public' engagement. I would have thought it reasonable to ask people viewing articles to indicate whether they are outside of academia, and then allocating funds from existing communication grants and budgets to the Universities/Departments publishing the work. This would motivate researchers to produce work that is relevant/interesting to taxpayers and write papers that can be understood by the public as well as their peers. Best Richard Professor Richard Wiseman, Psychology Department, University of Hertfordshire

Jrgen Burchardt

26th July 2012 13.04

I have recently made a study of Danish academic journals that shows that 30 % of the authors are unemployed, retired, students or are working for not-research companies/institutions. An author based payment Open Access system will reduce the available research with around 30 % by this factor alone. To this reduction will follow reductions in missing payment from poor countries and institutions. The Danish study will be translated in English in a month or so. Best, Jrgen Burchardt

Martin Counihan
[in reply to Martin Bauer]

19th July 2012 15.26

"Author pays"? I would like to know if the Swiss patent office in Bern will be willing to pay for the publication of any scientific papers written by their staff in their spare time. Martin Counihan

Matteo Merzagora

19th July 2012 10.48

[in response to Allessandro Delfanti 19.07.2012 10.46] A question: does anyone know of good studies providing evidence based data that support the fact that OA is discriminatory for poor countries (I am thinking of something like a wide comparison in several discipline of the percentage of paper published by researchers from developing countries in OA vs non OA journals, which would allow to see how serious is the discrimination problem we are addressing)? thank you for the discussion! Matteo

Fabienne Crettaz von Roten

[in response to Allessandro Delfanti 19.07.2012 09.55]

19th July 2012 10.40

In this context, one often mention that OA is discriminatory against researchers in less-developped areas, but it is also discriminatory against researchers with less scientific capital, that is younger researchers without fixed and/or higher positions, and women researchers which often work part-time in lower positions, for whom the institutions may be less willing to pay for "page charges" or for which the grants may not be large enough to pay for "page charges". Is there a risk that OA increases the Matthew and Mathilda effect? I think unfortunately. Fabienne Crettaz von Roten, Assistant professor (MER), University of Lausanne

Gerhard Samulat

19th July 2012 10.21

I wonder about the notion open access!! The models should be named either the "author pays" or the reader pays. Both have advantages ans disadvantages. Open access in my understanding is freely accessable/ available Best Regards, Gerhard Samulat Freelancer and a simple reader and writer Dotzheimer Strasse 52, 65197 Wiesbaden, GERMANY

Patrick Sturgis
Martin/Susanna

19th July 2012 10.21

Is it beyond the wit and ingenuity of multinational corporations (publishers) to come up with a charging model that reflects the ability of institutions from different parts of the world to pay? As I understand it, variable charging is already in place for journal subscriptions so it should be unproblematic to incorporate it in an author pays model.

And, with regard to the financial constraints on universities acting as a break on publication, this is surely being driven, in part, by the massive and rising costs of library subscriptions. These increasing costs are being driven, not by better quality publication but by the extravagant profits made by the publishers. At least with the author pays model, the costs are more transparent and comparable between outlets. This should serve to bring charges down in the medium to long term (though I conceded that this requires a certain degree of faith in free-market economics!). Author-pays has significant problems, particularly in the transition from current setup, but it is surely an improvement on a system which prevents scholars and members of the public from accessing the findings of research which they themselves have paid for. I say this as someone whose own institution (despite persistent lobbying) does not subscribe to PUS! Patrick [Sturgis]

Susanna Priest
All,

19th July 2012 17.52

Many good points have been raised. However, I really do not believe that publisher profits are excessive, after paying for all the costs. The people I've worked with in publishing over the years are certainly not getting rich off of our work. Nevertheless, there are many ironies in the current system. For example, not everyone who publishes in the academic system also volunteers to do reviewing work, meaning they benefit by a system to which they do not contribute. Thank goodness this is not very widespread, or it would be our own "tragedy of the commons" (to use the well-known example from environmental studies). A variable rate for different countries might be better, to be sure. However, this is an incredibly complex issue in itself. Countries with high GNPs may have researchers who work at very modest salaries, and these are often the ones in positions that do not provide institutional support for things like attending meetings or publication costs. The entire US higher education system is shifting to one in which there are fewer and fewer permanent faculty and many more adjunct faculty (as well as postdocs, etc.) working for very low wages and with no job security. The adjuncts will have no way at all to cover author publication costs. Currently I myself am in that position; I would be financially unable to publish in an author-pays journal at a cost like what is estimated for JCOM ($1000 or even $500), since I do not have any institutional support at the moment. Yes, librarians are worried about their subscription rates, but among those I know, many are also very sincere in their desire to make information and scholarship widely accessible to as many people as possible, and this is part of what attracts them to "open" access. I believe that in some cases they are being misled as to the likely impact of some of these alternatives. The literature of communication is full of critiques of the existing media system that is subsidized directly and indirectly by society's powerful institutions. We are lucky to be in a field (science communication) in which many institutions see it in their self-interest to promote scholarship, so a journal like JCOM is possible. However, considering the critical literature on the nature of journalism and what is happening to it in the existing economy, one has to wonder what will happen to academic freedom as the system of academic publishing as a whole shifts to a new foundation, if that is what ultimately happens.

I think I have written enough, though. I will take a look at Martin's blog, and again I would welcome further discussion of these issues in the commentary section of SC. Susanna Priest , Visiting Scholar, University of Washington and Editor, Science Communication

Alessandro Delfanti
[in reply to Susanna Priest 19.07.2012 00.12] Hi everybody,

19th July 2012 09.46

I am one of the editors of the Journal of Science Communication. As Susanna said, the journal is funded by an academic institution, SISSA. Yet the amount of money needed for JCOM is incredibly low. If we were to charge authors, we would be able to sustain the journal with a 500$ fee per article. Then of course I agree that the "author pays" model might not be always the best approach to social sciences, I believe there are other ways that might be worth pursuing. Anyhow, the fact that the PCST community lacks of open access spaces for debate is a crucial problem for the evolution of PCST itself... Here an editorial I just wrote for JCOM in order to stimulate the debate: http://jcom.sissa.it/archive/11/02/Jcom1102%282012%29E/ I also want to highlight that most OA journals that work on an "author pays" model are NOT discriminatory towards developing countries, as they usually do not charge authors from those universities. After all, they are not for-profit enterprises. Finally, I think a more widespread use of OA tools would not be a bad choice for social sciences... there are lots of good reasons to embrace OA, and lots of possible funding options. While some of the doubts raised by Susanna are absolutely important, we should analyse the whole issue more in depth. All the best, ad [Alessandro Delfanti]

Alessandro Delfanti

19 th July 2012 09.55

CORRECTION: the fee that would sustain JCOM is $1,000 rather than $500 [Alessandro Delfanti]

Martin Bauer
Suzanne,

19th July 2012 08.59

Indeed, on the PUS blog which I mentioned, you will find an estimate of JCOM's real costs (open access and an internet journal). The costs are not marginal at all. If we shake the current model, we might see also current consensus being

shaking up, in which reviewers work for free. If reviewers have to pay for contributing to a journal, why should they work for free?? I think this will change journal editing from a volunteer-based community cottage industry to a fully accounted business operation. This will mostly destroy humanities and social science journals, the other are already business operations. Contribute to the PUS blog on <http://pus-journal.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-access-to-public-understanding-of.html <http://pus-journal.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-access-to-public-understan%0bding-of.html> > Martin [Bauer]

Susanna Priest

19th July 2012 00.12

Yes, I heartily agree with Martin. We will soon publish a commentary in Science Communication that makes an argument for open access. However, that's not to say that as SC's editor, I necessarily agree - our commentaries are often opinion pieces, and perhaps eventually someone will want to write the other side. For the most part, in my own view, all that most "open access" plans do is to shift the burden of paying from readers to authors. Not only is it discriminatory against researchers in less-developed ("poorer") areas, but it is potentially a very bad choice for social science generally, and even worse for communication research specifically. For most scientists, grant funding is already necessary to support their research, and "page charges" are familiar and expected - and funded. You just write them into the grant. For most social scientists, grants are fewer, smaller, and less consistent, where they are available at all. I've seen at least one proposal for universities to pay the costs of open access publishing by their faculty, but many universities are near bankruptcy already, so I can't honestly see this succeeding. Are we going to be paying for this out of our personal pockets, then, in order to get tenure and keep our jobs? Librarians sometimes champion "open access" alternatives because they see the price of their journal subscriptions spiraling ever upward - and because "open" access sounds like democratic and equitable access. But this is not always the reality. Some open access online journals, such as "our" very own Journal of Science Communication, do survive and thrive, but in most cases this requires institutional support (in JCOM's case, presumably through SISSA, although I don't profess to know the details). Journals affiliated with scholarly societies are generally paid for by steeper membership fees for those societies. Faculty editors often get courseload reductions and staff or graduate student support from their universities, who are hoping for the added prestige, athough this is becoming much less common in the current economy, and I've personally not usually been so lucky. There just isn't any "free lunch"! And there are other models. I don't know what version is being adopted in Europe. I believe that the US NIH now requires research paid for with public funds to be published in an open archive, which I think is a good compromise. It does not prevent traditional journal publishing, and I think that most journals seem to be cooperating with this plan. Unpaid access to published NIH funded research articles may not really make science any more democratic, but it seems appropriate for publications created with public funds, so I'm sympathetic. In the interests of full disclosure, of course Martin and I both edit commercial journals (journals that are published by a for-profit - albeit progressive - publisher and that are supported by subscription fees primarily). However, it is often imagined that in the internet world, much - if not all - of the work of journal publishing can easily be accomplished for free, by scholar-volunteers, as there is no printing or postage to worry about. These are actually

only a small part of a print publication's budget. The actual work of creating a scholarly publication of consistent quality is very substantial and has little or nothing to do with the cost of paper or postage. A successful journal involves active and wise management of the submission and referee processes - essential to maintaining consistent quality and value - and of the journal publication process itself, including scheduling, counting pages, copyediting, proofreading, reference checking, layout and web posting, indexing and archiving. All of this work is labor intensive and requires a wide range of professionally skilled specialists, and cutting out the publisher doesn't make it go away. I have also heard of "open access" projects in which referees and/or editors get paid - but only if the articles they evaluate are accepted for publication. What this model implies for both academic ethics and academic quality is quite disturbing. We all need to be very discerning when evaluating projects and activities described as "open access." Caveat emptor, especially if the price is zero! Susanna Priest, Visiting Scholar, University of Washington and Editor, Science Communication

Martin Bauer

18th July 2012 09.43

Colleagues, In a recent note, Toss Gascoigne referred to a policy decision in the UK: to move all publicly funded research into open access publishing. Indeed in the UK there is quite a stir on this. The model, known as the Gold Standard, the author pays model, is intended to become binding for everybody. This bring us back to my recent Blog contribution for PUS Journal on this issue: in short: What sounds good in general, might backfire for research in our particular community !!!! a) this model is not good for PUS and science communication research, where we need to be collecting global information by encouraging contributions from fields afar, not flogging local studies and results to fields afar. b) The gold standard, the 'author pays model', will exclude or discriminate against many contributors from outside the Western remit, where paying the author fee is no problem. c) what works for the high end of bio-medical and physical research (Elsevier etc), does not necessarily work for social science and communication research; unless we can raise large funds to sponsor contributions from wider origins, journals like PUS will be reduced to the coverage of a local common place like that of the UK or the US. Who wants to read all that, and only that? Here is the PUS Blog link again http://pus-journal.blogspot.com/2012/05/open-access-to-public-understanding-of.html Martin [Bauer]

Cecelia Rosen

18th July 2012 12.56

I guess you know about Argentina's initiative on this matter...but in case you didn't, I post a news article I wrote for SciDev.Net some weeks ago. http://www.scidev.net/en/science-communication/open-access/news/argentina-takes-steps-towards-open-accesslaw.html Best wishes, Cecilia Rosen

Rick Holliman

18th July 2012 12.56

Hi Toss and PCST This is confirmed as Research Councils UK (RCUK) policy in the UK. The open access policy applies from 1 April 2013 to research papers published from projects that are part or wholly funded by UK Research Councils. The policy is briefly outlined here - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2012news/Pages/120716.aspx It follows the recommendations made in the Finch Report - http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/ Best wishes Rick Dr. Richard Holliman, The Open University, UK

Toss Gascoigne

17th July 2012 00.13

A newspaper report saying that the UK will make scientific research freely available by 2014: LONDON: The British government has revealed controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shake-up of academic publishing since the invention of the internet. Research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world. The universities and science minister, David Willetts said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years. The move reflects a groundswell of support for ''open access'' publishing among academics who have long protested that journal publishers make large profits by locking research behind online paywalls. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/scientific-research-will-be-free-online-20120716226aw.html#ixzz20pWeCF1B

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