4 ms·

Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications

Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. The funding committee will look at my CV, see I published 'only' in PLOS ONE, will think 'this guy publishes only in low IF journals, so his research must be mediocre, so he isn't suitable to receive our money' and pass the money on to someone else. Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss.

IanCal 9y ago
> Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. This is also a somewhat circular problem. You need to be publishing where other big papers go, increasing the strength of those journals, so others then also need to publish where you went and so on. The lag in this system can be huge, as we're talking about slow updating numbers (citations happen over many years) and publishing timescales themselves can be months to several years for a single paper. > Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss. One fix to this is the funding agencies requiring open access which is happening more and more. A mitigation is policies with journals like Nature Genetics, which allows you to place the paper in your institutions repository (or funders repository) 6 months after publication. [0] [0] http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html
- a_bonobo 9y ago
  Another fix for the second problem is a institution-wide pot exclusively for OA fees, so that they don't come from your own pocket. Have only seen that once.
- FTA 9y ago
  Some people don't even realize that researchers themselves pay money to publish a scientific manuscript, whether closed or open, and not the other way around. So the publishing house (likely) recoups their costs of editing and publication with the publication fee paid by the scientist. Remember peer reviewers are not paid either; editing staff, typesetters etc. are the ones that do get paid. So my issue with the pay for open access model is researchers have to use their grant money to pay even more to these publishers just to unlock the articles for anyone to download. It doesn't solve the underlying problem but rather just throws fuel on the fire of publishers and their mighty monopoly. They are for-profit entities. A truly effective mandate to shift the paradigm of publishing would be to mandate publication in completely open access journals, not ones that allow it only with an extra fee. Then more and more scientists would shift to these journals inherently raising the influence of completely open access journals.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    > So the publishing house (likely) recoups their costs of editing and publication with the publication fee paid by the scientist. This is not universally true, I just checked Nature Genetics (as it was mentioned before) and it appears there are no publication fees unless you have colour figures. Do you have any statistics on this? I can only quickly find APC data for open access.
    - FTA 9y ago
      Though the charts don't break it down by each journal specifically, here's a decent survey of the prices from a few years ago: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...

IanCal 9y ago

> Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. This is also a somewhat circular problem. You need to be publishing where other big papers go, increasing the strength of those journals, so others then also need to publish where you went and so on. The lag in this system can be huge, as we're talking about slow updating numbers (citations happen over many years) and publishing timescales themselves can be months to several years for a single paper. > Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss. One fix to this is the funding agencies requiring open access which is happening more and more. A mitigation is policies with journals like Nature Genetics, which allows you to place the paper in your institutions repository (or funders repository) 6 months after publication. [0] [0] http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html

a_bonobo 9y ago
Another fix for the second problem is a institution-wide pot exclusively for OA fees, so that they don't come from your own pocket. Have only seen that once.
FTA 9y ago
Some people don't even realize that researchers themselves pay money to publish a scientific manuscript, whether closed or open, and not the other way around. So the publishing house (likely) recoups their costs of editing and publication with the publication fee paid by the scientist. Remember peer reviewers are not paid either; editing staff, typesetters etc. are the ones that do get paid. So my issue with the pay for open access model is researchers have to use their grant money to pay even more to these publishers just to unlock the articles for anyone to download. It doesn't solve the underlying problem but rather just throws fuel on the fire of publishers and their mighty monopoly. They are for-profit entities. A truly effective mandate to shift the paradigm of publishing would be to mandate publication in completely open access journals, not ones that allow it only with an extra fee. Then more and more scientists would shift to these journals inherently raising the influence of completely open access journals.
- IanCal 9y ago
  > So the publishing house (likely) recoups their costs of editing and publication with the publication fee paid by the scientist. This is not universally true, I just checked Nature Genetics (as it was mentioned before) and it appears there are no publication fees unless you have colour figures. Do you have any statistics on this? I can only quickly find APC data for open access.
  - FTA 9y ago
    Though the charts don't break it down by each journal specifically, here's a decent survey of the prices from a few years ago: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...