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This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenu

This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical work (program committee, reviews etc.) is done for free by everyone involved. That it can end up behind a paywall is quite sad.

roadnottaken 9y ago
Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.
- xaedes 9y ago
  "A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals." It is not like the choice is for free..
- a3_nm 9y ago
  > But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
    The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.
    - a3_nm 9y ago
      I have heard this argument and I don't think it's valid. We are stuck in a broken system where researchers are pressured to publish in closed-access venues. It's hard to act against this at the publication level, because you may need to publish in such venues (for career reasons), and (more importantly, at least for me) you often co-author papers with other people who may not share your dislike of closed access. By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level. This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)
  - vanviegen 9y ago
    Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.
    - a3_nm 9y ago
      In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.
      - hueving 9y ago
        Well they wouldn't make it obvious. It would be rejected for other reasons.
  - tnecniv 9y ago
    Tenure isn't the end of the road and tenured researchers don't work alone. Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishing in OA journals, but it's way easier to sell yourself and maintain your status if you publish where everyone else publishes.
    - a3_nm 9y ago
      I agree with what you say, but I do not understand why it is related to my comment. I was trying to say that refusing to publish in closed-access journals is hard, but refusing to review for them is easy.
  - DaveWalk 9y ago
    What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field. From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.
    - roel_v 9y ago
      I get voted into oblivion every time I post this when this topic comes up (which is like, every other day), but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about 'open access' in academia (well, not 'nobody' in the pedantic nerd sense, but 'nobody' as in 'only a vocal but ultimately insignificant minority', mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet; the number of senior faculty staff who spends time on writing blog posts about this is minute). In fields where there are elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations (but, of course, who call themselves 'principled' and 'not corrupted by money' and that sort of spin on it) like CS and physics the proportion is higher, but still not enough to make a real difference. The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it. So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access. Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).
- davidgerard 9y ago
  > make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people Research Works Act, where Elsevier et al tried to do literally this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act
bjornsing 9y ago
Shouldn't this come from the political level (as it does in OP)? I mean we finance this work with taxes, why not just make it a (grant) requirement that all results need to be made publicly available? (And everyone would be uploading shit to the internet so fast it would make all our heads spin...)
tomjen3 9y ago
Honestly this sounds like it should come from Congress. You spend tax payers money on closed access journals you cheat the tax payers.
vivekd 9y ago
But if the high level accademics don't move to access on their own, government certainly has a large role in encouraging and incentivizing them to make the change, especially considering they provide a large amount of funding for academic institutions and research. Government action can certainly help us get there faster and more certainly than were we to wait for people to do it of their own accord.
- JohnStrange 9y ago
  It's not that simple. Where I live and work the implementation of these policies is actually quite horrible. We're supposed to put everything in open access repositories under a creative commons license and at the same time are supposed to publish in top journals if we want to have any career prospects. But almost no reputable journal of any rank and name allows this dual licensing - not Springer, De Gryuter, Oxford Journals, which alone make up > 90% of all journals in my area, and many journals demand the author to sign a copyright transfer agreement or equally strong publishing contracts. When we pointed out this conflict to superiors, top science administration officials and university directors and asked about legal support, the idea was that we get no legal support whatsoever! If we breach a publisher's contract because we're forced to by the government, we're on our own. And it doesn't stop there. Assessment of tenure track positions is done by committees that are not staffed with science administration people but with independent peer reviewers, of course, so the procedures cannot really be changed. But if they could be changed somehow, e.g. by forcing these panels to disregard closed access publications, we'd get a whole generation of complete crackpot professors and the level of science would go down the gutter nationwide, because there are simply not enough reputable open access journals. Anybody can upload something in an open access repository, whereas the top journals I'm talking about have acceptance rates below 5%. So for us currently the choice is between ignoring the open access policies and getting into trouble with the local science administration folks, or giving up our careers and any prospects to ever get a fixed position, and most people chose the former for obvious reasons.
  - _0ffh 9y ago
    The government could help by making licensing clauses that prevent open access illegal/unconscionable.
jknz 9y ago
A senior academic professor write papers with graduate students and postdocs. Because the senior professor wants his/her students to be successful in their next job search, he/she will continue to submit papers in high impact not open access journals. Doing otherwise would penalize heavily his students and postdocs.
ArneBab 9y ago
This is happening on all levels: New researchers want to publish Open Access if they don’t hit Nature or Science, because that gets them more citations. Libraries push for Open Access. Permanent employees see that Open Access is how science should be.

roadnottaken 9y ago

Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

xaedes 9y ago
"A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals." It is not like the choice is for free..
a3_nm 9y ago
> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
  The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    I have heard this argument and I don't think it's valid. We are stuck in a broken system where researchers are pressured to publish in closed-access venues. It's hard to act against this at the publication level, because you may need to publish in such venues (for career reasons), and (more importantly, at least for me) you often co-author papers with other people who may not share your dislike of closed access. By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level. This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)
- vanviegen 9y ago
  Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.
    - hueving 9y ago
      Well they wouldn't make it obvious. It would be rejected for other reasons.
- tnecniv 9y ago
  Tenure isn't the end of the road and tenured researchers don't work alone. Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishing in OA journals, but it's way easier to sell yourself and maintain your status if you publish where everyone else publishes.
  - a3_nm 9y ago
    I agree with what you say, but I do not understand why it is related to my comment. I was trying to say that refusing to publish in closed-access journals is hard, but refusing to review for them is easy.
- DaveWalk 9y ago
  What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field. From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.
  - roel_v 9y ago
    I get voted into oblivion every time I post this when this topic comes up (which is like, every other day), but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about 'open access' in academia (well, not 'nobody' in the pedantic nerd sense, but 'nobody' as in 'only a vocal but ultimately insignificant minority', mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet; the number of senior faculty staff who spends time on writing blog posts about this is minute). In fields where there are elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations (but, of course, who call themselves 'principled' and 'not corrupted by money' and that sort of spin on it) like CS and physics the proportion is higher, but still not enough to make a real difference. The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it. So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access. Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).
davidgerard 9y ago
> make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people Research Works Act, where Elsevier et al tried to do literally this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act

bjornsing 9y ago

Shouldn't this come from the political level (as it does in OP)? I mean we finance this work with taxes, why not just make it a (grant) requirement that all results need to be made publicly available? (And everyone would be uploading shit to the internet so fast it would make all our heads spin...)

tomjen3 9y ago

Honestly this sounds like it should come from Congress. You spend tax payers money on closed access journals you cheat the tax payers.

vivekd 9y ago

But if the high level accademics don't move to access on their own, government certainly has a large role in encouraging and incentivizing them to make the change, especially considering they provide a large amount of funding for academic institutions and research. Government action can certainly help us get there faster and more certainly than were we to wait for people to do it of their own accord.

JohnStrange 9y ago
It's not that simple. Where I live and work the implementation of these policies is actually quite horrible. We're supposed to put everything in open access repositories under a creative commons license and at the same time are supposed to publish in top journals if we want to have any career prospects. But almost no reputable journal of any rank and name allows this dual licensing - not Springer, De Gryuter, Oxford Journals, which alone make up > 90% of all journals in my area, and many journals demand the author to sign a copyright transfer agreement or equally strong publishing contracts. When we pointed out this conflict to superiors, top science administration officials and university directors and asked about legal support, the idea was that we get no legal support whatsoever! If we breach a publisher's contract because we're forced to by the government, we're on our own. And it doesn't stop there. Assessment of tenure track positions is done by committees that are not staffed with science administration people but with independent peer reviewers, of course, so the procedures cannot really be changed. But if they could be changed somehow, e.g. by forcing these panels to disregard closed access publications, we'd get a whole generation of complete crackpot professors and the level of science would go down the gutter nationwide, because there are simply not enough reputable open access journals. Anybody can upload something in an open access repository, whereas the top journals I'm talking about have acceptance rates below 5%. So for us currently the choice is between ignoring the open access policies and getting into trouble with the local science administration folks, or giving up our careers and any prospects to ever get a fixed position, and most people chose the former for obvious reasons.
- _0ffh 9y ago
  The government could help by making licensing clauses that prevent open access illegal/unconscionable.

jknz 9y ago

A senior academic professor write papers with graduate students and postdocs. Because the senior professor wants his/her students to be successful in their next job search, he/she will continue to submit papers in high impact not open access journals. Doing otherwise would penalize heavily his students and postdocs.

ArneBab 9y ago

This is happening on all levels: New researchers want to publish Open Access if they don’t hit Nature or Science, because that gets them more citations. Libraries push for Open Access. Permanent employees see that Open Access is how science should be.