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Open access, as is mentioned in the article, is both important and difficult to achieve. As a PhD student or associate professor, you work on a strict schedule
by SoylentOrange 8y ago
Open access, as is mentioned in the article, is both important and difficult to achieve. As a PhD student or associate professor, you work on a strict schedule to publish or perish. The only acceptable publication venues are the 4-6 respectable journals in your field. You have no time or power to push for open access.
Only large research institutions like (I’m familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue.
I work at a smaller industrial research lab. We try to push for open access whenever we publish, but publishing in non open access journals is important to maintaining our perceived prestige, which in turn is important in hiring (especially when we poach from academia).
I publish pretty regularly and try to be selective, but ultimately the push has to come from an institutional level such as universities or large industrial research labs to say “we will only publish in open access journals”. This is especially true in the US where EU style legislation is a long way off.
- skeptic_69 8y agodo you put your work in the arxiv?
- cbkeller 8y agoNot the OP, but I've started putting all my first-author papers in the EarthArXiv [1]. The original ArXiv only accepts preprints from a few fields, but the Open Science Framework has recently made a federation of preprint servers that fills many of the gaps, and can be searched in one place [2]. [1] https://eartharxiv.org/ https://eartharxiv.org/ [2] https://osf.io/preprints/ https://osf.io/preprints/
- ma2rten 8y agoLarge industrial research labs have the same problem. They need to maintain their prestige for recruiting purposes.
- drb91 8y agoAt the same time, this seems to select the worst of the candidates: those who care about prestige.
- Vinnl 8y ago> Only large research institutions like (I’m familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue. Well, they can to a certain extent, by submitting their work to open access (preferably fair OA [1]) journals, thus increasing their prestige. I think a more important role here lies with funders, though, and more specifically the people that decide who to fund (although these often are researchers as well). By currently strongly relying on journal brand names as indicators of "excellence", they're providing the incentive that keeps/forces academics to publish in traditional, paywalled or high-APC journals. They need to find other ways to decide whom to give funding to. (And perhaps have less of a focus on an ill-defined idea of "excellence" as well.) Disclaimer: I'm part of a just-launched initiative that aims to provide such an alternative. I'd love to hear people's thoughts about this though. [1] https://www.fairoa.org/ https://www.fairoa.org/
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