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Congratulations Caltech on a great move! This will only have positive effects for the future of scholarly publishing. Best part: >Faculty may still grant excl

Congratulations Caltech on a great move! This will only have positive effects for the future of scholarly publishing. Best part: >Faculty may still grant exclusive rights to their publishers, either permanently or for an embargoed period, but to do so, they must request a waiver from the open-access policy. At other institutions with open-access policies, such as MIT and Harvard, faculty have requested waivers for about 5 percent of the total number of papers produced, usually to comply with the requirement of a few publishers that want a formal waiver in order to even consider manuscripts for publication. 5%, and in those cases, because of dinosaur publishers. This is a very conclusive sign for the shift in mentality towards open access.

mjn 13y ago
One nice thing about even having the waiver process, even if it's granted to anyone who requests, is that it adds a slight bureaucratic roadblock that causes some authors to rethink a publication choice they might not have thought much about in the past. You go to publish with $big_journal, the journal sees you're from a university with an open-access mandate and asks you to get an open-access waiver before you can submit a manuscript, and in some percentage of the cases this might cause you to just redirect your manuscript elsewhere. In some cases that might be difficult; some sub-fields don't have as many respected journals as others, or your paper might be something unusual that's a perfect fit for a particular special issue and hard to publish otherwise. But those end up being minority cases.
- marvin 13y ago
  This is incidentally a textbook example of how the regulation of free markets is supposed to work.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    This is a good thing in this case, but adding red-tape to intentionally alter incentives is merely one useful tool in regulating markets, not a panacea, and can easily be used, intentionally or not, to work against those aims e.g. of course you're allowed to to use any supplier, just fill in these forms in triplicate or use our preselected choice.
- toufka 13y ago
  Having to have signed one such waiver, it's treated much like a standard 'oh sign this so they'll get moving on your paper'. Again, because it's only for the 'nicer' journals, the 5% number is a bit misleading - only to the best research would this apply. And that's the unfortunate fact - it is too often the good stuff that bypasses the policy. On the flip side, it is a point of friction, if small. It did give me a very specific moment for my complaint to be registered (even if overridden).

mjn 13y ago

One nice thing about even having the waiver process, even if it's granted to anyone who requests, is that it adds a slight bureaucratic roadblock that causes some authors to rethink a publication choice they might not have thought much about in the past. You go to publish with $big_journal, the journal sees you're from a university with an open-access mandate and asks you to get an open-access waiver before you can submit a manuscript, and in some percentage of the cases this might cause you to just redirect your manuscript elsewhere. In some cases that might be difficult; some sub-fields don't have as many respected journals as others, or your paper might be something unusual that's a perfect fit for a particular special issue and hard to publish otherwise. But those end up being minority cases.

marvin 13y ago
This is incidentally a textbook example of how the regulation of free markets is supposed to work.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  This is a good thing in this case, but adding red-tape to intentionally alter incentives is merely one useful tool in regulating markets, not a panacea, and can easily be used, intentionally or not, to work against those aims e.g. of course you're allowed to to use any supplier, just fill in these forms in triplicate or use our preselected choice.
toufka 13y ago
Having to have signed one such waiver, it's treated much like a standard 'oh sign this so they'll get moving on your paper'. Again, because it's only for the 'nicer' journals, the 5% number is a bit misleading - only to the best research would this apply. And that's the unfortunate fact - it is too often the good stuff that bypasses the policy. On the flip side, it is a point of friction, if small. It did give me a very specific moment for my complaint to be registered (even if overridden).