3 ms·

AAAS misses opportunity to advance open access

2 points by jmnicholson 12y ago

dougmccune 12y ago
Upvoted because I think it's a good debate to have, but I'm not impressed with the arguments. Full disclosure: I'm on the board of a big for-profit publisher (SAGE). There are two main arguments being made: 1) Nothing "open access" should ever be licensed CC-BY NC because it's incompatible with some funding agency mandates and it's just plain against the spirit of OA 2) The fees to publish, which top out at $5,500 are too high #1 is a perfectly good argument, and one I think I agree with. However, I also believe that AAAS isn't lying when it says they asked their authors and this is what the authors wanted. You'll always be able to find authors who believe in liberal copyright licenses as the way the world should work. And those authors are the vocal ones, the ones making petitions and signing open letters, etc. But the rest (and by rest I mean more like 95%+) either don't care or are legitimately concerned with someone either misappropriating their work or making money off their work (yes, this is kind of ironic given that in academic journals the only entity making money off their work anyway is the publisher). Overall I think there's a solid argument for why the publishers should adopt CC BY, and that the publishers should be making that to their authors. But this isn't a black and white publishers vs authors type of argument. #2 is just silly. The OP has no idea about the internal cost to AAAS to get this thing up and running. If it's too expensive for the service offered then people won't submit and the market will work like it should and the thing will fail. The graph showing "comparable" OA journals and their much lower fees is misleading. The text explains that there are indeed two other OA journals in the same price bracket, the OA options from Nature and Cell. Science is clearly trying to compete in that bracket, since they have the necessary prestige to do so. The chart showing Science Advances being "off the chart" is ridiculous, because the noted examples of Cell and Nature are also off the chart. The internal finances for a very high-prestige OA journal (or at least one hoping to be high-prestige) called eLife were recently released, and the numbers show that on average it costs them about $14k per article to run that journal. Doing the type of curation, editing, and peer review that is required for an OA journal trying to be super prestigious is incredibly different than the amount of work required to publish PLOS One or PeerJ or any of the similar competitors. In my opinion the argument about price just comes off as petty and silly. Launching a high-prestige OA journal is expensive - plain and simple. They're not trying to launch something of the same prestige as PLOS One, they're trying to launch something with similar prestige as Science. That means they can't get away with doing the same base-level methodological peer review that other OA journals do. Complaining about the price just comes off as being entirely out of touch with how expensive that endeavor is.

2 points by jmnicholson 12y ago

Upvoted because I think it's a good debate to have, but I'm not impressed with the arguments. Full disclosure: I'm on the board of a big for-profit publisher (SAGE). There are two main arguments being made: 1) Nothing "open access" should ever be licensed CC-BY NC because it's incompatible with some funding agency mandates and it's just plain against the spirit of OA 2) The fees to publish, which top out at $5,500 are too high #1 is a perfectly good argument, and one I think I agree with. However, I also believe that AAAS isn't lying when it says they asked their authors and this is what the authors wanted. You'll always be able to find authors who believe in liberal copyright licenses as the way the world should work. And those authors are the vocal ones, the ones making petitions and signing open letters, etc. But the rest (and by rest I mean more like 95%+) either don't care or are legitimately concerned with someone either misappropriating their work or making money off their work (yes, this is kind of ironic given that in academic journals the only entity making money off their work anyway is the publisher). Overall I think there's a solid argument for why the publishers should adopt CC BY, and that the publishers should be making that to their authors. But this isn't a black and white publishers vs authors type of argument. #2 is just silly. The OP has no idea about the internal cost to AAAS to get this thing up and running. If it's too expensive for the service offered then people won't submit and the market will work like it should and the thing will fail. The graph showing "comparable" OA journals and their much lower fees is misleading. The text explains that there are indeed two other OA journals in the same price bracket, the OA options from Nature and Cell. Science is clearly trying to compete in that bracket, since they have the necessary prestige to do so. The chart showing Science Advances being "off the chart" is ridiculous, because the noted examples of Cell and Nature are also off the chart. The internal finances for a very high-prestige OA journal (or at least one hoping to be high-prestige) called eLife were recently released, and the numbers show that on average it costs them about $14k per article to run that journal. Doing the type of curation, editing, and peer review that is required for an OA journal trying to be super prestigious is incredibly different than the amount of work required to publish PLOS One or PeerJ or any of the similar competitors. In my opinion the argument about price just comes off as petty and silly. Launching a high-prestige OA journal is expensive - plain and simple. They're not trying to launch something of the same prestige as PLOS One, they're trying to launch something with similar prestige as Science. That means they can't get away with doing the same base-level methodological peer review that other OA journals do. Complaining about the price just comes off as being entirely out of touch with how expensive that endeavor is.