The Scientist considers open access and scientific publishing’s future

The August issue of The Scientist , which calls itself ‘the magazine for life science professionals,’ features articles on ‘Debating the Future of Science Publishing,’ focusing almost entirely on open access. Here are some highlights.

Under the headline ‘Predatory Publishing ,’ Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, warns that ‘overzealous open-access advocates are creating an exploitative environment, threatening the credibility of scholarly publishing.’ He warns that ‘bogus publishers’ with ‘unethical practices’ are threatening to ‘erase the line that divides science from nonscience’ and that they ‘use deception to appear legitimate, entrapping researchers into submitting their work and then charging them to publish it.’ The problem has been fostered, he writes, thanks to ‘a very low barrier to entrance into the learned publishing industry. To become a scholarly publisher, all you need now is a computer, a website, and the ability to create unique journal titles.’ He observes that under author-pays arrangements, authors ‘become the publishers’ customers,’ creating ‘a conflict of interest: the more papers a publisher accepts, the more revenue it earns.’ He complains that many ‘academic librarians and other open-access advocates have promoted open-access scholarly publishing across the board, without limiting their promotion to the few worthy open-access publishers.’

Beall adduces some practical specifics:

Beall ends with a prescription: ‘Scholarly communication needs more unbiased analysis and less ideology. The publishing model that we bequeath to the next generation of researchers needs to be the best one, and not necessarily the ideologically correct one.’

On the positive side of open access, an editorial highlights new OA journals, including:

* GigaScience , an open-data journal with articles containing huge amounts of data.

* F1000 Research , with post-publication peer review.

* PeerJ , which researchers can pay a fee to join.

* eLife , which ‘will publish only high-impact articles.’

The August cover story ‘Whither Science Publishing? ’ observes that ‘academic publishing has morphed into a sprawling international industry that ... rakes in revenues of more than $19 billion in its scientific, technical, and medical segment alone’ and includes a ‘constellation’ of ‘nearly 8,000 OA journals,’ though ‘open access and other newer publishing modalities are still dwarfed by the traditional subscription-based model.’

The cover story includes extensive comments from prominent ‘publishers, researchers, information scientists, and others.’

The Berkeley scientist Michael Eisen offers his usual outspokenness:

Eisen also declares that peer review as practiced today in biomedicine ‘poisons science’ and that having ‘scientists effectively blogging about their research’ would beat the journal system.

Patrick Taylor of Harvard Medical School worries that articles under the present system merely ‘land in readers’ laps, like an unalterable consumable product, rather than with the dialogue of 17th-century Royal Society proceedings or a vivacious contemporary conference.’ He also worries about what he calls ‘decontextualization,’ with research publication ‘still mainly considered apart from the larger public ecosystem in which understandable and valid discoveries, engagement and public support for knowledge, and scientific methods are all intertwined.’ This leads, he says, to ‘narrow discussions about business models for publication, or to benchmarking problems as lapses from a recent status quo.’ Scientists should instead ask, ‘What would a robust, imaginative, future device for encouraging pertinent inquiry, and validating and disseminating scientific knowledge to peers, policy-makers, and public, optimally look like?’

Susan King of the American Chemical Society Journals Publishing Group stresses what she calls the ‘value-add that publishers provide through services like supporting peer review; enhancing the global accessibility of scholarly communication in standardized formats; enabling the discovery of knowledge through innovative web-based platforms, tools, and interlinked content; protecting the integrity and reliability of the scholarly record; and preserving the scholarly record for future generations.’ She cautions that these all ‘have costs that must be paid for in some way.’

In ‘OA Coming of Age ,’ two authors — David Solomon of Michigan State University and Bo-Christer Björk of the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, and the Open Access Publishers Association — report on research comparing ‘approximately 600 OA journals with 7,500 subscription journals using Web of Science citation data.’ They acknowledge the ‘dark side’ discussed by Beall, but conclude that open-access journals ‘are reaching the same quality levels as their subscription counterparts.’

The brief news report ‘ArXiv Attracts Biologists ’ by Bob Grant reports, ‘Life scientists are increasingly posting manuscripts to the [Cornell University-based arXiv] preprint server, joining the ranks of thousands of physicists.’ Grant quotes the statistical geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis: ‘Biology will soon have to embrace this trend fully. The speed of discussion, comment, and pre-publication review allowed is needed in biology more than most fields.’

In ‘Bring on the Transparency Index ,’ Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky propose that ‘grading journals on how well they share information with readers will help deliver accountability to an industry that often lacks it.’ The authors co-founded RetractionWatch in the belief ‘that journals become more trustworthy when they are open about not only their successes, but also their failures.’ They suggest that scientists devise a ‘transparency index’ as a ‘metric of journal performance.’ They offer a list of criteria that could be used in defining a quantitative measure.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.