I quite agree with that if things are not managed well open access
journals may end up being as restricted as Pamela Shurmer-Smith has
suggested. While I have had the suspicion for sometime that Journals as
we have known them may be on the way out, there is a flaw with Dr.
Shaw's suggestion in that it requires one to be an associate of an
institution in order for one's publication to have authority. Sir James
Lovelock has recounted how, when he became an independent researcher,
Nature would no longer publish his work because he was no longer
associated with an "Institution"; this despite the fact that he had been
published many times previously in Nature. There are people doing
serious research that are not affiliated with teaching nor research
institutions and have not been for sometime. Because one is employed
by an academic institution does not necessarily mean that the
"academician's" research is of any greater quality.
Janet Forbes
[log in to unmask]
Toronto, ON.
M4L 1P2
Dr Hillary Shaw wrote:
> What would happen if we shifted entirely away from a journals-based
> system to an academic's-website system? It costs around £100 a year
> to maintain a website of the .org type, with enough capacity for
> 1,000s of 10,000 word articles, complete with colour illustrations.
> What if every academic maintained their own website, and put what they
> want on it, accessible to all?
>
> I guess a number of you are now screaming "Quality Controll !!!" -
> well that could be judged by two means. 1) by citations, and unlike
> the present journal system, articles would appear and be ready to be
> cited, instantly, not the 1 year or so delay we face now. 2) Google
> effectively ranks pages by their number of visitors - OK you can fudge
> this by judicious uise of key words, hopefully us academics would soon
> develop the search skills to edit the good from the mediocre.
>
> It would mean the end of peer review (a useful QC system, but not
> exactly without its problems, as discussed recently in the THES.
> Apart from the above paragraph, I'm not sure what QC system we could
> have this way.
>
> If we want to ensure only academics put such articles on the web, and
> not say political activists from the Far Right, then just as now, only
> teaching institutions can have a .ac.uk. site, have a new suffix, like
> .pu.uk, issued by the employing educational institution, and valid for
> period of employment plus (say) three years - can be extended by
> negotiation (e.g. into retirement), with a clause that intellectual
> property rights stay with the author, if jobs change, material on
> former website goes to the new website.
>
> Material could be accessed for free by anyone, and rather than having
> to trawl; through journal contents pages (online or physically,
> because Athens is now for millionaire academics only (sort-of), we'd
> just Google keywords to get all the articles we could ever want.
>
> Far too simple of course, what do the rest of us think?
>
> Hillary Shaw,
> Harper Adams University College
> Shropshire, UK
> www.fooddeserts.org
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pamela Shurmer-Smith <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Tue, 18 May 2010 4:18
> Subject: Re: Article Processing Charges
>
> We are looking at terrible contradictions regarding widening and
> narrowing the knowledge consumption and production gap here. A huge
> number of people find it difficult to access even the major journals,
> those who are not members of universities (those who have been
> deprived of higher education altogether, graduates not employed in
> academia, even retired long-serving academics like myself) but
> also members of universities in poorer countries and poorer
> universities in wealthy countries. One immediately welcomes the
> principle of open access. Then comes the sting - exactly the same
> people as would benefit as "consumers" are immediately excluded as
> producers, when one considers the huge numbers who will never see a
> research grant and who don't think £250 cheap. One can't produce
> publishable material without access, then can't afford to problish
> one's product with it!
>
> This matters to everyone, unless one agrees that only the views of the
> establishment count.
>
> Pamela Shurmer-Smith
> Currently National University of Singapore, but soon to be back in the
> wilderness.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Steve Cummins <[log in to unmask]>
> *To:* [log in to unmask]
> *Sent:* Mon, 17 May, 2010 23:54:16
> *Subject:* Re: Article Processing Charges
>
> Open access publishing is now common in the sciences, in fact are a
> condition of funding for NIHR, MRC, ESRC etc and you can request funds
> to cover charges as part of any grant budget. Personally I support
> such things, but the charges are onerous for projects without research
> grants.
>
> £250 is fairly cheap - PLoS and BioMed Central for example charge c
> US$1000 per article depending on the journal. PLoS journals are very
> high impact now if that is your bag.
>
> You can of course deposit a word pre-publication version on your
> manuscript in UKPMC that will be open access for nothing if your
> article is life science related. For ESRC research you can deposit it
> in the ESRC Society Today archive. You can also deposit a pre-pub
> version on your home webpage or institutional repository.
>
> Of course I would ensure that the publisher is a not for profit, and
> not a paper mill. Some 'open access' publishers may have looser
> quality criteria in order to maximise income from page charges and
> there are possible scholarly implications as suggested by this story
> in Nature.
>
> "Editor will quit over hoax paper
> Computer-generated manuscript accepted for publication in open-access
> journal.
>
> http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090615/full/news.2009.571.html"
>
> Best
> Steve
>
> Halfacree K.H. wrote:
> > Hi everyone
> >
> >
> > A quick question. What do folks think of the following arrangement?
> >
> >
> > “Open access publishing proposes a relatively new model for
> scholarly journal publishing that provides immediate, worldwide,
> barrier-free access to the full-text of all published articles. Open
> access allows all interested readers to view, download, print, and
> redistribute any article without a subscription, enabling far greater
> distribution of an author's work than the traditional
> subscription-based publishing model…. In an open access model, the
> publication costs of an article are paid from an author's research
> budget, or by their supporting institution, in the form of Article
> Processing Charges (APC). APCs replace subscription charges and allow
> publishers to make the full-text of every published article freely
> available to all interested readers. In addition, authors who publish
> in our open access journals retain the copyright of their work…”
> >
> > Personally, I’m unsure. APC of c.250 pounds and having a very very
> limited ‘research budget’, versus the great benefits of open access…
> >
> >
> > Cheers, and now back to marking…. Keith
> >
>
> -- Steven Cummins MSc PhD
> Senior Lecturer & NIHR Fellow
> Department of Geography
> Queen Mary, University of London
> Mile End Road
> London E1 4NS
>
> T: 44 020 7882 7653 (direct)
> F: 44 020 7882 7479
> E: [log in to unmask]
>
> W: Healthy Environments Research Programme
> http://webspace.qmul.ac.uk/healthyenvironments/index.html
> http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/cumminss.html
>
--
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