Barriers to open access publishing at a scientific not-for-profit

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journals, open access, publishing

Things have been going rather well lately. Lots of science, days are getting longer, and I made an awesome curry last Thursday.  Wary of falling into complacency, I thought I’d open a (possible) can of worms. Please, be kind.

 

Open Access is a wonderful thing.  I appreciate this as someone working at a not-for-profit with a total journal subscription of <40 titles. If we don’t subscribe to a title, or to the full back-catalogue, it’s £12 to the British Library, and one working week if I can’t find a stashed copy on the interwebs.  I’m a classic example of the sort of person who benefits from OA publishing – a practitioner on the ground, working with local partners on applied conservation issues.  But here’s the crux: it’s not easy for me to publish OA.

 

Now before y’all go for the pitchforks and high tempo bluegrass, hear me out.

 

I’ve been thinking about this for the last number of years, and I can break down the reasons why I don’t publish more OA papers into the following:

1. Money
2. Audience
3. External forces

Let’s begin.

 

1. Money

I’ll distinguish between the two types of journals that publish OA – those hybrid journals that let you pay for the option of OA, but will publish your article behind a paywall if you don’t pony up the cash, and those journals that are entirely OA.

Hybrid journals tend to charge significant sums of cash (thousands of your currency of choice).  The same goes for some OA-only journals.  Recently, Zen Faulkes highlighted his lab’s experience publishing many articles in OA journals.  Some journals had complete waivers, while for the majority, the fees were paid by a variety of sources, including research grants, departmental budgets, coauthors, and even apparently his own pocket (!).  I have no external grants, as my work is funded mostly through our core funding.  This core funding does not include covering page charges of any kind (OA or not), and I certainly don’t have the means to shell out for OA from my own pocket (were that it so!).  I’ve lobbied to have *some* publication fees included in our future budget, and we’ll see if that comes to pass, but for now, I am , financially speaking, stuck.

And yes, it’s true that there are several OA journals without any fees.  This recent study on journals indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) found a mean fee of $964, and many with no fees at all.  While the DOAJ might seem like a nice dataset with which to work, it presents two problems.  The first is the inclusion of known predatory publishers.  Many of the publishers appear on Beall’s List.  When I reached out to DOAJ via Twitter, they told me that they are in the process of upping the standards for inclusion in the index, and that essentially all journals will have to reapply.  Which is great, but for now, the problem remains.

The second issue is one that falls under #2.

 

2. Audience

I’m in a fortunate position (but see #3 below) in that I have a permanent full-time job, and one that isn’t (yet) harping on Impact Factors, which means I tend to publish in journals where I think my research best fits, and had the right target audience.  If I’m writing about plastic pollution in the oceans, I’d tend towards Marine Pollution Bulletin, but if I’d rather discuss gull diet, Waterbirds is a better bet.  Last night, I scrolled through the 108 journals listed in the DOAJ under Zoology, and the 393 listed under General Biology.  Many (most?) titles were ones I had never heard of, and were of very local interest in places where I don’t work (Acta Biologica Malaysiana, anyone?).  After filtering out the predatory journals (see #1 above), and those of exceptional local interest, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice aside from the “mega-journals” like Plos One, or PeerJ.  And what few did remain often had considerable fees.  It seems counter-intuitive if I want to publish an article OA, but resort to doing so in journals so obscure, you probably haven’t heard of them (perhaps we could call these “hipster journals”?).

 

3. External forces

For the overwhelming majority of my papers & projects, I’m not the only one involved, and a number of other folks have a stake.  In some cases, they’re prioritizing different things than I am, such as Impact Factors.  A colleague at a large research university had her department chair tell her that anything published in a journal with an Impact Factor < 4 was a waste of time, and wouldn’t count towards departmental/funding totals.  Collaboration involves negotiation.  In some cases, as in Zen Faukles’ case, coauthors have the funds or departmental support to cover OA costs, but this isn’t that common, particularly when things start running into four-digit invoices per paper.  This is particularly true when we consider that there are few “high Impact Factor” strictly-OA journals in ecology (though most/all? operate on a hybrid system).

Colleagues looking for jobs are also concerned that publishing everything in Journal A, an example OA journal, will reflect poorly on their CV (not because it’s OA, but because of the volume of papers in a single journal).  Whether it’s right nor not, people with power and who make decisions still care about where things are published.  Heck, so are most of us.  I have yet to meet an ecologist who was as excited about their paper in Ecology Letters as they were about one in Southwestern Naturalist. I will be keenly watching (and interested in hearing about experiences) as the “Open Access generation” (roughly those with PhDs since 2010, which is when I’d guess the OA movement gained significant mainstream attention) enters the job market.

 

I’m well aware of the philosophical arguments for Open Access, and I agree with them.  The concept of OA publishing is a good thing.  My hang-up is in the execution.  Yes, research grants are starting to include / require OA publication as a budget item*.  But if I look at my CV, I’d have a hard time coming up with suitable OA journal equivalents (or thousands of dollars / pounds / euros / pesos / dinari).

 

Would I like all my papers to be Open Access? Heck yes. But can I make that happen? Not yet.

 

Before everyone decries my possibly ill-informed orthodox maintenance of the inadequate status quo, here are two questions to kick things off:

1. What steps have I missed in achieving a goal of OA publishing on a limited/no budget? Are preprints the answer?
2.  This obviously doesn’t solve the problem of limited access.  What can we do to improve access to already-published literature, particularly for those in the not-for-profit sector?

 

Please, be gentle.

 

*And yes, I’m aware of fee waivers, but I’ve had colleagues & coworkers have their waiver requests turned down on a fair number of occasions, or large fees turned into smaller-but-still-large fees.  Hybrid journals also don’t tend to offer such waivers. I don’t see this as a viable solution.

Does where academics publish matter? Yes (but it shouldn’t)

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hiring, jobs, open access, peer review, publishing

Looking back at the last year, I’ve had terrible luck with journals.  Earlier in my (brief) career as a publishing scientist, I had a pretty good sense of where a paper I was working on would end up – it fit with the journal’s mandate, was similar in scope to previously published works, and my coauthors agreed with my choices.

But in the last year, I’m not so sure.  I don’t think I’m aiming artificially “high” (whatever that means), and when I relay the editorial decisions to coauthors, they seem almost equally baffled.  Here are three examples:

• A natural history paper, but founded in theory, previous research, and high sample size, was rejected from a lower-tier organismal journal because it wasn’t sufficiently broad.
• A paper was rejected from a toxicological journal despite two positive reviews. We appealed the decision, it went out for review again, and one reviewer (note: not the Editor) thought it didn’t fit with the scope of the journal. Reject.
• A methods paper was rejected from a methods journal in part because the maths were too technical.

Now, before everyone thinks this is just sour grapes, let me explain why this is a problem. In total, these represent the time of 9 people, plus us authors.  Even 4-5 years ago, I’m almost certain that these papers would have been accepted after revision.  When authors have a harder time predicting the outcome of peer-review, it wastes the time of the editors, subject editors, reviewers, and authors. I’m not talking about “Let’s try this at Ecology Letters & see if it sticks”, but considered thought about where a manuscript a) would be presented to the target audience, and b) is likely to be accepted based on the authors cumulative experience with the journal (both as readers and as authors).

The result is a tendency (especially of grad students, post-docs, and other early-career researchers) to play it safe, since they can’t be bouncing a paper around 3-5 journals, each of which takes 1-4 months to review it (that’s almost two years in an extreme case, and something I’ve experienced.  Trust me, it’s not pleasant).

And when even positive reviews are no guarantee of acceptance (and the justification isn’t one of space in the journal), my journal-selecting confidence takes a hit.

True, there are journals like PLoS One that evaluate only on technical soundness, but as I’ve pointed out before, that starts to get pricey (and how many waivers will they grant before they start to catch on, or we reach a tragedy of the commons scenario?), and gets to the question: is publication just about (peer-reviewed) publication no matter where, or is it about reaching a certain group of people via a particular journal?  Have journals become so cosmopolitan in this online age that it doesn’t matter where you publish, as long as it’s indexed by Web of Knowledge or Scopus or Biological Abstracts?  Does that explain the rapid rise in predatory Open Access journals?  If publication without regard for the journal is the end goal, why are some journals viewed as “better” than others (by authors, readers, and more importantly for early-career researchers, by search committees)?

Part of the solution lies in pre-print servers like PeerJ PrePrints and biorXiv, or refereeing services like Peerage of Science, or Axios Review.  But in this age of the engaged academic who’s tuned into the topic of ethics in scientific publishing, let’s take a hypothetical example.

I’m in environmental science, and let’s say that I have a paper on contaminants in birds that I want to publish in a “mid-range” journal (i.e., not Science, Nature, PNAS, etc).  I also want to deposit a pre-print in biorXiv, and don’t want to publish in an Elsevier journal.

Well, Elsevier publishes Environmental Pollution, Science of the Total Environment, Chemosphere, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Environmental Research, Ecological Indicators, and Ecotoxicology & Environmental Safety.

That leaves Springer journals (like Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, or Ecotoxicology), and some society journals like Environmental Science & Technology (published by the American Chemical Society, ACS), and Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (published by the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, SETAC).

ACS doesn’t currently allow preprints, and Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry is published by Wiley, which hasn’t set a formal preprint policy yet.

But let’s not forget – the only reason this matters is because where academics publish (not [just] what they publish) is considered important by hiring, tenure, and promotion committees (among others).  This assertion isn’t just idle speculation by a grumpy postdoc, either – I will offer three examples.  In 2013, I was long-listed for a faculty position at a well-respected UK university. After I was eliminated, one of the search committee members approached me about collaborating, and I asked if he could provide any feedback on my application.  His response was that I hadn’t been short-listed because I lacked any papers in “high impact journals”, by which he meant PNAS, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Science, Nature, and their ilk.  A colleague in Australia was recently informed by the head of department that papers “published in journals with an impact factor < 4 don’t matter”.  Lastly, one of my own colleagues (a senior academic who sits on hiring and promotion committees) authored/coauthored >2 papers in PLOS One in a given year, and quipped that they wouldn’t be sending anything there for a while because “you don’t want everything just in PLOS”.

In a perfect world, the where is secondary (nay, completely irrelevant) to the what of academic publishing.  If no one cared where a paper was published,  we could eliminate the “aiming high” mentality that wastes everyone’s time, and I’d have everything on a preprint server, and submitted to exclusively open-access sources like PLOS, or PeerJ.

But for someone looking for work in research, my experience tells me this isn’t a good idea.  Change must come from those within who are making the decisions, even if they must be pressured to do so by those of us on the outside.

Open Access revisited

Tags

copyright, open access, publishing

Recently, I detailed some of the issues I have with the current way Open Access publishing is set up – namely that it downloads the costs from the institution to the researcher.

And then yesterday, Andrew over at Early Career Ecologists detailed his experience with PLoS One, which prompted me to comment, and outline the financial side of things.  A couple of people replied (thanks!) with two main points:

1. PLoS can give full or partial waivers.  Now, I have no experience with this, but the PLoS website gives the following details:

Our fee waiver policy, whereby PLOS offers to waive or further reduce the payment required of authors who cannot pay the full amount charged for publication, remains in effect. Editors and reviewers have no access to whether authors are able to pay; decisions to publish are only based on editorial criteria.

-PLoS, http://www.plosone.org/static/editorial#fees

As for how they determine who can and who can’t pay, I don’t know.  But I imagine that if I submitted a paper as a grad student or post doc, I’d have a greater chance of having fees waived than a full professor.

For the record, such a fee waiver isn’t mentioned in PNAS, MEPS, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, or Journal of Animal Ecology.

2. Universities offer a subsidy to cover publication costs.  While this is true, it’s often not as sweet as it seems at first.  Our university does have a “Publication Fund”, but it comes with a fairly long list of restrictions:

• Only faculty may apply (i.e., no grad students or post docs)
• Preference is given to full time faculty over adjuncts
• Applicants can only request support for one journal article per year
• The maximum allocation is $1000
• The article must be accepted for publication (though reimbursements are possible, I don’t know how far back they will go)

A quick look at some Open Access fees reveals that, on average, $650-$900 would still need to covered by research grants.  And it only covers one article (which doesn’t necessarily have to be Open Access).

So while my university “[endorses] the principles of Open Access and endeavour to make our research as openly available and widely distributed as possible”, there’s still a fair way to go before it’s an accessible option for most researchers.

My problem with “Open Access”

Tags

copyright, open access, publishing

There’s been a whirlwind of opinions and new stories surrounding open access articles (those not behind a paywall) in the last number of years.  Everything from Aaron Swartz’s “liberating” articles from JSTOR to Tim Gowers abstaining from any involvement with mega-published Elsevier.  I don’t necessarily disagree with either of these individuals.

Even granting agencies, like the NIH, or Wellcome Trust, require articles funded with NIH grants to be published Open Access so that taxpayer-funded research is available to all.  So far, there’s no similar requirement for NSERC grant-holders.

Here’s how things work: in the ‘traditional” system, some journals have page charges, where authors contribute per printed page.  This is more typical of society-published journals (e.g., the American Ornithologists Union’s Auk charges $100/page).  Journals published by large publishing houses (e.g., Wiley, Elsevier) often don’t have page charges.  Where these journals get their money is from library subscription fees (which can be into the 5- or 6-figure range for a “bundle” of journal titles).

There are also some journals that are exclusively open access – the PLoS titles are the best-known example.

In the “open access” system, journals levy a publishing fee up front, and thereafter the article is freely available to anyone, anywhere, in perpetuity.  This sounds good in theory, but like any plan that looks good on paper, there are some hiccups in practice.

The push for academics to publish articles open access has meant a proliferation of fake open access journals (a list of which is lovingly curated by Jeffrey Beale at Scholarly Open Access).  These journals often masquerade as legitimate journals, have fake editorial boards, and aren’t peer reviewed.  But they do take the “article processing fee”.

My other issue, and this is the more significant in my mind, is that the open access model downloads the publishing costs from the institution to the individual.  Here’s a quick summary of the cost of publishing an article as “open access”:

Title	Open Access Price
PNAS	$1000
Proceedings of the Royal Society B	$2380
PLoS One	$1350
Ecology	$1250 (members) $1500 (non-members)
Journal of Animal Ecology	$1500 (members) $3000 (non-members)
Marine Ecology Progress Series	$1000
Environmental Pollution	$3000
Average	$1650-1900

 

A typical NSERC Discovery grant in Ecology/Evolution is roughly $30,000/year.  A reasonably productive ecologist and their students might publish, for example, 8-10 papers/year (though your mileage may vary. See in store for details).  That’s over $13,000 in open access fees each year, or about 43% of the average Discovery Grant.

What are the alternatives?  Unlike physics/maths, there’s no arXiv for ecology.  But universities are increasingly creating their own repositories for pre-print articles (i.e., the same text, just not with all the journals’ formatting and style).  And many academics post their PDFs freely on their websites.  Additionally, in Canada at least, academics need not assign copyright to the publisher, and can post articles under the “fair dealing” aspect of copyright legislation.

And, with the increased globalization and interconnectedness of academics, if your university doesn’t subscribe to the Central Ontario Journal of Applied and Theoretical Ecology: Series B*, chances are you know someone at a university who does, and they can e-mail you the article (that is, if you don’t request it via inter-library loan from your own institution).

Publishing an article as open access is an altruistic behaviour (though there’s some evidence that these papers may get a few more citations).  Until research grants contain an explicit allocation for open access publishing that’s commensurate with the fees and expected output, feel free to e-mail me for a PDF of any one of my papers.

*Not an actual journal. But if anyone wants to start it, I’d gladly change the name to Central Labrador Journal of Applied and Theoretical Ecology: Series B.