New US Federal guidance on open access publishing

[fizzycist]

It would be better for the government would subsidize non profit publications (ie society journals) to allow them to publish open access articles for free, or cheap, instead of propping up the many for profit publishers who rely on donated time from reviewers and editors to drink from the public teat.

There was a time when I thought this was a good move, but I'm no longer sure. If publication power is concentrated in a few hands, someone is gonna get screwed by a nasty editor(s) and not have anywhere to publish. Also, if there is no room for new players, it may stifle innovation (to the extent we need it... this is a minor point).

Biggest problem is I don't think it is sustainable. There are too many ppl who will say F you and figure out another way to publish and that could become the cool fad. Also there is no guarantee the rest of the world will follow suit and agree which societies should be in power--a lot of the biggest societies have the word American at the beginning. The last thing we need is for every country to have its own publishing system.

So I dunno how this ends. But I think that US govt requiring open access and limiting APCs is a big enough jolt to the system that actors are going to innovate and the system will evolve. And I'm optimistic it will be better on the whole.

I do share hibush's concern about the result leading to ppl reading only papers from famous labs at famous universities. There needs to be a rigorous curation system in place. But the journal name brand doesn't need to be it.

[Hibush]

The problem I see with this "breakthrough" that comes from the US government is that it seems it will be implemented (again) by non-scientists. It is not a coincidence that barely any of the US senators or representatives over the years has been a scientist. Scientists are simply too busy to regularly participate in policy making (to some extent this is understandable), thus leaving the implementation of policies to people that have no clue about how the economics of science work. Yes, scientists show up from time to time being part of a taskforce, but still in the long run they do not participate in policy making. That's my 2 cents.

I think scientists have more influence than that. This policy was promulgate by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is staffed by scientists who largely made their careers as working scientists. Within OSTP, this came from the Science and Society task force headed by Dr. Jedidah Isler an astronomy professor at Dartmouth. OSTP regularly seeks input from scientists to understand what effect their recommendations will have.

The staff at the research agencies that will implement the policies are largely scientists who want their programs to be as successful as possible, and make sure their grantees can use their funds effectively. These agencies have active opportunities ("request for comment") for scientists to indicate how policies, procedures and priorities can be improved for the programs to better meet their missions.

When the rules are set by legislators, I have found the committee staff who write the legislation to be very receptive to scientists' perspectives on how to make a program better meet legislative goals. If something is working poorly, and you can explain what is the nub of the problem and ways that would work better, they will use that information. (Of course, if the legislative goal is to do the thing you find to be a problem you will not have success.)

[Kron3007]

It would be better for the government would subsidize non profit publications (ie society journals) to allow them to publish open access articles for free, or cheap, instead of propping up the many for profit publishers who rely on donated time from reviewers and editors to drink from the public teat.

There was a time when I thought this was a good move, but I'm no longer sure. If publication power is concentrated in a few hands, someone is gonna get screwed by a nasty editor(s) and not have anywhere to publish. Also, if there is no room for new players, it may stifle innovation (to the extent we need it... this is a minor point).

Biggest problem is I don't think it is sustainable. There are too many ppl who will say F you and figure out another way to publish and that could become the cool fad. Also there is no guarantee the rest of the world will follow suit and agree which societies should be in power--a lot of the biggest societies have the word American at the beginning. The last thing we need is for every country to have its own publishing system.

So I dunno how this ends. But I think that US govt requiring open access and limiting APCs is a big enough jolt to the system that actors are going to innovate and the system will evolve. And I'm optimistic it will be better on the whole.

I do share hibush's concern about the result leading to ppl reading only papers from famous labs at famous universities. There needs to be a rigorous curation system in place. But the journal name brand doesn't need to be it.

Yes, maybe there is a better approach with more nuance.  However,  the current approach will just lead to lower cost open access journals popping up to meet this need, and many will have very low standards.  For example, I have published a few papers in MDPI journals, which are quite a bit cheaper than Frontiers (for example), and the feedback I get from them is typically very minor and editorial in nature.  Maybe a typo here or there, but I have never had their reviewers make any significant comments about the content or recommend anything other than accept.  As much as I like to think this reflects the quality of the work, when I submit to traditional journals, I usually get a lot more feedback and the occasional rejection.  It feels like MDPI reviewers are just skimming the manuscript.

They also offer discount vouchers etc. for reviewing, which makes a lot of sense in principle, but I feel people may just review for this and not really spend much time or effort reviewing (they also have crazy short review timelines).  I recently received a message from one of their journals thanking me for reviewing for them and offering a discount.  I never submitted my review (I was late), so I assume they went ahead and assumed I had no comments?

Anyway, I dont think this has a simple solution, but I do think that the current system is broken and is only getting worse.