What are your thoughts on open access publishing?

[SAnna12]

I know that there is a rather controversial debate raging about the benefits and negatives of Open Access policies. Can anybody share your opinions about  Open Access?

Edited March 26, 2021 by SAnna12

[Arete]

1) The current model of academic publishing is a #%&ing scam. Nowhere else would the creators of a product not only be expected to sign over their copy rights for free, but also perform the review and editing of others work for free, and have our institutions get financially reamed for access to the #$^ing work we created there in the first place. THEN, with the advent of open access publishing, they get to tack on fees to the tune of $USD 11,320 upfront to the %^(&ing authors. It's really no wonder that the profit margin in academic publishing is ~40%. 

2) While the idea of open science is generally admirable and beneficial, oftentimes the implementation has been exclusionary, elitist and rife with gatekeeping. See "bropen science".

3) While I see the benefits of preprint servers, and I really do like the fact that money isn't changing hands when you publish an article on one, I don't believe they replace the peer review process.  The explosion of really crap COVID19 studies being submitted to preprint servers highlights the problems with omitting peer review to speed up the publication process. 

4) I'm a big fan of double blind review. If there was a journal in my field that a) didn't charge an open access fee b)didn't charge a viewing fee and c) implemented a rigorous double blind review process, I'd probably publish there exclusively even if they had a barrage of loud, popup ads for penis pills on every page. 

5) Whoever is behind sci-hub is a gift to humanity.   

[Area54]

Very well put. The only thing where we might differ is that I could see the penis pill ads as a plus.

[Prometheus]

On 3/26/2021 at 3:18 PM, Arete said:

3) While I see the benefits of preprint servers, and I really do like the fact that money isn't changing hands when you publish an article on one, I don't believe they replace the peer review process.  The explosion of really crap COVID19 studies being submitted to preprint servers highlights the problems with omitting peer review to speed up the publication process. 

I think they could replace current peer review. A community much like that at Cross-Validated could provide the peer-review, with a public back and forth between commentors and the authors discussing various points. It would give far more transparency to the process. To prevent spamming could use some machine learning to filter out absolute junk and also have submissions cost a little bit of reputation (rep being earned by getting actually published, usefully reviewing others work, maybe accounts linked to a uni get to start with a few free rep points). Once it's been through the preprint peer-review process a paper can then apply to be published in an official journal.

There's probably loads more we could do with current technology 21st century technology. Let's use it.

[exchemist]

55 minutes ago, Tina Hu said:

Open access journals are so friendly to young scholars. Unknown scholars are too weak in the face of traditional journals. We often wait for a rejection. After nearly ten years of development, everyone can see that the manuscripts in open access journals are also of good quality. Many excellent open-access journal publishers continue to emerge. Scientific Research Publishing is one of the outstanding representatives. There are various types of journals in this publishing house, and there are many fine journals, such as HEALTH, Journal of Biomaterials and Nanobiotechnology, etc.

SCIRP appears on Beal's List of possibly predatory journals: https://predatoryjournals.com/publishers/

More about its questionable nature here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing

And you are a spammer.