The thing is, Chris, that payments, be they APCs or subscription
charges, are for the 'service' of publisher-mediated peer review (plus
'prestige ribbons') and access to publisher-mediated peer-reviewed (and
'ribboned') articles. They are not for publishing one's research results
per se. That can be done at no cost or at very low, often negligible,
cost. For instance via 'preprint' facilities or other repositories. I
realise that for many a researcher having 'ribbons' pinned on their
articles is important for career advancement and possibly also for
reputation, but that is where the real problem lies. As long as the
scholarly culture expects and demands publisher-mediated peer review and
the 'prestige ribbons' associated with that, there will be a cost beyond
the generally (very, or negligibly) low cost of just making one's
articles publicly and freely available – open – to be reviewed,
commented on, assessed, etc. by the community at large. The process of
proper scientific discourse, in other words. That's where
scicomm/scholcomm should be headed. I hope you agree.
Best,
Jan
Jan Velterop
velte...@protonmail.com
On 25/04/2018 12:17, Chris Zielinski wrote:
Richard,
In this context, you may be interested in a post I recently submitted
to the Healthcare Information for All (HIFA) list in the context of a
HIFA discussion of this topic:
---------- Original Message ----------
To: HIFA - Healthcare Information For All <h...@dgroups.org>
Date: 18 April 2018 at 19:33
Subject: Re: [hifa] Open Access Author Processing Charges (3)
In the bad old days before Open Access (OA), a developing country
author wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal and, if the paper
was good enough, the generous people at the journal organized peer
review, redid/redesigned the tables and most of the graphics, and
maybe even did some language editing - at no cost to the author. Then
they published the journal, charging for access to the paper version
and pay-walling any online version. From the author's perspective,
thus, there was no barrier to publication, although there were cost
barriers to reading the paper subsequently, which was particularly
onerous in poorer countries. So the situation in developing countries
was good for authors - who simply had to write well - and bad for
librarians and readers, who had to find the money to buy the content.
Now that Open Access is making serious inroads, we are finding the
situation reversed - librarians and readers bask in an avalanche of
cost-free online papers, while authors are scrambling to find the
resources to pay for publication.From the commentary on this list it
is clear that authors in developing countries are being restrained
from publishing by the "Article Processing Charge" (APC).
Zoe Mullan, Editor of The Lancet Global Health makes the point that
"we assume that this cost will be borne by the funding body". This
seems to be rather more likely in industrialized countries than in
developing ones.
Basic research is much more frequently carried out in industrialized
countries and supported by the sort of international funding that pays
for papers. But the kind of health research that is essential in
developing countries - health services and health systems research -
is generally undertaken by local institutions and universities. This
is a reason for serious concern, as the economic model of OA appears
to be blocking the most important local research. I would add that
this research needs to be published internationally, not just locally,
in order to attract opinions, input and (in some cases) validation and
consensus from the global health community.
Many OA journals have special rates, flexibilities and waivers for
writers from developing countries. It is also true that about a
quarter of the OA journals do not charge an APC at all - I presume
they pay for their work by sales of their print editions in
industrialized countries, thus enabling those in other countries free
access to the online version.
Incidentally, this is not just an issue for developing country writers
- I am a non-institutional writer in an industrialized country,
writing papers which are not based on funded research, and it is a
real hardship to find APC money to pay for my papers.
Best,
Chris
Chris Zielinski
ch...@chriszielinski.com
Blogs: http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and
http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Research publications: http://www.researchgate.net
On 25 April 2018 at 08:47 Richard Poynder
<richard.poyn...@cantab.net> wrote:
To try and get a sense of how open access looks from different parts
of the world, particularly as the strategy of engineering a global
“flip” of subscription journals to a pay-to-publish gold OA model
gains more traction, I am interested in talking to open access
advocates in different parts of the world, ideally by means of
matched interviews.
Earlier this month, for instance, I published a Q&A with Jeff
MacKie-Mason, UC Berkeley’s University Librarian and Chief Digital
Scholarship Officer.
(https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from.html).
Yesterday, I published a matched Q&A covering the same themes with
Mahmoud Khalifa, a librarian at the Library of Congress Cairo Office,
and DOAJ Ambassador for the Middle East and Persian Gulf. This
interview can be read here:
https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-view-from_24.html
I have also been asking those I interview to comment on the answers
given by their matched interviewee. Mahmoud Khalifa’s response to the
MacKie-Mason Q&A is incorporated in this post:
https://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/north-south-and-open-access-mahmoud.html
I am open to suggestions for further matched interviews.
Richard Poynder
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