Archive for EarthArxiv

Open Access in Ecology

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on May 6, 2024 by telescoper

My attention was drawn yesterday to the following blog post about Open Access in the field of ecology. I recommend you read it (and the comments, some of which are excellent).

The state of academic publishing in 3 graphs, 6 trends, and 4 thoughts

I will add a few comments of my own here.

First, whenever I read an article like this from a discipline different from my own it makes me not only feel grateful that we have arXiv but also wonder why so many fields don’t have the equivalent. On the other hand, there is EarthArxiv, but it doesn’t seem to have very many papers on it.

Second, I agree with the author of the post that far too many papers are being published. That is driven by the absurdity of a system that no longer regards the journal article as a means of disseminating scientific results but instead as a kind of epaulette to give status to the author. I also agree that scientists have largely got themselves to blame for this ridiculous situation.

Third, I disagree most strongly with this statement:

First, pipe dreaming academics who believed in the mirage of “Diamond OA” (nobody pays and it is free to publish). Guess what – publishing a paper costs money – $500-$2000 depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists. 

This is nonsense. It does not cost anything like $500-$2000 dollars to publish a paper. Of course it does cost something, but the true amount is trivial – tens of dollars, rather than hundreds or thousands – and can easily be absorbed. The entire annual running costs of OJAp are less than the typical Article Processing Charge for a single paper in a “prestigious” journal. Most money being paid in the form of APC goes directly into profit for the publishers, and the rest is largely wasted on administrative overhead. The Open Journal of Astrophysics is a Diamond Open Access journal, not a mirage. It may be a no-frills service, but it’s a reality. Why doesn’t someone set up an overlay journal on EarthArXiv?

The author of this blog post also spectacularly misses the point with “depending on how much it is subsidized by volunteer scientists”. Volunteer scientists are already subsidizing the profits of profit-making publishers! One of the commenters on the blog post has it right:

On Diamond OA and who pays; we’re already paying the big publishers with both our time and our money to publish in / review for / edit for their journals. Perhaps if we redirected that time to Diamond OA titles things would be somewhat different.

A final comment, only tangentially related to this post, is that I have been (pleasantly) surprised by the extent to which early career researchers have embraced the concept of the Open Journal of Astrophysics when you might have thought that they had more to lose by not publishing in mainstream journals rather than us oldies who don’t care any more. The explanation seems to be that younger people seem to see the absurdity and obvious unsustainability of the current publishing environment more easily than those who have put up with it for decades already.

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How do we make accessible research papers a reality?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on March 21, 2023 by telescoper

I wanted to advertise an event – an accessibility forum – organized by arXiv that looks interesting to anyone interested in open access publishing understood in the widest possible sense. It’s advertised as a practical forum, free for all:

Hosted by arXiv, this half-day online forum will center the experiences of academic researchers with disabilities who face barriers to accessing and reading papers. The forum will be useful for people across the academic authoring and publishing ecosystem who are committed to making accessible research papers a reality. Together, we can chart a path towards fully accessible research papers, and leave with practical next steps for our own organizations.

It’s on April 17th, from 1pm to 5pm Eastern Time (USA), which is 6pm to 10pm Dublin Time. You can find more details including information on how to register, here.

We usually focus on open access publishing in terms of the costs involved, but there is much more we can do in other respects to make scientific research as accessible as possible to as wide a community as possible. Having said that, this announcement did inspire me to go off

When I saw the word “ecosystem” in the description above, it reminded me of a brief discussion I had recently with a colleague who asked what I hoped to achieve with the Open Journal of Astrophysics (other than “world domination”). My answer was that I just wanted to show that there is a practical way to bypass the enormous expense of the traditional journal industry. Instead of just sitting around complaining about the state of things I wanted to demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be the way it is. The way the number of submissions to OJAp is increasing, it seems more and more people are becoming convinced.

It seems to me that the switch from subscription charges to the dreaded Article Processing Charge has help generate momentum in this direction, by making it even more explicit that the current arrangements are unsustainable. Previously the profits of the big publishers were hidden in library budgets. Now they are hitting researchers and their grants directly, as authors now have to pay, and people who previously hadn’t thought much about the absurdity of it all are now realizing what a racket academic publishing really is.

Increasing numbers of researchers think that the current ecosystem is doomed. I am convinced that it will die a natural death soon enough. But a question I am often asked is what will replace it? I think the answer to that is very clear: a worldwide network of institutional and/or subject-based repositories that share research literature freely for the common good. Universities and research centres should simply bypass the grotesque parasite that is the publishing industry. Indeed, I would be in favour of hastening the demise of the Academic Journal Racket by having institutions make it a disciplinary offence for any researcher to pay an APC.

We’re lucky in physics and astronomy because arXiv has already done the hard work for us. Indeed, it is now a fact universally acknowledged that every research paper worth reading in these disciplines can be found on arXiv. Old-style journals are no longer necessary. It is great that arXiv is being joined by similar ventures in other fields, such as BiorXiv and EarthArxiv. I’m sure many more will follow. What is needed is a global effort to link these repositories to each other and to peer review mechanisms. One way is through overlays as demonstrated by the Open Journal of Astrophysics, there being no reason why the idea can’t be extended beyond arXiv. Other routes are possible, of course, and I would love to see different models developed. I think the next few years are going to be very exciting.

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