Publishing Paradox in Science

 

 

All journals will be OA after 2025. Here is the dope - Plan S -   into effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo. Plan S transformative agreements – There is a transition period agreed upon for this and this is called Plan S transformative agreements. This is temporary and transitional, where cOAlition S members provide funding to support publication fees of journals covered by such arrangements, this funding will cease on the 31 December 2024. Which means all the journals will be OA from 2025 and funding agencies have to pay APC. This means there won't be any subscription charges to institutions. Research organizations which may be paying a lot of money for subscription will not have pay as all the articles will free access. 

 

All organizations have to then pay for the articles published. All research organizations have to allocate money specifically for publication. Now if we work out the economics - a few thousand dollars for a paper, only electronic and no print, with the hosting infrastructure already in place, no reviewer cost - the publishing houses stand to gain more than what they get by subscription which anyway is dwindling. The only thing is they don't own the copyright and the authors have it, which is a little bit of a down side for them as they can't charge for permission to use, I think even then they stand to gain more in this transition to OA than what they get from subscription. That only problem is that the poorer economies of the world will find it difficult to publish in these transitioning journals. The innate desire of the researcher is recognition and not monetary gains, and this is what is capitalized upon by the scientific publishing houses. The tricky situation we face now of unreasonable page charges or access charges is a creation of our own fallacious desire over the years.

 

We as researchers have been always very much aware that the deal, we get from the publishing houses is far from fair, in fact it is a raw deal with nothing in terms of negotiatory leeway for us.

It is not just skewed on the publisher’s side, the whole thing is fully on their side and we simply agree to it and go on – sign all the copyrights they want – I would say we sometimes don’t even read the terms of the copyright transfer we sign on out of excitement on the acceptance of our MS for publication. I myself have done that, I think many of us would have done that, anyway what is the point in reading all that when we have made a decision to accept it all and sign the agreement.This state of affairs is what that has to be changed now if we have to gain negotiating grounds with the publisher. We think that the publishing houses are doing us a favour or doing a job that we need so direly and also that we cannot do that job. With the advent of preprint servers this has to extant been taken care of, although I must say we have to do a lot more to actually take the publishing houses head on.

 

The desire to have the scientific data judged and arbitrated upon is what that should be done away with. We have redefined how documentation of scientific results is viewed by peers and also the lay person. As long as career is linked with the publications in the so called prestigious journals this will go on and it will be difficult to break out of this.The point is that the scientific article published is seemingly the only way science is represented now, it has come to a point that however good a work is, if not published, is of no value – this is intrinsically wrong, it is the work that defines science and not the documentation of it in a prestigious journal.The publishing houses cleverly built an industry on this where they falsely created a belief in us where we started to think that there is no alternative but to go to them. We talk about predatory journals now, what we don’t realize is that every journal is predatory in its own way, it is only that we feel it is better to be predated upon by a prestigious journal than a journal without the so called prestige.

When journals started to define what should get into them, then we started to define what our work should be to get into them. We are incentivised in terms of career progress to produce work that is documentation worthy in these journals.

 

It is time we took notice and thought of an alternative system that is not based on profits in documentation alone, we have to break away from the concept that these journals are the gatekeepers of prestige and reward.Although I agree that the publishing houses are charging unreasonably for access, it must be noted that they are spending money on publishing, as I see it the charges are not for the content, it is for the process of publishing the content in its final form. The content itself is free in the form of preprint at proof stage of the paper and also there is no restriction on posting the MS in repositories and archives.

So it is the published form that is retrievable from access points that is charged for, like I said, I agree that the charges are unreasonable, on the other hand that does make a claim by us that the final published form should be free correct. It is we who go after these publishers and publish our papers in thier journals and sign copyright transfer agreements to them, so how can we complain that they are taking away our content. The content is free anyway, as we can post our MS which is not in the final published form anywhere. The published article is indexed and comes up in search results, so of we find a way for our MS deposited in repositories to come up in search results that would be good.

 

The so called good OA journals are now slowly becoming even worse than predatory journals. Sometimes I think major publishing houses are better, at least to publish if not to access literature. The good OAs are as predatory as any other predatory journal that spams your mailbox. Only that they do it in a subtle way, showcasing IF and all that, even that is coming down in many of these OA journals. They have this trick of asking researchers to guest edit issues and literally out sourcing the dirty the job of searching and spamming researchers for articles for exorbitant APC. What anyway is the cost incurred by these journals to host articles and the whole of the publishing process. These OA journals charge about 3000 - 4000 dollars for an article, definitely they won't be spending even half of that for the whole process of publication - from submission to publication and then to hosting and indexing - these journals are not some non profit types that we are lead to believe in comparison to the presumed evil big for profit publishing houses.For an author with limited funding the major publishing houses are a better option than the unreasonably high APC charging OA journals. When you publish with funds in an OA journal then it is double money for the govt - funding research and also funding publication.

 

 If we put together all the APC, won't it be more than institutional subscription of a lot of journals. Which do you think is better and less resource intensive for the govt - subscribing a whole lot of journals or paying exorbitant APC for every article published. The worst part is the institution has to subscribe the closed access journals even when they pay APC to the OA journals.I am very much a fan and a supporter of Sci-Hub. Having said that I must say that - there is no free lunch - so the saying goes. Someone has to pay for the publication and the processes, copy editing, typesetting, proofs, web hosting and a whole lot of other things that go into it. EU and other powerful govts should go after the OA publishers who charge unreasonably high Article Processing Charges (APC), some even charge for closed access as a surcharge.

We should go after these people instead of hounding Alexandra Elbakyan. PNAS charges 1590- 4215 dollars per article (depending on length) for closed-access, with a surcharge of 1700-2200 dollars for open-access (depending on licence). Journal of Geophysical Research charges 1000 dollars for closed-access and 3500 dollars for open-access – nature Communication charge 5560 dollars as APC. This is simply too much even for all the processing and hosting they do.

 

In some journals in finance and economics even article submission fees are charged prior to the start of peer review. This is all very unreasonable and very much with a profit motive where like I said the person generating content does not get anything.When there so much resentment for Impact Factor and citations and all that, then why not the countries of the world form a consortium and start a one stop publishing platform for all the researcher of the world. Every country and contribute according to their ability and then all can have access. We all know that in academia there is no monetary remuneration paid to the actual suppliers of productive services.Researchers do the peer-review process not for money, but as a service to science with a sense of duty. Govts paying money to these companies or giving funds for OA is not the correct option. This will only make these publishing houses stronger in their stature and in future they will have more negotiating power and dictate rates and governments cannot go back on the decision to get access for money.

 

Better still, I have this wild sounding idea – why not United Nations start an org like United Nations Scientific Publishing Organization (UNSPO) and do all the publishing of scientific research for all the world in all the subjects with all the member countries contributing to the org – this can do away not only with major publishing houses, it will also do away with the OA journals charging high APC.

The proposed UNSPO can have a select group of voluntary reviewers from every country, anyway we all review for free. It can all be hosted in multiple servers all over the world for easy access. This will also amalgamate everything and make indexing and searching also easy. The other thing is we can also do away with impact factor. The only problem will be society journals which cant join in, even that can be negotiated.

I don’t know how this idea sounds to you, maybe like I said it is a little wild, I must say that this will be a workable idea. We can do away with these publishing houses, Impact Factor, access charges and all that and most importantly it will be an independent endeavor of the world governments without the involvement of the major publishing houses.