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Five ways open access will ruin scientific publishing - and why it's still the best way to go

By Emily Wortman-Wunder posted 03-21-2014 12:41 PM

  
1.      Open access is bad for authors. The traditional model of scientific publishing looks like this: authors write. Societies publish. Subscribers fund. The open access model, initiated in 1998 and gaining momentum steadily ever since, tries to makes government-funded research available to the ultimate source of government funds, the general taxpaying public. Since publication is never free, this model pushes the cost of publication back onto the authors. This has led in the past five years or so to author fees that range into the thousands of dollars. Some authors can afford this. Most, especially those supported by the already strained budgets of research institutions, cannot. Open access makes it  harder to publish, across the board.

2.      Open access is bad for publishers. It’s true: some large publishers have seen towering profits in the past few decades, much of it driven by scholarly journals, in which the content is provided to them for free. However, smaller publishers, such as SME, are just getting by. Quality publishing, even online, is not free. Copy editors and production managers require salaries. Web technicians cost money; so does advertising, upgrading technology, server space, networking, attending conferences – all of the mundane details of supporting and distributing a quality publication. Even the hybrid model, in which some content is free (paid for by the author fee) and some is subscription-only (the traditional model), is not ideal. Libraries and institutions, which shoulder the lion's share of funding scholarly publications, have recently begun to challenge hybrid model publishers that haven't adjusted their subscription prices. If this challenge gains momentum, revenues of smaller publishers will be further impaired.

3.      Open access is bad for copyright. Copyright law is based on people playing the same game by the same rules: if something is published, it's protected. Open access is a whole new game, with totally new rules. If something is freely available, do you have to get permission to use it? Photocopy it? Republish it as your own? Ideally, open access material would be used with the same courtesy that published material has always - with full and proper attribution, so that the creators get credit for the material. With open access, that path becomes a lot more optional, with a higher chance of abuse.

4.      Open access is bad for scholarly societies. It makes it harder to publish, harder to find an audience, harder to fulfill the mission of creating and distributing quality technical information - especially when producing that information has always happened pretty close to the margin.

5.      Overall, open access is bad for traditional publishing values. It looks a little like the death of a model that worked well for more than two centuries.

In fact, the one thing that open access publishing has going for it is that it is more or less an unstoppable force. In spite of the financial hardship it produces, authors like it, because it gets their work out to a wider audience and leads to higher citation rates. Publishers like it for the same reason, and because it allows them to publish material that otherwise would be inaccessible to them. Even scholarly societies are having to adjust: the model of society membership benefits that was based on reserving information for members only has begun to be challenged by the fact that information becomes more powerful the better it is known.

In many ways, traditional publishers are being thrown into the same perilous situation as traditional universities: we're going to have to innovate by disrupting the models that worked best for us. Time will tell what works and what doesn't. In the meantime, the only thing that is certain is change.


Emily Wortman-Wunder is the managing editor of technical publications at SME, including Minerals & Metallurgical Processing, Transactions and the technical papers in Mining Engineering.
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