The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals.
It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication.
The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.
> The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals.
True, just like Wikipedia lacks prestige and "credibility" now.
I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and have never seen a printed encyclopedia.
But the academics can't "wait +/- 20 years" --- they have careers to build now. Grad students, post-docs, and junior faculty have to build a portfolio of work that will be impressive across many institutions where they might get tenure, or just their next gig. (Most would love to get promoted at MIT, but the odds are against that.)
If most of those institutions are looking at the same set of prestigious, closed journals, avoiding those journals is not an option for an ambitious academic --- and if MIT starts insisting they must, good talent will go elsewhere.
> True, just like Wikipedia lacks prestige and "credibility" now.
Note, I mentioned nothing about credibility or it's sarcastic variant "credibility". Though, saying you appeared in Wikipedia is hardly prestigious, and I like Wikipedia.
> I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and have never seen a printed encyclopedia.
I should hope you'll need to wait a great deal longer than that! I hope for a day when I am so old even I can't remember a day without Wikipedia.
I read that article when it came out. It's a little hand-wavy on the details.
It's good idea to use arxiv because they enforce submission standards. For-profit journals can't do that and society presses try but are not always successful. What happens if arxiv decides it needs to charge for submissions to defray operational costs? It's too early to tell.
They also do not prohibit individual journals from charging for publishing a paper. Not different from today's open access policies.
Bottom line -- for me its not different. It's just someone saying, "I think I can do it cheaper this way."
More than that, high quality academic journals provide a source of well-reviewed, thoroughly edited content. The arXiv, for example, is a great resource, but it can be overwhelming to have to filter through everything. As of yet, we don't have a freely available alternative to serious peer review in the 'prestigious' journals.
"high quality academic journals provide a source of well-reviewed, thoroughly edited content"
Review and editing is often done by volunteers, so this should not be a problem: we should encourage people to voluntarily review and edit journals that are freely accessible and shared. Assuming, of course, that the people who are in a position to do so actually care about making their work available for everyone to read, rather than just to the ivory tower.
I'd be interested in how people propose to maintain expert review, editing, and vetting of ideas without having the users and beneficiaries of that research bear at least some of the cost.
It's easy to make the taxpayers pay for everything but I'd feel better about it if the proponents of this were at least actually actively using the research in question.
This still doesn't answer the question of how properly to prioritize the taxpayer funding involved. Fully funding every journal gives no incentive for efficient operation and would be incredibly wasteful. But if we decide not to fully funding all journals, who makes that decision? What criteria do they use? What specialized training should they have? Etc., etc.
"I'd be interested in how people propose to maintain expert review, editing, and vetting of ideas without having the users and beneficiaries of that research bear at least some of the cost."
First of all, the reviewers and editors of journals often work as volunteers -- so the notion of cost here is somewhat dubious.
That being said, I see no problem with asking universities to facilitate the review and editing process, using money given by the government for that purpose, and to host publicly accessible archives of academic publications for the benefit of society. We should remove academic publishers from the picture entirely, because they contribute nothing to society anymore. Universities already use tax dollars (grant money) to pay academic publishers for journal access; why don't we cut out the middle man?
>First of all, the reviewers and editors of journals often work as volunteers -- so the notion of cost here is somewhat dubious.
The reviewers and Editors (in the editorial sense of the word) are not the largest contributors to the costs associated with publishing an academic paper -- that's why they can be done for free (in the cases they are). When they are done for free they offer some other career-enhancing benefit.
Most of the cost relates to making the sausage, if you will. The manuscripts must be wrestled into a form that can be printed. That is boring and tedious work that you have to pay someone to do. There's the cost of the infrastructure required for these folks to do their work. Then there's the continuing cost of hosting the digital version(s) of the article.
I believe preparing an article for publication and distribution can be reduced to a fixed cost -- provided all parties involved cooperate.
It would be helpful to think about _why_ academic publishers exist in the first place before tossing them aside. Otherwise we'll just end up with the same situation we have now.
I think you give to much credit to the manufacture of academic sausage. It seems pretty clear - and supported by people close to the academic journal industry - that most of the cost is straightforward rentier capitalism just crying out for disruption.
> I think you give to much credit to the manufacture of academic sausage.
I don't understand what you mean by that. I merely point out it needs to be done and most discussions about open access publishing neglect to mention it.
The discussions we're having about open access publishing are based on the understanding that new communications technologies specifically target those parts of academic publishing that cost money - the formatting, layout, publication and distribution of articles.
That's why we're able to have a conversation about open access in the first place: the original source of scarcity has mostly evaporated, but Elsevier et al. are still collecting rentier profits from the artificial scarcity of access to a printing press.
The part of academic journals that actually creates value - i.e. the work of writers, reviewers and editors - is mostly unpaid work anyway.
It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication.
The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.