[Ecommerce] Peter Suber: no excuse not to know the Open Access journals in your field.
Manon Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org
Thu Feb 2 13:19:00 2006
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #94 February 2, 2006
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/02-02-06.htm
Six things that researchers need to know about open access
When I was a graduate student, my elders never took me aside to pass
on the secrets of academic publishing. I hope this failure isn't
widespread and simply reflects on my discipline, my school, my
decade, or perhaps even my elders. Today's graduate students deserve
a more effective rite of passage. But even if they're told all they
need to know about in-journals and out-journals (at least by the
standards of their elders), publishing contracts, submissions
etiquette, turn-around time, referee behavior, citation politics,
impact factors, and perishing, I know they're not told all they need
to know about open access. Here's a brief attempt to remedy that --
six things that publishing researchers need to know about OA.
Readers of this newsletter shouldn't find anything new here. But if
you want a short list of what your colleagues (junior and senior)
need to know, I hope this will fit the bill. We'll know we're making
progress if we can shorten this list every year until it disappears.
(1) What OA journals exist in your field?
When "presented with a list of reasons why they have not chosen to
publish in an OA journal and asked to say which were important...[t]
he reason that scored highest (70%) was that authors were not
familiar enough with OA journals in their field." Alma Swan and
Sheridan Brown, "Authors and Open Access Publishing," Learned
Publishing, July 2004, p. 220.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11003/
There's no excuse not to know the OA journals in your field. Go to
the DOAJ and browse by discipline.
http://www.doaj.org/
Some of the journals you find may not meet your standards for
prestige or impact. But others might. According to the ISI's own
studies, nearly every scientific discipline has an OA journal in the
top cohort of impact factors.
http://www.isinet.com/media/presentrep/acropdf/impact-oa-journals.pdf
(April 2004)
http://www.isinet.com/media/presentrep/essayspdf/
openaccesscitations2.pdf (October 2004)
If you learn what OA journals exist in your field and decide against
each of them, all right. At least you made an informed decision.
But check the DOAJ again when you've written your next paper. Things
are changing fast. Established OA journals are growing in prestige;
some are getting impact factors; new OA journals are being launched;
non-OA journals are converting to full OA or OA hybrid models; and
non-OA journals are experimenting with different forms of OA.
If you don't publish in an OA journal, you can publish in a non-OA
journal and self-archive the peer-reviewed version of your manuscript
in an OA repository. About 70% of existing non-OA journals already
permit this. More in #4 below.
(2) OA journals are not the whole story of OA. There are also OA
archives or repositories.
When people hear about OA for the first time, they tend to take away
that OA journals are the way to deliver it. Even when they hear a
two-sided presentation that gives equal attention to OA journals and
OA repositories, they tend to remember the part about OA journals and
forget the part about OA repositories. Sometimes a policy proposal
may be about nothing but OA repositories and some readers will still
think it's about OA journals. Sometimes this happens even when the
readers have with Ph.D.s.
This is puzzling and harmful. Part of the explanation is that we
assimilate new ideas to older and more familiar ideas, and we already
understand what journals are. But try to shake yourself loose from
this assimilation --or shake your colleagues loose from it. There
are two primary vehicles of OA, not just one. OA repositories don't
perform peer review; they merely make their contents freely available
to the world. But they can contain peer-reviewed postprints as
easily unrefereed preprints. You can deposit a preprint at the time
you submit it to a journal and then deposit the postprint after it's
published. You can deposit your postprint in an OA repository even
if you also publish it in a conventional or non-OA journal. Don't
let the novelty of OA repositories make them invisible. Don't
believe that if the concept is too good to be true then it can't be
true.
The best places to look for OA repositories are the Registry of Open
Access Repositories (ROAR) and OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access
Repositories).
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://www.opendoar.org/
Here's more detail on the distinction between OA journals and OA
archives or repositories.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm#vehicles
(3) OA archiving only takes a few minutes.
"Authors have frequently expressed reluctance to self-archive because
of the perceived time required and possible technical difficulties in
carrying out this activity, yet findings here show that only 20% of
authors found some degree of difficulty with the first act of
depositing an article in a repository, and that this dropped to 9%
for subsequent deposits." Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown, Open access
self-archiving: An author study, JISC, May 2005.
http://cogprints.org/4385/
Les Carr and Stevan Harnad studied two months of log activity at a
much-used repository and found that the time required for deposit
averaged 10 minutes per paper. Taking into account the rate at which
authors had their work archived for them by others (co-authors,
librarians, students, or assistants), authors who published one paper
per month would spend less than 40 minutes per year on their deposits.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
If you haven't deposited papers in a repository yourself and worry
about adding one more task to your schedule, at least trust the Carr-
Harnad evidence more than any anecdotes you might have heard from
colleagues. If you've deposited once but not twice, trust the Swan-
Brown evidence that the time requirement plummets. (Compare the
first time you used endnotes in a word processor with the second
time.) If you're worrying about adding a new task regardless of the
time required, then think about the many more time-consuming jobs you
already do to make your work known to the world, such as keeping your
c.v. up to date, mailing offprints, and sending your bibliography to
deans and department chairs. Self-archiving takes less time and has
more impact than any of these.
(4) Most non-OA journals allow authors to deposit their postprints in
an OA repository.
The best current estimate is that 70% of non-OA journals consent in
advance to postprint archiving.
http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
When you publish in one of these journals, you don't need further
permission for self-archiving, even if you've transferred the
copyright to the journal. These journals have already given
permission. For this significant majority of peer-reviewed journals,
the obstacle to OA is author failure, not copyright complexity or
publisher opposition. Journals have opened the door and authors have
to walk through.
SHERPA and Eprints both maintain online databases where you can look
up a journal and finds its policy on self-archiving.
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
http://romeo.eprints.org/
Three notes on the 70% figure. First, it represents surveyed
journals. Among unsurveyed journals, there are likely to be journals
that do, and journals that don't, permit postprint archiving. We
don't know their proportions yet. Second, the number represents
journals that consent in advance to postprint archiving without
requiring case-by-case requests. Many that do not consent in advance
will still consent if asked individually, however. Elsevier
routinely granted individual requests until mid-2004 when it decided
to offer blanket permission instead. Third, it represents the
journals that consent to postprint archiving, not preprint
archiving. If we count the journals that consent to preprint or
postprint archiving (or both), the figure rises to 93%.
Note the all-important consequence of this kind of blanket
permission. OA archiving is compatible with publishing in most
conventional, subscription-based journals. If the top journals in
your field (by impact or prestige) are not OA, you can go for impact
or prestige and still have OA. It's rarely a trade-off.
(5) Journals using the Ingelfinger Rule are a shrinking minority.
Some authors are afraid that depositing a preprint in an OA
repository will disqualify it for subsequent publication. It's true
that some journals refuse to publish papers that have previously
circulated as preprints or whose results have been publicized. This
is called the Ingelfinger Rule, named after a former editor at the
New England Journal of Medicine. The rule is rare outside the field
of medicine and in decline.
There are some very rare journals, like the California Law Review,
that allow postprint archiving but not preprint archiving. But
essentially all the journals that don't allow preprint archiving
(i.e. that follow the Ingelfinger Rule) also bar postprint
archiving. Only 7% of surveyed journals fall into this category.
Don't let groundless fears deter you from preprint archiving. If you
worry about the Ingelfinger Rule, check out the policies of the
journals where you intend to submit your work.
(6) OA enlarges your audience and citation impact.
This is the chief reason for authors to provide OA to their own
work. OA increases the audience for a work far beyond the audience
of any priced journal, even the most prestigious or popular journal.
Studies in many fields show a correlation between OA and citation-
count increases from 50% to 250%.
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
There is almost certainly causation here as well as correlation,
though this hasn't been nailed down yet. There are many hypotheses
to explain the correlation. Some of it seems to arise from the fact
that self-archived articles circulate sooner than journal-published
articles (and have a head-start toward citations) and the fact that
authors self-archive their best work (biasing the OA sample toward
quality). But it's very likely that ongoing studies will show that
much of the correlation simply due to the larger audience and
heightened visibility for the work among researchers who find the
work useful, relevant, and worth citing in their own work.
These studies bring a welcome note of self-interest to the case for
OA. Providing OA to your own work is not an act of charity that only
benefits others, or a sacrifice justified only by the greater good.
It's not a sacrifice at all. It increases your visibility,
retrievability, audience, usage, and citations. It's about career-
building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it
were costly, difficult, and time-consuming.
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This is the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (ISSN 1546-7821), written by
Peter Suber and published by SPARC. The views I express in this
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Timeline of the Open Access Movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
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Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters
peter.suber@earlham.edu
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************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org
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