Today I want to touch on a topic that I has been nagging me for a while : open access science . There are indeed benefits to it , at least theoretically. Imagine everyone being able to access all of the scientific articles for free! Perhaps still not so useful for the general public , because let’s face it , scientific articles are sometimes even illegible if you are coming from a slightly different discipline , let alone if the last time you were close to science was high school… But still, I hear you say: it could be very useful for other scientists, maybe some from institutions that don’t have the means to subscribe to journals (something that costs various hundreds thousands, or more, because accessing this information is far from open access…) . Let’s assume then that open access is good. But we should remember that appearances can be deceitful, and that oftentimes good things come at cost… At what cost? generally $1.000-$5000 per publication
Which is 1000-5000 coming out of research budget 1000-5000 that cannot be spent on buying a piece of equipment, or reagents… Worse. As much as this open access may benefit in some way researchers from institutes that cannot afford article processing charges, it also hurts them.. ‘Can I afford to publish?’, a recent (open access) publication in ecology letters, shows how hard it is for scholars in Africa to publish, since 3/4 of ecology publications are now open access but grants don’t allow for OA publishing, and salaries are too low for paying the fees themselves (plus, should it really come from the salary ?? ). I think it’s beyond absurd. Maybe I am too close to it, but this sentence in the article really hit home.. ‘Open-access publishing in ecology will likely increase because it confers a citation advantage to individual articles. As researchers are increasingly evaluated for promotion and grants by citation metrics, there is considerable pressure to pay article processing charges. However, article processing charges are expensive, even by the standards of wealthy countries.’ And worse, because journals with higher impact factors have higher OA fees, so journals were it’s more pressuring to publishing are the most expensive… So scientists send their article, review other people’s science, act as ‘guest editors’ for ‘free’ (one may say from the salary, but the salary is not coming from the publishing industry. They are coming from public funding most of the times…) and then pay the journals…. sounds so absurd, right? but it’s reality And it’s giving the field to the opening of predatory journals more and more are appearing, and the publication standards are less than low with reviewers being given just a week to review, and standards of submission being really low but somehow published, a bit because of reviewer’s fatigue, a bit because they choose early career researchers…. What does this mean for science? That it is becoming another victim of capitalism? That we are going to read a lot of fake stuff? Who will live will see… For now, let’s keep our eyes open. And if you are a fellow scientist reading: Accept those review requests. And fight through the fatigue to review them truthfully and rejecting when that’s the case. Reply to those emails coming day in day out, saying that something is not your job. Fight back….
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