Open Access: Whom would you back?

Open Access (OA) advocates will tell you that there are two roads to OA.

Green OA consists of researchers continuing to publish in traditional subscription journals, and then self-archiving their final peer-reviewed papers on the Web, either in an institutional repository or in a central or subject-based repository like arXiv or PubMed Central. In this way they can ensure that any other researcher in the world is able to access their papers, regardless of whether the other researcher's institution has a subscription to the journals in which the papers are published.

Gold OA, by contrast, consists of researchers publishing in specialist OA journals (e.g. the journals of OA publishers like BioMed Central or Public Library of Science) rather than in a subscription journal. Instead of limiting access by imposing a subscription, OA publishers levy on authors (or more usually their funders or institutions) an article processing charge (APC). This is intended to cover the costs of organising peer review, and any costs incurred in making papers available online.

There are two variations on Gold OA: Hybrid OA, where a subscription journal agrees to make single papers freely available on the Web on payment of an APC (while the rest of the papers remain available to subscribers only); and institutional "membership" OA, where a research institution forward-buys in bulk the right for all of its researchers to publish with a specific OA publisher, thereby avoiding the need to pay an APC every time an article is published.

Whether Green or Gold, OA implies providing immediate, permanent, toll-free online access to the full-texts of peer-reviewed research journal articles.

The logic of OA is that the global network allows the scholarly community to dispense with the traditional paywalls characteristic of the print publishing world, thereby maximising the number of researchers able to view published papers. The assumption is that this will enable research to develop more quickly, and more effectively.

But as the OA movement has developed an interesting question has arisen: should Green and Gold OA be viewed as concurrent or consecutive activities?

This is not an issue of intellectual curiosity alone: it has important strategic implications for the OA movement. It requires, for instance, that the movement decides whether to treat Green and Gold OA as complementary or competitive activities; and if they are competitive, then where the OA movement should focus its main efforts ...

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If you wish to read the rest of this article please click on the link below. I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.



To read the article (as a PDF file) click here.

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UPDATE (17/03/09).

Peter Suber comments on this article here.

Ivy Anderson, Director, Collections, California Digital Library comments here.

Former Commercial Director of publisher Wiley-Blackwell Steven Hall comments here

Stevan Harnad responds to Ivy Anderson's comments here.

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Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: Still looking for an editor

While the Elsevier nonlinear science journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (CS&F) expects to publish its delayed first issue of 2009 next week, it appears that the publisher has yet to find a new editor.

Last November, when Nature published a number of allegations about the founding editor of CS&F M. S. El Naschie, and the way in which peer review had been conducted at the journal, Elsevier informed me that M. S. El Naschie would be retiring, and that this would be announced in the first issue of the journal published in 2009.

"[A]s a former editor El Naschie will no longer be involved in editorial decision making for the journal," Elsevier spokesperson Shira Tabachnikoff added.

When CS&F's first issue of 2009 failed to appear, however, rumours began to circulate on the Internet that there had been a disagreement over M. S. El Naschie's retirement. Amongst other things, letters purporting to have been written on behalf of the editorial board were posted on the Web stating that M. S. El Naschie did not intend to step down as editor, and hinting at legal action against Elsevier.

On 13th February, however, Tabachnikoff emailed me to say that the first issue of 2009 would be available electronically on February 20th, and the paper version would be published on 10th March.

The electronic version failed to appear online on 20th February and, as of today, it is still not available. Currently, the backlog of articles waiting to be published has grown to 965.

I emailed Elsevier last week to find out what had happened, and received a reply yesterday: "The delay in publishing this issue is due to very pragmatic, operational reasons," wrote Tabachnikoff. "The latest update I have been given is that the journal is now in line to be uploaded onto ScienceDirect and we expect on Monday [2nd March] it will be up."

Tabachnikoff added, "The paper version will be published mid-March. March 10th is an estimate as it is hard to say exactly what day it will be finalised."

After receiving this reply I asked Tabachnikoff for the name of CS&F's new editor. She replied: "We do not yet have a new editor, but as stated on our website we are still in discussion about filling this position. The publisher will work with the editorial board and other advisors to identify a new editor, as well as reviewing the aims and scope of the journal, as well as the editorial policies and submission arrangements."

Conscious that researchers have been wondering about the status of the 900 plus papers in the publication queue I also asked whether Elsevier planned to send any of the papers out to be re-reviewed prior to publication.

"The coming editions of CS&F will publish papers that have been pending publication which were already peer reviewed when El Naschie was the editor," said Tabachnikoff. "These papers will not be reviewed again, and authors have signed copyright agreements."

I also asked how many of the papers in the queue had been authored by M. S. El Naschie. "At this point it is hard to establish how many papers in future issues are authored by El Naschie," replied Tabachnikoff. Saying that she hoped to find out more next week she added: "I do know that the first issue will not contain any of his papers."

Finally, I asked if all disagreements between Elsevier and M.S. El Naschie, both over the journal itself, and over his retirement as editor, have now been resolved. Tabachnikoff replied: "At the moment, we have no outstanding issues and/or problems with El Naschie."

Despite a number of attempts I have been unable to speak to M. S. El Naschie.

In the meantime, it seems likely that critics of the way in which Elsevier has handled the situation will remain unappeased. Zoran Škoda, a theoretical physicist at the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb, Croatia, for instance, believes that by not having papers that were approved under the old editorial regime re-reviewed, Elsevier has "made the worst possible decision."

For this reason, he adds, Elsevier should be criticised harshly. "Before they could say that they did not understand the problem, but now they do."

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Update 3rd March



As promised by Elsevier, the January 15th issue of CS&F was published yesterday, 2nd March 2009. An accompanying "Publisher's note" reads:



The Founding Editor for Chaos, Solitons and Fractals Dr El Naschie has retired as Editor-in-Chief. The publisher will work with the editorial board and other advisors to identify a new editor. This is likely to also lead to revision of the aims and scope of the journal, as well as the editorial policies and submission arrangements. Prospective authors can keep informed

of the progress on this through the journal’s homepage.



With the journal now apparently operating with no one at the helm the debate appears to be moving on to the question of whether, and for how long, a peer-reviewed journal can operate without an editor-in-chief.

Update 16th March 2010: CS&F has been relaunched with two new co-editors-in-chief, a new editorial board and refined aims and scope.

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Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: Update

Those following events at the Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals (CS&F) will know that last November Elsevier announced that the founding editor-in-chief M. S. El Naschie was set to retire, and that this would be formally confirmed in the first issue of 2009. A note to that effect was subsequently also posted on the CS&F web site.

What Elsevier didn't say, however, was when the first issue of 2009 would appear. As January came and went, and then February arrived, there has been growing speculation over what might be happening behind the scenes.

But it appears that the journal may soon be back on track: Last Friday, Elsevier spokesperson Shira Tabachnikoff emailed me to say: "the journal manager for Chaos has just informed me that the first issue of 2009 is expected to be out electronically on February 20^th and the paper version on March 10^th."

Frustratingly, Tabachnikoff did not include the name of a new editor in her message, and I have yet to receive a reply to my email requesting more information.

With luck all will be revealed on Friday.

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Further update (21st February 2009):

CS&F's first issue of 2009 did not appear yesterday as anticipated. At the end of the day I contacted Elsevier's Shira Tabachnikoff, who said that she would look into it and hope to update me on Monday.

Meanwhile, the journal's Articles in Press page indicates that there are now 949 papers waiting to be published. Clearly that is a substantial backlog.

And another update (November 17th) is available here.

Update 16th March 2010: CS&F has been relaunched with two new co-editors-in-chief, a new editorial board and refined aims and scope.

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The Open Access Interviews: Libertas Academica

Richard Poynder talks to Tom Hill, Publisher and Managing Director of Libertas Academica, an OA publisher based in Auckland, New Zealand.

Tom Hill

About a year ago people began to contact me to complain about the activities of a number of start-up Open Access (OA) publishers.

Their first concern was that these companies were bombarding researchers with spam-like messages inviting them to join the editorial boards of hundreds of new journals, and/or to submit papers to these journals, for which researchers were asked to pay article-processing charges.

The second concern was that the quality of the peer review process provided by some of these new publishers appeared as though it might not be adequate.

Why were researchers contacting me about this? Because I write about scholarly publishing, and I specialise in Open Access.

So I began to contact these new companies in order to ask them about their activities. To my surprise, some of those I contacted greeted my enquiry with a variable mixture of silence, stonewalling, criticism, and even threats of legal action.

All of this is most unfortunate, not least because it creates a very poor impression of OA, and of scholarly publishers in general.

I should stress that the more established OA publishers — e.g. Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central (BMC), Hindawi etc. — have always responded readily to questions about their business practices, and with a good deal of openness.

Similarly, amongst the new crop of OA publishers both Dove Medical Press and Libertas Academica replied willingly to my questions when I contacted them. My interview with Tim Hill was published last November, and below I attach an email interview I undertook recently with the managing director of Libertas Academica, Tom Hill (Tim Hill's son).

What, if anything, the OA movement decides to do about the small minority of publishers who continue to give OA a bad name remains unclear. In recognition that there is a problem, however, last year a group of OA publishers founded the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) — with the aim of introducing a degree of self-regulation into the market.

How successful that organisation will prove over time remains unclear. For now both Dove Medical and Libertas Academica have told me that they have no plans to join OASPA.

But whatever happens it seems likely that even those OA publishers who respond openly and willingly to questions from journalists, and who are genuinely committed to providing a valuable service to the research community, will continue to face a degree of suspicion and distrust.

In particular, the quality of the peer review process that OA publishers offer looks set to remain a live issue for some time. This is partly because many believe that in an online OA environment the only significant service that publishers continue to provide is that of organising the peer review process. The nature and value of that service can therefore be expected to come under increasingly critical scrutiny.

Additionally, since fee-based OA journals bill researchers directly for publishing their papers (although in most cases the money will come not from researchers' own pockets, but from the budgets of their funders and/or institutions) the details of the financial transaction are much more visible than in a subscription-based environment — where publication charges are recovered indirectly by means of journal subscriptions. This, not unnaturally, increases expectations about the quality of the service provided in return.

It seems likely, therefore, that — sooner or later — OA publishers are going to have to become much more transparent than traditional subscription publishers ever had to be, both with regard to the process that papers undergo before they are published, and in explaining what the research community is getting for its money.

People are more likely to want to know, for instance, exactly what happens to a paper during the review process, who specifically reviews any given paper (and what qualifications they have for doing so), plus who makes the final decision on whether or not to publish a paper, and how that decision is arrived at.

This transparency will be all the more important given the high degree of automation that OA publishers utilise. A recent incident in which Libertas Academica mistakenly published a paper that had been rejected by the referees (a consequence says Tom Hill of a database error) highlights the potential dangers of automation, and the bad press that can circulate in the blogosphere when such an error occurs.

Moreover, with growing scepticism about the quality and nature of the peer review process being undertaken by all scholarly publishers, the need for greater transparency will surely become ever more pressing for OA publishers as time goes on.

A second issue of transparency relates to the question of ownership. Most of the new crop of OA publishers are privately held companies, and most of them are unforthcoming when asked to divulge ownership details. Since the services they provide are primarily — if not exclusively — paid for out of the public purse some are beginning to conclude that such secrecy is undesirable, particularly where the quality of the service being provided is also at issue, and particularly where the publishers concerned are selling their services under the banner of "openness".

As I asked when I published the Dove Medical interview, "Is it not reasonable ... for taxpayers to expect to know exactly what is being provided for [their] money, and who will benefit from any profits that are made as a result?"

I discuss these and other issues below with Libertas Academica's managing director Tom Hill.

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If you wish to read the interview with Tom Hill please click on the link below. The PDF file that will download includes both the interview and this introduction.

I am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.



To read the interview (as a PDF file) click here.

Read More