Do you have to pay Journals to publish your articles?
For the open access journal I submitted to, if you don't have the means to pay you can apply for a fee waiver. In addition, if you're (or a member of the author team) a member of a professional society (such as the nursing one, or the physiotherapy on), the society will cover the cost.
I'd need the fee waiver option, especially because I have no income at all! Is that standard in open access do you know? It applied to your journal, but does it apply to other ones?
For the open access journal I submitted to, if you don't have the means to pay you can apply for a fee waiver. In addition, if you're (or a member of the author team) a member of a professional society (such as the nursing one, or the physiotherapy on), the society will cover the cost.
I'd need the fee waiver option, especially because I have no income at all! Is that standard in open access do you know? It applied to your journal, but does it apply to other ones?
Well PLoS says this:
What if I can't afford the publication fee?
PLoS is committed to ensuring that our fee is never a barrier to publication and so we offer a waiver to any authors who do not have access to funds to cover our publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to author payment information, to ensure that the ability to pay never influences a publishing decision.
And I'm fairly certain Biomed is the same.
[The only downside is that the journals do tend to have lower impact factors than the subscription model ones. But hopefully that will change in the future.
Arrrgh don't even get me started on the importance put on impact factors.....:-s
I'm with Wally here, the whole point of research and publishing is to bring new findings to light and inform people, and I don't see why this should be restricted to universities paying subscription fees or the individual willing to fork out a fortune to have access to new journals. Not everyone has access to uni subscriptions and having to pay for journal access is a major barrier to many independent researchers or people who like to read up the research about something they may have heard about. I'm all for open access journals myself.
And while the cost does seem very high, considering they still have to have editors etc and people to format papers for the website and run the whole thing, it's to be expected. Perhaps the cost will come down in the future when open access becomes more widely used, at the moment I'd say they aren't getting the same amount of revenue as print journals. Plus, print journals often have a page limit and extra charges for going over this or providing Appendices or colour images, which isn't an issue for open access journals, well, the ones in my field at least. Which is very handy for someone with heaps of background data and images and graphs that are much easier to interpret in colour... :)
AQ, I agree with the intent of OpenAccess Journals, and other "open" projects, very much so. However, what I disagree with is the nature in which it is being done. Particularly, my problem is that, unlike other open projects, it is being done by a for-profit company that utilises a revenue scheme that fundamentally changes who the customer of the publisher is - the author, instead of the readers, becomes the audience who must be satisfied by the journal. While I recognise that the academic publishing market is a for-profit market anyway, I just don't think that Hindawi's way of doing things is an improvement on the current way of doing things.
One last point, I don't think this will catch on in the social sciences or humanities........unless the government decides to stop ringfencing STEM and chuck some money towards the less economically-productive subjects.
IMO - I'm the person who's done the work, they should be paying ME
AND I should get ....erm......£1million for every citation :-x :-x:-x:-x:-x:-x
'Particularly, my problem is that, unlike other open projects, it is being done by a for-profit company that utilises a revenue scheme that fundamentally changes who the customer of the publisher is - the author, instead of the readers, becomes the audience who must be satisfied by the journal.'
How do you arrive at this conclusion, Slizor? Take Nature. Everybody (well, scientists) wants to get an article in Nature because they perceive it to be the best journal - and that's why they get offered all the best research and turn over 75% of it away. So, one of the customers of the publisher in this case is the author. It's probably different in humanities, but when I publish an article, I look at the most 'suitable' journal and I then approach them. So, effectively, I have to be satisfied by the journal. Of course, the journal could then say, sorry, it's not for our readers. But then, so could an open-access journal. There's no shortage of research studies trying to find a home, as evidenced by the burgeoning number of journals online.
Did you know that subscription-only academic publishing is proportionately more profitable than Microsoft? That the better the access a university has to subscription only journals, the more successful research proposals they end up with? It's hardly fair. I'm waxing lyrical now, but if Open Access is doing anything, it's helping to create a more level playing field for universities. Just because someone goes to a former polytechnic or a poorer university shouldn't mean that they end up with restricted access to journals, having to spend money for photocopies from the British Library every time they want an article. :-)
I'm shocked, nay stunned, at the fact that you have to pay to be published - ironically i've been tidying up my first potential publication today and am ( was :-) ) positively excited.
Great question Anna, certainly got the conversation going
What sort of money are we talking about ? or does it depends on journal ? and dare i mention their rankings :-)
What sort of money are we talking about ? or does it depends on journal ? and dare i mention their rankings :-)
It depends on journal, but can range from 1000-3000 dollars, as far as I can see. Might range higher.
My Research Fellow husband was also stunned. This publishing practice hasn't reached his area of computer science yet :p
dif
Did you know that ... the better the access a university has to subscription only journals, the more successful research proposals they end up with? It's hardly fair. I'm waxing lyrical now, but if Open Access is doing anything, it's helping to create a more level playing field for universities. Just because someone goes to a former polytechnic or a poorer university shouldn't mean that they end up with restricted access to journals, having to spend money for photocopies from the British Library every time they want an article. :-)
But then lots of us have friends at other universities or people on the forum (and similar) who will help us out :-)
Really interesting to see such a 'cultural'/discipline divide on this issue. I'm based in medical science/biostats and a lot of people in these fields consider the general principles of open access publishing to be a really really good thing. Here are some of my thoughts/experiences:
- Lack of journal access is not just limited to former polys. I've just finished an MSc at a small, very specialist institution which most people outside the field have never heard of but EVERYONE around the world working in this field knows of and considers to be one of, if not THE, best institutions for that kind of thing. Yet library budgets were finite and journal access was pretty poor compared to the heavyweight multi-faculty university I was at before. Open access has been a boon for me this year.
- A lot of my fellow students will be going off to do work in low and middle income countries where research is poorly funded. If they don't have access to the research that enables them to produce good quality research/policy in their own countries, that's a reinforcement of the baseline inequalities some of them are trying to tackle.
- A lot of funders (e.g. Cancer Research, and I think Wellcome) require publication in Open Access journals on the grounds that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible. There was a bit of a dodgy phase of transition when it was unclear how this would work financially, but I think you can now write publication costs into grant applications.
- Subscription journals can be quite prone to 'publication bias' - they need to sell themselves so sometimes there is a preference for the headline-grabbing, paradigm shifting work, meaning that good quality but less revolutionary work gets overlooked. In clinical medicine, having access to as much of the data as possible, even negative results, is really really important for making informed clinical and policy decisions. Open Access journals such as PlosMed will publish anything that is good quality peer reviewed research, regardless of editorial agendas.
- On a technical point, because there's no concern about printing costs as it's all online, Open Access journals often don't impose a word limit or a max number of publications per month, which is useful!
- Following on from that, it's arguable that in some fields the rapidity of growth and amount of research coming out means that even if every good quality paper was accepted, existing print journals wouldn't be able to cope with the throughput, leading to the necessity for more journals, more subscriptions etc.
- Impact factors change over time. A paper I contributed to was published in PlosMed. Admittedly we did try a couple of subscription based higher impact journals first, but when they turned it down (not because of the quality of the research) we went to PlosMed as it was regarded as a better journal than some of the print ones which would have cost us nothing.
I can see that it's a model that won't necessarily translate well to arts/humanities where a lot of work comes from independent researchers who couldn't foot the bill (and it remains to be seen whether journals in those fields would adapt to accommodate this). But with some fields there's almost an ethical issue with not having stuff freely accessible to all, and I would say that this was particularly the case in medical sciences.
i was searching for publishing my article online. Found that most free journal has procedures that is long and ask for more of literature than the analysis in the article. Lots are very costly that cannot be afforded. In real life we can prove something as correct or wrong based on our past experience and not with other's past experience so Literature need not been given that importance is explained to me when i submitted an article with Saru Publications ( www.sarupub.org ) this made me understand the need to focus of my research largely. I share my experience with a good journal publisher who also has fee waiver option for good work and needy.
