[Foundation-l] Access to academic journals (was Re: Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser)

Tue Mar 15 13:10:28 UTC 2011

>> > Though there are almost ten thousand open access journals, 95% of
them
>> are
>> > either very small or very unimportant, and  in almost all fields
>> > of study, none or almost none of the important journals are open
>> > access:
>>
>> This is my experience too; thanks for pointing it out.
> 
> 
> I also think this is true, but I wonder how much the current,
established
> process of scholarship
> is driving high quality articles towards "closed access": as I said
before,
> OA is mainly librarian-driven, because researchers and professors are
much
> more worried about
> their career and tenure (it's no judgement, just a statement), so they
> struggle to publish in high quality journals.
> I think it is very difficult to change the whole environment of
> scholarship,
> 
> and just pointing out the virtue of being open is not enough if not
> supported by real benefits
> regarding tenure and career.
> I personally believe that the Wikimedia movement should ally with OA
> movement (i just don't know how ;-),
> also tho change this situation.
> Open access to reasearch and science is open access to culture and
> knowledge, we perfectly match.
>

I publish on a regular basis in top journals in physics, and there is only
one OA journal of any value I know of: this is New Journal of Physics
(published by IOP). It charges publication fees from the authors rather
than from the readers, and has a reasonably good quality, at least special
issues. Basically switching the scientific community to OA journals is
equivalent from raising a number of new journals from scratch, and in my
experience is unlikely. The only thing which potentially can occur is
cross-field research, where new journals are likely to appear and for
whatever reason they can be OA, but so far traditional journals like e.g.
Nature responded by far more successfully to these cross-field changes. I
personally do not see here any perspective, unless existing journals for
whatever reason (which will have nothing to do with WMF) will switch to OA
themselves.

Cheers
Yaroslav