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Publishers of scholarly journals currently obtain most of their revenue from subscription fees charged to libraries and individual users. We call this the 'Reader Pays' pricing model. An alternative pricing method has recently emerged, in which publishers collect their revenue by charging significant publication fees to authors, and then supply their content over the Internet, at no cost to readers.

Nature Communications has announced it will go open access only from 20 October in a bid to show the world that quality papers do not have to be paid for.

I've chosen to link to the article on Wired which discusses the move as the explanation is easier for those who (like me!) have little experience of academic journals to understand. One of the most important points I've taken from reading this article (and the PDF study explaining the reasons for the move to Open Access, which is linked from the article) is that to date, articles which have previously been published to Nature Communications using the OA model have earned more citations than those published under a subscription model. I'm interested to learn more about the mentioned Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I'm not yet familiar with. If anyone with experience using (or publishing to) academic journals would like to add any relevant points to the potential impact of the magazine's choice to go OA, I would really appreciate the insight!

"The science journal Nature will make its archive of papers, dating back to 1869, free by way of read-only links available to subscribers and major news outlets. Under the new system, planned as a one-year trial, subscribers such as universities and researchers will be able to share a link to a read-only version of a Nature paper with anyone."

This is a great idea - hope to see more follow this model. Ideally, it would be nice to see it open a bit further (to lay persons), but this is a positive move.

This is a special issue from Nature Magazine on the future of science publishing and open access. In addition to the feature articles, the comments also provide different perspectives.

Innovative ways of teaching, learning and doing research

Interesting paper on utilizing citizen science for digitizing natural history collection data. It is nice to get the perspective of how these programs are constructed.

Michael Eisen is a researcher at UC Berkley and a co-founder of Public Library of Science. He discusses the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher, who is a critic of the open access movement. The most interesting thing for me was the mention in his blog post as well as in the comments section by another, that it is perhaps a trend for scholarly publications to produce open access journals. A peculiar motive, to perhaps "own" the open movement? It would be interesting to learn more about this trend, motivations behind it, and the implications on how that affects the OA movement.

And then a quick Google search found an announcement that Nature will be fully open access as of 20 October 2014... but still costs $5,200 USD to cover the article processing charges - perhaps Universities should (will) start to pay these costs instead of the high costs of subscriptions to scholarly journals as they continue to open up their access. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/open_access/index.html

Wow--these article publishing charges are ridiculous. I don't know if the scholars whose work gets published in these esteemed journals have budgets that would allow them to cover such fees, but I am sure that I wouldn't be able to get multiple articles covered by grants for my own work in the social sciences. And I'm 99% sure that the public universities I've worked for would not be ponying up that kind of money to cover my publication fees. This seems like yet another way to penalize scholars working in fields that don't get big grants or living in countries that don't have this kind of money to throw around. I prefer the UK's policy of requiring all nationally funded research to be published open access without any publication fees. That's the only way to even the playing field.

Publicado el 7/5/2012 This is a brief overview of several Open Peer Review Models, including ETAI, Nature, ACP, PLoS One and EJCBS. It is recorded based on a Prezi Presentation first developed for Open Access Week 2011 at UBC.

I found this presentation, in particular the visual representations, to be very useful in understanding just how diverse open peer review models can be. Several things stuck out to me throughout the presentation. First, I was surprised that many of the open peer review models either maintained anonymity of the reviewers or self-identification was optional. For example, PLOSone and the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics journals did not require self-identification. This raises a tension for me in that it does enable more people to participate in the publishing/review process, but it still inherently indicates context does not matter, which is something I disagree with. That is, if, for example, a paper is on student-faculty partnerships or feminism, it seems to me that crucial insights pertain to the particularities of the people reviewing an article. The other aspect that stuck out to me was how crucial it is for a journal to be intentional about implementing, integrating, and valuing an open peer review process. The Nature experiment is a good example of this. While I am sure they spent a great deal of time figuring out how to construct and enable an open peer review process, it was not necessarily emphasized as important by the journal nor well integrated into people's current practice. In contrast, the ETAI did this by permanently archiving the peer comments rather than deleting them unannounced, and editors also sent notifications to people that articles were ready rather than assuming people would seek out articles themselves.

"For most societies, the potential financial consequences of a move to Gold OA are the key concern. Income from subscriptions often provides a basis for financing other activities; as such, a loss in income can have far-reaching consequences. Naturally those who are charged with protecting a society´s interests are fearful of making changes that could have a negative impact on their organisation´s ability to fulfil its aims."

"Now, following criticism of its quality-control checks, the website is asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria. It hopes the move will weed out 'predatory journals': those that profess to publish research openly, often charging fees, but that are either outright scams or do not provide the services a scientist would expect, such as a minimal standard of peer review or permanent archiving. "

"The trouble is that impact factor of journals where researchers publish their work is a poor surrogate to measure an individual researcher's accomplishments. "

Una mirada crítica al acceso abierto: Nature 495, 426-429 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495426a http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers - and research funders - want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story - publishing 26,000 papers last year - it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. "I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing," he says.

La cuestión es que no hay quien ofrezca una opción sólida que pueda remplazar al Factor de Impacto. La comunidad científica lo ha adoptado cómo "LA" manera en que se puede medir el desempeño de los investigadores en el mundo. Y ese supuesto es hegemónico en el mundo. Tan es así que Scielo, a pesar de ser un repositorio en acceso abierto que sigue la filosofía de dar a conocer la producción científica latinoamericana, se decanto por generar indicadores bibliométricos de la mano de Thomson-Reuters y entrar al Web of Science. Esto no es asunto menor, es un indicador definitivo de que el dominio del FI no decaerá. Esto repercute directamente con la política científica nacional de cada país. En México CONACYT evalúa a los miembros del SNI mediante sus publicaciones en SCOPUS -pidiendo como evidencia las citaciones en este sistema de información. En Colombia, PUBLINDEX colocá revistas en A1 por el hecho de ser JCR-WoS u SJR-SCOPUS. Esto es innegable y seguirá pasando. Es por ello que iniciativas regionales de Acceso Abierto en América Latina (ya sean repositorios, leyes, etc:) ofrecen una posibilidad diferente que debe ser explotada por los investigadores de la región para mejorar la visibilidad de su producción. Del mismo modo, es ahí donde espacios como este MOOC deben ser valorados por su capacidad para diseminar la cultura del conocimiento abierto.

Great article that talks about the very nature of openness! In this article the author argues that openness in education has been successful in establishing itself as an approach. However, this initial victory should be viewed as part of a larger battle around the nature of openness. Drawing lessons from history and the green movement, a number of challenges for the open education movement are identified as it enters this new stage. The value of openness to education is stressed in that it relates to opportunities for development and the role of the higher education in society.

Thanks for sharing this, Marieke. It provides a wonderful overview of the central issues of "openness". This is one that should definitely be bumped up into the course reading list.

Hola Marieke. Coincido con Kevin en que el artículo es muy ilustrativo, con datos y una interesante reflexión sobre el acceso abierto. Pero me parece que la comparación con el movimiento verde requiere matizarse, principalmente el de los verdes porque era un movimiento político de transformación civilisatoria (eso se proponía, al menos) y terminó bastante desinflado (http://newleftreview.org/II/81/joachim-jachnow-what-s-become-of-the-german-greens). Igual, el texto vale la pena. Danke

"A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education covers a phenomenon all of us have suspected, mainly because we've seen it via our editorial boards and editorial advisors - the proliferation of open access (OA) publishers with new names, unknown pedigrees, big promises, and fulsome editorial boards, which often spam our editors and advisors with offers to join the parade." This article does a good job of outlining the pitfalls of the author pay model of open access journals. With open access journals the whole idea is to make it so that information is accessible to the public, but unfortunately that access comes with a cost. The cost of predatory open access journal undermines the whole democratic and altruistic intent behind open access journals. By taking advantage of recently endowed academics these predatory publishers cause many problems for both the individuals affected as well as the Open publishing industry. I also like how there is a clear definition of what predatory open access publishing is.

"Just as important as learning these helpful tools, however, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. Reminding us of where society is most vulnerable to those, Sagan writes: In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.He admonishes against the twenty most common and perilous ones - many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - with examples of each in action"

The 20 fallacies: "ad hominem - Latin for "to the man," attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously) argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia - but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out) argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn't, society would be much more lawless and dangerous - perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives) appeal to ignorance - the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist - and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don't understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don't understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - each in their own way enjoined to

Wonderful post, Kim! These are great guidelines alongside which to test ideas.

"The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) aims at defining standards and/or best practices for the new generation of library discovery services that are based on indexed search. These discovery services are primarily based upon indexes derived from journals, ebooks and other electronic information of a scholarly nature. "

"By leveraging technology, we can open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. Through new collaborations, we can create exciting shared spaces, both virtual and physical, where that inquiry can take place. The library is a natural home for these technology-rich spaces.

This article is fantastic, and speaks to just about everything I'm passionate about as an aspiring academic librarian. I'm somewhat worried about how smaller universities-my chosen workplace-will adapt to these newer models of scholarly communication and publication, and generally with how the academic conversation is changing. These exciting developments in what the university means have the potential to widen the already extensive divide between smaller and larger schools. I know the challenges section at the end talks a little bit about convincing decision makers to fund these projects, but has anyone read anything about how these changes can be made specifically by smaller or poorly funded universities?