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We spend years teaching our children to share. Yet from the moment students enter academia, we discourage it. Lock up your work in prestigious subscription journals; keep your data close to your chest; compete instead of collaborate – these are the messages transmitted by peers and mentors. These are the tenets of our unhealthy academic culture. We need to change our priorities.
Every day we make amazing discoveries, some of which could even save lives. Then we lock that information in journals that most of the population cannot read. In many parts of the world, access to subscription journals is just too expensive.
The amount some US or UK universities pay a single publisher in a year equals a large percentage of the annual budget of research institutions in less developed countries (over 10% for some Latin American institutions). The cost of an electronic subscription to a single high-profile journal can be as much as the annual salary of a researcher. Institutions in these countries often have to choose between conducting educational and research programmes, paying instructors and researchers, or paying publishers. Effectively, that means forgoing access.
Paywalls stifle innovation
A lack of access to information hinders learning, stifles innovation and slows scientific progress. I have watched colleagues researching public health issues struggle to obtain articles on the most recent developments in their field. I have seen the frustration of students who are motivated to learn about a new subject but hit paywall after paywall.
I hit those paywalls myself every day. I am able to eventually get past some, tracking down author versions or receiving articles from people I reach out to through email and social media. But there are some articles I cannot gain access to, and am left to wonder if there is information crucial to my research that I am missing.
Reforming the current system will require action at multiple levels: government and funder initiatives; institutional open access mandates; and, perhaps most importantly, strong commitments to openness from individual researchers.
I am an early career researcher, and have pledged to make all of my work openly available, forgoing publication in closed access journals like Nature and Science. I have been told by peers and mentors that this is career suicide. But I do not believe it has to be. There are so many ways to be open and be successful in academia. There is even evidence that being open can help your career.
Publishing openly, whether via open access journals or self-archiving, can lead to more citations and more visibility for your work. This is especially important for early career researchers as they try to make a name for themselves. Published studies that make data openly available also tend to receive more citations.
If Journal Impact Factor (JIF) is a concern – this flawed measure is unfortunately still used by many institutions in hiring, tenure, and promotion evaluations – there are many open access journals with moderate-to-high JIFs, including several BioMed Central and Public Library Of Science journals.
It is encouraging that over 400 institutions and over 10,000 individuals have now signed the San Francisco declaration on research assessment, pledging not to consider JIF and to weigh the scientific content of a paper more heavily than where it is published. Some institutions now explicitly value open access publications in hiring, tenure, and promotion evaluations.
Peer review is transparent
Many researchers worry about the quality of peer review in open access journals. However, no controlled study has been done comparing peer review in open access versus subscription journals. A 2013 sting conducted by Science magazine’s John Bohannon showed that some open access journals readily accepted a spoof paper. But other reputable open access publishers, such as Frontiers, Hindawi and PLoS, rejected the paper. It was recently found that subscription journals from Springer and IEEE published over one hundred spoof papers, showing that flaws in peer review are not exclusive to open access journals. In their favour, peer review in open access journals is often transparent – the history is published alongside the article, so those wanting to check its rigour can read every criticism and every change.
Of course, openness is not limited to publishing in open access journals. If researchers feel it necessary to publish in certain subscription journals, there is always the option to use the green open access model and self-archive an author copy in an open repository. In this context, it is important that authors know their rights and do not sign them away to publishers. Attaching an author addendum to your publishing agreement is a great way to publish where you want while still retaining the right to openly distribute your work.
In short, there does not have to be a conflict between being open and being successful. You have many options, and the benefits to your career can be significant. Publishing openly means that you get more exposure for your work, the public has access to your research, taxpayers get more value for money and there is greater opportunity for your research to influence policy.
At any stage of your career, you have the right to stand up for what you believe in. If you believe in openness, stand up for it. Access to information is a human right, but it is often treated as a privilege. This has to change. And it will take all of us to make it happen.
Erin McKiernan is a researcher in experimental and computational neuroscience, and an advocate for open access, open data and open science. Follow her on Twitter @emckiernan13.
More like this:
• Open access is not enough on its own – data must be free too
• Why academic publishers still add value
• Why open access should be a key issue for university leaders
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