[Taxacom] Open Access Publishing

[Alex Borisenko]

Dear Ken,

There is one more strategy: to support (through paper submission and peer review) middlemen who do this not for profit. 
An example is the Russian Journal of Theriology: http://zmmu.msu.ru/rjt/ whose publisher covers publication costs from 
selling to libraries and from other publishing projects (also largely science-related).
It is a low impact periodical with limited taxonomic focus (mammals), but it is an academic peer-reviewed journal with 
an ISSN. Importantly, it is a truly 'open access' journal - free to publish and free to download PDFs. IMO, seeking out 
journals like this and raising their impact factors by submitting high quality papers and reviews will be a step towards 
promoting open access without sacrificing scientific credibility as it is currently perceived. In a perfect world, it 
may also stimulate some larger academic publishers to revisit their current business models.

Best wishes,
Alex



On 02/10/2010 12:31 AM, Kenneth Kinman wrote:
> Dear All,
>        For a large number of publishers claiming "open access" options
> under various names, it seems like just more PR of a sort, and whether
> it is paid for by end users or is an upfront-paid "option" for authors
> (their institutions), it still seems to pay an expensive middle-man
> publishing firm a rather hefty fee that tends to restrict the
> availability of scientific information from those less able to pay.
>          I guess this is fine for institutions backed by governments with
> "deep pockets" financially, but like media in general, your influence
> tends to depend on how much you can pay to get it into mainstream
> scientific circulation (which can in turn influence how much you can get
> government agencies to continue funding your research).
>         The question is whether it make sense to pay such a middle-man
> fee when much less expensive options are available on an increasingly
> egalitarian Internet.  Most new valuable, scientific information could
> easily be transmitted by text files or even richer PDF files, neither of
> which require a middle-man publisher that inflates the price and thus
> restricts how many people can access it.
>         The Internet is a great tool for eliminating middlemen that can
> unnecessarily add great cost and restrict access, but often only
> minimally add to quality (if at all).   Frankly, I'd rather have greater
> access and do my own peer review (quality assessment).  In general, one
> cannot probably always trust anonymous peer reviewers picked by
> publishers (who can be influenced by financial concerns) to be totally
> objective in their reviews.  When profits become a concern, scientific
> truth can become a casualty.  In some ways, publishers can be as
> problematic as the U.S. Congress.
>              --------Ken Kinman
>
>
>
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-- 
____________________________________________

Alex Borisenko, Ph.D.
Curator of zoological collections
Biodiversity Institute of Ontario
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1
Phone: +1 519 824-4120 ext. 54834
Fax: +1 519 824-5703
E-mail: aborisen at uoguelph.ca
http://mammaliabol.org/
http://www.dnabarcoding.ca/