Earlier this week, I got some exciting news - an article I wrote is going to be published! It's a small online journal with a teeny impact factor, but for baby doctors like me, it is great to just get some experience of the whole process. It's an article on novel therapies for small cell lung cancer that I wrote for my Masters, if you're interested...
But here's the big hurdle: how to make it Open Access?
Now anyone who reads journals will be familiar with the difficulty of reaching journal articles stuck behind massive pay walls. It's very frustrating - you find the article on Pubmed (other search engines are available) that promises to tell you everything you want to know about a topic, or explain the method for a certain experiment you want to do, or could outline a study you thought was novel but has actually already been done. They problem? You either have to hope your institution has access (that is, if you have an institutional affiliation) and if not, it's tough cheese unless you want to fork out some big bucks to read the article. Which might turn out to be useless, but of course you don't know that until you've read it.
And this is all despite the fact that research is largely publicly funded and undertaken by scientists who get paid relatively diddly squat to do ground breaking research. Journals are supplied with articles from said scientists, and then the refining and peer review process happens by other scientists in the same field who do not get paid to do so. Most journals these days are predominantly read online. So the main overheads for journals are for editing, formatting etc... Um... so why do journal subscriptions cost so much...?
Especially in the UK, there has been a real drive towards Open Access, and encouraging journals to make their publications freely available. One method to cover the overhead costs is to charge a publication fee - and herein lies my challenge. For a little journal like the one I'm publishing in, it still costs a few hundred dollars to meet that fee.
Who pays for that? Me. I pay for that. Because institutions can often only support those who are funded through specific funding bodies who usually ring fence some of their monies for that purpose (e.g. Wellcome, RCUK). This reflects well on these organisations, but you're a bit stuck if they're not your funders.
Doesn't this just become a thing where people who can afford to pay get stuff published (in this scientific world that is already ruled by a 'he who survives must publish' mantra?), thus devaluing the whole process into one driven by money? And what about those in the developing world - how do their research groups publish in even the smaller journals with these kinds of fees? And what hope is there of reaching some of the bigger, more expensive journals, who have much higher publication fees? And what about journals that are a mix of open access and pay-for articles - if you have to pay a subscription fee for the whole lot anyway, don't you just end up paying twice - once to publish and another to read?
I'm totally team Open Access, but it feels a bit like some journals are winning a game where old boundaries remain and new ones have been created. Hmm. I don't like those sorts of professional games.
As a complete aside and nothing to do with the above, my new-found employment freedom has given me a bit of brain breathing space which I didn't even realise I needed. The kind of breathing space that actually winds you quite majorly when all those squashed parts of the soul get some air time. Without wishing to get too heavy with you, dear blog reader, I will instead say that I can most heartily recommend such pauses, and share with you the view from the lake I went swimming in yesterday. Pretty sweet, huh?
But here's the big hurdle: how to make it Open Access?
Now anyone who reads journals will be familiar with the difficulty of reaching journal articles stuck behind massive pay walls. It's very frustrating - you find the article on Pubmed (other search engines are available) that promises to tell you everything you want to know about a topic, or explain the method for a certain experiment you want to do, or could outline a study you thought was novel but has actually already been done. They problem? You either have to hope your institution has access (that is, if you have an institutional affiliation) and if not, it's tough cheese unless you want to fork out some big bucks to read the article. Which might turn out to be useless, but of course you don't know that until you've read it.
And this is all despite the fact that research is largely publicly funded and undertaken by scientists who get paid relatively diddly squat to do ground breaking research. Journals are supplied with articles from said scientists, and then the refining and peer review process happens by other scientists in the same field who do not get paid to do so. Most journals these days are predominantly read online. So the main overheads for journals are for editing, formatting etc... Um... so why do journal subscriptions cost so much...?
Especially in the UK, there has been a real drive towards Open Access, and encouraging journals to make their publications freely available. One method to cover the overhead costs is to charge a publication fee - and herein lies my challenge. For a little journal like the one I'm publishing in, it still costs a few hundred dollars to meet that fee.
Who pays for that? Me. I pay for that. Because institutions can often only support those who are funded through specific funding bodies who usually ring fence some of their monies for that purpose (e.g. Wellcome, RCUK). This reflects well on these organisations, but you're a bit stuck if they're not your funders.
Doesn't this just become a thing where people who can afford to pay get stuff published (in this scientific world that is already ruled by a 'he who survives must publish' mantra?), thus devaluing the whole process into one driven by money? And what about those in the developing world - how do their research groups publish in even the smaller journals with these kinds of fees? And what hope is there of reaching some of the bigger, more expensive journals, who have much higher publication fees? And what about journals that are a mix of open access and pay-for articles - if you have to pay a subscription fee for the whole lot anyway, don't you just end up paying twice - once to publish and another to read?
I'm totally team Open Access, but it feels a bit like some journals are winning a game where old boundaries remain and new ones have been created. Hmm. I don't like those sorts of professional games.
As a complete aside and nothing to do with the above, my new-found employment freedom has given me a bit of brain breathing space which I didn't even realise I needed. The kind of breathing space that actually winds you quite majorly when all those squashed parts of the soul get some air time. Without wishing to get too heavy with you, dear blog reader, I will instead say that I can most heartily recommend such pauses, and share with you the view from the lake I went swimming in yesterday. Pretty sweet, huh?
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