Perhaps I wasn't clear. Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good not because they are less selective, but although they are less selective. The reason their acceptance criteria don't adversely affect the quality of their published articles is because they do select on quality -- if it's not good, it doesn't go in. But they don't select on impact.
Ah, my mistake, I see what you're claiming. However, let me ask a more substantive question. You end by stating:"The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them."
The OA model largely involves shifting the cost from the user to the author. This will be paid out of the authors grant money, which in many cases is publicly funded as well. It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim.
Reminds me a bit of how Google uses "open" as a competitive weapon to push Android. I wonder if OA publishers are not doing the same to push their business model...
It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim.
Were you born in that ivory tower, or did you just move there before you could read?
Go get a job outside of research for a while (software companies are hiring!) and then take another look at this question. Those of us on the outside can tell you the difference between PLoS and, say, Nature. It's about $200 per year per journal, or $30 per article in small quantities. More importantly, it's the difference between being able to quickly skim an article in thirty seconds with one click and paying to skim each and every one of the hundreds of articles that are required to really get a firm grasp on a field. It's the difference between being able to simply link your most interested blog readers to the original research (complete with original data and figures) and having to tediously paraphrase everything you want to convey, a paraphrasing process that often goes awry.
I was a graduate student for seven years and a postdoc for three. I still count many academics among my friends. I sometimes entertain the thought of once again working for a university. So I'm afraid I'm not very shy about potentially insulting my own social class. ;)
And I'm sorry the subject makes me angry. But it makes me angry! For example, the fact that most of my own published work is trapped behind expensive paywalls makes me very unhappy.
And I use the phrase ivory tower not as a mere gratuitous insult, but because it's the metaphor that seems to fit. Every time this subject comes up, a few people pop up to say that they just can't see the problem: Everyone who goes to school or works in science has one-click access to the whole literature, right? And if I happen to not be a college student or a scientist, can't I just physically travel to the nearest well-funded, publicly accessible university library? Doesn't anyone who matters have such a library at hand, and the time to visit it?
There was a time when printed journals in university libraries were the best we could do. But now it is 2011, and many people no longer read physical books or magazines. In less than a decade the idea of having to leave the house to retrieve written material will be as quaint as having to talk to a human telephone operator to place a long-distance call. In this era, if the attitude I described above isn't "ivory-tower", what is? What should I be reserving the ivory-tower metaphor for?
What exactly are those costs? Reviewers work for free. The only other thing that's needed is a web application and some hosting. These costs are negligible compared to the tax that closed journals are imposing on the scientific world.
At a premier journal in my field, a "managing editor" is paid for the 25+ hours/wk of work assigning submissions out to the SEs/AEs (based on area of focus), and—more importantly—following up with them on their progress. As I understand, he's also responsible for managing itineraries and speaking engagements for the editor-in-chief, who travels regularly evangelizing (and getting feedback on) the top journal in our field.
We have a couple of EICs for major journals at our school, and I suspect (but do not know for certain) that the journal subsidizes their conference attendance too, so that the journal's senior editorial staff can meet in person at least annually.
My point is: don't constrain your cost focus to just distribution. There's more to running any organization than initially meets the eye.
Is all of that necessary? Would a model like the following work:
Have a web site where scientists can submit papers. Other scientists can then review the papers. The reviews are publicly (though optionally anonymously) published along with the papers, and the authors of the paper can submit revised versions of the paper.
The website would get far too many terrible papers.
Many papers would get no reviews.
Many reviews would be terrible, and done by non-trustworthy people.
The problem with the system you are suggesting is that it feels a lot like wikipedia, and who "wins" on wikipedia has little to do quality, and a lot to do with who is willing to spend the most time editing / wiki-lawyering.
Sadly, the evidence so far strongly suggests that you're right, and this idealistic approach won't work. That evidence is from PLoS ONE (which remember is the main example of how many innovations do work). They have had the ability for people to comment on and evaluate their papers for a couple of years now, and it's hardly ever used.
This would not work. Reviewers would not feel comfortable being completely honest if they knew their reviews would be published publicly. In any case, there should be no need for the reviews to be public.
Reviewers should be prepared to stand by their reviews. If they're not prepated for it to be known that they said something in a review, then they should not say that thing. Anonymity and secrecy in reviewing doesn't help the field.
Why should the reviewers feel unconfortable? In the current system, reviews are made available to the paper writers, and that doesn't seem to inhibit the reviewers, despite the fact that one often has a good idea of who the reviewers are, especially in the more niche fields of science.
Even today reviewers run the risk of having their reviews made public, since nothing prevents the author from disseminating it. They are however normally anonymous.
> It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim.
There have been studies (arXiv used to link to them, maybe still does) that show that open access substantially increases the number of citations a paper receives. That strongly suggests that open access works better for distributing research even within the academy, which is just common sense — open-access papers are easier to discuss, find links to on Reddit and Wikipedia, and often simply obtain. Outside the academy, where it's even harder to measure readership, we can expect the effect to be much more extreme, since most people outside the academy actually have to pay to read non-open-access papers.
Good point: But the analogy may/may not hold if we look at actual numbers. My bet is on it not holding and PLOS style coming out better. Unfortunately, i have no idea of the balance sheet/economics of a journal publisher. Is there any such data that can be compared?
