Cheaper and Better: Why Scientific Advancement Demands the Move to Open Access Publishing

Abstract

Once in a while, someone has the courage to stand up and say something that is obviously true but that, once it has been said out loud, changes things. After someone says the emperor has no clothes, the crowd can react to the absurdity of the situation. Brian A. Nosek and Yoav Bar-Anan’s article (this issue) speaks the truth about the archaic and inefficient system of journals and commercial publishers that we academics have been relying on for disseminating our work. Nosek and Bar-Anan describe the process by which commercial publishers exploit our volunteer labor as researchers, reviewers, and editors; claim copyright over our work; delay dissemination of the work; and then charge our own university libraries for access to it. Articulating it helps us realize that this process is absurd, and we can react. The days of our dependence on commercial publishers should be over. In the current system, universities and research institutions are both supply and demand: supplying resources and financial backing to professors and researchers as they write journal articles and then paying commercial publishers for access to those articles. That business model should be obsolete in a world where researchers can share their work by simply posting it online, costlessly. We, as scientists, have helped keep an archaic, exploitative, and inefficient system alive. Nosek and Bar-Anan have penned a persuasive entreaty for us to throw off the yoke of our exploiters. In doing so, we can also advance a fundamental goal that we all share: the speedy dissemination of scientific knowledge. They have painted a compelling vision of this future in which the most obvious beneficiary is the advancement of our science. The scientific utopia to which Nosek and Bar-Anan invite us would bring us closer to our scientific goals of wide and efficient dissemination, insightful and transparent review, broader and faster influence for our work, and more rapid scientific progress. What could get in the way of moving toward scientific utopia at full speed? Institutional inertia is probably the largest single reason. If the editorial team at well-respected journals decided to take their status, prestige, and wisdom and move en mass to a new online version of the same journal, they would undoubtedly take the paper submissions with them and effectively cut commercial publishers out of the picture. But getting the whole group to move requires work and a coordinated effort that few have the incentive to undertake. Our university libraries arguably have more incentive to enact change than editorial teams because libraries are the ones that directly pay the exorbitant subscription fees to journals (e.g., $1,165 for a 1-year subscription to the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology through Elsevier; the fees add up, and libraries spend millions of dollars on journal subscriptions each year). Indeed, university libraries have begun trying to nudge us toward open-access outlets for our work, but they could do more. As an essential early step, libraries should educate professors and researchers about the consequences of their choices (e.g., perpetuation of the dysfunctional status quo), and they should also work with our professional societies (e.g., the American Psychological Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology) to support open access journals. Currently, commercial publishers pay fees to professional societies, and, although the fees are modest, societies have come to depend on them. The fees may, in effect, be buying professional societies’ support for the current system. However, the nominal fees commercial publishers pay to professional societies are negligible compared to the fees that libraries pay to the commercial publishers for access to articles. Thus, it may be financially advisable for libraries to help wean professional societies from their addiction to fees from commercial publishers by giving some financial support to the societies. This exchange would make it easier for professional societies to move their flagship journals to open access formats. Short of such coordinated action to shift to open access outlets, we can take individual action. There are open access journals out there in every field, and when we can submit to them, we should. Publishing in open access journals is also a good bet, because even if those journals aren’t the most selective now, their status is likely to increase as more submissions move online. Open access facilitates dissemination, reading, citation, and influence. Some of these journals, such as Judgment and Decision Making (http://journal.sjdm.org/), do not charge submission or publication fees. Others, like PLoS, do, but this ought not to be an insurmountable obstacle to