Should We be More "Open" About Publishing Research?

Abstract

Dr Spock is a brilliant young vascular surgeon who is up for promotion next year. The chair of surgery has warned him that he needs to increase his list of publications to assure passage. He has recently had a paper reviewed by one of the top journals in his specialty, Journal X-special, with several suggestions for revision. He received an e-mail request for manuscript submission from a newly minted, open access, Journal of Vascular Disease Therapy, which promises a quick and likely favorable response for a fee. What should be done? A. Send the paper to another peer-reviewed journal with the suggested revisions. B. Resubmit the paper to Journal X-special. C. Submit to the online journal as is to save time. D. Submit to the online journal and another regular journal. E. Look for another job. These were the questions posed by Jones & McCullough in their excellent recent publication that discussed corruption in publication research [1]. Is open-access publishing the wave of the future in science? Open access (OA) means unrestricted free online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. Open access is primarily intended for scholarly journal articles, but is also provided for a growing number of theses, book chapters, and scholarly monographs [2–4]. The OA movement had its official start in 2002 with the establishment of the Budapest Open-Access Initiative [2]. Public access to the World Wide Web became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The low-cost distribution technology has fueled the open-access movement. Conventional non-open-access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses, or pay-per-view [2]. Some non-open-access journals provide open access after an embargo period of 6–12 months or longer [3]. The movement for open access to science seeks to achieve unrestricted and free access to academic publications on the Internet. To this end, two mechanisms have been established: the gold road, in which scientific journals are openly accessible, and the green road, in which publications are self-archived in repositories. The publication of the Finch Report in 2012, advocating exclusively the adoption of the gold road, generated a debate as to whether either of the two options should be prioritized [5]. The recommendations of the Finch Report stirred controversy among academicians specialized in open-access issues, who felt that the role played by repositories was not adequately considered and because the green road places the burden of publishing costs basically on authors. The Finch Report’s conclusions are compatible with the characteristics of science communication in the UK and they could surely also be applied to the (few) countries with a powerful publishing industry and substantial research funding. In Spain, both the current national legislation and the existing rules at universities largely advocate the green road. This is directly related to the structure of scientific communication in Spain, where many journals have little commercial significance, the system of charging a fee to authors has not been adopted, and there is a good repository infrastructure. As for open-access policies, the performance of the scientific communication system in each country should be carefully analyzed to determine the most suitable open-access strategy [5]. The premises behind open-access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while also making OA self-sufficient. The challenge is to establish a sustainable financial business model that will permit the use of digital technology but yet not endanger the decades-old traditional publication model and peer review system. Rather than making journal articles accessible through a subscription business model, all academic publications could be made free to read and published with some other cost-recovery models, such as publication charges, subsidies, or charging subscriptions only for the print edition, with the online edition gratis or “free to read” [6–8]. The idealists for the open-access movement are seeking open access to the literature but also to the data that constitute the research within the manuscript [9]. The open-access movement is maturing and must be embraced in some format. Authors seem to be slower in adopting open access than the idealists in the movement [6–9].