Should academia boycott "locked-down" academic journals?

re: Should academia boycott "locked-down" academic journals?

robyn.owens — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:09:52 GMT

Open access is not the only attribute to optimize however. It is really important to go for high quality outputs and to consider the journal impact factor before you submit a publication. There are plenty of open access journals indexed by ISI, for example, the Public Library of Science Journals (see http://www.plos.org/journals/index.html)

re: Should academia boycott "locked-down" academic journals?

david.glance — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:48:14 GMT

and there are varying degrees of "closedness" - some journals may not object to publishing pre-prints in institutional repositories for example. UWA is working towards supporting an open access repository but it is going to be an interesting question as to what can actually be published in it.

re: Should academia boycott "locked-down" academic journals?

Toby Burrows — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:23:39 GMT

The crucial issue is the system of (1) jobs/tenure/promotion and (2) research quality assessment (for grants especially). Demonstrating a high-quality, high-impact publication record is essential for both of these. But journal impact and quality are largely defined in terms of the ISI impact factors (despite some well-known flaws in ISI's methodology), and the journals of the big commercial publishers still dominate ISI's database.

Open access journals like PLOS have made some headway, but even they are not "free" - many require authors to pay a substantial fee to get an article published. Several of the big commercial publishers now offer similar "open access" arrangements of their own. Most of these publishers also allow pre-prints and post-prints to be freely available through institutional repositories (see the SHERPA/ROMEO listings).

The current system won't change fundamentally unless all the research universities can agree collectively to move to a different approach which combines open institutional repositories with peer review, impact measurement, and a journal/discipline framework, in some way.

As it stands, postgrads and ECRs should still be aiming to publish in high-impact journals (as the current system defines them) - whether commercial or open access - but they can get some extra exposure for their work by putting a copy in an institutional or discipline-based repository as well.