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Open access: infatuation or love at first sight?

2016; Wiley; Volume: 221; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/apha.12741

1748-1716

Pontus B. Persson,

Academic Publishing and Open Access

Alexandra Elbakyan is a software developer, neurotechnology scientist and academic Robin Hood from Kazakhstan. She has made sure that, while you are reading this sentence, thousands of scientific articles are made available to all. Her free depository exceeds 50 million articles. Kim Dotcom, born Kim Schmitz, also known as Kimble and Kim Tim Jim Vestor, is an Internet entrepreneur and hacker from Germany, who made a fortune out of making copyright-protected music open to share. United States Authorities demand both suspects to be extradited. Emotions flare when these two vitae are placed side-to-side. Many scientists, politicians and institutions feel that – unlike music – scientific articles need to be free, because research is often government (and thus tax) funded. Thus, society is entitled to the results, straightaway and at no cost. For these opinion leaders, open access is love at first sight. However, we must not mistake Elbakyan's way of providing millions of articles for nothing with open access. Open access simply means that the scientists doing the research, and not the readers, pay the bill for publishing. Taking money from the laboratory researchers to publish their results bears many advantages for a journal: In the world of open access, there no longer are librarians scrutinizing journal quality before purchasing. Thus, the potential profit behind the seemingly philanthropic open-access movement has set free sinister fortune seekers constantly launching new journals with flashy names. Similar to the pioneer open-access policy journals, these so-called predatory journals take a handling fee, which often adds up to thousands of dollars. Such publications’ fees are unsurmountable thresholds for scientists in developing countries. Thus, the pay-to-publish policy of all open-access journals has the potential to effectively shut out several countries from actively participating in science. Publishers, on the other hand, see similarities between Elbakyan's and Dotcom's behaviours. Both persons similarly infringe intellectual property (at least for company sponsored science). But are there any advantages of non-open-access journals? Yes, all purchased journals must first have gone through a professional decision-making. Resources are allocated to journals according to performance. Predatory journals have no future in this setting. What is more, if non-open-access journals provide all handling and publishing free to the author, we may refer to them as free to publish or open publishing. What is morally superior, open access or open publishing? That is a difficult call. Scientists may not consider that publishing has always been a part of science and great resources for science have long ago been allotted to libraries for experts to judge and purchase the journals. Paying for open access means that the scientists are paying the bill twice. Does our money for libraries return to the workbench when we publish open access? Probably not. Taken together, the open-access movement may be more like infatuation than love at first sight. Acta Physiologica goes both ways. The authors can pay for open access (at a comparable cost to other open-access journals), or they can publish for free (Persson 2015). Hence, our journal can be seen as a form of scientist's plebiscite for open access vs. open publishing. The result is quite clear: far more than 95% of scientist choose the free-to-publish track. This astonishing result is in stark contrast to the perceived majority if scientists demanding open access. Why is that so? Perhaps, when it comes to publishing, we see the issue of open access from a reader's perspective. After all, we read much more than we publish. When a bill is presented for printing our work, we find us in the position of the average scientist with far too few resources, and we tick the free to publish option! None.