Academic Prestige & Open Access Publishing
I think I’ve been living in a parallel universe, or at least on another planet. For more than a decade now, unbeknown to me, governments, academics, international publishers and charities have been thrashing out ways, on a global scale, to freely disseminate my research. Well, actually, it’s not just for my small contribution (that would be weird), it’s to share the fruits of all academic endeavours with anyone who can access the internet. At least that’s my take on open access in higher education (HE).
So what’s been going on and what has it really got to do with me? I am of course talking about open access (OA) to research papers and scholarly work. I don’t want to be alarmist but we appear to be in the middle of a revolution of seismic proportions. It’s not an overnight revolution though, it turns out it’s been going on for the last 20 years, so it might more accurately be called evolution. The story is complex and multi-facetted with many forces at work. I don’t profess to understand all of it, so in this short piece I’d like to share a few thoughts on the important issue of prestige, how this is a major barrier to OA and what’s happening to overcome this.
I’m a Senior Lecturer in biochemistry at the University of Manchester and have been here for the past 18 years. I teach medical students, undergraduates, and postgraduates in biological sciences, including 14 PhD students so far. I attend conferences, give seminars, write and review grants and publish our research findings. This latter activity is our life-blood. That old maxim of publish or perish is not an idle threat. So, given that we live in a time where almost anybody can publish anything that can be read freely throughout the world, why don’t we post our work on our own web sites? It’s no secret that academics are generally a philanthropic bunch and most of us probably believe that if it’s possible to promulgate our findings freely then the world might become a better place.
It turns out that a major barrier to OA in HE is academic prestige. Quality and prestige are important currencies in academia. So it’s no surprise that we hold established journals in high regard and want our work to be published in them. Prestigious journals have long histories, many of them born out of academic societies, we trust them and we’re proud to publish in them. However, the prestige problem now runs deeper than that. Our success is judged on the perceived quality of such research journals. Indeed, universities depend heavily on that numerical value which defines journal quality, the impact factor, to measure academic productivity. Such numbers are processed to give other numbers that define our career output. When I started my lab few cared about these numbers, it was nice to publish in a high impact journal, but we didn’t really need the numbers to tell us that a journal had a good reputation. How things have changed. The importance of such measures cannot be over-estimated. Promotions committees, funding bodies, reviewers, editors and even my son want to know my h-index (it’s 20 by the way). The stakes are high, if the numbers aren’t right then there’s no funding, these days that means no research, no promotion and no job. It’s not surprising then that publishing in prestigious journals with high impact factors is the Holy Grail for many academics and their institutions. On this basis alone I doubt we will ever see a universally accepted system whereby scientists publish their work on their own web sites.
How then can we have a system that allows our research findings to be made freely available whilst maintaining quality and prestige that can be measured? In an attempt to answer this I’ll first have to explore what we mean by “freely” and the definition of open access. My mother taught me many years ago that nothing is actually free, there is of course a cost for all activity, so somebody has to pay something. In academia open access generally means freely available — widely disseminated and no access charge, it’s not always available to use without some kind of condition. One way of achieving this has been through the so-called gold open access model, where the author pays the journal so that the article can be freely accessed. Many prestigious journals offer a gold access route and so at first glance the problem is solved, academics can have the best of both worlds, our work freely available to all in our favourite journals. Indeed this has been the case for many years now and I have published several papers through this route. There does seem to be a snag though, the publication charges are enormous for free access articles. For me this hasn’t yet been a problem, as funding bodies pay the charges and insist that the work is published as open access. However, for some funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the recent implementation of the stringent OA policy effectively bars them from publishing in some prestigious journals, including Nature and Science. Whilst well-established scientists might welcome this, for many it could adversely affect their careers. Indeed, this is likely to be a contributing factor to the more recent announcement that the Gates Foundation has struck a deal with the publishers of Science to pay $100, 000 for OA charges associated with their funded research.
At the moment then it looks like we are at a stage where prestigious journals are paid by funders to publish OA research. However, the costs are probably unsustainable and the publishers are profiting from money that comes from charities or taxpayers. Last year in the UK the Charity Open Access Fund (formed by six major charities) spent £6.6 million on OA article processing charges, an increase of over 32% on the previous year. This is in addition to the £14 million announced by the UK research councils (RCUK) to pay for this year’s OA charges. I would be amazed if this can continue to be justified. Indeed, the charities have started to set up their own publishing platforms and there are new online not-for-profit publishers, driven by academics, that are developing their own prestigious brand.
So perhaps the OA revolution is indeed more of an evolution and as the new online OA platforms become more established, their prestige currency will rise and as in Darwinian evolution, those that fail to adapt will become extinct.
