What is your experience with open
access publishing?
I write about open access publishing in my blog, “Publishing
Archaeology” (see URL below) and I speak out within my scholarly community
(archaeology) through papers and workshops at conferences, publishing in
newsletters, and such. I have posted papers in online open access “journals”
(non-peer reviewed). I post most of my papers, somewhat inconsistently between
my personal ASU website, Academia.edu, and the Selected Works site. I like to
try out new scholarly programs and sites to see if they are useful for
promoting open access and the values and benefits of OA. Academia.edu turned
out to be a great site, but Researchgate turned out to be not at all useful,
but with many annoying traits, so I unsubscribed. Selected Works has a very
attractive interface, but seems less widely used the Academia.edu and slightly
more difficult to use. I have a deep personal and professional commitment to
open access (that is one reason I started my publishing blog in 2007), although
I have become somewhat cynical over the lack of progress, and even signs of
retrenchment or anti-progress, in the past few years.
Do you believe that open access
to scholarly research is important? Why or why not?
If scholarly research is important, then open access is important.
One does research in order to build knowledge that is communicated to others:
colleagues and the public. Open access contributes in a strong way to the basic
and fundamental goals of research and publication. Much of my research is
funded by U.S. taxpayers, and they have a right to know what I have done with
the funds, and to see my results. Traditional publishing in journals used to
serve the goals of research/publishing very well, but today with the Internet
we can promote the goals and values of research far more widely, and
traditional journal publishing only serves a limited sector of our potential
audience. Furthermore, commercial journals now serve to limit access to
published papers by refusing to engage in open access (without a big fee).
I do research and fieldwork in Mexico. As such I work as a guest
of the Mexican government and the Mexican nation. Most of the journals I
publish in, however, are not available to my Mexican colleagues or the Mexican
public. They are locked behind a pay wall, and people in Mexico (and most of
the rest of the world) simply cannot afford the fees required to get access.
When Academia.edu and Selected Works provide access statistics, my
Spanish-language papers often have a higher download rate than my
English-language papers. I interpret this as a function of the lack of
availability of journal articles around the world. Most of my U.S. colleagues
can get access to online journals through a university website, but that is not
true in Mexico. Posting my papers online is the only way around this obstacle,
yet that very simple and basic example of scholarly activity—making my own
papers available online—is being turned into a crime.
What do you see as the biggest
barrier to open access publishing options for scholars?
Let me list three barriers to open access publishing. First,
the commercial publishers who lock up published papers behind a paywall are
perhaps the largest barrier to open access. Modern academic research is the
only realm where one works with compensation from the public and from one’s own
time and resources, then gives the results for free to a large corporation, who
then make profits from one’s work while preventing others from seeing it. Does
this sound right? Not to me.
The second barrier to open access is apathy and ignorance by
researchers. Most researchers just want to get on with their research without
being bothered by setting up websites, posting papers, or dealing with the
ethical and professional issues of open access.
The third barrier is universities that fail to recognize the
substantial gains they could make if they embraced open access. Few
universities have an institutional repository where all papers published by
faculty (and students) are archived. While journals have the legal right to
suppress the public posting of article pdfs, authors have the right to send pdf
reprints to colleagues. The “reprint button” is a way around the barrier, by
automating send sending of reprints while maintaining the lack of open posting
of pdfs. How would universities (such as ASU) benefit from embracing open
access, setting up a repository, and promoting other open access ideas and
procedures?
First, research carried out at the university would become better known.
Citations will increase (this has been shown quantitatively) and overall
familiarity with university research will increase. This promotes science and
scholarship and its availability to colleagues and the public. Faculty will
benefit from this. Second, by boosting the research profile, it will increase the
prestige of the university and its faculty. More people will see more of the
activity taking place at the university. One of the basic missions of
universities—creating new knowledge through research, will thus be promoted
more explicitly and more intensively. Third, people outside the university
will become more familiar with what the university is doing, and the university
can thus have a greater impact on such people in the local region. Fourth,
the global reach and engagement of the university will be improved with open
access, as constituents around the world getter better access to the research
findings of faculty and students. Fifth, the public display of
research that is at the cutting edge of individual disciplines, and research
that breaks new ground by synthesizing multiple disciplines, will benefit by
finding a wider audience, which encourages communication and synergies.
In the case of ASU, these benefits of open access (and this is
just a quick off-the-cuff list; there are surely more) fit with many of the
principles of the New American University (http://newamericanuniversity.asu.edu/). I continue to be surprised at
the lack of action on open access at this university.
What advice or recommendations
about open access publishing (or scholarly publishing in general) would you
give to early career researchers?
My first piece of advice would be that conducting research and
publishing is more important than worrying about open access. I know of at
least one colleague who put so much time into an OA project that they failed to
produce sufficient scholarship to get tenure (and they were denied tenure).
Everyone is grateful for this person’s professional contributions, but that
person, and probably the discipline generally, would probably be better off if
they had spent more time getting their own scholarship in order. That said, one
rarely has to make a stark choice between basic scholarship and OA activities. I
would advise early career researchers to make their publications available in
one or more repositories or websites. Publish in OA journals, agitate within
professional societies for OA policies and practices. Young scholars are
generally highly media savvy, and they should explore the growing number of
options for scholarship and scholarly communication, including OA and
OA-related activities.
Resources:
My blog, Publishing Archaeology:
(http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/)
An online, open access, paper: Smith, Michael E. (2011)
Why Anthropology is too Narrow an Intellectual Context for Archaeology. Anthropologies
3: (online). http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2011/05/why-anthropology-is-too-narrow.html.
My personal website: http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/
My site on Academia. Edu: https://asu.academia.edu/MichaelESmith
My site on Selected Works: http://works.bepress.com/michael_e_smith/
1 comment:
Thanks Michael. Happy OA week.
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