by fdecomite
Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications Update:
[Via The Tree of Life]
Well, I have made some progress already in my quest I began on Father’s Day to free up the scientific publications of my father (see The Tree of Life: Freeing My Father’s Scientific Publications).
I wrote to the powers that be at the journal “Endocrinology” asking about when back issues might be made available. And I got a VERY quick reply from someone from Highwire Press which is the place that puts out Endocrinology on the webDear Jonathan Eisen,
The Endocrine Society is currently in the process of loading back issues for all of their journals. It will most likely be six months before back content is online.
The person who wrote back was almost apologetic about how long this might take but I am personally very pleased. Given that Endocrinology says the make all articles more than a year old available for free, this likely means that my father’s three papers in Endocrinology will soon be available for free online. This then changes my tally to:
Pubmed Central: 3
Free access: 17
Fee access: 11
Unavailable: 4Getting better. Of course, I want them all to be as widely available as possible so I am still going to work to move everything up the list towards Pubmed Central. Also, my brother suggests (in the comments to my previous post) that since my father was a government employee we should be able to just post his papers online. I think this is a good option but I still will be working on the “official” channels to see what happens.
Since I made the original posting there have been some useful comments about what I might do on some other sites. See for example, this FriendFeed discussion (I have just discovered FriendFeed and it seems quite cool but I am not sure if everyone can see this discussion or not so please let me know if this link does not work).
I will keep posting on my progress as well as what I learn about Copyright, Free Access, etc.
Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Social media, Web 2.0
June 29, 2008 at 6:12 am
I recently talked to a professor who’s currently making a name for himself through a string of high-profile publications. We talked about open access and whether he’d post PDFs of his papers online without the consent of the publisher.
He’s usually very irreverent and headstrong and has a substantial ego (I realize that this description fits for many profs). I asked him: “So, if the [Big Name Journal] would threaten to never publish a paper from you again unless you took down the PDFs from your website, wouldn’t you just answer “Thanks, but no thanks” and take your future work to another respected journal?”
I found his answer quite sobering, because I had expected otherwise: “No, I’d take them down. Big Name Journal is just too important for me.”
June 29, 2008 at 8:04 am
An important thing to remember is that Big Name Journal is providing something in return for closed access that very few other journals can – a future. For example, if I could get a string of papers published in Nature, I would hand them just about anything,
Because they are a (the?) top journal where having multiple publications can make a career, provide a strong route for tenure and make the grant money flow a little more easily.
This a reasonable quid pro quo. But it only indirectly matters whether anyone ever reads those articles. It is the reputation of the Big Name journal that supplies my needs.
The same does not necessarily hold for other journals and not all of my papers are going to be accepted by the Big Name Journal. So the same quid pro quo may not apply with other journals and there may be other concerns, like having as many researchers as possible have access to the paper.
How would this professor feel about having to pay $30 or more to access his own paper 10 years later? That is what a large number of researchers have to do currently, simply because they do not work at a large instituion that provides access.
That is part of the battle being fought. How to value articles that are older than a year, or 5 years? I think most researchers would agree that these should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Charging $30 or more for access does not provide that.
The NIH says that after a year, government funded publications should be available to all. That sounds about right for the top tier of journals. So, would Big Name Journal make the same threat if the paper was posted on the professor’s web site after a year? If it was available at PubMed Central?
That would be a more interesting discussion, I think.
June 30, 2008 at 10:18 am
Of course, the reputation of Big Name Journal does count for a lot in a researcher’s academic career. In this case, however, the professor had already had three publications (including a lead article) in Big Name Journal in the past year alone – that’s why I wouldn’t have expected him to throw in the towel so quickly (even in the hypothetical situation).
You’re right, though, that it doesn’t have to be an either/or situation. A one-year window or at least a sliding pricing scale would a go a long way towards making everybody happier… I can’t imagine that it makes sense from a business perspective to charge $30 for a 10-year-old article.