The University Needs to Support Open Access

Open Access. Research is increasingly being published in open access journals that, unlike traditional research publications, offer free online access to everyone. That gives rise to new possibilities as well as new challenges for the research community.
Illustration: Lisa Grue, Underwerket

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INTERVIEW The idea of Open Access publishing is gaining ground and some universities and governments have mandated that researchers make all of their research Open Access. However, some researchers find that Open Access publishing requires more work than traditional publishing. But is Open Access on the rise if it is less convenient than traditional publishing and what does this mean for the university and for the individual researcher?

By Charlie Breindahl

The traditional career advice to university scholars is publish or perish. Each step in a research career is taken on the basis of the quality and quantity of the researcher’s writing. Research output is the most important factor in university rankings as well. However, the research is published by commercial academic publishers. At a time of shrinking budgets, universities therefore pay an ever-increasing cost for scholarly publishing. Since 2002, the Open Access initiative has tried to change this.

Peer review. Taking part in the scholarly conversation is an essential part of being a researcher, says Professor Steve Jones. Photo: Illinois Universitet i Chicago

Open Access includes peer review

Steve Jones is professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a founding editor of New Media and Society, one of the leading journals in the new media field, published by the commercial publisher SAGE. As a leading scholar in the field of internet research, Steve Jones thinks that open access to scientific papers is a choice each researcher can make:
“I make all of my academic articles available for free as PDF documents. The point of publishing something is to make it public. I want to get heard, so why would I prevent people from seeing this,” he asks.

Steve Jones recognizes that this may cost him and his publishers money. More importantly, this practice does not take into account the practice of peer reviewing, which has become the de facto standard of quality control in academic publishing. Open Access publishing usually means publishing in a peer-reviewed, Open Access journal.
“But that is a secondary issue,” Steve Jones counters. “Saying that research has to be open and that it has to be publicly available is not the same. A web page with a PDF document is open, but to be publicly available, research must be peer reviewed, copyrighted, stored in a permanent location, indexed, and referenced in other academic texts. Researching and publishing are fundamentally two different activities, where publishing is what makes the research available and accessible for others,” Steve Jones argues.

How to make Open Access journals work

The most common form of peer review is double-blind review. In double-blind reviews, neither the author nor the reviewer know the identity of each other. In commercial as well as Open Access publishing, neither gets paid for their work.
“It is part of the scholarly conversation. Peer review is tied to what it means to be an academic: Someone engaged in the kind of conversation and in the standardsetting within your field of work,” Steve Jones says.
Peer review may be the core of academic publishing, but publishing also entails copy editing, layout, handling copyright, storing articles and making articles available in a timely manner. While publishers handle these editorial tasks in traditional journals, Open Access journals will have to find ways of doing it with­out a publisher.

Freely available. According to Professor Ken Friedman, the main challenge for Open Access publishing is finding the resources for the editorial work. Therefore, he argues, universities should support Open Access publishing. Photo: Swinburne University of Technology

Where to obtain funding for Open Access journals

Ken Friedman is professor and Dean of Design at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. He thinks editorial work is the greatest challenge facing Open Access:
“Whether profit-making publishers charge too much for these services is an issue quite separate to the fact that these services are significant and vital. Without them, it is impossible to manage and produce a high quality scientific or scholarly journal. Solving the funding problem in Open Access involves bringing down the costs of publishing. We can do this if we can determine where we can best aggregate, disaggregate, and reconfigure them,” he says.

Reorganizing publishing will not make the work disappear, however. As universities place increasing demands on young researchers and scholars with respect to teaching and administration, some argue that it will be impossible for young researchers to work on journal editorial teams.
“I understand the argument, but I disagree,” says Ken Friedman. “The same young scholars that we need for open Access journals already give their time free to older journals. The issue here is ensuring that universities allocate the time for this kind of service to the field. If all the universities of the world recognize that we can save billions of dollars with a shift to Open Access journals, we can equally well allocate some of the savings to pay that portion of the salaries of staff members that do our editorial work,” he says.

Self-governance is needed 

Steve Jones thinks a majority of academics would rather avoid work not related to research, such as talk to the press or serve in administrative positions. He thinks each academic has to contribute:
“We can’t have a university and say we want to operate the university as a community of scholars in the traditional way and then have each of us as an individual scholar refuse to participate in this kind of work. People just want to do their research. With that kind of attitude, how is Open Access going to work? If it’s all about the individual work,” he asks.

In his own department, the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Steve Jones has already taken steps to keep the scholarly conversation alive:
“So what we do about this at my department is that we have these informal seminars that are semi-required. We don’t take attendances, but the contents are: How do you get published, how do you participate in department life, how do you behave at conferences, how do you present a paper, how do you present yourself. Because there are all these pragmatic elements that you need to do if you want to keep alive the community of scholars. This is what we have to pass on. It is not just the knowledge, it is not just the discipline. It is all this other stuff too and a big part of that is self-governance,” he says.

Open Access will not replace traditional publishers

Steve Jones is cautious when stating how much progress Open Access publishing has made:
“It depends on how you define and measure ‘progress.’ If it is in terms of number of Open Access journals, number of submissions, readership, etc., I think it is making progress. If it is in terms of counting toward tenure or promotion at levels comparable to that of traditional journals, I think that it has made little, if any, progress. There are a few exceptions though, particularly engineering and science,” Steve Jones says.

Ken Friedman partly agrees:
“I do not think that Open Access publishing will or should replace all the older models. No one can hope to replicate the depth and skills of such great academic publishers as University of Chicago, Oxford, or MIT,” Ken Friedman says.
However, he is confident that the problems in Open Access will be solved:
“I expect that Open Access publishing will prove a robust model that offers new ways to publish and distribute high quality science and scholarship. I think Open Access can provide all the selection criteria and production standards we see in standard academic and scientific publishing. The difference is that we intend to make it available at no cost,” Ken Friedman states.