It seems this prominent evolutionist let a little truth seep through his dyke of ideology. I wonder if he will stick by this quote when the hordes of pink faeries descend like locusts on upon his next speaking engagement. Even if he doesn’t, this quote will surely be in the next issue of our church newsletter!

1. Lobby the government to make OA publishing a requirement in exchange for federal funding

2. Lobby the government to provide supplemental funds to cover the costs. This is economically reasonable since the true costs of OA publishing are lower than non OA publishing (e.g., libraries do not have to buy subscriptions, there are no fees for reuse, etc).

3. Work with society publishers in all fields, especially the poorer ones, to switch to at least a partial OA model

4. Stop volunteering your time to work for non OA journals. Volunteer for the OA ones. Then the costs will go down. A lot of the reason that non OA journals can be so cheap is that so many scientists review/edit for them for free.

5. Apply to funding agencies for grants to support OA journals. Just as funding agencies support conferences, workshops and courses, they should support OA journals.

6. Make use of institutional and other repositories through which you can place preprints even those for non OA journals. The more these are used the better.

7. Submit to journals that have a fee waiver such as the PLoS journals when needed.

8. Pay the OA fees if you can afford it.

9. Make better use of OA material for blogs, courses, textbooks, etc. The more it gets used the more the funding agencies will support paying for it.

10+. I am sure they are other things …

Having recently submitted a paper to (and gotten reject from) PLoS Biology, I noted during the whole process that PLoS strongly requested* US$2500 up front in order to make an accepted paper “open access.” I’m not really complaining about that — in the absence of revenue generated by subscriptions (or advertising…ugh, I hate to think about ads in scientific journals…!), I fully understand that they have to get the money to stay afloat while providing free access from somewhere. What I have a problem with is that not every science — I might venture (sans data) to think that most sciences — is awash with lavish grant monies with which to cover such fees. Certainly the sciences with substantial and relatively short-order scientific boons, like genetics, biotechnology, pharmacology, etc. — sciences that can benefit the tax-paying public at large in (relatively) short order — get lots of grant money, both public and private, and can much more easily cover open access fees. Most sciences, however, do not fit this mold — many sciences, such as many aspects of geoscience, most biological disciplines, much of astrophysics, etc., do not have such short-term returns — they are more about establishing the fundamentals that can be used over a much longer term to better understand the universe in which we live; only in the longer term do the economic benefits of such knowledge typically appear. But because we live in a free-market, capitalistic society, the economy itself determines where the money goes, and it by and large goes to short-term return projects. Thus, a vast number of scientists either cannot get grants (at least not large ones) or get only partial funding that has to be applied to time, equipment, etc. rather than open access fees.

*I say “strongly request” because PLoS does state that papers won’t necessarily be rejected, or not made open access, if the authors don’t have the funds to pay the fee, which is good…but I think it’s fairly obvious what could happen to that system if it were abused too much!

The fault is not with open access, which is a terrific concept in principle and, I suspect, practice, and not even with any one entity in particular, be they science organization, publisher, or granting agency. But it is a sad side effect of the trend toward open access that the poorest (in a financial sense) sciences will be the last to reap the benefits. Subscription-based access to journals, at least, had the benefit of leveling the playing field to a greater extent, though even there biases were apparent, and of course subscription rates were and are bizarrely exorbitant, which greatly limited access for many. I don’t pretend to have a solution; I just think that something more equitable across all sciences needs to be implemented.

Luca: PLOS has a charitable endowment. Also many publishers, NPG included, encourage authors to archive into PMC and their institutional archives, without restriction. At NPG, we explain this to authors when they have a paper accepted for publication.

I did review a paper once, so I know this is free of charge for them – but the reviewers do actually spend quite some time on it. Doesn’t PLOS need some permanent employee (secretary, or so) to take care of submissions, applications etc.

PDFs of the various papers here, as well as interesting related research into symbiosis:

  http://gordonlab.wustl.edu/Publications.html

Explains the whole issue in ten minutes of ‘fairly used’ comedy.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/mendel2019s-mouse/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

Fascinating writing, as per usual. Thanks!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/03cell.html?ex=1180152000&en=f5f81fe0ac54ceac&ei=5070

Is it the sex gene then? (It has no homolg in humans)

The same group recently published a follow up in nature.