I really like this idea. It has a major strength as a boycott -- it just involves me refusing to do work which I would not have been paid to do anyway. It was never going to be possible to convince people to boycott submitting papers to top journals, as that would damage their career and standing.<p>I also think journals as they currently stand serve an important purpose, of quality control. They are not perfect, but I have nightmares where the future of publication is just arXiv, or worse a wikipedia-style "the research anyone can edit". I'm not saying these don't have an important place, but I also want a way for the best papers to get exposure, and I think our current system is about the best way of doing that.
This is kind of chicken-and-egg problem. Today most established journals with high impact factors (= prestigious) are non-open-access. Publishing in or being a reviewer of a high impact factor non-open-access journal looks much better in a resume of a scientist than publishing in non-prestigious open-access journal.<p>For an open-access journal to become prestigious it needs high quality contributions. But at the same time an author of some important discovery will more likely to publish it in some high prestigious non-open-access journal. Of course for tenured faculty members it is not such a big problem because they have a secured position. But for their apprentices not having high impact publications may become a problem in their future career. And while tenured adviser may force a postdoc to publish in an open-access journal most of them will not likely do this because they understand that this puts members of his/her lab in a bad position compared to competing scientists.<p>I think that well known scientists should make the first move here and to start publishing in open-access journals. Their work has a lot of traction and will not suffer from being published in some not-so-well-known open-access journal. On the other hand this will help open-access journals to start building reputation.
Although I'm in favor of open access journals for a handful of reasons, I think there are a couple of things working against the idea:<p>First, handling fees. As someone starting out in the field, there are a great number of journals that advertise (read:spam), and have handling fees. It feels very much like a scam, or a system were "success" can be bought.<p>Second, as one commenter on the article suggests, with a handling fee, the publisher is incentivized to print more. (There's an undercurrent of complain in my field that there isn't enough quality publication space, so this is two-sided, but is the cost of more outlets a lowering in quality?) However, with a subscription model, the quality must remain high to keep subscribers. (One might also argue that "closed" publishers want to print as much as possible to give more authors' schools reason to subscribe, but I don't know the level of this effect.)<p>Third, on a more personal level, living as a doctoral student—more particularly, with the budget of a doctoral student—even nominal costs can seem overwhelming. I don't see my institution covering "handling fees" in the near future, particularly with the amount of cost-cutting going on. The fees are less onerous for faculty, but present a slightly higher barrier for student entrants.
I let you in on a secret: In many research institutions the people that "do" peer-review don't do the review, they delegate the reviews to their underlings who are not in a position to refuse.
It seems like it should be governments who fund the publishing and peer review services, they are already funding most of the research. Having private corporations as middle-men just doesn't make sense, even if they are non-profits.
I love how this all came about because of a criminal action. No amount of protesting or discussion was succesful. Would it ever have been succesful? Possibly, but unlikely. However, the second we see some illegal activity (the guy from MIT who downloaded the JSTOR articles from that server), suddenly Pandoras box has opened and we see real change, real disruption and fast.<p>Does this justify his actions? Is the only way to disrupt entranched business to conduct borderline actions? Effectively pushing boundaries to the very limits of legality?.<p>Either way, this is the concept of "tipping point" in action folks.
One of the reasons academics do peer review is to put it on their CV/evaluations that universities do to evaluate the amount of academic work they do. Voluntarily declining offers to do peer review would therefore have a negative effect on that person's ability to retain their job. (I'm talking about those without tenure, mainly.)<p>One solution would be for universities taking stands like this is to somehow "give credit" to their academics who are asked to do peer review for non-open-access journals.
A lot of conventional journals have an open access option available to the author for a fee (usually for about $3000). What about offering a no-cost upgrade after reviewing some number of papers for the journal?
I'm a CS professor and for the last several years have refused almost every review request from a non-ACM/IEEE journal.<p>I'm also an associate editor of an ACM journal and often have a very hard time getting people to review submissions. My sense is that a lot of my peers have simply stopped doing (most) journal reviews at all.<p>A person can be totally overloaded just doing conference reviews, which are a lot more fun anyway. The papers are shorter and (at a good conference) the papers are a lot better than journal submissions.
Since most reviewers are probably from Universities or Companies, it is likely that their employment contract prohibits them from doing professional work not associated with their current job. It should be fairly simple for these Universities and Companies to start enforcing this and take away the supply of qualified reviewers from Journals that lock up knowledge.
This is a lovely idea but I'm afraid it's a pipe dream. Boycotts don't change profitable practices. (And there is little enough profit in academic publishing to begin with!) The author's heart is in the right place but his head is in the clouds. Too bad.
So why is the idea that science publishing should be <i>free</i> attributed more intellectual weight than the idea that music should be free, or movies, or software? I mean, we get it, everybody loves free stuff.