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A comment on Open access: The true cost of science publishing.

Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by merraksh on Sunday October 13, 2013 @12:51PM (#6543179)
As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers — and research funders — want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story — publishing 26,000 papers last year — it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. “I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing,” he says.

Among the reasons that a scientist may have against embracing open access publishing is perhaps being Editor in Chief or Associate Editor of a prestigious journal. That is just a line in a scholar's CV, but sometimes it counts. I would happily do without that line, but I'm sure many, young and old, would not.

Building prestige in an open-access publication is slow, and the transition might be slow by design.

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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by mjn on Sunday October 13, 2013 @07:08PM (#6544491)
It can happen quickly given the right circumstances. In machine learning, the editors of Machine Learning resigned en masse and set up the open-access Journal of Machine Learning Research, which became the top ML journal quite soon after being launched: http://jmlr.org/

The old ML journal is still prestigious as well, but there's now an open-access alternative that's at least as good and probably somewhat better.

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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by seanmcdirmid on Sunday October 13, 2013 @08:20PM (#6544685)
I believe JMLR forced the old ML journal to become open access as well, just to stay alive.
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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by mjn on Sunday October 13, 2013 @08:34PM (#6544738)
It looks like it has the regular Springer policy still, i.e. some OA stuff but mostly not: http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10994
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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by trauco on Sunday October 13, 2013 @03:50PM (#6543904)
Building prestige for any new publication, open-access or not, would be slow now, given the number of incumbents.
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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by merraksh on Sunday October 13, 2013 @05:42PM (#6544259)
Agreed. Yet my field (Operations Research) has seen four or five new journals born in the past 10 years, all of relatively high level. Most often they were born as an initiative of one or more scholars in the field, who convinced a publisher that the journal would receive submissions.

So there is room for new challengers. However, now these scholars treat this journal as their precious pet project, would like everyone to submit articles to it and are (understandably) unwilling to embark in another, open-access initiative.

[edit: clarity]

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Re:Open access: The true cost of science publishing by seanmcdirmid on Sunday October 13, 2013 @08:29PM (#6544717)
It really depends on who the editors/founders are; e.g. the JMLR was automatically prestigious when founded by leaders of the ML community, forcing the previous crown bearer to become open access itself.
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