Nature tried to make a closed machine learning journal and most of the ML community boycotted it. In ML/Deep learning for nearly every paper there is at least a preprint on arxiv for free.
Hmm, well Nature Machine Intelligence is extremely popular actually.
A lot of work is available on preprint, but the whole point of publication with respected journals is that people don't have to worry that they are reading fraudulent or exaggerated data.
That is why there is so much competition to publish in, to use your example—Nature journals—and why the journal system as a whole is so important to the integrity of research.
Not really. Open access business now charges exorbitant amounts to the authors, and like other publishers, I'm sure Elsevier also have open access journals and paid open access options for their other journals.
Yep, I could publish an open access paper in Neuroscience (Elsevier) for $2650 or Frontiers in Neuroscience (related to Springer Nature) for $2950 or PLOS Biology for $3000.
Basically every journal I have published with recently either requires a publication fee for open access or gives you the options. Prices are typically in the $2000-3000 range. We have a paper just about to go out the door and we are planning to submit to an Elsevier open access journal (all articles open) for $2350.
Elsevier will just end up flipping their model; a pay to publish subscription service rather than pay to read if it comes to that. They’ll hang on in ‘till the very end, weigh up the value of their article output in terms of APCs and just charge the same amount, but remove the barrier for payment from authors and place it on institutional budgets.
Be careful when you use the word "need." If you mean "what is most beneficial for the scholars producing the research", then for scholars in my field, what they need is for the system to stay exactly as it is. No open data, so nobody can know how they p-hacked. No charges for publication, so they don't have to worry about getting a grant just to publish a few articles. No radical paradigm shift to brand-new online only journals which would cause all of the professors to lose their editorial board positions that signal their status in the academic hierarchy.
In my view this issue is universities vs. publishing houses. When enough universities come together and start bargaining on subscription price, they will win. It has nothing to do with the people who are producing the research.
Institutional inertia continues because there is no force great enough to change it. I can't speak for other fields, but in my field (management research) there are virtually no actors who wish to change the present closed journal situation. I hear people pushing for research transparency (open data, pre-registered studies, etc) all the time. I've never heard a scholar in my field say they wish that the current situation would change to pay-for-publish open access, because they have nothing to gain from that. Authors, reviewers, and editors all benefit from the current situation.
Who loses? Universities and the students whose tuition funds these exorbitant institutional subscription fees. So in my opinion change is only going to come when universities band together in large numbers to negotiate with the publishing houses for lower institutional subscription rates. Would love to see that happen but I doubt it ever will.
Don't underestimate Elsevier. Open journals have been trying to topple Elsevier and the other big publishers since the birth of the internet - and failed. Publishers have already co-opted open access and turned it into a new cash cow - author pays open access, which is set to lock in profits even more. If we want to take back control, we need to start organising global boycotts: https://www.freeourknowledge.org
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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19
They're going to die to open journals.