Chemistry Central Blog

"if we all stopped taking closed access journals the publishers would have to toe the line?" asks Peter Murray-Rust

If you have an interest in (open) publishing and (open) chemical data, and haven't already stumbled upon Peter Murray-Rust's Blog I suggest you make yourself a large cup of coffee and get settled. On April 24th alone he made 7 lengthy posts on topics ranging from

• institutional repositories as an "author support environment", based on his experience with Sourceforge
• concerns over the accuracy of ChemSpider, claiming the ChemZoo is filled with monkeys
• how institutions who cancel closed journals face losing their accreditation
• highlighting open chemistry experiment, a wiki based approach to carrying out chemical experiments, which Peter hopes to add a manuscript versioning wiki alongside
  

The post that alarmed me most concerned cancellation of "closed" journals - Another Publisher catch-22. While visiting Colorado State University he made a suggestion I've heard him make before ... "if we all stopped taking closed access journals the publishers would have to toe the line?".

And the librarians at CSU hit me with a terrifying gotcha. Apparently it applies to more than one publisher - and necessarily learned societies also.

The learned societies are not only member-organisations, quasi-commercial publishers and keepers of the discipline (a worthy role), but also provide accreditation for courses. This is, of course, highly worthy in itself and an useful way of accrediting schools which are, perhaps, not large enough to run their own course reviews. (I am not sure how much this varies from country to country).

BUT the society as part of its accreditation service requires that the college take certain journals and use certain information products which happen to be supplied by the society. If the college removes its subscriptions, then the society refuses to accredit the courses.

If I have got this right it is terrible. In commercial circles it would either be outlawed or highly regulated with chinese walls. But this seems like a monopoly where the publisher (sorry, society) can insist on a college buying highly-priced journals and information products and services.

Please tell me this isn¿t so.

If this is so it needs addressing. In the past I too have gained "credits" for receiving a magazine regularly - I hardly ever read that magazine! As a Publisher I have managed a portfolio of magazines which aligned themselves with societies to boost circulation figures, and therefore revenue. There are many ways to measure how much an institution/individual uses a product/journal, we have usage statistics for example. Simply because something is supplied does not mean it is used.

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 11:38    Comments (0)