{"id":1147,"date":"2012-07-27T15:33:12","date_gmt":"2012-07-27T20:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=1147"},"modified":"2012-07-30T11:01:46","modified_gmt":"2012-07-30T16:01:46","slug":"going-for-gold-in-open-access-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/07\/27\/going-for-gold-in-open-access-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Going for Gold in Open-Access Publishing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"photo<\/a>As editors and publishers of\u00a0TSP, we take more than a casual interest in open-source publishing debates. And though some form of open access seems a foregone conclusion\u00a0for publicly-funded research,\u00a0there’s still little consensus on the forms it will take and who will ultimately bear the costs of editing articles, administering peer review, and disseminating and maintaining scholarly work.<\/p>\n

A new\u00a0Economist<\/a><\/em> article\u00a0reviews open-access trends in Europe, foreshadowing some of the\u00a0changes scholars are likely to see stateside. It describes three basic models for the future–a gold model, a green model, and a third way. In the gold model adopted by the Public Library of Science (PLoS<\/a>), authors are charged $1,350-$2,900 to make their works available for free online. In the green model favored by the National Institutes of health, researchers continue to publish in traditional journals but they must also make their work available online within one year on\u00a0the free repository site PubMed<\/a>.\u00a0A third model, exemplified\u00a0by university-funded public repositories such as\u00a0arXiv<\/a>, \u00a0does away with\u00a0“peer” review altogether.\u00a0Scientists upload drafts of their papers into this public archive, subject to open<\/em> review from all comers.<\/p>\n

One tension in these models is balancing timely public access against traditional review systems for scientific discovery and dissemination. In trying to develop and sustain TSP, these issues are never far from our minds. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t see our site as a medium for adjudicating or releasing original research. Nevertheless, with our peer-reviewed white papers and other special features, we do\u00a0offer striking original content that includes both new data and new arguments.\u00a0\u00a0Moreover, our access policies allow us to quickly bring this research and writing to broader public audiences — which makes us the envy of our editor friends working for standard scholarly journals.<\/p>\n

Thus far, we’ve been able to preserve access to our articles and sustain\u00a0our\u00a0small shop (with the\u00a0collaboration\u00a0and assistance\u00a0of a terrific forward-looking\u00a0publishing partner in WW Norton<\/a>). As editors, we know that we could\u00a0do more good work if we had\u00a0the sort of\u00a0resources that another business model might provide. But as\u00a0scholars ourselves, we\u00a0“get it” —\u00a0open access is bringing exciting changes and, if we do it right, greater visibility and influence\u00a0for our\u00a0work. For example, opinion pieces in the\u00a0New York Times <\/em><\/a>and Washington Post<\/a><\/em>\u00a0linked directly to the full-text of one of our reports, with the Times <\/em>also linking to\u00a0a summary document written for the Scholars Strategy Network<\/a>. We’re certain that the absence of a journal paywall made it easier for\u00a0these newspapers\u00a0<\/em>to link to our work. Yet we’re equally certain that\u00a0this work wouldn’t have been cited at all unless the underlying research in the reports had\u00a0been\u00a0screened and published\u00a0through\u00a0a traditional peer-reviewed journal system.<\/p>\n

Green or gold,\u00a0we’re\u00a0just trying to\u00a0build a sustainable model that works for TSP and our readers.\u00a0With so many\u00a0other scholars, editors, and publishers engaged in similar projects, we might see a whole new rainbow of publishing models in the very near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As editors and publishers of\u00a0TSP, we take more than a casual interest in open-source publishing debates. And though some form of open access seems a foregone conclusion\u00a0for publicly-funded research,\u00a0there’s still little consensus on the forms it will take and who will ultimately bear the costs of editing articles, administering peer review, and disseminating and maintaining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/07\/speedshop.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1147"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1172,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1147\/revisions\/1172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}