Wellcome Trust backs boffins in open publishing row The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest non-government funders of science, has reiterated its open-access policy, in a move seen as supporting the growing scientists’ revolt against major academic publisher Elsevier. So far, more than 9,000 scientists worldwide have attached their names to a boycott of Elsevier, which …
Examples from the physical sciences
New. J. Phys. -- mandatory article fee £650 (but £550 for IoP members) (www.njp.org)
APS journals: (http://publish.aps.org/)
Phys Rev -- open access fee $1700
Phys Rev Lett -- open access fee $2700
OSA journals: (http://www.opticsinfobase.org/)
Opt. Express -- mandatory fee $1018 for 6 or fewer published pages
JOSA, etc -- open access fee $1500
I seem to recall that copyright is transferred to Elsevier and its cohorts upon acceptance for publishing; that might well have an impact on the requirement to publish in MedPub.
Nonetheless, I do think this is an important step; it seems to me that the more published peer-reviewed material the better. It's extremely annoying and prohibitively expensive for someone not currently in the academic work to get access to this material - though I have a bad feeling that this is not going to have much impact on the last hundred years of work... that's still going to be stuck behind a paywall.
The costs of publishing in not-for-profit Open Access journals like PLoS are also exorbitant, and inline with the costs of making your Elsevier manuscript OA....
http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/
How is that place non-profit? Shirley all there are are admin and hosting costs? for eg, PLoS Biology published 260 papers in the last 12 months, and @$2900/paper == $750k. 6 other journals in the plos range publishing similar numbers of manuscripts and similar(ish) costs, so rough estimate of 4-5 million in revenue per year. They don't pay their reviewers and their editors get peanuts, so how is all this non-profit?
Aggregating items of a certain type has a very real value to the reader. Just consider that you read this story on El Reg presumably without first thinking "I'll go looking for more Elsevoir revolt stories" but clicked an interesting headline on the contents page.
Instead of this Register journal/website existing the dozen or two contributors could blog and you could follow those but (a) the research journal equivalent would be hundreds of blogs with only one or two posts per year (b) the continued success of such sites suggests the edited aggregation model has value for readers (c) much of that value is filtering out the kooks...
Top marks to the authors of the spoof paper 'Computer application in mathematics' for poking fun at Elsevier, who published it in one of their learned journals. So much for the claims about peer review!
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/math-paper-retracted-because-it-contains-no-scientific-content/#more-7311
"Computer magnification is a Universal computer phenomenon. This technique is applied in physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, architecture, particle physics, genetics, microbiology and in chemistry. Without magnification, deep studies and research are impossible. For the first time in the history of mathematics, the authors applied magnification technology and obtained a solution for a nearly 4300 year old parallel postulate problem. In brief an impossible proposition was proved as possible. This is a problematic problem. Further studies will give birth to a new branch of mathematical science."
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
