Not knowing about the practices of a new publishing medium, I want to know for sure that the good things about the old model haven't been tossed out with the bad.
My impression is that the biggest change in medical publishing isn't the "real" open-access journals like PLoS's—called "gold OA"—but open-access repositories, called "green OA". These haven't done very well, because scientists don't bother to post to repositories unless someone makes them, even if the journal explicitly allows it (and many toll-access journals do). This, despite pretty good evidence that open access, not surprisingly, increases exposure and therefore increases "impact". Scientists are insanely conservative. The high-energy physicists may have started xxx.lanl.gov because it was the smart thing to do, but I'm sure the only reason they keep using it is habit.
However, the NIH is about to mandate that all journal articles resulting from NIH-funded research be posted to PubMed. In the long term, funder mandates mean that the old model will work even more badly than it already does (serials crisis? what serials crisis?), because there's no need for institutions to subscribe to journals if the articles are freely available. The journals will have to convert to "author pays" (which will really mean "funder pays") to survive. But that really has nothing to do with peer review.
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Date: 2008-02-27 01:50 am (UTC)My impression is that the biggest change in medical publishing isn't the "real" open-access journals like PLoS's—called "gold OA"—but open-access repositories, called "green OA". These haven't done very well, because scientists don't bother to post to repositories unless someone makes them, even if the journal explicitly allows it (and many toll-access journals do). This, despite pretty good evidence that open access, not surprisingly, increases exposure and therefore increases "impact". Scientists are insanely conservative. The high-energy physicists may have started xxx.lanl.gov because it was the smart thing to do, but I'm sure the only reason they keep using it is habit.
However, the NIH is about to mandate that all journal articles resulting from NIH-funded research be posted to PubMed. In the long term, funder mandates mean that the old model will work even more badly than it already does (serials crisis? what serials crisis?), because there's no need for institutions to subscribe to journals if the articles are freely available. The journals will have to convert to "author pays" (which will really mean "funder pays") to survive. But that really has nothing to do with peer review.