Some myths about open access to science (Open Access)

On October 4, the journal Science published a study on the publication of a pseudoscientific article in 157 open access peer-reviewed journals (OA). The author of the study “ Who's afraid of peer review? ”(“ Who is afraid of reviewing? ”) - biologist John Bohannon (John Bohannon) - talks about the preparation of an article containing obvious methodological errors and sending it to several hundred open access journals.

As a result, out of 255 journals that responded to the article, in 157 it was accepted for publication, and only 98 journals rejected it after reviewing. This is submitted by the author as a big problem, which is hard to disagree with, if not for one “but”: this is submitted as an open access problem. It must be said that similar experiments were carried out earlier, including in Russia (the notorious article Roger), but were not directly associated with any form of publication of scientific articles (traditional print, open access, etc.).
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The general tone of the publication in Science as a whole is intended to build in the minds of the reader the association “open access is bad.” Many foreign media have become willing to reprint and refer to this article, because The topic of open access is now quite relevant in European countries and the USA. In Russia, open access is currently not yet so popular, but this did not prevent our leading media from catching this “stuffing”, which was expressed, for example, in an article by RIA Novosti “ Science magazine revealed a shadow empire of“ garbage ”scientific publications ”. It would seem that the usual translation of a foreign article was, but on the RIA Science Twitter of this news was assigned the hashtag #openaccess, and this translation caught our eye. We, in CyberLeninka , tried to adjust the vision of this problem by journalists from RIA Novosti, but met with their “serious” argument. Note that RIA journalists quite adequately translated the article itself and did not make high-profile headlines linking “garbage” and “open access” into a single whole, while their colleagues from Lenta.ru chased a more flashy headline: “ Half of the open scientific journals were called“ garbage ”, ” thereby fulfilling the original intention of the authors of an article from Science. On the other hand, Lenta.ru journalists, in conclusion of their publication, nevertheless indicated that the sample was not quite representative, and the problem is inherent not only in open access journals. It is a pity that many could simply not finish reading the article to the end, forming a wrong view of the situation because of this. In order to somehow dilute the negative mediaphone that has developed around open access, in this article we will try to explain to all people interested in this topic what is actually happening. To do this, we bring to your attention a brief consideration of the most common myths about open access from various sources.

Myth number 1: Access to scientific knowledge is not a problem.

The problem of access to scientific knowledge is relevant to world science as a whole, but in Russia it is particularly acute for several reasons. First, the most high-status and popular for publication among scholarly journals that are part of the former publishing house “Nauka” (now “MAIK / Interperiodica”) and a number of other large publishing houses are available exclusively on a paid basis. Many regional universities and research institutions are not in a position to pay for subscriptions to these journals, not to mention private individuals who are offered the only opportunity - to buy materials article by article for an impressive amount. Secondly, in our country the practice of publishing preprints is poorly distributed, and authors' self-publication of articles on the Internet is practically impossible due to the most severe conditions on the part of traditional publishing houses, which consist in a complete or partial ban on the use of the published text of the article. As a result, we have a large number of scientific studies (often the most interesting and advanced) that are completely inaccessible to a wide audience.

The myth in question has a twin myth actively promoted by large commercial publishers (in particular, Elsevier), which says: “The reader can access any article through interlibrary lending.” But even in the United Kingdom, where open access is maintained at the state level, there is no full access to scientific articles. This is due to the high cost of subscriptions, as a result of which scientific libraries are forced to limit the availability of scientific articles. Also note that this is all about the researchers. In universities, things are even worse, especially in Russian ones: fake ELSs (electronic library systems) are flourishing here for show, and the other not very personable “kitchen”, which we will not discuss in this article. Well, for a wide range of Internet users access is even more limited, because Online subscriptions are almost non-existent, and if they are, the prices are prohibitive.

Myth number 2: Open access logs are not reviewed.

Most scientific journals, regardless of whether they provide their archives on the open access model or not, are still reviewed. Moreover, at present, many large scientific publishers provide an opportunity to publish in open access ( Springer , Nature , Elsevier ), and this does not affect the review process of these journals.

Of course, it cannot be argued that there are no open access journals that do not use peer review of published articles. The same cannot be said about traditional print magazines. As practice shows, such journals (both open access and print) do not exist for a long time and are closed due to the lack of demand by the scientific community.

In real life, open access journals need to be even more careful about the quality of published materials because of the much larger potential audience that needs to prove its worth. All information about reviews and revisions of articles is open, which imposes additional reputational risks on both experts and the journal as a whole and motivates to approach their work more responsibly. In addition to experts, all interested persons can take part in reviewing articles, and their opinion can also be taken into account by experts. A similar scheme is implemented in the PeerJ open access log .

Myth # 3: Open access logs have a low impact factor.

Several other formulations of this myth are cited in the literature: “You must choose between prestige and open access”, “Open access is acceptable for“ walkthrough articles ”, but it is not suitable for serious articles”. It is easy to trace (for example, the open catalog DOAJ ) that currently there are a number of open access journals with high impact factor - this is PLoS Biology, BioMed Central, etc. Moreover, leading scientists of the world already realize the importance of publishing scientific results in the open access A striking example of this is the article published by the Nobel Prize in medicine Tomas Sudkhov in open access.

Myth number 4: Articles in the public domain are not protected by copyright.

There is a widespread opinion that articles, being in open access, are not protected by copyright. In reality, this is not the case, and copyright extends to all intellectual property, regardless of the form of their publication. However, open access has an additional plus: it allows authors to retain all rights to use their articles instead of transferring the rights to them to a traditional journal and to lose the ability to dispose of them. This is exactly what happens in the case of the publication of articles in the above-mentioned journals of the MAIK / Interperiodica publishing house.

Our experience related to the implementation of CyberLeninki shows that this problem is particularly relevant for Russia: both the authors and even some magazines declare that they fear for the rights to materials placed in the public domain.

Myth number 5: Open access with the author’s payment model for his publication threatens the integrity of the scientific system

This myth is extremely popular (a journalist from RIA Novosti cites it as one of the main ones ) and is that open access journals, in an effort to make more money, will publish as many articles as possible without making their proper selection. In reality, in this respect there is no difference between traditional magazines and open access journals. Both for those and for others, the goal is to increase their readership, and this can be achieved only by publishing quality materials.

In addition, there is often a fear in the Russian scientific community that the authors (or the organizations in which they work) can hardly pay for publishing their research in open access journals. In our opinion, for the cardinal solution of this problem, the state needs to gradually change the financing scheme for the publication of scientific research and move from subsidies to journals to subsidies to scientists. This scheme is natural - the state invests money in scientists, in the development of science, and scientists themselves choose a site for publication - for example, an open access journal with high attendance and excellent “visibility” on the Internet.

At the moment in Russia we see the opposite picture, when the state (represented by the same scientific organizations) invests money not in scientists, but in scientific publishing houses, setting “unpleasant” tasks for them: increasing the impact factor of the journal, meeting the criteria of the journal from the List VAK, getting into WOS, Scopus, and others. These tasks of the publisher solve differently, to the best of power, understanding and possibilities. Someone considers the condition fulfilled, having printed a good WAKO magazine with a representative editorial board and a quality review with a circulation of 200 copies, someone has done a publishing page deeply buried on the university’s website and put the archive of the journal over the past 10 years (which formally meets the requirement of open access to magazine materials). Ultimately, a large number of publications simply do not cope with their main task - to facilitate access to the materials of articles of the widest possible audience of interested readers. Both the authors, and other researchers, and science as a whole, suffer from this.

PS Dear readers, in order not to be distracted by politics and not to divert the conversation from the constructive channel, we decided to change politicians for jellyfish.
PPS We would like to thank Alexander Semenov for these wonderful photos of jellyfish.