Quick post on an important topic. I don’t publish in OA journals 100% of the time…. almost always, but not always. What gives?
This deserves more discussion than I’ll give it in this post, but here’s a recent response to someone who was rightly curious about the following links to my three most recent papers:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bult.2013.1720390404
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/bult.2013.1720390405
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v493/n7431/full/493159a.html
Here was my response:
Great question. The first two are actually also available OA, under a CC-BY license (though I was disappointed to see the publishers didn’t make the CC-BY license clear, and I didn’t know that they would also appear in a format that makes it look like they are subscription only… I’m unhappy about that but oh well).
- http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Piwowar.html (includes paragraph about CC-BY of the whole collection)
- http://asis.org/Bulletin/Apr-13/AprMay13_Piwowar_Priem.html
The final one was upon invitation from Nature. I hemmed and hawwed about whether to do it, since it wasn’t OA, but decided ultimately to go for it because (a) it was an opinion piece not primary research, and (b) if opinion pieces about open things are only published in open places, they miss many audiences that aren’t yet convinced about the value of open. I tried to mitigate lack of open by publishing as much preprint about it as I could, negotiating hard for no paywall for its first week, and I’ll post the preprint as soon as I can (I think July 10th? will double check)
- https://researchremix.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/nature-comment/
- https://researchremix.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/first-draft-of-nature-comment/
- https://researchremix.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/process-behind-a-nature-comment/
The purist-loving part of me does wish I only published in OA places and is unsettled when I don’t. More than that, though, I want to change the world to be more open, and I think I can do that best by sometimes publishing in places that aren’t OA. (yet. ;) )
Edited: moved the “sometimes” in the last sentence to better capture my meaning.
Research Remix 
Huh! I didn’t even know that our Organizing our Knowledge of Biodiversity article had a DOI now (10.1002/bult.2011.1720370411). Although that one doesn’t appear to be paywalled (nice), whereas your articles in the ASIST Bulletin do (even for Duke!) (not nice). Is that maybe because of time past publication, or is there some other arrangement that’s different?
Comment by Hilmar Lapp (@hlapp) — July 11, 2013 @ 7:18 am
Thanks for this. I am in the middle of a similar situation, and have a post planned titled exactly the same as yours here. I signed the Cost of Knowledge boycott, but am now a co-author on a paper that is being submitted to Lib and Info Sci Research, an Elsevier journal. The reason I am letting this go is because the lead author is a PhD student and his career depends on being able to publish in the major InfoSci journals, and unfortunately LISR is the one. Also, the faculty member we worked with is on the Editorial Board. So… it puts me in the complicated position of “publishing” with Elsevier for the purposes of supporting my colleagues, and in this instance supporting colleagues is more important. It helps that the paper is about open access archiving, and that we have all agreed that I will do my darndest to negotiate the copyright contract for better terms. Appreciate your honesty and the points about the importance of changing the system from the inside out.
Comment by Micah Vandegrift (@micahvandegrift) — July 11, 2013 @ 7:18 am
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