[Music]
I want to thank everybody for coming. This is our first official
event for Open Access Week. And I'm going to
begin by introducing Philip Young who is the organizer this week
and the libraries' Chair of our Open Knowledge Committee.
Thanks Gail. I just wanted to mention
our schedule for the week. We have five events
this week. Um and our schedules back there on
the table. This is our first event for Open
Access Week. Um Tomorrow we have a session on
data and digitization here in this room at 1:30.
Uh that's data and digitization for the liberal arts and
human sciences. Um on Wednesday we have a session
on our open access fund which is increasingly popular and
which Gail and I help operate here in the libraries
to help pay the article processing fees for some open
access journals. You can find out more about it
at that session. On thursday, I'm leading a
session on scholarly publishing trends. Uh it's a really
dynamic environment right now, a lot going on with
scholarly publishing. So we're gonna cover open access as
well as other things like bibliometrics, changes in
peer review and other topics. Uh, and then
Thursday evening is our our keynote address. We're bringing in Victoria
Stodden from the university of Illinois to speak about scholarly
communication in the era of big data and big computation.
So we feel really fortunate to have her uh
coming to Virginia tech this year. That will
be at 7:00 over in Davidson Hall 281.
So in all of our events are available for NLI
credit including tonight. So, so I think that's
it. Thank you all very much for coming and
thank you to our panelists. Thank you.
So like to welcome you all officially to the
faculty graduate student panel on open access. Um I'm
Gail McMillan, I'm the Director of Scholarly Communication and
to live here at Virginia Tech Library. And um
let me just start by defining open access. So
we're all on the same page. Um, definition
of open access is literature is digital online free of
charge and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
What makes it possible is the internet and the consent
of the author and the copyright holder. And I
think maybe one of the things that also makes it
possible as library support and we do that in a
variety of ways. The library has a part of what
we do in Scholarly Communication is helped to publish online
journals and conference proceedings so we can provide support for
that. We also as Philip said, we manage
the open access subvention fund and several of you
I invited because you've taken advantage of that fund and
I'll be doing a session on Wednesday at 10:00 in
3080 tortoise. And so if you know anybody
that might be interested in subvention fund, like I
would like to know more about it or they can
just come and fill out the form right there with
me at hand in case they need some help. So let me
introduce our panelists and and we'll move along. First
on my right is Titilola Obilade. I hope I
said that right. Um She's earned her PhD in
Learning Sciences and Technologies last spring. Her dissertation investigating
the alignments between scholarly and popular texts and design content
analysis is publicly available in the VTechWorks. Um
as are several of the articles that she's published next
to Obilade is Sascha Engel who is a PhD candidate and
aspect the alliance political, ethical and cultural theory archives.
during its work and she is also a PhD candidate
She's in the department of Biological sciences and she
has published an article in Plos One access journals we
supported. Next to Allison is Carola Haas
who's a professor in the department of
Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the College of Natural Resources
and Environment and she's published through the open access
subvention fund also. Um So she said so that
she can reach land managers, independent contractors conservationists in
developing countries, many of whom lack access to extensive
journals. Next to Caroline is Scott King professor in
the department of geosciences where he says he studies the
interiors of terrestrial plants. Yes you must be.
So he is the senior executive editor of GeoResJ,
an open access interdisciplinary online journal
and he has also served as an editor of
earth and planetary science letters which is not an open
system. And at the end of the line we have Jeremy Ernst
who is an associate professor of integrated stem education.
He's also on the faculty of the Institute for Creative
Arts and Technology. He's associate director of the Office
of Education Research and Outreach and an affiliate faculty member
for the College of, You know, for engineering
education. And he was our very first subvention fund
recipient, successful back in fiscal year 2013. Yes.
And with the very first round. So now I'll
let them do the talking. And I just want
to remind everybody when I invited them to participate in
the panel, I told them it would be very
informal. There was nothing to prepare. We just
wanted to know about your experiences with open access,
your opinions about it and then maybe you'll have a
conversation among yourselves, invite the audience to to comment
or have questions as well. So my life would
like to start. Okay, thank you. Thanks
for inviting me. The first experience I had was
actually online through the Biomed Central Publishing side.
I had an article I wanted to publish there.
It was a journal and the cost was in the
thousands. But somewhere in the lines has said,
check if your institution is, um, has all
this about mid central So that you can get some
reduction. And so I read through all the lines
and he said Virginia Tech was part of it that
I would have some 20% because he was asking for
something in 1000 spots. So when I read it
and I wanted to submit again, that was stopped
. I didn't check something. So that's how I
got to get. I'm like, okay, this
is my article and this is what I saw on
the website, but I don't know that's kind of
what it meant. So that's how I got to
know. And she explained to me, he didn't
seem very difficult what the sub pension fund was all
about and I got into it. I'm like,
okay if it's 15 and biomedicine role because I'm like
18, what happens to the remaining 300 on top
of it? It's like, well that comes to
my, I've got to do that. So I
did some mathematical calculation and I'm like, okay if
I can get um, Other other journals that will
have something less within the 1005, I could get
some fashion fun without having to pay out of pocket
for myself, which I eventually did. And there
wasn't much example about it at all. It was
all through email, I didn't have to come knocking
at her door, anything like that. But the
most important thing was the journal must have accepted the
article, you know, even though on the options
on the website was like, has it been accepted
or something like that. Um what was key was
that the journal had, the applicant must have been
accepted by the um, by the general. then
the process was much faster and balance it. That's
it. And I've actually done like several after that
, you know, it was it was the same
process. It was pretty quick. That's all I
have to say. Thank you. Uh Yeah,
thanks for having me. Uh I was the editor
of the social and political, ethical and cultural theory
Archives Spectra um last academic year. The way we
do it is we we have um we used to
have one person. Now, it's two persons.
My immediate successes that our editors now is to people
. Um And every one of us is we all
have a three year period. You start out as
an editor um elect. Uh That was two years
ago, then you become editor for a year and
then editor emeritus for the third year. And that's
what I am right now, here it is.
Um And so when I was editor elect two years
ago, uh 2013, Yeah. Um We were
spectrum was posted on a Wordpress platform um and that
came with the domain name, which we still have
thanks to the generosity of the library Spectra journal dot
org. Um And uh we had always tried to
keep the articles such that order to keep the publications
such that the authors would retain copyright um and such
that it would be as freely accessible as possible without
them having to pay any fees because it's a graduate
student journal. And it's a graduate student run graduate
student journal, which means we try to provide an
environment that was as friendly to publishing and as friendly
to dissemination as possible. Um And then during my
tenure as editor, we move from the Wordpress platform
to um the Open Journal Systems hosted by the library
e journals. And so we have been using the
Open Journal Systems platform throughout the last year and we
are using it now, which has a number of
uh huh very beneficial consequences, particularly for the authors
because they now unlike the Wordpress platform, which was
all based on email between the authors and editors and
editors in between them and then the edit respect to
the authors, authors copy editors, yada, yada
, yada. Right. Uh So instead now we
have this platform which hosts the articles and which allows
us to um which allows authors to submit them independent
of sending us an email, which allows us to
manage them independent of sending emails to the authors and
sending emails amongst ourselves and which allows the peer reviewers
to access them directly on the platform. So that's
that's very useful for us. And the added benefit
to is that the authors get a chance to log
in at any point during the process and see what
the article where the articles that and what the what
the process is all about. Um So there's this
added convenience. Um and uh through e journals,
we benefit greatly from any improvements that are made more
or less in real time. Uh huh to the
server architecture and to the architecture of the journal itself
, to the functionality and all this stuff because it's
constantly updated and it's constantly in the works. Um
So yeah, you know it looks much better than
on the Wordpress platform I think and it's much more
functional and much more convenient and yet we still retain
the principle that the authors retain copyright and so they
can do with the articles after they published them on
spectrum. They can do with articles uh they can
continue using the articles, reworking them keeping them more
as works in progress and yet allow them to be
disseminated as widely as possible. So yeah, so
um My experience has been with publishing and plus one
um which is a open access journal and we are
in a funding gap for our lab and needed to
get publications out and um without money to publish them
, the A couple of$1,000 that it takes um
adds up fast. And so I had actually done
some research and found the library suspension fund. And
I actually told my adviser, hey there's the suspension
fund, you know, we could and she was
on the fence about publishing my work because we didn't
have the money to publish it. And so I
found the suspension fund and I said you know,
if we publish them plus one, this is the
cost the library is willing to pay, we can
publish my article and we don't have to sit around
and wait on it. And so um we actually
used it have used the suspension suspension fund for publishing
two articles at this point and I've submitted a third
. Um and so it's really helped me where my
research was put at the bottom of the barrel for
our lab because we didn't have direct funding for it
. I was able to get that published um faster
through the library's help with that. And there's also
the added convenience of its now open access. So
it's more widely disseminated and more people are able to
use it to further their research as well. And
so when looking at some of the other articles that
I have published in um micro biology journals specifically,
there aren't open access. My ones that are in
open access journals have more views because there um easier
to find and actually get a copy of it and
read it without having to pay for it. So
it's helped boost some of that research as well.
Well, I have also used the suspension fund and
I published in a journal that's a traditional, you
know, paper and journal. But it does do
, I mean it has online presence now as everything
does, but it does have a mixed open access
platform and so you know when you submit an article
once it's accepted bill tell you, you know,
if you'd like to publish it open access, that
will be$3000 if you'd like to publish it.
You know, in our traditional way it's actually free
, which is unusual for my field. Most journals
in my field have page charges just for the print
oh, print version of, you know, usually
between 90 and 100 and$50 per page. So
it's pretty standard to pay 1000 or$1500 for a
journal article. And I do budget for that in
my grants, but 3000 is a lot more.
And uh you know, I hadn't budgeted that.
It's hard for a sponsor when you think, well
you could hire an undergrad with technician for the summer
and give them some great research experience for you can
you can you can publish this this paper. And
so uh huh the submission fund was was great that
it covered about half that Costs. So I still
had to pony up$1,500 where I could have just
done it for free if I had just done it
for free. But since I had already budgeted for
page charges, you know that that journal, for
whatever reason, it just happened to drop Jack page
charges. This was a journal wetlands, wetlands,
that worked out well for me. But it's a
, it's a fascinating thing to, to think about
the process when I was in graduate school, even
when I was an undergraduate, you know, I
mean, we just, I had paper copies of
everything. And I remember thinking about, you had
to be a member of a journal. You can
subscribe, but of course the libraries, they charge
libraries, astronomical rates. So that, you know
, rather than subscribing, you would be a member
of the society that published the the journal. And
I remember joining the most obscure societies in my field
because I knew wherever I went, you know,
even if I ended up at some small liberal arts
college that everybody would have the journal ecology or,
you know, that everybody would have the major journals
in my field, but you know, the the
little one. So I remember being very strategic about
which organizations you joined, so you can have access
to their journals. And it's such a different world
now where, you know, that you used to
be, You know, so proud of you had
your collection going back to 1972 or whatever it was
and now it just takes up room on the room
on the shelves. And so it's a, but
it's still, it's still definitely a system in transition
because, you know, I just actually, I
just had a students submit a or get a paper
accepted in the exact same journal. And You know
, and this time we just went with the free
, even though I still had, you know,
we could have come back to the suspension fund,
but it still would have cost me the$1,500.
And in this case it was I mean, not
to say anything bad about the student's paper, you
know, it's fine paper, but you know,
it's just it's describing the aquatic invertebrates that live in
ephemeral wetlands in the florida panhandle. So I don't
think anybody but academics is really gonna want to read
it and it's not going to make major conservation decisions
, there's not gonna be a lot of managers who
don't, you know, don't have access to a
library who are going to be responding to this article
. So in that case, you know, I
saved I saved my money for another, you know
, let another article, you know, to go
open access because we've got one that we're going to
submit to Plus one soon and let this one go
in the in the standard format. But it's a
challenging thing because of course, I think as academics
, our guts are would be nice, you know
, most of the cases, the government paid for
this research, wouldn't it be nice if it was
just freely available to to everybody? It's all it's
all like that. Well, thank you for inviting
me. I'm I guess my name is out there
. I'm scott king started as an editor in 2000
of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, which is a
journal of elsevier's it's a journal that's been around for
At least 50 years. If not longer, it's
got a very strong reputation. That's one of the
highest impact factors in geology or geochemistry and geophysics.
And Did that for I mean when I started in
2000. Yeah, I got papers by mail,
you know, it's not email, you know,
letters, you know, envelopes with stamps, things
that you just don't see anymore. Um So you
know, things have really changed quite a bit.
I did that served 23 year terms as a senior
editor. There were six of us by the time
I quit there were seven of us um as senior
editors. And when I left the journal in June
of 20 2007, I had 150 submissions between January
and June it had ballooned to the point that it
was absolutely crazy paul. and so I had a
hiatus at that point. And then 2011 or so
um publisher at elle severe called me up and they
said that they were thinking of starting an open access
journal that was going to be yeah, available through
Science Direct still. But everything with everything in the
journal would be open access. Um and they were
targeting of you know, a group of papers or
type of papers which would fit very well. So
I was one of the first editors too agree to
join that team. We started accepting papers in 2013
. Um and we're still um still in sort of
a ramp up phase of accepting papers. The response
from the community has not been as good as what
the sort of economic model you can argue about Elsevier's
economics, but you know, it's not as good
as what they had been looking for in terms of
home things. And I talked with a number of
my colleagues and their response generally was Why should I
be paying$2,000 to publish a paper in a startup
journal that's not well respected, whatever when here's another
journal by the same publisher That I can only pay
$400, you know, even though it's not open
access and the open access, I'm not sure that
the community of people who work on the deep Earth
are terribly worried about that. There aren't a whole
lot of policy implications and there's you know there's sort
of some general interest things and people publish and discover
and Earth and National Geographic for that. And I
don't think the community sees open access as a good
thing for the community because pretty much everyone who's doing
it is at a university or a national lab.
You know, they just go to their website and
click and they can get all of the journals and
they don't see any of the economics. Um so
I think that that has been for this case again
and like your experience, I just published a paper
in geology six months ago or so. And you
know, I had the option, you know,
I could pay an additional$3000 on top of the
whatever outrageous amount it was to pay for it and
to begin with um to be an open access within
that journal and that that is going on as well
. And I think that there, I think publishers
are really grappling with what, what to do,
They seem to be trying lots of things. Let's
start an open access journal, let's allow some of
the papers in our regular journal to be open access
. They don't seem to know how to deal with
it. And I talked with a good friend of
mine is an editor at nature and until a couple
years ago they seem to be in complete denial.
It said open access is a bad, it'll go
away. I don't know, I wouldn't want to
be a publisher right now. I think it's a
tough area to try and figure out what the future
landscape is going to look like and how to be
successful. And so my open access story Yeah Prisoner
two mathematic Research Agenda. So mhm, that's pretty
much my story in a nutshell. Um and what
I mean by that is my area is stem education
, which is kind of at the intersection of multiple
disciplines and each discipline within stem education, they all
have their journals that you can publish it. There
are very, very few that do have that interdisciplinary
angle and that's part of their scope and they accept
those types of submissions. The most notable was one
of the very early early adopters of open access and
it had been prohibitive for for quite some time because
of some of the reasons that the panel has already
previously identified however, were in education didn't cost that
much in education, but it's a bargain in terms
of what you guys are talking about, most of
our journals are free to publish it. The vast
majority are so uh anyways, the premier journals and
that type of research that have that type of scope
are beginning and have been as the trend was set
over a decade ago with the Journal of stem Education
and it's been an open access journal and that was
kind of always read those articles just because you can
conduct a google search and that comes right to the
top and you can actually download it and it was
fantastic. And whereas other journals would take you through
, you would see the abstract and then Uh you
know, then it would ask you for 29-95 to
bring in the article, even if you are on
the university system, which that I'm not talking about
this university system, a previous university system would would
prompt you for those fees. So those, those
works kind of went undiscovered to a large degree they
have a readership of four or 500 based off of
whoever. Um, not only is a member of
the organization organization, but also in addition subscribes to
the journal. So, you know, it's a
really small readership and uh, so so I published
in in an open access journal and then I and
it sounds really silly, but this is this is
the way I determined its impact all of a sudden
when google scholar, it tells citations for sites first
document and the ones that I have an open access
journals are much much higher uh, than than those
that are in print only in those really closed membership
type journals but are still prestigious, not knocking them
at all. They're high quality, high caliber journals
. They just aren't accessible to the masses. And
so, um I've kind of took that to heart
more recently and that's been my primary target is the
way it used to work is that we go,
you know, Premier Journal and then work my way
down now. It's kind of where are you going
to have that presence and make an impact on the
field because you have to think about who your audience
is as well in my audience, half of my
audience or public educators, so you really have to
think about what they have access to and how are
you going to have that research to practice continuum if
it's never, it's never getting in their hands.
So, so I've had really positive experiences when it
comes open access and um you see, you see
more and more publishers going that way, and I
think it's a fantastic thing, it's me as a
researcher as well. I now have access to things
that I didn't previously have access to. And I
can I can just query that through a search and
I don't always have to go through the log in
because the university can't subscribe to everything, they just
can't. And there's some pretty obscure journals out there
, that was very similarly, uh two years,
I was joining, joining Professional organizations just to get
the journal, and I smiled when you said this
, uh dating back to 1972. So we have
this uh, this professional organization that has a council
within the organization. If you pay your additional council
membership dues, you get this book and, you
know, everybody in the field as these books lined
up your order, guess what now, all of
those are online. Uh so I came here with
38 boxes of books and now I've convinced those 22
small bookshelves, and I think it's it's this kind
of, this kind of initiative, this kind of
, I would call it forward thinking, because it's
it's definitely making a notable, notable impact. And
in your and you're seeing people that aren't necessary and
, you know, in the field aren't necessarily attuned
or have no indirect connection to you. And they're
in there identifying your work as as the precursor to
their work and usually uh specifically in my in my
discipline, it was you had to have studied under
them or you had to have worked with them or
you had to you had to have some type of
interaction with them on some professional level to fully be
aware of even what they were doing. And I
think it's definitely changed change the field in in many
ways because of that. So this is this is
a really, really impactful thing that's occurred specific to
my discipline. And I know it's not the same
for everyone, but it has been for ours and
just have access and other other journals that I'm referring
to that had kind of a closed leadership or now
now there easily accessible online. Matter of fact,
Virginia Tech Houses two of them or or has her
for a while and they're easily accessible. There's no
log in. It's just access the articles and they're
searchable. And there, you know, there's there's
so many advantages to that format of publication. I
could record ramble on, right. I could stop
. I like to ramble on, but I'll stop
. Mhm. Thank you all for your, your
perspectives. You have any questions or comments from the
audience, um comments by the way. I'm a
man of french on, you forgot 2.6 months and
I'm usually running the institutional repository V tech work.
So one of the primary like just to store copies
of I think maybe, you know, earlier drafts
of versions that are in non away gold slipped free
to upload those. But I think it was,
I think you were saying about people not necessarily wanting
to read, you know, really obscure academic articles
on, you know, uh invertebrates, fish in
florida and so on like that. So I've actually
, I've been I've been writing approaching a lot lately
, but I have a doctorate in english. And
so back when I was doing more of that,
um, I was early in the 19 here in
the mid 90s began putting my things on. Of
course, we didn't have the infrastructure that you now
journals and histories. But what I really noticed was
that I would put up these things that I thought
were quite obscure about your victorian poets and things and
that people would come out of the woodwork from around
the world to write me about those articles. And
in fact they still do in places, you know
that. And it's really clear a lot of the
times that they found them online and not in the
journal. And a lot of times it's uh,
you know, at one time I have the same
spurs, you know, where, you know,
a booker, award winning author, irish author.
I found an article of mine that was linked to
the Wikipedia article that I put on my website and
wrote me about this sort of semi biographical article about
obscure irish woman. You know, And I mean
, you can't by that kind of like feeling that
your research is having an impact. You know,
Wikipedia by the way to go. But this is
all very well, but it's like the seventh.
But yeah, so but it's a little bit of
a vicious circle because I'm not sort of asserting that
like if you put it online then people will come
. But I have to say that has been my
experience that like totally the things that I think are
completely obscure and then only academics read or understand definitely
get you also get kind of like some crazy people
who really don't understand it, do that in the
health sciences. They have to where they're writing really
, really high level pieces of research about, you
know, the latest kind of cancer and then you're
a significant other gets that kind of cancer and really
have a desire to read that advanced research whether or
not understand. So great. No, no.
I mean I definitely am a big believer in open
access. I think it has, you know,
it's changed a lot of things. And if I
had gotten my article open access for 200 more dollars
, that would have been worth it to me.
You know, maybe$500. But it's just,
you know, when you know, when funds are
limited them and given the expense of that, journalists
just don't it's still a weighing the options but without
the library suspension fund, it would be a way
worse option because you know, as I said,
and In the one instance it was worth an extra
$1,500 to me you know, I felt like that's
where it needed To go, but for it to
have ever been worth an extra$3,000 to me.
You know? I mean that's that's when it's starting
to get Yeah. You know, even for people
that have research budgets that include money for publishing,
that's a lot. That's a lot of money.
And so the so the yeah, the library's invention
, fun has been a huge help in allowing in
allowing that, you know, how you all manage
to get the money. I don't know. But
I hope, I hope it stays around because it
is it's a really it's a it's a really helpful
, helpful thing and you know, part of this
whole publishing process to him. And I think that's
that's a whole another thing of I know it really
costs people to have editors and I mean, they
don't pay the academic editor story, but you know
, they have the copy editors and that, you
know, I mean, I know that, you
know, but but Yeah, does it really cost
him$3,000 to process this article? I don't know
. Let's get the demon library most credit. They're
the ones who are funding could access a pension fund
. The library Dean has been a he tends to
put in more than the others put in. Yeah
, we've never we've never run out of funds whenever
, whenever we'd spend our limit, he'd say,
well, you know, one more article comes in
let me know and he funded it. So we've
spent our budget several times to them that we have
to get. I wanted to kind of ask something
similar to what Amanda was talking about. And that
is have you had reactions to your open access journals
that you've published or have you talked to your colleagues
about publishing open access? Yes. So in our
field it's actually if you're going open access, it's
considered a lower journal and that you went open access
because your research isn't significant enough to be that nature
science paper. So you went to open access because
you couldn't get it anywhere else. So um it's
trying to change, I guess there's a lot of
work going on trying to change that thinking and that
thought process that, you know, everything, not
a nature paper, but it's still important um and
still furthers the knowledge of the field. Um But
yeah, our culture tends to be the open access
isn't as significant and that you just couldn't get it
anywhere else published anywhere else. Well, there's also
literally thousands of scam open access journals. So it
doesn't mean that your article is not legitimate or that
you know, certain journals are not legitimate journals,
but it's a pretty scary and strange thing that,
you know, any one of us could get a
paper accepted tomorrow if we paid enough money anyway.
You know, I mean not not in any journal
, but I mean like there's literally thousands of these
journals that are just money making things but also find
yourself on the editorial. Right, right, right
. There are probably once a week invitations to publish
in some international open access journal that I've never heard
of before. And if you look at the address
, it's often a post office box in Torrance California
or something like that. And it's you know that
I think that that muddies the water and it's you
know that that contributes to this, you know,
perception among some people that open access papers are.
Yeah, but on the other hand, mainstream journals
are now offering this option of publishing your paper open
access or not. And you know to also many
of the mainstream journals are now saying After two years
there's no embargo and they what would Romeo green access
or something like that. And so, you know
, I have all of my papers that I can
put on research gate dot net which is basically allows
you to sort of set up and finds all your
papers and co authors and you know, they you
know, as you were suggesting Amanda there's some,
I'm amazed at some of the papers that are You
know from 15 years ago that have been lost in
the literature are getting a huge number of reads whether
they'll actually get a citation or whether they will get
used. I don't know, but the journal tracks
how many times that particular or the website tracks how
many times that has been read. And you know
, some of those papers are getting a phenomenal number
of reads and I kind of look at it like
we're from, that's a that's actually an interesting point
. The where from part to react to your the
whole global no impact as it were thing is for
spectrum, it has been interesting to see when we
moved over when we move platforms. Uh huh.
We're in the process over the last couple of years
as we sort of got more established, its relatively
young Journal. We are in the 5th year,
6th Year of Publication Now. Uh and we've we've
received last year, we've suddenly received things from Australia
and Russia. Um which was really bizarre seeing how
this particular kind of this particular kind of journal in
this particular institutional environment is not naturally poised to get
lots of attention. But then people people look for
keywords and they then articles pop up that people have
published in Spectra. And all of a sudden it
got interesting and the recent uh this year's editors tell
me that we have suddenly tripled the number of publications
or the number of submissions that we are getting just
because it's getting more traction, right? So it's
interesting to see not just the temporal but also the
geographical scope that this has taken on. Well,
I noticed that your journal has and prices in makes
it a real journal among other things as well as
being so it's everything that's by any of them databases
we are working. Yeah, this right. It's
signifying in a number of ways, including being an
O. J. S, that it is a
real right? That's the other thing is that amongst
graduate journals, I think this might be field specific
, but I think when you look at graduate journals
, um but they are often considered lower two year
obviously uh oh, you didn't get into a real
journal? Well, I guess you can publish in
a journal. Uh there are some that are very
high profile Millennium is an example for international relations which
are very well received and published high quality stuff and
we are getting there. Um but yeah, setting
these markers is really important. We also, for
example, one of the things that we do is
that we publish every article in two formats html format
in pdf format. And so our authors can put
page numbers on their CVS, which is super important
. Right? It's not just an html. Because
of course, you know, the assumption is that
when you see in the U. R. L
. That means it's somehow not real. But if
it has a page number that now we're talking right
. So, you know, it's sort of the
other thing is that the way that you establish uh
huh a profile as a journal of this kind hosted
on this platform is also important, Jeff pushing.
Yes, I was I was interested to hear about
the issue of prestige biology, but I was wondering
if there were other fields where there's a disconnect between
the, where you need to publish to get tenure
or promotion and and access that was their biggest connecting
. So, I guess that's for all the panelists
, there's a disconnect except for one journal and that's
the one I was referring to. So, yeah
, I think that it's in the in the short
list of must sees and then then there's the list
goes on. One of the, yeah, from
a prestige standpoint, there's there's not a huge fall
off, but there is a little bit of a
follow up and one of the main factors and I
can only speak specifically to where I'm sitting in.
My advantage point is, um, is it a
for profit that backs the open access and that seems
to make all the world of difference in how it's
perceived by the field. And, and it really
is, I mean, the outward perception whether it
is or not, it's a money maker. And
so therefore there is incentive to maybe accept question on
war, but all that speculation, we don't know
that, uh, there are still index in very
reputable places that are, you know, all the
places that you would index an educational research article that's
where they're indexed as well as openly accessible in many
other ways. So if you're inside Pepsico, then
it's going to still populate if versus if you just
do a search criteria on any, on any web
based search engine. So there is uh, there
is a little bit of disconnect and except there's a
big difference when you have a relatively organized impact factor
, which I know that's flawed in many, many
, many ways, but um, you can overcome
many of those perceptions if your index in the right
places and if you have an impact factor with the
right people and, and then at that point there's
no, there's no prestige issues and others and other
disciplines have, have kind of warmed up to that
within within education as well. You see you see
numbers and you're pretty receptive to this is, wow
, that's a really great impact factor. So you
google the journal, see what's going on there and
yeah, if it passes the passes the eye test
of this index in the right places and impact factors
to the right company then, which is ironic because
the impact factor is more profit, so it all
comes full circle. But those have been my observations
, Well, I think there's a tension between what
people saw as the purpose of open access that leads
to some of this, you know, that like
the journal that I published in, it was an
old journal and it had paper thing and they just
decided, well we'll also let some of our articles
go open access. So in that kind of thing
, I don't think there's any prestige issue still had
to get accepted to the journal. It was first
accepted the journal. And then I got to decide
whether I wanted to pay the feed to go open
access. So I think you know, in that
case there's no issue, but I know with plus
one the first time that I reviewed for them and
this is one of the ones, you know,
this is one of the journals that's really you know
, stepped out ahead and sort of lead lead this
idea of open access and said this is really important
. You know created themselves as an open access journal
and you know what, I was sort of shocked
by the reviewer instructions which were do not evaluate the
I forget exactly what were they used but you know
, so many journalists want to say this is cutting
edge or this is important or this will transformative or
you know, it's something like you know, this
is really super stuff that's going to change the field
. And plus one was very specific of saying they
want, you know, if somebody has done reasonable
work, they wanted to have a place that can
get out. And so I'm not to say yours
was not transformative enough. Yours was absolutely transformative and
you know favor one over the other. I'm just
supposed to look at your methods if you both used
appropriate methods to answer your question and you have the
data needed, then you know, I just check
all those boxes and it's good. And then what
happens after that? I don't know, you know
like do they really? I mean I've just been
out as a reviewer, you know, did the
editors still say, yeah, but here's what's really
more transformative and we're finally accept one. So we're
not gonna take years or does it just go.
But I mean, I feel like that's how plus
one put itself out as they wanted of anywhere,
anybody who did good work, you didn't get left
out of the publishing process. As long as you've
invested in that the rest of the world may be
able to see it. And so that might contribute
. I mean plus one actually has a relatively high
impact factor. So you know, as you said
, that helps to counteract those negative feelings. But
I mean that that could contribute to people feeling like
, oh it's lower quality if they basically said at
the outset will publish anything. But again, all
this stuff about transformative was pretty subjective Anyway. Um
Thank you, I was going to say for journals
like the new England Journal of Medicine, they had
the highest post facto last year and it's all open
access before it used to be had copy. And
this is the first american herring, that open actress
looked down upon. But because in journals like the
new England Journal of Medicine and Lancet does have the
highest impact practice all over. They publish every week
and you don't actually have to pay. And their
reasoning I don't know how to make that money.
I think the advertisements or something and some other things
but the thing is that the kind of uh information
they gave up they're always hot button issues and everything
like that. And so every week there's always something
in fact when you submit um to them, one
of the things they probably want to know is or
get ready maybe you're going to be interviewed somehow on
some T. V. Or something like that.
And you know so the open access that I have
seen through any J. M. And uh Lancet
what they have done is to actually provide the information
for everyone at no cost to um to the writers
at no cost to whoever I want to read it
. Even if you just go through any database one
can actually get there and sometimes you have to log
in and you don't have to actually pay to actually
log in to the general side. And so um
this and they have maintained the high impact factor for
several several years now. And so to actually be
able to publish their or even and then one thing
I've also noticed in those journals they can have a
long string of authors sometimes 1020. And usually it's
because um they have gone into the field maybe during
the Ebola virus disease crisis, you know, so
you had a lot of people go into the field
so you can have a long string of names that
could fill up half of a pig in some of
their hot button issues that get published. But uh
from my observation open access in those places. I
mean to get published there even if they're one of
the long list of 20 or 30 or 40 names
, it is big. You know, it's not
, it's not something that one looks down, one
looks down upon. And so I just want to
throw that like that because they still it's a science
journal. But I mean to get your name in
one of the laundry's of names there, you know
, and sometimes actually commission um authors to write something
about a certain topic. You know, and it's
all it's all about the impact is all saucing to
the readers. And they also have committed no I
find it that the open access in this jungle sometimes
I use them as a data base because I know
that what I'm getting there, the information I'm getting
there is one of the most current. You know
, I mean you know sometimes just going straight to
google's call. I'm like okay let me just see
what they have here and I get the information because
of all the open access that they make available.
Everyone was something I wanted to ask and that is
how do you find your open access journal? How
did did you hear about them or discover them other
than being invited to edit? Have you had how
did you go about deciding where to publish? Find
access to mates, then seek out an open access
journal to start with? It was the journal that
I met the scope, identified it through more traditional
means. Um And more traditional search engine house to
the library. I said, well I can I
can do that. My works better than that.
So then I looked at how to submit and it
just happened to be open access. But then after
that experience, it was a positive one, you
know, kind of kept an eye out for that
. And then just I found a website that had
open access educational journals and it's a long long list
and 90% I don't know. I don't need any
, it's not the scope, that's not what I
do, but there's a few that are kind of
broadened out through that. So I still am.
I'm not I'm talking like three journalists. I'm not
talking about the time of journalists, but if you
rotate that, it ends up being a good number
of articles as an ally. Mhm. It's actually
one of the journals that's used a lot in our
field, even though it's not it's looked down upon
, but it's used a lot um and it's because
of that and it's that it's not cutting edge.
So a lot of time a lot of our higher
to your journals, you have to be on the
cutting edge and it has to be novel something amazing
in it. And plus one you can publish as
long as your research method is sound, you can
publish their And so um it's actually one of the
journals that you come across a lot of the times
because everything is not a nature paper but you've still
done work and you still want it published. Mhm
. It was it fit our criteria, what we
four really interested in that. I didn't think I
knew that about blossom. They had. That's lower
but maybe broader criteria for acceptance. And it's just
interesting is it you're such a correlation somehow between publishing
openly course increase to sometimes in your data raw data
plus of course also and reproducibility, your results and
transparency of results. And there's, you know,
and then there's also this whole argument which is really
clearly true that there's what do they call it the
file drawer bias or something like that. Where because
journals are mostly looking for exciting new innovative cutting edge
things you do your experiment. You don't have any
published. So you don't publish that and then nobody
knows somebody else wasted wherever. Um So I don't
know, there's there's some weird like spectrum there between
having things be open and having them be shared elsewhere
. They don't know if they published that kind of
thing in Las, you know, the, oh
, I did this experiment and totally failed. No
, I think you have to have some result because
we write, we actually joke all the time that
, you know, one of us is going to
start the Journal of failed of tents because we find
a lot of times that, you know, we're
trying to do something and then we'll talk to collaborate
and they're like, yeah, we did that.
And we're, we're like, oh, we right
. Also in the life sciences explicitly accepts negative for
no results. Thanks. Right. Yeah. And
that she cares about why you founded the journalist's job
, right. Question about find your open external,
Why did you found a journal? Is, um
, for two reasons, the on the one hand
, we we wanted to emphasize that the works that
are published in spectra are at once finished pieces that
are, that are very much publishable. Um,
and yet that they express something that is, that
is part of a bigger conversation we have, you
know, I would assume that the disciplinary equivalent of
an experiment is an ongoing conversation. Right? And
so we are we are emphasizing that the other,
the other reason why we're doing this is that as
a graduate journal we're trying to, we're trying to
show, but one of the, one of the
purposes, I think one of the ways I've always
understood graduate journals in my fields, in this case
. So Political science, Economics, International Relations,
all that stuff um, is to show that there
are conversations going on between graduate students, amongst graduate
students, between graduate students and faculty, between faculty
and graduate students that are often cutting edge, often
daring, often interdisciplinary often do not fit into any
of the established criteria. Um and which rightfully ought
to have a place in the journals that are more
quote unquote established this war, I would not do
air quotes, I'm sorry, that are more quote
unquote established. Um but where it is often more
difficult to get in for a variety of reasons.
And so offering the authors the ability to maintain their
copyright when we were in the war press platform,
that was worded a little differently. Um but the
authors to hold onto that allows them to keep working
on this stuff, uh and to to prepare it
for other venues, prepared for better, better whatever
that means. Venues, venues with high impact factor
venues with more institutional recognition, that kind of thing
, while simultaneously having something out there that contributes to
an ongoing conversation on the one hand, and allows
them to frankly put it on their cV. Mhm
. Um so, you know, it seems to
me that that gives a variety of incentives and it
has it has been fairly successful um as sort of
a point when I when I was editor and talk
to people at conferences about spectrum is a publication platform
. I would mention that and you could sort of
see people's eyes getting, you know, lighting up
because it's not, you know, it's published and
it's done right, It's published. And it's sort
of, it's an ongoing thing. You can continue
doing that. You know, you don't have to
give up copyright, you don't have to sign this
particular formulation over to a journal that suddenly, miraculously
, by the virtues of property rights. Now suddenly
owns your thought in this precise incarnation of your thought
. Um, and then you have to ask the
journal, which I always found rather bizarre. I
have to ask the journal to then publish that stuff
. And, you, you know, turning dissertation
into a book or something like that. Right?
That seemed absurd to me. And so a number
of people who are publishing Inspector, faculty and graduate
students alike, we've had sort of an expansion of
that base from from graduate students. Two faculty have
expressed that that is one of the things that attracts
them to publish their and it's not interestingly enough,
that has not led authors too, you know,
submit what you would expect of, you know,
communist, economically right, rational utility maximizing individuals,
uh to just sort of send us these bizarre working
paper kind of things that are that would never pass
our peer review anyway, because we do have here
with you. Uhh and, you know, it
has not led to a diminishing of quality either.
I think it's it works. It's good stuff.
Any last comment support what you'd like to say rational
choice here is not valid. I agree. Life
. Thank you all so much for coming. Was
a great conversation. Thank you. Mhm. Mhm 1026 01:00:52.719 --> A:middle L:90% . Yeah.