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 of 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
schedule is back there on the table. Um This is
our first event for Open Access Week. Um Tomorrow
we have a session on data and digitization uh here
in this room at 1:30. 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. So
you can find out more about it at that session.
On Thursday, I'm leading a session on scholarly
publishing trends. Uh there's 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 uh bibliometrics, um 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 coming
to Virginia Tech this year. That will be at
7:00 over in Davidson Hall 281. Um So
in all of our events are available for N.L.I.
credit including tonight. So um
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 this faculty graduate student panel on open
access. Um I'm Gail McMillan, I'm the director
of Scholarly Communication at the 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 is library support and we do
that in a variety of ways. Um 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. Um 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 um I'll be
doing a session on Wednesday at 10:00 in 3080 Torgerson
so if you know anybody that might be interested in
subvention fund and 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 help. So let me introduce our panelists and then we'll
move along first on my right 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 Text and Design Content
Analysis is publicly available in VTechWorks. Um
as are several of the articles that she's published. Next
to Titilola is Sascha who is a PhD candidate in 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 Plos One of the open access journals
we supported. Next to Alison 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 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 Carola is Scott King professor in the department of
Geosciences where he says he studies the interiors of terrestrial
plants, must be so. He is the senior executive editor
of GeoResJ an open access
interdisciplinary online journal. Um And he has also served
as an editor of Earth and Planetary Science Letters which
is not an opening access journal. And end of the line
we have Jeremy Ernst who is an Associate Professor of
Integrative STEM Education, he's also on the faculty of
the Institute for Creative Arts and Technology. He's an
associate director of the Office of Education, Research and
Outreach and an affiliate faculty member for the College of
no, for Engineering Education. And he
was our very first subvention fund applicant, successful, back in
fiscal year 2013. Yes, with the very first
one. 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 will invite the
audience to to comment or have questions as well.
So would like to start. Okay, thank you.
Thanks for inviting me. Um The first experience
I had was actually online through the central um publishing
site, I had an article I wanted to publish
um there it was a journal and the cost was
in the thousands, but somewhere in the lines I
said, check if your institution is um had of
this med Central so that it 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
need to check something. So that's how I got
to gail. I'm like, okay, this is
my article and this is what I saw on the
website, but I don't understand what it meant.
And so that's how I got to know. And
um, she explained to me it 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 hold something like 18, what
happens to the remaining three already on top of it
was 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 working for myself,
which I eventually did. And there wasn't much,
for 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 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 that was it. That's it.
And I've I've actually done like several after that,
you know, it was it was the same person
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, 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 successors
that our editors now is two 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
um for the third year and that's what I am
right now. Editor emeritus. Um And so when
I was editor elect two years ago, uh 2013,
Yeah. Um We were spectacles posted on a
Wordpress platform. Um And uh 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 or to keep the publication such that the
authors would retain copyright um and such that it would
be as freely accessible as possible um 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 moved from the Wordpress platform to um the
Open Journal Systems hosted by the library um e journals.
Uh 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 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 the
editors in between them and then the edit respect to
the authors, authors copy editors. 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 too, is that the authors
get a chance to log in at any point during
the process and see what the article where the articles
at 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 um more or less in real time uh
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.
Um and it's much more functional and much more convenient,
And yet we still retain the principle that the
authors retain their copyright and so they can do with
the articles as after they publish 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, 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
couple$1,000 that it takes um adds up fast.
And so um I had actually done some research and
found the library suspension fund and I actually told my
adviser, you know, hey there's the sub mention
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 said, you know if
we publish and 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 um
when looking at some of the other articles that I
have published and um micro biology journals specifically, there
aren't open access. Um my ones that are in
open access journals have more views because they're 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 this invention fund and
I published in a journal that's a traditional, you
know paper and ink 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, they'll tell you,
you know, if you'd like to publish it
open access, that'll be$3,000 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 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 um, you know, I hadn't
budgeted that. It's hard for a sponsor when you
think, well you could higher not undergraduate technician for
the summer and give them some great research experience for,
you can, you can, you can publish
this this paper. And so um, The,
the pension fund was was great that it covered about
half that cost. 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 drop page charges.
So this was a journal, wetlands, wetlands.
But um, 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.
I mean, you could 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 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 little ones. So I remember,
you know, being very strategic about which organizations you
joined, so you can have access to their 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 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
submitted where I get a paper accepted in the exact
same journal. And You know, in this time
we just went with the free, even though I
still had, you know, we could have come
back to the the Prevention 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
a 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 gonna make major conservation decisions. There's not
gonna be a lot of managers who don't, you
know, don't have access to a to a library
who are gonna be responding to this article. So
in that case, you know, I saved,
I saved my money for another, you know,
let another article to, you know, to go
open access because we've got one that we're gonna 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 wouldn't 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 everybody. I 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 of not longer. It's got a very um
strong reputation. It's one of the highest impact factors
in geology or geochemistry and geophysics and Um did that
for, I mean when I started in 2000,
you know, I got papers by mail, you
know, not email, you know, letters uh
you know, envelopes with stamps, you know,
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. Um And so I
I had a hiatus at that point and 2011 or
so. Um publisher at elle severe called me up
and they said that they were thinking of starting an
open access journal um that was gonna be, you
know, available through Science Direct still, but everything
with everything in the journal would be open access.
Um And they were targeting uh you know, a
group of papers or type of papers which would fit
very well. So I was one of the first
editors to agree to join that team. Um 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 um things. And I talked
with a number of my colleagues and their response generally
was, You know, 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
you know, 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
and 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
uh you know, 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$3,000
on top of the whatever outrageous amount it was to
pay for it and to begin with, but um
to be in 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. I they don't
seem to know how to deal with it. And
I talked with a good friend of mine as a
editor at nature and until a couple of years ago
they seemed to be in complete denial. It said
open access is a fad, 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
gonna look like and and how to be successful in
it. So my open access story, I'm a
prisoner to my thematic research agenda. So that's pretty
much my story in a nutshell. Um and what
I mean by that is um my area is stem
education, which is kind of at the intersection of
multiple disciplines and each discipline within them education. They
all have their journals that you can publish in.
Um, 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. Uh 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. It doesn't cost that much in education,
but it's uh, you know, it's a bargain
in in terms of what you guys are talking about.
Uh most of our journals are free to publish
in and the vast majority are so anyways, the,
the premier journals and that type of research that
have that type of scope um are beginning and have
been as the trend was set um over a decade
ago with the Journal of stem Education and, 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 I would ask you for 29 95
to bring the article, even if you were 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 as
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 in google
scholar it tells citations for sites per 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 of 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. Uh,
half of my audience or public educators. So you
really have to think about what they have access to,
and and how how are you gonna have that
research to practice continuum, if it's never it's never
getting in their hands. Um So, so I've
had really positive experiences when it comes to open access,
and um you see you see more and more
publishers going that way, and and I think it's
a it's a fantastic thing. It's um me 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
login, because university can't describe everything, they just
can't. And there's some pretty obscure journals out there
that was very similarly to you. I was joining,
Joining uh professional organizations just to get the journal.
And I know I smiled when you said this
uh dating back to 1972. So we 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 my field has these books lined up
your order, and guess what? Now, all
of those are online. So, uh so my
I came here with 38 boxes of books and now
I've condensed those 22 small bookshelves, and I think
it's it's this kind of, this kind of initiative,
this kind of um I would call it forward
thinking because it's it's definitely making a notable, notable
impact and in your and you're seeing uh 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 um identifying your work as
as the precursor to their work and usually uh and
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
know, 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 it's definitely changed changed 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 but it has been for hours and
just that access and other other journals that that I'm
referring to, that had kind of a closed readership
or now, now they're easily accessible online in a
matter of fact Virginia Tech houses two of them now
or or has for 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 as well. I could I could ramble on,
right. I could stop, I like the
revlon, but I'll stop. Thank you all for
your perspectives. You have any questions or comments from
the audience. Um, it's a comment by the
way, I'm Amanda french um, forgot that 0.6
months and I'm really running the institutional repository, the
tech work. So one of the primary like this
to store copies of maybe, you know, earlier
drafts of versions that are in non oa articles,
so feel free to upload those that um, but
I think it was, I think you were saying,
um, People not necessarily wanting to read,
you know, sort of really obscure academic articles on,
you know, uh, invertebrates, uh,
fish in Florida and so on like that. So
I've actually, I've been, I haven't been writing
approaching a lot, but I have a doctorate in
English. And so back when I was doing more
of that, um, I was early in the
19, in the mid-90s began putting my things online.
And of course we didn't have the infrastructure that
we do now journals institutional culture. But what I
really noticed was that I would put up these things
that I thought were quite obscure about, you know,
your victorian poets and things and that people would
come out of the woodwork from around the world to
write me about those articles in the in fact they
still do like 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 you know, at one
time I have the same stories, you know,
where you know, a booker, award winning author,
Irish author found an article of mine that was
linked to from a Wikipedia article that I put on
my website and wrote me about this sort of semi
biographical article that I've written about obscure irish woman,
you know what I mean? It's just you can't
buy that kind of like feeling that your research is
having an impact, you know, Wikipedia by the
way to very well, but It is like the
7th most traffic but yeah, so, but it's
it's 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 that
only academics would read or understand definitely get you also
get kind of like some crazy people who are reading,
I don't understand it, do that currently in
the health sciences. They had this to where they're
writing really, really high level pieces of research about,
you know, the latest kind of cancer and
then your significant other gets that kind of cancer and
something really have a desire to read, you know,
that advanced research whether or not understand should 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 then and given the expense of that
journalists just it's still a weighing the options. But
without the Library Prevention Fund it would be a way
worse option because, you know, as I said
in in the one instance, it was worth an
extra$1500 to me. You know, I felt
like that's where it needed to to go, but
for it to have ever been worth an extra$3000
to me, you know, I mean that's that's
when it's starting to get, 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
libraries have mentioned fund has been a huge help in
allowing in allowing that and uh 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 them. 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 serie but you know
to have the copy editors and that you know I
mean I know that you know. But Yeah it
doesn't really cost him$3,000 to process this article.
You didn't know that. Let's get the demon library
and the provost credit, they're the ones who are
funding the open access a pension fund. The library
dean has been a proponent of it, he tends
to put in more than the others put in.
And we've never we've never run out of funds,
you know 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 um we've
over spent our budget several times to them that we
have to get credit. I wanted to kind of
ask something similar to what Amanda was talking about.
And that is have you had reactions to your your
open access journals that you've published or have you talked
to your colleagues about publishing open access. Yeah.
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
yet our culture tends to be that 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. Right. Right. Right.
Probably once a week invitations to you know 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. Uh and it's
you know that that contributes to this, you know,
perception amongst some people that open access papers aren't.
Yeah, but on the other hand, mainstream
journals are now offering this option of publishing your paper
open access or not. And you know 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, you
know, 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, you know, 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 and I'm like, where
from? That's a that's actually an interesting point where
from part to react to your the whole uh global,
you know, impact as it were. Thing
is for spectrum. It has been interesting to see
when we moved over, when we move platforms.
Uh we're in the process over the last couple of
years as we sort of got more established. It's
a relatively young journal, we are in the fifth
year, sixth 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,
you know, people look for uh keywords. Uh
and they and 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? And so
it's 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 an SSN
which makes it a real journal among other things,
as well as being, you know, so it's
it's indexed by any of the, you know,
databases like Yeah, it's signifying in a number of
ways, including being an O. J. S.
That it is a real not right. That's
it. That's the other thing is that amongst graduate
journals, but I think this might be field specific,
but I think when you look at graduate journals,
um they are often considered lower tier, obviously,
oh, you can get into a real journal.
Well, I guess you can publish in a
graduate. 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 uh,
yeah, setting these markers is really important. Uh,
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 a
URL, 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,
that's sort of the other thing, is that
the way that you establish a profile as a journal
of this kind hosted on this platform is also important
question. Yes, I was uh, I was
interested to hear about the issue of prestige in biology,
but I was wondering if there were other fields
where there's um, a disconnect between the uh,
where you need to publish to get tenure or promotion
and open access um, is their biggest connect in
that. So I guess that's for all the panels,
there's a disconnect except for one journal and that's
the one I was referring to. So um,
yeah, I think that it's in the, it's
in the short list of must sees and then there's
the list goes on. One of the um,
from a prestige standpoint, there's, there's not a
huge fall off, but there is a little bit
of a fall off and one of the main factors
and, 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
moneymaker and, and so therefore there is incentive to
maybe accept questionable. But all that speculation, we
don't know that they're 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, um as well as openly accessible uh
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 a,
there is a little bit of disconnect and except here's
the big difference when you have a rapidly 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,
yeah, there's there's no, there's no prestige issues
and 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,
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
its index in the right places and in fact,
factors to the right company thing, which is ironic
because the impact factor is for profit. So it's,
it all comes full circle. But but those,
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. I mean, it
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 fee 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, I
was sort of shocked by the reviewer instructions which were
do not evaluate the I forget exactly what words they
use, but you know, so many journals 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 had 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, do the editors
still say, yeah, but here's what's really more
transformative and we're gonna only 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 a venue where
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
equality. If they basically said at the outset we'll
publish anything. But again all this stuff about transformative
was pretty subjective. Anyway thank you. I was
gonna say for journals like the new England Journal of
Medicine, they had the highest infant tractor last year
and it's all open access before it used to be
had copy. And this is the first american hearing
that open access is looked down upon. But because
in journals like the new England Journal of Medicine and
Lancet those have the highest impact factors all over.
They publish every week and you don't actually have to
pay. And their reasoning um 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 um information they give out, they're
always hot body 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 you
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 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 wants
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
pick to actually log in to the journal side.
And so um they 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 10 20 usually
is because um they have gone into the field maybe
during the DVD Ebola virus disease crisis you know so
you've had a lot of go into the field so
you actually have a long stream of names that could
feel of half of a pig in some of the
hot button issues that get published. But 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 and it's not it's not something that
one looks down one looks down upon and so I
just want to prove that like that because it's still
it's a science journal. But I mean to get
your name in one of the long list 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,
it's all sourcing to the readers. And they
also have committed. No, I find it that
the open access in this journal, sometimes I use
them as a data base because I know that what
I'm getting their information and getting there is one of
the most current, you know, I mean,
you know sometimes just going straight to google because 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. That reminds me of
something I wanted to ask. And that is how
do you how do you find your open access journals?
How did how did you hear about them or
discover them other than being invited to edit? Have
you had you know, how did you go about
deciding where to publish and find your open access journals?
I didn't seek out an open access journal to
start with. It was a journal that I met
the scope, identified it through more traditional means um
in more traditional search engine house to the library I
said well I can I can do that, my
works better than that. So so then I I
looked out and 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, long list
and 90%. I don't I don't need any that's
not the scope, that's not what I do,
but there's a few that are kind of broadened out
through that. So still, I'm I'm not talking
like three journals. I'm not talking about the Time
Tunnel journals, but if you rotate that, that
ends up being a good number of articles as an
outlet. Alison, How did you find this 1?
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 tier 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 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. So it was it
fit our criteria of what we were looking for?
It's really interesting that I didn't think I knew that
about glass. They had that's lower but maybe broader
sort of criteria for acceptance. And it's it's just
interesting cause it if there's such a correlation somehow between
publishing openly of course increase. It's just pushing your
data raw data which of course also leading in and
reproducibility of results and transparency of results. And there's,
you know, and 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
else you don't have anything published. So you don't
publish that and then nobody knows exactly the same thing.
You know. Um so I don't know there's
some there's some weird like spectrum there between, you
know, having things be open and having them be
shared elsewhere. I don't know if they published that
kind of thing. Did this experiment? I think
you have to have some result because we write,
we actually joke all the time that you know,
one of us is gonna start the Journal of failed
of tense because we find a lot lot of times
that you know, we're trying to do something and
then we'll talk to a collaborator and they're like,
yeah, we did that. We were like,
oh right. Actually cares about uh why you founded
the journal copywriters. Question about how did you find
your open access journal? Why did you found a
journal with that as a for two reasons? Um
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. Uh
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 uh the
other the other reason why we're doing this is uh
that as a graduate journal, we're trying to uh
we're trying to show one of the, one of
the purposes. I think one of the ways I've
always understood graduate journals in uh 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. I swore I would not do air
quotes. I'm sorry that are 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 authors the ability to maintain their copyright
when we were in the Wordpress platform, that was
worded a little differently. Um but the authors to
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. Um,
so, you know, it's 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 as a publication platform,
I would mention that, and you could sort
of see people's eyes getting, you know, lighting
up, because there's there's it's not, you know,
it's published and it's done right. It's it's
published and it's sort of, it's an ongoing thing
and 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, turn your dissertation into a book or something
like that, right? That seemed absurd to me.
And so a number of people who are publishing
in spectra, 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, harmonists 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 peer
review. Uh, and, you know, it
has not led to a diminishing of quality either.
Like it's it works, it's good stuff. Any
last comments so hard, anything else you'd like to
say? Rational choice theory is not valid? I
agree. Okay, well, thank you all so
much for coming. It was a great conversation.
Thank you. Thank you