like all. Good evening. I'm Kiri DeBose,
the College Librarian for Natural Resources and Environment.
And I'm here to introduce our faculty panel. We'll
be talking about open access. We have Dr Zachary
Drescher, a dresser. He is from religion and
culture. Dr. Deborah Good. She is from
human nutrition Foods and exercise. And Dr Morella,
who is from department of Chemistry. So they're gonna
be giving us some of their perspectives on the various
disciplines that they work with with open access. Um
, we'll take questions from the audience. And if
nobody has any, I have an entire list which
they have seen and said, Oh, God,
yes. So please ask questions. I don't know
. Maybe we should start without. Our experiences are
Do you think? Sounds good. Sounds good.
Get the discussion started. And since you stepped forward
, go ahead. Um, so I guess,
um, I would start by saying that I am
technically an editor of a on the editorial bar of
an open access panel or an open access journal.
Um, that was asked in 2000 and eight.
I looked back in my notes on that, and
at the time, it actually seems like a really
good journal. I've reevaluated it at this point and
decided that it's probably not, and I actually think
it's not even functional at this point. I can't
get a hold of anyone there, But as part
of that, I mean, I know that if
you look at some of the literature on there have
been a lot of reports about lack of peer review
, I know that the articles that I, um
, put through or saw were as rigorously peer reviewed
by myself as any other paper that I would peer
review. So, uh, you know, I
I guess it all depends on the actual individual.
I think that actually is true of any journal,
though. So I sit on the editorial board of
the Open your endocrinology board journal, but I'm I'm
going to tell them to take my name off very
soon. Uh, if I ever hear from them
. And then even this morning, I got an
email and I get them all the time asking me
to join the editorial board of such and so journal
. Uh, I have papers in PLOS one,
which is a highly reputable open access journal, and
I would publish their again, and I have peer
reviewed for them as well. So I guess that's
my experience with open access. Yes, my experience
is actually quite similar. I am also on the
editorial board of a couple of open access journals that
when they initially invited me, I was fairly naive
about open access. Other than, um, I
did have good experience with one that I'll talk about
in a minute. And since I did think that
this was a good thing, I said yes.
One particular one, though even from the start,
was you know, they invited me to actually submit
a paper which I did, and I never heard
anything, never heard anything tried to contact people,
got no response. I've asked them since to withdraw
that submission and take my name off the editorial board
, which they haven't and I have not heard back
from anybody. So again, that's now made me
much more wary as well as a lot of the
publications that have popped up about predatory journals and other
things. So, um, that was the kind
of negative experience I've had, and it continues to
this day that I get lots of requests almost on
a weekly basis. Would you please be on our
editorial board? But I have published five papers in
a well established, long established, highly reputable journal
for crystallography. Um, it's got probably one of
the most rigorous peer reviews of any journal that I've
worked with, and they've been in in the business
for 30 some years. And so very good experience
with them. Um uh, when lots of good
interactions with the editors whenever I have submitted a paper
and nicely that, uh, lately when I've submitted
them this wonderful sub mention fund that the library offers
actually paid for it. So great experience on that
end. Okay, um, I am going to
be the outlier in this panel because things are different
in the humanities and especially I'm trained as a historian
. I am an American historian. Um, religion
and culture is this kind of hodgepodge of folks different
disciplines. Um and I guess so. I'm at
the beginning stages of my career. I am a
haven't even been a PhD for a year at this
point. Um, and so I'm not on any
advisory boards just trying to get things published at this
point, But I have worked for a traditional print
journal that well regarding the field, the Journal of
Southern History, that shows absolutely no effort or desire
to move towards open access. So I've I've seen
that. And I think that that journal represents how
the most highly respected journals, at least in history
, are working. Um, they don't really see
any incentive to move toward any open access. Um
, there are journals that are starting to pop up
that are open access and peer reviewed. And,
um, even put forward some good work, one
that's popping up to mind and in my sub fields
, The Journal of Southern Religion. But it's it's
not a publication you're gonna seek after. If you're
in my stage of your career, right, you're
gonna still want to aim for these more traditional print
based sources. Another thing that I'm involved in right
now is, um, people I know are putting
together an open access textbook for American history and in
order to compile a lot of different voices. So
I am at the moment, I think one of
210 contributors to this, uh, so this is
a massively collective collaborative project that's That's kind of different
from the issues that my co Panelists were talking about
involving journals. But it's still I think it's an
important thing that we're doing. You mentioned your early
stage career, and there's not a huge incentive to
publish these open access. How do we get around
? This is not going away. Yeah. Um
well, I mean, again, answering from my
discipline. So there was this. I don't know
if any of you are familiar with the statement that
the American Historical Association, um put forward. I
mean, I'm sure that the information professionals in the
room our but the American Historical Association issued a statement
about open access policy regarding dissertations over the summer.
And they basically said institutions should make it possible for
recently minute PhDs to put an embargo on their dissertation
and hide it from the world. Mm. And
that provoked a lot of controversy, mainly because people
said, um, you know, that's fine,
giving people a choice. But this isn't what are
leading institutions should do? Our leading institutions should stand
up for the most vulnerable people, right? Grad
students and recent, you know, new PhDs.
Uh, and they haven't done that Uh And so
that's the problem, right? Is that especially in
the humanities, where folks or humanities and even some
social sciences, where new graduates are really vulnerable If
they don't get that academic job, then what's next
? Um and so there's There's a call for greater
, I guess, institutional awareness and activism, uh
, to start accepting other forms of publication to start
accepting more openly available things. Look for a number
of publications in the quality, and if someone has
50 publications, can't beat them all. Tell the
quality. So you looked at the German name basically
as a metric for this giving one way around.
This would be just point those out. Awesome.
Require CDs with the Journal is not on it.
In place of that put citations or something like this
. I think that I don't think that's fair,
because there really is a quality gap in stuff that's
published in the top journals. And then a lot
of open access journals are and you really I mean
, it's comparing apples and you have a lower journal
. Yeah, A. And you have 100 citations
in your the other one. The review committee has
never seen. They just see your nature. You
gotta be better than this other one. Despite them
having the exact same Controlling. Probably. Good.
Yeah. So isn't this I mean, I think
it needs to get away from this chase of the
big publications. Otherwise, you have all these someone
mentioned before the panel. All this fraud is correlated
with impact factor. Make sense of smell. Since
you know what inches it seems to me that what
? What? What that says about reading a book
is that the market is determined whether you should get
10 years. Do you have a popular topic?
Do you have a topic that the publisher wants to
sell and we'll make enough money to? Should that
be what determines I say? No. But again
, I can't I don't have that say at this
point in my career, you know? So it's
up to folks who are established to start worrying about
these issues. And from what I've seen, that's
a slow change. Right? Um So what?
What she's referring to is that the reason this whole
dissertation embargo thing was a big deal is that to
get tenure in the humanities, you have to get
that first book out. And that's really the only
way that a lot of places, uh, teaching
colleges decide. Um, and academic publishers don't really
make a lot of money. Um, and they're
making less money. And so they are becoming more
and more hesitant to publish things, especially things that
are freely available on the Internet. And so one
of the fears is that, um, you know
, I'll have my dissertation out there available, and
Publisher X, which is a good publisher, may
have some hidden policy. We don't publish anything that's
even, you know, half available. Um,
openly. That's the fear. Um, and you
know, the debate since has been is that really
how publication works? And people have argued on both
sides of that, and I don't really know how
publication works now in chemistry. We don't really have
that issue. I mean, it's it's an entirely
different group of metrics, and certainly publications are are
the main issue now back to the question, though
, of what makes for a good publication. I
think both promotion and tenure committees and hiring committees do
look at the name but tied to what is its
impact factor, which is tied not to that individual
persons publications, obviously, but to the overall citation
. But we we do take advantage of the citation
report that can be obtained on any individual. And
I don't know if anybody is familiar with the what
is it called the H in, uh, the
H Index, which it's kind of interesting because I'm
not sure what made the person who came up with
it pick that. I think it's their last name
starts with age, but age is, you know
, you're If you've got an age index of 10
, you've got 10 publications with 10 or more citations
. So you know why that metric, regardless of
whether it's called age, is kind of unusual in
some respect. I mean, 10 publications of 100
Citation strikes me as better than 10 with 10 or
more, but nevertheless, so the index actually talks
about the numbers of papers with a certain number of
citations, and so that's one way of looking at
them. But then, one of the things that
I've discovered with respect to reviews of papers is more
and more. The reviewers, since they typically are
chosen from the same field, are basically demanding that
well your paper is okay, but you're missing all
of these references that absolutely must be in this paper
before publication. So it's to me a conflict of
interest that they are kind of able to call the
It's called the shots on the review process based on
they want you to put, you know, and
you can tell obviously right away who it is because
you know, the 10 references they want all have
the same author. I wonder if I could ask
ask you a question about, um, sort of
the social sciences. Uh, you know, I
mean tradition for for Joan eyes that we would publish
our dissertation research, probably in several papers in a
journal. And I wonder why that's not cheering the
social sciences. Why can't that be true? And
and it and it still has to do with interest
level. So you mentioned, you know, a
publisher isn't going to be maybe as interested in a
book on subject acts that's still the same in a
journal, right? I mean, a journal can
say the science is all sound, but it's just
is not going to generate enough interest. Um,
but still, there are lots of other options is
that is that it would open access journals actually give
some of the reputable ones that is, give social
scientists sort of that opportunity to publish essays. I
guess it would be more essays on the information rather
than rather than a whole textbook or a whole,
you know. And so, from conversations I've had
with maybe one sociologist I'm thinking of, he was
able to do something like that. But coming from
history, I don't know that a split up product
is ever going to be accepted like that. Um
, and I think this is largely because it's tradition
, right? And historians, uh, they are
stuck in the past in more ways than one.
Uh, I joke about what I do, but
it's true. It's really hard to change what historians
want to do. The other thing historians have to
get over is that they have this assumption that they
are not just scholars creating new knowledge, but they're
creating, um, stories or art, or something
that has another, I guess, more aesthetic quality
to what they do, and that needs to be
presented in this book format for some reason. So
there's a lot of things to get over for that
to be possible, I would like to see it
. But then I would also on your comments,
say about reviewers, uh, you know, whenever
, at least in my field. But I'm sure
it's probably two years whenever we submit an article,
uh, we always put down who we think would
be the best reviewers. And I'm not gonna put
down someone that I think hates me or, you
know, hates my work. I'm gonna put down
the people that I talked to at conferences, and
they know my work well, and they respect what
I do, and they're probably going to get my
paper a favorable rating. And that's just, you
know, I rarely put down someone that I have
never met ever. That's I don't in my journals
actually ask you the other questions. Is there somebody
you absolutely do not want to review this paper?
So they do that. And so and so you
know, it goes to the question of peer review
. I mean, certainly some of these predatory journals
maybe are not even reviewing right, you know,
and that's that's kind of established at this point,
but you have to ask the question of even the
non predatory, the more traditional journals we essentially,
we don't know who the who the reviewers ultimately are
. But, I mean, I know that there's
a there's a person. One of my colleagues and
I always send papers to her, and she always
sends the papers to me, and I think we
know how each other we review. I still do
a very thorough job of reviewing her papers. She
still does. I could kind of tell which ones
are hers. She still does a thorough review of
mine. But you know, is that acceptable?
That the scientists submitting gets to determine essentially, who's
going to review their paper because the editors don't have
time to try to find, um, completely anonymous
reviewers. I mean, I came down probably the
time because it didn't used to be. I just
see it more. Almost every journal now asked for
viewers, and I'm going to say, maybe 10
years ago, that wasn't the case. That's probably
they're fine. Uh huh. Also feel any alternative
knowledge from arising fishers. You're looking for people who
will substantiate the argument that you're already making any email
that they are. Yeah, a good point.
A one of the interesting phenomenon about some of the
traditional journals. At least the ones that I deal
with is that they are making it an option.
Two, Have your paper either be open access or
to be quote traditional, which, to me now
raises a whole bunch of questions back to my library
. Friends is are these journals getting any cheaper?
Since people are paying, um, for some publication
, I suspected the answer was no. And I
don't know what percentage of people ultimately have agreed to
pay open access, but they're now making that an
option. And and I always I've actually been wondering
because I've seen that also, in the journals,
I submit to, um you pick that option as
to whether you're you think you might go open access
or traditional before your papers reviewed, and it says
in the text, this will have no influence on
how your papers reviewed. And yet I've always wondered
if one is willing to pay. I mean,
we get into the same predatory practices. Potentially that
may be the editor is more willing to let a
few minor comments, You know that don't need to
be addressed a fly so that publication goes through?
Um, I don't know. I really think that
that question should be asked after acceptance and the paper
should either be accepted or not, and then those
Then that author can decide whether they want to be
open access. And I've I've been very surprised to
see this pop up on nearly. I substituted a
papers this year, and I think every single one
asked just about you know, they had an open
access format as well as the traditional, every single
one asked before I submitted whether or not I wanted
this to be an open access your statement about history
, though, and I'm going to draw a blank
now. But the latest Nobel Prize winner and literature
, she said, You know, she's Finally someone
was recognized for writing short stories, and she said
that she originally always thought short stories were just the
practice Before you got around to publishing that novel.
But, she said, I realized I don't write
novels, I write short stories and she was recognized
for that. So it it, you know,
kind of is a parallel, um, situation to
what you're talking about. And so many revised dissertation
books end up looking like short stories that have been
cobbled together. Right? Um, there's only minimal
revision to tie everything into into a hole. And
, um, yeah, I mean, I think
that doing away with that would be nice question that
sort of is in and around this area. My
experience of science have a strongly articulated value around access
. There's a greater emphasis on the disability. There's
sort of ability to justify research by making some that
research ability. And I find it really interesting that
the humanities outside of the digital humanities is not really
articulated. The strong values that are different because the
humanities are not interested for reproducibility. And that's it
, that it's different data, though different types of
data. And, I mean, if you're if
you're thought, If if a thought pass us of
a historian, that's it. Seems to me like
I'm not a social scientist, so I don't know
. But it would seem to me like that's unique
to that person coming up with that concept. And
how could you reproduce that? And and it could
be just that I'm you know, I'm a basic
scientist and I can you know I can. I
can't do your experiments necessarily. But as someone,
I could do something in someone, and I feel
I can repeat it and you're invited to come to
my lab and head of chemistry so I could maybe
I could do something. Question is, is not
broadly about if the types of drivers for openness that
are within the sciences are not the same as the
humanities, what kinds of things humanity's due to identify
their own unique drivers that would then speak to both
the publishing industry training graduate students, the more experimental
modes of thinking and working, because we it's just
maybe not necessarily question anymore. And because as we
move towards digital work, we don't have traditional research
prize anyway. And so that's already a pressure point
on thinking about things like Europe or how something how
the product of research is published, that that shifts
. Is there a testable hypothesis? And, you
know, we would we would talk and are in
this in the basic scientist about a testable hypothesis.
Um, and I could think of cases you know
, where someone's brought forth, a new theory of
I don't know this somebody in the Civil War really
pulling at straws here. But I would think that
there's data that can be pulled from sources that can
be testable in some ways. And maybe that's what
you're getting at. And that's the purpose of peer
review in the humanities. Is this person interpreting those
sources faithfully, okay Or just making stuff up?
That's that's what that's the test of peer review.
Is this person making stuff up? It's actually problema
ties is the idea of counting citations because those 10
citations could be negative. Interpretation. True good point
. That's a good point. Problematic. It's just
replacing one way exactly about this point. And I
actually converted anywhere our ability factor, basically introducing distinguishing
citations, the one that was supported in one way
. You have a score, but I agree with
you 100% downside. Maybe this was so bad that
that great So I think I mean to me.
It's just shocking how resistant scientists are changing things,
but I also understand it like it's hard to,
you know, submit to an open access as opposed
to the more prestigious journal because you need to get
tenure. But Once you get tenure, you still
need to get funding. I mean, really,
all these career things I don't think it changes,
wants to get tenure for me. That's easy to
say. Grad student mortgage to worry about so idealistic
, but a lot of things but there There are
a couple of very recent stories in chemistry that don't
necessarily specifically deal with open access, but they do
deal with the overall issue of peer review and openness
. So one was that for one of the prestigious
journals, um, within the supplementary material not within
the paper itself, but within the supplementary material.
You find a handwritten note that says to the graduate
student from the professor, What happened to the data
for this? And for this piece of data,
just make up some numbers, Okay, so it
made it through. So they're invest. The journal
itself is investigating because they number one don't know if
that was added post a review or that was in
there, and obviously the reviewers didn't pay a bit
of attention to it. So that's one thing now
that's sparking. The whole issue of you know someone
is telling someone to make up data And then there's
another one. Where somebody in presenting some visual data
in a chemistry journal, it was pretty clear that
there were, like, little white boxes over parts
of the data to block out peaks in a spectrum
that they wanted to pretend weren't there. That shouldn't
have been there. And it was just basically a
very bad photo shop job. And that was a
case of, like, who reviewed this? I
mean, this was so blatant to anybody who saw
it. There's actually one journal now, and I
can't remember its name that is basically asking people to
publish there, attempts to repeat other work in some
of the established journals and say, we saw this
. We thought this was neat. They claimed,
you know, in our field to make a compound
, you talk about yield. They claimed a 90%
yield. The best we ever got after five tries
was 20%. You know, things like that and
our stuff did not look like what they claimed and
things like that. So there is a journal in
terms of openness that is asking for things like that
. Um, and you know, that's not a
bad idea to be honest with you. I wonder
also if you know, as I'm listening to you
talk, I'm wondering and sort of. We have
a little discussion about this before our panel started.
Um, you know, we get the reviews as
an author of a paper, and then we make
a response to that review. Uh, and then
sometimes we have to make revisions based on that response
. Um, and those are included in the paper
, and sometimes even it comes back again and you
make another response to the second review, which could
be editorial or could be actually going back out to
peer review. But none of that goes out to
the public who is now going to read the paper
. And I'm wondering if at least the response to
review might be something that journals could consider adding because
that tells the readers how this paper was reviewed,
how rigorously it might have been reviewed. And we
don't have When you read a paper, you you
actually don't have any. You have to do your
own review. I mean, I teach undergraduates,
uh, in a senior seminar how to critically review
papers. Um, but that's all we can do
is is what with our own knowledge basis to critically
review that paper. And I'm just wondering if,
um, you know, open access journals, especially
could give access to that review and the response to
review That would be a really useful piece of a
paper. Could be supplemental. It doesn't have to
be part of the text itself that people wanted to
go Look at it, they could. But I
mean, generally, I agree that people don't normally
look at the supplemental data unless they really care about
the paper. And that's unfortunate. Superfund basically Howard
Hughes earlier. This is okay, um, their
reviews are open, and I think these are actually
more interesting to read than the supplementary because you actually
see what people are saying. Like the science gossip
. Okay, reports. But also it's starting to
change. They they do use things in life that
I actually think that his name is Pope. This
is an option for years. Now. You can
sign it off the most, and I expect because
they're saying something unfair or be. They know this
person, and it's going to look like they're biased
. Um, well, and I think that that
point is a good one because, um uh,
that if it's a big name in the field and
you know, the thought is that you get the
paper from the big name in the field and maybe
you're not going to be as rigorous, because,
gosh, I mean, they've been doing this for
40 years. This is what this is their whole
life. Your whole lab is based on, you
know, angiogenesis. And and so maybe those papers
aren't as rigorously reviewed as my angiogenesis paper or something
. Um, as an example. Well, that's
what's a bit in my view, um, that
exercise of sending out 300 manuscripts to the, you
know, the same manuscript of 300 open access journals
to see who was being rigorous and who wasn't.
You know, it's one of those again back to
experiments. You know, the number of variables needs
to be kept to a reasonable number that you can
twist out the statistics from, and the fact that
this person made it so that it seemed like English
wasn't the first language by putting it through Google translation
twice, um, and making it seem like and
giving it an address from I mean, yeah,
I guess this person was really, really trying to
completely biased against publication. But But the problem is
again, it really does shed a light that now
makes it seem like all open access is not good
instead of the bigger issue of the so called predatory
journals. And I think Beall's list is a very
good, um, list of predatory journals that does
help people understand some of these these issues. And
it is a problem because, unless you're aware,
there are a number of them that very deliberately try
to give themselves titles that are maybe one word different
from one of the more highly established ones. And
so it's It throws confusion out there, and I
think the biggest problem right now because I think these
things are going to fall by the wayside personally.
But I think one of the biggest problems right now
is a question of information management. To the scientist
is what is trustworthy out there. Not that but
top journals automatically or trustworthy because we know lots of
issues there. But now you're getting all of these
other journals that, you know, maybe to make
sure you've got to now cover a whole broader range
of publications. Who's going to be abstracting them and
indexing them or not? That's a major. That's
a major problem. And so find the information,
Um, that's being published in some of those without
actually just going to their homepage. Sometimes it's in
Google Scholar, but not always. Yeah, that's
that's a big problem. You don't even know if
something has already been done in some cases, you
know, or well, if you believe it.
And if those papers aren't trustworthy for that group for
which the review wasn't good. And perhaps now the
authors themselves are maybe not the most ethical. That
potentially could cause a huge problem for intellectual property issues
worldwide because those do become prior publications that could be
cited against an inventor, even if there's no real
validity to it. So that's that's another whole issue
as to why I'm both hoping and thinking that these
more unethical ones will drop by the wayside. Uh
huh. I usually have to give up, like
to get condition. Do you ever get or share
compromise so that you can use your armies? Yes
, it's usually you sign a copyright farming when you're
publishing it, you're giving it up to the journal
. You can use some of the you can use
your allowed to use the figures and public presentations.
I've never seen anything. Anything that says you can't
do that, but you can't. You'll get your
own personal copy of the pdf normally, um,
and you you are allowed to distribute that, but
not necessarily post it in an open way. If
it's not something that should be. I'm trying to
think of the actual language in these documents. I
mean, there, you know, a full page
document. And honestly, a lot of times you're
happy that your stuff coming and you just sort of
sign the copyright release and and say okay with it
because it is so traditional in our field that that's
what you do. Um, that I guess I
don't I don't think about it that much. I
don't have another. I'm not going to republish the
data anywhere, so I don't have another use for
it. Other than, um, you know,
I'm going to use the figures in a grant proposal
or in a seminar I might give. That's completely
allowed. Now. Some journals are basically giving you
the right to post, um, some period of
time, whether it be a year or three years
after publication so that it could be put into some
of the things like the Virginia Tech archives. It
could be put. I could put Link, put
it on my own website. But I think the
Journal of the American Chemical Society I don't know if
they've got a standard across the border. If it's
journal by journal, think about the electronic Jackie Appiah
. Right. Okay. What we have here,
right? That's okay. I mean, it's I
think that's okay. I would I would do that
. I mean, for internally, as long as
we have, we have access to it. The
d o I in the faculty activities reports, we'll
we'll link to it. Unless you're trying to read
it someplace else. Um, that isn't from a
Virginia Tech address. And you don't VPN in virtual
private network for those of you that name or what
? Or you don't have your subscription, but yeah
, and then a lot of our material, um
, if it was funded by an NIH grant who
has to be publicly available, and so, um
, whenever I publish something that has a grant number
in it. Uh, the pub mad contacts me
and says here, you need to verify that this
is the correct citation and this is the correct paper
we've associated with it. And this is the correct
grant number, and it becomes publicly available. At
that point, just yes. And if if your
publisher didn't and the work was funded by an NIH
grant, it's your requirement to do so. But
normally the what I publish in normally, the publishers
do that. But correct me if I'm wrong,
you can't always get the full paper from apartment.
Um, if it's open access, you can.
If it's if it's an open access in that because
of your grant funding, it had to be made
open. Then you can, but you can't always
. If it's not. I mean, you can
get the abstract from them, and then they'll maybe
give you a link to the delight. But if
we don't then have the right the subscription than you
can't get it, so it isn't like their archiving
it for anybody to get to that Other articles is
divorced. Now this is a requirement. It's maybe
Ben I was gonna say five, but it's not
been that long. Where there's Hmm, right.
Oh, you're saying before the the ones that are
now those have to be full text online. Um
, and I'm not sure if it's a journal.
Um, you know, I'm thinking about if it's
a journal that is not archived by pub med,
and it's an open access journal that should constitute you're
still within, uh, you know what you agree
to do when you take the federal funding, which
is provided as open access? I think you're still
okay. In that sense, you know, a
lot of the open access journals are not necessarily archived
in What I would find is my traditional search engine
, which is pub med or med line. Did
you have a question? So it depends on whether
you wrote that into your grant. Um, and
then what journal you're applying to? There are a
lot of journals that don't charge anything. Um,
it's completely free. Um, I sit on the
Finance Committee for Endocrine Society. They have a lot
of journals. They charge the library's a nice fee
for those journals. Um, and they also have
advertising within the Journal because a lot of clinicians get
those, and a lot of drug companies will advertise
within. In that case, many of their journals
have color figure charges, but not a publishing charge
. Um, there. And then there are other
situations where many times when I read an NIH proposal
, I'll put a 2 to$3000 per year publishing
fees or publishing costs right within my request to NIH
with the thought that it may cost me to have
color publication. Or I may choose to go to
a journal where there's a publication fee. So if
I put it in there, I can always reallocate
that money. But at least I have it as
a line item. Um, but not all journals
charge a fee. Some of them are completely free
, and they're reputable and completely free. But I
still like to write. I actually have one accepted
. Before you submit, you have to agree to
pay. So, um, and I I just
committed to an open access journal, BMC Journal Molecular
Genetics. I email them for us as students sole
author can just wait no give you 400 bucks off
. It was originally$1800. I don't have this
. At least 10% of what I've been here.
Yeah, Um, so I figured, Oh,
I can get the money somewhere. Only to ask
my department or at the library. Thank goodness the
library came through to do this. But in a
lot of cases, I don't know how many universities
have such funds. Yeah, So this really restricts
a lot of people to pay for my my Not
most do charge unless you're invited. Even I've been
invited to write a review. You ended up a
1600 Europe, which means crazy things are going to
strike the view. We wrote it. People ever
unit won't pay anything. And then there were$600
. Well, the open access. I mean,
that's the difference between some of the traditional ones they
don't charge. I don't know of any of the
open access ones that I've worked with. They all
charge for something. Now, again, getting back
to that predatory. Um, I don't understand how
they could be asking for for a fully online journal
. Yes, I do understand that there are servers
and all of these other things, but, you
know, 5 to$6000 per article. I mean
, to me, that's one of the tip offs
that that's got that. Someone is getting a very
nice I mean, that's when I decided I am
I going to start an open access journal for my
retirement age. Now I decided not to go there
. One thing to that question, because you have
to obstruct student. So most of them have grown
up Google age, where everything has been online and
everything's been free and they don't understand the paywall you
don't understand. The good information is subscription based.
Now these predatory publishers who make everything open students have
no idea. So many paid$5000 to get the
article published, but they just come across well.
Here's a research article that meets the abstract and citation
. It's got affiliation, meeting all of that good
solidly period you criteria. But because again they're not
aware of there. There is a reason why we
pay Walls weren't originally their way to some knowledge in
the first place. But how do you guys teach
your students about? Okay, now that you find
information and you found in the journal, how do
you know this is a reputable scholastic source. And
how do you guys address that in their classes without
going to open again? They say I'm at Oxbridge
. I can get this article. The other ones
asking me to pay, not remembering the time in
which we teach a lot. You know, um
, how do you guys think you can get their
papers? You see this stuff coming through? I
mean, I I teach a senior seminar, and
I mean, it's almost too late at that point
, but they actually haven't had, um that kind
of information as to how to critique a journal article
. Unfortunately, they've had to read a lot of
them, so I think a lot of things that
they've read is not necessarily, uh they have not
done the critique themselves. They just sort of read
it. Summarized it believed the data. Um I
mean, we spend a lot of time going over
looking at the author's names, looking at where they're
affiliated, doing a search on the author. So
in addition to the impact factor, how many citations
of that article get? Um, you know,
And if they found an open access journal that they
looked at the day and then looking at the data
. So really looking and digging in and not just
reading the abstract. I tell them, Don't even
you read the abstract really quickly to see if it's
something you want to read further and then you don't
actually read the results section? You look at the
results and you make your own conclusions, and if
you want to go back and read the results,
you can. But that's how I go about telling
my students to do that, Um, and then
we as part of this class, we have four
journal clubs that I oversee, where we pull apart
papers and critique them just like I would as a
reviewer. Um, and then they all have to
do their own. Each week they have to do
the paper. But then as a group, they
actually come up and give a presentation where they have
now pulled apart of paper. And I know that
I've been doing this for several years, and the
students say that they never realized you know, how
many flaws are in just the average paper. I
mean, any paper you can find a flaw,
or you can find a conflict of interest. Um
, you know, there's one I love to do
where Nestle is sponsoring this research on how great chocolate
is, you know, and and the data is
not bad, but it's over exaggerated. So if
you look at the figures, but then you read
what the authors are saying in the results, there's
a lot of over over exaggeration and then go to
the press releases. So that's another thing I tell
them to look at is you know what I'm hoping
that they leave with what my objective is is that
they will go out into the world on their own
and see a press release that they might be interested
in. But then actually look at the data and
not believe what the publisher, what the press says
and not actually believe what the scientist says either,
but actually believe what they can interpret from that data
. Um, and and, you know, I
guess that's that's my Hopefully, that's that's good for
them and that they all learn that in some way
. Um, and I guess I would only hope
that when someone's reviewing papers, that's what they're doing
is that they're not reading necessarily the result, I
don't almost never. When I review a paper,
read what the person says until after I've looked at
the data. Then I read the results because part
of my work as a reviewer is to make sure
that they are interpreting their data correctly in that in
that way, and I will, I will let
them know if I think they're over interpreting. And
I would say most of the time when I'm doing
a review probably eight times out of 10, I
have somebody where I say, you know, in
figure for you say this is a This is a
big difference It's not even significant. So you need
to probably modify line to 37 in your results section
because if it's not a significant difference, you should
not be making a big deal out of it.
You can in the discussion and say there's a trend
towards something or whatever but down the results. But
your question is really not a new one. It
may be complicated by a proliferation of open access,
but the first question and an issue I have with
the students is don't believe. Has she said anything
? Anything I don't care. If it's a traditional
journal, you know they and and even if it's
some big name in the field, cell metabolism impact
factor 35 you know, But you still need to
look at that data with your own critical I There
is something of hero worship that that shows up sometimes
with students that they say, Oh, but this
guy won the Nobel Prize. Well, okay,
fine. But read the paper Stop, you know
, critical. Be critical. Don't take it as
though you know this was written on golden tablets because
that's sometimes that's one of the issues with some new
graduate students. I often do have, and it's
not. It doesn't have to do with the new
journals. It has to do with just They see
it in print. You know, textbooks textbooks can
be wrong. Um, journal articles. They can
be wrong just because it's nicely polished and bound and
everything like that. So it's just a new twist
on the old question of of question, everything and
interpret it yourself. And obviously, if they're at
an early stage, they don't have the practice and
the skills, and that's where we come in to
try to help them to do that with a lot
of the same techniques that she and and the open
access complicates everything that's essentially, It's not that it's
vastly different practice. It's that now there's more of
the non non rigorously peer reviewed material out there.
Yeah, I mean, when I So now I'm
just teaching intro classes and don't deal with this problem
because I'm not asking him to evaluate and find the
stuff in the room. But when I was teaching
history, I mean, it's enough of a burden
to communicate that there's a difference between the first thing
that pops up on Google and something that's been published
. So that's what I have to worry about.
First and foremost not, I guess, that level
of quality between journals or anything like that. It's
getting people to think that, you know, Confederate
history dot com or something like that might have a
biased perspective. So that's what I'm worried about,
making people think that everything it's not just that everything
that's published is true. It's everything that is written
down somewhere digitally or print is true, right.
That assumption is the tough thing to get over in
teaching history. so again, an old issue.
All right, that's more complicated than open access.
Have a question. You said earlier that, like
, for your publishing right now, you'd probably focus
on those traditional journalists. Perhaps in the open access
one is that strictly based on, you know,
the impact and how well they're known. You see
, that may be changing. 5, 10 years
from now, it will be a big, open
access to history and maybe everyone that'd be nice.
But what I'm seeing is so, for instance,
one new journal just popped up. Uh, two
years ago, just got started off the ground in
19th century American history and two years ago, perfect
time to make this journal revolutionary in other ways instead
of just another respected name. And they did nothing
new right there. They're just the journal of the
Civil War era, which is going to be this
new 19th century studies, uh, in American history
. And it's the same stuff, so it would
be nice. I know that the AJ has issued
a statement. American Historical Association has issued a statement
saying we would like for there to be a well
respected open access venue, but no one really has
followed up on that. And I think there's plenty
of, you know, rising voices, plenty of
people who are making a fuss saying this should happen
. Um, but it's just a matter of getting
enough steam behind that. One of the interesting things
that I've wanted to bring up along the way is
that one of the discussions earlier I want to bring
up one of my dissertation committee members is doing his
current project open access from start to finish. And
so, you know, from the disinterested observers perspective
, the question is, why would I want to
look at that? But this is his objective is
that historians shouldn't be competing with each other. They
should be sharing along every step of the way.
And so he's reading something that affects his project in
one way and taking notes on it and putting his
notes out there and letting people know what's in a
certain source. Mm, and other people can come
to that is the hope. And so I guess
getting back to your question is, there's all sorts
of efforts from on every level of the, I
guess, the scholarly enterprise from taking notes on sources
to this textbook that I'm kind of a part of
. And hopefully with enough of that stuff, eventually
big changes like you're talking about what happened, actually
, get somewhere to my point. I was going
to ask a little bit about the public historians and
some of the digital research projects that are not necessarily
the workers. How strong I've been influenced are those
voices, particularly that intersection of digital humanities and in
public history, where very complicated digital research with layers
of math and interpretation of the topic maps, census
data, all of the complexity of those kinds of
research fighters and the mechanisms for your review within that
kind of hi. Uh huh. Being shaped now
, but they're not fully shaped. I was wondering
if you had thoughts on through the weight of those
voices. What do you mean, the way?
Yeah. Are people getting to engage with them?
How strong of a voice for that kind of openness
or transparency process. Yeah, well, I mean
, I know that there are history departments, for
instance, that are accepting G i s as a
language instead of French or German. Um, and
so there's there's little things like that that are starting
to show that the digital skills are being accepted in
replacement of some of the older stuff. You know
, in one of the discussions we've been having is
about tenure requirements. I know in some departments it
varies by department. Some departments see really complicated digital
projects as something that's on par with a book or
somewhere near that. Other departments just don't get it
. So it's just it just depends on where you
are. I know the department here in history,
for instance, has this new, relatively new public
history digital history certification, and so obviously they care
about it. But it's the again. It's it's
not everywhere. It's an evolving practice. And so
I think that there's no really one answer to that
question. Fine. Before I. The library has
has posted electronic journals for many years, but we
now hosts some software whole editorial process of the foods
we want you thinking about journal. I want to
convert a traditional drink too electronic. We have services
and staff, so even if you're not interested,
but there's no doubt that they will never be happy
to help. You're fine. I'm thinking mind I
can have one too Well, we can make our
camels. Thank you.