Senior Research Communication Partner
PhD, Cell and Molecular Biology University of Texas at Austin
We live in a society that is increasingly Internet-centric, and this shift in the way that we communicate, connect, share, and do business with each other has deeply impacted scientific research and academic publishing.
When tackling large research questions, collaboration among researchers is essential, and since the first issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society was disseminated in 1665, this collaboration has been highly dependent on the publishing industry.
However, since the advent of the Internet, scientists no longer require access to the latest hard copy of their favorite journal to keep in touch with the most recent developments. Indeed, it is no longer necessary to leave the lab and spend all afternoon in the library stacks – much of the information needed to do research is available on our own personal computers.
In modern society, research is disseminated through many venues, including social media sites, blogs, Twitter, and open access (OA) scholarly journals that are freely available to anyone with Internet access. As opposed to traditional journals, which often charge readers hefty fees to access journal content, OA journals provide content for free on the web and charge researchers to publish their findings.
Although the idea of a journal that is freely available to the public with no financial barriers to access seems great in theory, when it comes time to publish, many researchers struggle with the decision of whether to do so in an OA journal versus a traditional (and perhaps more well-established) journal. The four main factors to consider when making this decision are visibility, cost, prestige, and speed.
Publishing your article in an OA journal means that more people are likely to see it, simply because more people will be able to access it. Indeed, one study showed that full-text downloads of OA papers were 89% higher, PDF downloads were 42% higher, and unique visitors were 23% higher than those for subscription-access articles.
Additionally, a survey of both science and humanities/social science authors revealed that the belief that OA publications are read more widely is the second most common reason for deciding to publish in an OA journal. Although it is still uncertain whether this increase in downloads and visitors translates into an increased citation rate, the greater visibility achieved with OA may allow you to reach potential collaborators more easily.
Additionally, your data will be available to educators and the general public, most of whom do not have access to expensive journal subscriptions.
Both traditional and OA journals may charge a small fee at the time of submission to cover editorial and peer review-related costs. The difference arises in the post-acceptance fees.
Traditional journals commonly charge per page (often $100-250 each) and/or per color figure ($150-1000 each). However, OA journals typically charge a flat article processing charge that can range from $8 to as much as $5000 (Cell Reports). In some cases, when authors genuinely do not have the means to pay publication fees, they can apply for full or partial waivers, depending on their financial capability.
The other cost is associated with subscriptions, which can be prohibitive, with some academic subscriptions costing as much as $40,000 for full online access to articles. These steep costs may even cause some libraries to cancel subscriptions, which harms both readers and authors. Indeed, the high cost of subscriptions led Harvard University to urge its academics to “Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access.”
Some researchers are more reticent to publish in OA journals because they may not be as well known as some of the larger, more well-established journals in a given field. Indeed, the most common reason cited by science and humanities/social science authors for deciding not to publish in an OA journal is related to concerns about the perceived quality of OA publications. It is also important to note that many OA journals are new and have not yet received their first impact factor (IF). For example, in 2013, 179 of 500 OA journals published by Springer were given an IF.
However, high-IF OA journals are available in a variety of fields. In the field of biology, the OA journals PLOS Biology, BMC Biology, and PLOS ONE ranked 1st, 4th, and 10th by IF, respectively, in 2009 according to Journal Citation Reports. Additionally, that same year, PLOS Computational Biology, BMC Systems Biology, and BMC Bioinformatics ranked 1st, 3rd, and 4th in the category of mathematical and computational biology.