Furthering the Open Access Movement

In recognition of open access week, Jason Baird Jackson wrote a blog post titled Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps. His five steps are as follows:
• Choose not to submit scholarly journal articles or other works to publications owned by for-profit firms.
• Say no, when asked to undertake peer-review work on a book or article manuscript that has been submitted for publication by a for-profit publisher or a journal under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not seek or accept the editorship of a journal owned or under the control of a commercial publisher.
• Do not take on the role of series editor for a book series being published by a for-profit publisher.
• Turn down invitations to join the editorial boards of commercially published journals or book series.

In effect, he is advocating a boycott against for-profit journals. In theory this sounds good, but I have trouble seeing it play out well in practice. AS we have discussed many times, many of the people writing articles are doing so in part to fulfill tenure requirements. Those requirements include publishing to the top journals in the field which are almost exclusively for profit. While the idea behind a boycott is noble, it seems hard to believe that researchers would be willing to give up publishing in the top journals.

Stevan Harnad wrote a blog post in response to Jackson saying just that. But more interestingly, he explained that just such a boycott was threatened in 2000 among biological researchers. As expected, the journals ignored the threat and the biologists never followed through with the boycott. That's when they decided to try something new. They launched PLoS, an alternative open-access journal for the field.

PLoS is now one of the great success stories of open access, becoming known for its quality and becoming a leading journal.
But may other open-access journals have not been so successful. Harnad suggests the solution to open-access lies in the institutional repository mandating of all published works of the researchers at an institution being placed into the repository.

Again, I have my doubts that this will work as institutional repositories do not have a good track record. Even when researchers are required to place articles in their repository, they don't always do it. And many for-profit journals will not allow a final version of the article to be placed in the repository, leaving the researcher forced to place preprints into the repository.

Clearly the system we have for journals is not working, but with few exceptions, institutional repositories are not the answer. Currently, it's pretty rare for an open-access journal to be considered as good as the top for-profit journals. We still haven't found an appropriate strategy to further the open access movement, only strategies that have had mixed results in the past. It seems that it is time for something new, but what form would it take?