Open Access News

A frequent criticism of Open Access (OA) is that it will lead to the traditional peer review process being abandoned, with scientific papers simply thrown on to the Web without being subjected to any quality control or independent assessment. Is this likely? If so, would it matter?

The argument that OA threatens peer review is most often made by scientific publishers. They do so, argue OA advocates, not out of any genuine concern, but in the hope that by alarming people they can ward off the growing calls for research funders to introduce mandates requiring that all the research they fund is made freely available on the Internet....Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that STM publishers are currently very keen to derail initiatives like the US Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)...a primary reason [they]  give for their opposition to such initiatives is that it would "adversely impact the existing peer review system." ...

Since both methods [publishing in an OA journal and self-archiving a postprint published in a TA journal]...require that papers are peer reviewed, OA advocates point out, publisher claims that making research OA necessitates foregoing the peer review process is factually inaccurate.
And while it is true that some researchers also post their preprints in IRs prior to having them peer reviewed, they add, this is done solely in order to make their research available more quickly, not to avoid peer review....

There is, however, a second strand to publishers' claims that OA threatens peer review. If OA is forced on them, they say, they will not be able to survive financially, either because they will discover that there is no stable long-term business model for OA publishing, or because the increasing number of papers researchers post in institutional repositories will cause academic institutions to cancel their journal subscriptions. This poses a threat to peer review, they add, since if publishers exit the market there will be no one left to manage the process.

However, these claims are also rejected by OA advocates, who argue that most publishers have already accommodated themselves to self-archiving. Indeed, they add, there is no indication at all that self-archiving negatively impacts journal subscriptions....

The problem for OA advocates...is that [experiments with open review at Nature, PLoS ONE, Philica, and Naboj] are complicating an already confused picture, and leading to a great deal of misunderstanding about the relationship between OA and peer review.

The consequences of this were amply demonstrated at the beginning of October, when an Associated Press news story about PLoS ONE and Philica was published. As is usual with AP stories, the article was syndicated to multiple newspapers — and with every republication the headlines became increasingly alarmist.  The Desert Sun, for instance, reprinted the article with the headline and subtitle: "Online journals threaten scientific review system: Internet sites publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by peers"; The Gainesville Sun, published it with the headline, "Online publishing a threat to peer review"; and The Monterey Herald went with: "Academic journals bypass peers, go to Web."

"Is this routine editorial carelessness or spreading paranoia?" asked OA advocate Peter Suber exasperatedly on his blog.
The answer, perhaps, is a bit of both. Certainly, the spreading confusion is a boon to publishers bent on killing the various proposals intended to make OA mandatory — since it is causing many to conclude that OA represents a serious threat to the scientific process.

The paranoia reached a peak when the AP article attracted the attention of Harvard's college newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which responded by publishing a muddle-headed editorial called "Keep Science in Print"....Unfortunately, pointed out Suber, The Harvard Crimson editorial was seriously flawed, failing on at least two important counts. "First, it confuses open review with non-review. Second, it assumes that all online-only journals (open access and subscription-based) use open review — i.e. that traditional peer review requires print."

For those impatient to see OA prevail, the spreading confusion is very frustrating. What OA advocates therefore need to do, suggests Harnad, is insist on keeping discussions about reforming peer review separate from the debate about OA. So while agreeing that peer review "can be made more effective and efficient", Harnad insists that any discussion about reforming it "should not be mixed up with — or allowed to get in the way of — OA, which is free access to the peer-reviewed literature we have, such as it is."
Conflation, however, seems inevitable — not just because the public is confused, but because, as Suber recently pointed out, "there are a lot of exciting synergies to explore between OA and different models of peer review." A good example of the way in which these are being explored at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he added, was mentioned by Herbert Van de Sompel during the Nature debate on peer review....

This was a point made by Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Centre, in a recent response to Harnad on the American Scientist Open Access Forum. "I think you go too far by denying that Open Access has anything to do with peer review," he said. "For many (including myself), Open Access is (among other things) a facilitator of the evolution towards an improved peer review system."...