This post addresses the Closed world of chemistry publishing and offers some not very optimistic comments. I subscribe to the CHMINF-L list which serves the chemical information community. Much of the traffic is about specific (usually commercial) chemical information services or where to find esoteric pieces of information. It reflects the innate conservatism of chemistry. I and a few others have from time to time raised the question of how do we take chemistry into the current century, but generally fail to get much of a response. There is, for example, little belief in the value of Wikipedia, etc. or how to develop virtual chemical communities.
Occasionally, however, some of the membership raise the question of Open Access (and implicitly why chemistry is effectively the least enlightened major scientific discipline by having no major Open Access journals). Michael Engel is one of the few list members who tries to question the way things are currently done and writes (Open Access and costs):
I still do not understand the 3000 USD per paper. How much unnecessary overhead costs are in this figure ?
I wonder how much it would cost to have a Chemistry journal at virtually no cost to the author and the reader.... [PS: Omitting Engel's other criteria and suggestions.]
On simple answer is that it has been tried.
Steve Bachrach ran the Internet Journal of Chemistry for a period. It was at (http://www.ijc.com/) but the server no longer runs....
Jean-Claude Bradley publishes his science directly onto the Internet (UsefulChemistry molecules) without peer-review but Openly visible This is effectively a zero-cost model (marginal academic costs - e.g. a university of personal server and effectively part of the actual practice of science).
The chemistry blogosphere now contains high quality reviews such as TotallySynthetic which reviews peer-reviewed articles in closed access chemistry publications with the subject of natural product synthesis. I believe that this is effectively peer-reviewed by the community.
Wikipedia has a large and growing amount of factual chemistry material which will (I believe and hope) challenge the current overpriced and out-of-date methods of secondary publication in chemistry. IMO Wikipedia is also effectively peer-reviewed by the community.
So the problem is not technical but social....[T]he Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry (”an Open Access, peer-reviewed online journal that will encompass all aspects of organic chemistry.”)...is free to authors and free to readers. So what could be more attractive? As you can see [PS: from a graph, omitted here] it’s a year-and-a-bit old. All new journals take time to develop....
But the answer is simple. Chemistry exemplifies the artificial citation economy which is destructive of innovation and amplifies statis. Effectively chemists (like me) are judged on their formal publication record in journals with high impact factors....We leave it to a commercial company (such as Thomson ISI) to give us metrics about academic value. In other words we have no metric or worth of our own - we rely on a process which is driven by how much money an independent company can make out of it. There is no societal control over this.
So we are locked in a dystopia. Small changes are detrimental to any individual or organisation who tries to change it. Publish in an unusual way and you will suffer. Yes, there is a visible better future but there is no way to get there by our own will....
However it must and will change. And I’d point to the following:
The Wellcome trust and other funders
The changing face of the information world, such as Flickr, Facebook, etc.
The increasing economic unsustainability of conventional publishing.
So it will change. I think it will be dramatic. But I don’t think we can say how....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
