[Atlantium]

I've often wondered why universities themselves don't publish each others papers. I understand that there will be cliques as that is standard human behavior but:

-They can maintain their own web servers and have a service charge

-It's an extra project for IT departments that holds real world importance

By eliminating the publisher wanting to make a profit the cost of publishing an be decreased.

Is this a viable start?

[13415]

They do that and have done it all the time and it's called grey literature: self-publications with dubious peer-reviewing policies, that are prone to fraud and corruption.

In most cases grey literature will nowadays count against you if you apply somewhere, but there are quite a few countries and professors who made their careers with it in some less acclaimed universities during the 70s and 80s.

As I laid out in another post (see above), unfortunately you cannot just start some open access journal and expect it to have a reputation as good as a journal that exists for more than a hundred years. It takes several decades of 95% rejection rate and rigorous editorial work to build up that reputation.

Still, it's the right way to go in the long run, new open access journals open all the time and some have good editorial boards. It just can't happen overnight and for young researchers like me in my area, there is currently no alternative to also publishing in closed journals. It's either publish in those journals, or give up any prospects of making a career in academia.

That's why the current EU open access policies are, as noble as they seem, quite problematic and have a potential to destroy many promising careers within the next 5-10 years.

[bdhess]

> That's why the current EU open access policies are, as noble as they seem, quite problematic

The purpose of government funded research isn't to help university faculty build portfolios for professional advancement. It's to find new original knowledge about topics that are in the public interest. That goal is frustrated if the public can't access the knowledge afterwards.

> have a potential to destroy many promising careers

"Destroy careers" sounds too dramatic. I'm expect there will be some churn, and some exceptions, but I expect that a strong P&T case will continue to be a strong P&T case, with the committee noting that some publications were in less established journals because the corresponding research was publicly funded.

[13415]

> The purpose of government funded research isn't to help university faculty build portfolios for professional advancement. It's to find new original knowledge about topics that are in the public interest. That goal is frustrated if the public can't access the knowledge afterwards.

I'm talking about the evaluation criteria of the government funding agencies. You should tell them them your opinion, not me.

>"Destroy careers" sounds too dramatic.

You don't understand. This is about the quality of the research. If you put arbitrary open access journals on a par with the top journals that have been established over 100 years, or even rank them higher, then even more bullshitters will make a career at the cost of serious scientists.

I'm in the humanities where this is a real concern. I already have colleagues who publish 10 lousy papers/year in bad journals and make a career out of this, rather than publishing 3 good papers/year in top journals.

I wouldn't put this into so drastic words if I wasn't 100% convinced that the problem exists. There is already a race to mediocrity due to excessive indicator counting, pushing researchers away from the top journals to mediocre journals with less quality control will make things even worse.

In my field there are maybe 2-3 halfway acceptable open access journals, and all the top journals are proprietary, mostly Springer and Oxford Journals.