| > 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. |