Open Foo or Open Fool

Why it is so much hard to accept that Open Foo and Open Bar are not above the reality of this world where econometric is a major factor for survival. Commercial viability is one of deadly factor when it comes that Open Foo switched to Closed Foo and recent in the series is JoVE has gone closed access. When last time Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI) announced that the journal’s years-long free online access was coming to a close, there were hot arguments on friendfeed that journal management had made a wrong decision and in long run they will realize that it is not going to help them. May you know the people those have hardly any experience in running a publishing house are arguing that a group who has running journals for more than 100 years made a wrong decision without any facts but because of only agenda- they all are blind supporters of open access. Story is not different than me, I too was a heavy weight supporter for these open access journals, knowledge dissemination and bla bla from year 2004 until I faced the reality. People who think I am too much aggressive against open models they should know I was very first few those joined OpenWetWare, and my OpenWetWare page was full of advocacy badges for PLoS and BMC. I was the one who really enjoyed the free access articles and wrote a regular section on my OpenWetWare page on hot computational biology papers. Then suddenly one day I got an email from a big open access house about copyright issue and the end I have to add a copyright notice on the page, and that was the last day I wrote anything on that section. Unfortunately at that time there was no open access supporter gang, the one we see at friendfeed, otherwise I should have nailed the open access publisher rather than changing my test about open access. So what exactly changed, nothing actually except I got a wake up call about open access intentions, and I realized these open access guys are no much different from traditional publishers. For last few years these open access vendors are rising on popularity chart, and now the time is came for show down then open access supporters are feeling fooled and shocked. You know this is a real trick, start a open access journal and become popular among your blind supporters and one day when you think you purpose is solved, you got sufficient publicity and a good impact factor, then suddenly your supporters learned that their favorite open access journal is unsustainable commercially and hence publisher decided to adopt a closed access model. Woo! great strategy, and a great April fool by Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) to their blind open access supporters. So what will happen in long run, does all open access journals will turn into closed? No, not exactly but their model is going is to change for sure, they can not survive alone on sky high author side charges which is increasing every year. Mostly they will change to a hybrid model where they will have open as well as close contents, those who can pay a higher author fees their content will be open and highly cited, while those can not pay their content will be accessible via institutional or personal subscriptions and they will be less cited. At the end there will be a subscription model, so what exactly open access is all about. The whole setup is very logical, if you start a new closed journal no one will ask for a institutional license, but starting with open journal and later switching once you gained higher impact factor will of course attract a lot of subscriptions. If libraries are cutting costs then of course that will be passed to some one, either to authors or to publishers. Regrettably neither authors nor publishers can afford that then who is going to bear this? Even what authors are bearing is nothing but tax payers money, so at the end it is tax payers money it does not matters what way it was exhausted. One need to have a careful distinction between green and gold open access model. In green open access model stress is more on author side open access and it is responsibility of author to make preprint freely available across different preprint server before their manuscript goes in print via official peer reviewed journals. While gold open access stress on publisher side open access via author side charges, and guess for what they are charging- distributing free t-shirts, hiring discussion experts, wasting money on many more ways. I am unable to understand people who are showing biased support for gold open access, why they can not show their unconditional support for green open access, why they do not make preprints of their published manuscript available across their webpages and blogs. For reality check I just ran around blogs of many friendfeed open access supporters and hardly few of them maintain their preprints on their websites or blogs-although most of them do maintain opinionated blog posts about open access. Why it is so hard to do so, it does not take much time at all to put the same final version on your web page which you submitted to publishers. Because deep down in mind we have made a predetermined opinion that there is one and only way to provide open access. Why gold open access supporter are ready to accept financial troubles can occur on publishers side, but they overlooked the fact that even some of them can not afford lavish open access author side charges. I think green open access is only reliable way if you really want to disseminate the knowledge and research across all community, those who can afford gold open access and those who can not. In a recent post Egon Willighagen writes his dashing hopes about publishing in open access journal if he can arrange the funds (“unless someone funds my papers to become Open Choice”). Of course gold open access supporters will argue that they have author side fees waiver and other options, but if that is the case why they don’t disclose their stats for their so generous charity which I asked several times before. That is really disappointing when one really want to circularize their knowledge and research but due to funding issues he or she can not. What we really need is a strong advocacy group for the green open access model (not exactly fighters) to create a better balanced eco-friendly open access model. Everyone is well aware about the fact that open access journals have more chance to be cited, not because they are high quality journal because they are easily accessible. Did you ever thought which section of article contains most citations, of course introduction part, that mean our citation matrices are equally flawed as impact factors. No one is going to check in what context the paper was cited, exactly it may be cited for wrong reasons or cause of better research content. If one want to just argue then there is nothing which can stop, but the truth is gold open access model is yet to be tested on time scale and it is too early to conclude that their model is best. Nature, Science and Cell have made their reputation in long run, and not to forget about PNAS and many physiological journals those are operated by non profit societies. Rather than solving real time issues such as how open access can be made affordable, much of attention is diverted to criticizing the close publishers to prove that the gold open access model is honest and purist. Many people fooled the numbers now numbers fool them, face the reality.