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Editorial
Pay to publish? Open access publishing from the viewpoint of a scientist and editor
Graphene and 2D materials
11 May 2023
Abstract
Scientific publishing is currently undergoing a fast change toward open access (OA). Many new OA journals emerged in the past decade, every major publisher has scores of OA journals and the number of journals in general keeps growing quickly, primarily due to new OA journals. One can read everywhere about the advantages and fairness of OA publishing—free science available to everyone. Isn’t OA publishing a great idea? It sounds like communism, providing to each according to his/her needs. But will communism in publishing lead to the same disaster as communist ideas in politics? Why should scientists, who are producers of scientific information, pay thousands of dollars for making their findings available to others? Doesn’t it contradict the laws of economics (and common sense)? No one expects farmers to pay people who acquire their crops or cooks to pay restaurant guests for eating dishes they prepared. Maybe scientific publishing is an intrinsically unprofitable business that cannot be sustained without donations from researchers. Then why do many publishers report record profits? The more I observe the quickly changing scientific publishing landscape, the more questions come to my mind, and I don’t necessarily have answers to all of them. If I’m confused and ask those questions after acting as editor or associate editor of big and small journals for almost two decades, serving on editorial boards of at least 20 journals, and authoring/co-authoring close to 800 papers, maybe scientists with less extensive experience are confused too? Let’s discuss this issue together.
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Details
- Title
- Pay to publish? Open access publishing from the viewpoint of a scientist and editor
- Creators
- Yury Gogotsi - Drexel University, Materials Science and Engineering
- Publication Details
- Graphene and 2D materials
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Number of pages
- 3
- Resource Type
- Editorial
- Academic Unit
- Materials Science and Engineering
- Other Identifier
- 991020482015404721