Book People Archive

Re: Scientific publishing corporations get nervous about open access

Allen Kleiman wrote:
>One thing I would like to know is which open access journals are accepted by
>major institutions as credit for tenure and which journals are considered as
>representations of good work in evaluating grant proposals.

I'm not aware of any schools that have specific lists of journals that are
acceptable for building a case for tenure. Of course it's the norm that
you publish in a peer-reviewed journal, and some journals are considered
more prestigious than others.

But I think that has very little relevance here. People generally don't
publish a paper solely via a free online system such as PLOS or
arxiv.org. Generally what they do is the following:
- Post a preprint on the online system.
- Submit the paper to a traditional journal.
- Typically when the paper is accepted by the traditional journal,
  the referees request changes, which may be major or minor. The
  authors make those changes, and post a revised version of the paper
  on the online system at the same time they send it to the publisher.
- The paper appears in print. By the time it arrives in libraries and
  mailboxes, specialists in the field already know about the result,
  and have read the paper online.

The physicists have been doing this for decades now via arxiv.org.
The life sciences are playing catch-up. Arxiv doesn't do traditional
peer reviewing, but that doesn't matter, because it's not meant to
substitute for traditional peer reviewing.

It is true that a few respected researchers bypass the traditional system
completely and simply post their papers on arxiv.org. Typically I think
this happens in fast-moving theoretical fields, for papers that have
only one author, who already has tenure. The number of people doing this,
however, is very small, and probably always will be.