I don't think the incentives on the researcher side are that poor. I can't pay OA fees out of NSF awards. I have to do so out of discretionary funds, which are substantially harder to come by. I think carefully before paying them.

Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue. There's no win, at least in the top tier.

Have you been specifically told by NSF that you can't? I have included OA funds as line items in NSF (Earth Science division) budgets before, and never received any flak. However, none of the grants ever got funded, so maybe they didn't get the fine-toothed comb treatment following peer review.

No, just my business manager. It's possible I could do it if I line-item it in the budget. I'll try that. :)

> Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue.

That's the heart of the problem right there. Would you laugh your colleagues if they published in a junk venue?

Or would you look at the work on its merits and ignore the medium?

I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches.

I wouldn't do anything of the sort if they published on arxiv. We have a place to publish respectable work without fees and without peer-review. In some subfields of CS, we're also lucky enough to have high quality, open access venues without exorbitant fees (e.g., USENIX conferences). So pay-for-crap is not a necessary choice.

> I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches.

That's the whole point of this debate. All the paid access journals are leeches in one form or another.

No, many (if not most) academic fields have high-quality journals run by non-profit societies. In my field (geoscience) the best of these are trusted more than Nature and Science, which are higher impact even though it's common knowledge that there are more unreliable papers in the glamour journals, mostly because the editors optimize for impact instead of scientific solidity. The non-profit societies charge similar rates (a few hundred to a few thousand per article). The fees reflect outsourcing of web hosting, formatting (both LaTeX and Word are re-keyed to XML for many journals) and typesetting, as well as dead-tree publication costs which are actually common if rarely read.

Additionally, to get at your earlier question of evaluating a paper by its host journal: Because academics are strongly incentivized to publish in high-impact journals, if someone publishes in a crap journal it raises eyebrows, because the obvious question is 'why' and the obvious answer is 'because the authors didn't want rigorous review' or 'the work is of supreme unimportance'.

Furthermore, because of curation aside from peer review (editors weeding out solid but unimportant papers) the journal's brand makes a difference in how many people will actually see the paper. While many readers will come across papers either by specific searches in Google Scholar, or by going through the citations in a different paper, many of us still read the tables of contents of a few key journals every week or month to see what is being produced.

I'm a non-academic scientist (in the non-profit world currently) and though I will never face a promotion and tenure committee who really gets into impact factors etc., I still want my work to be as widely read as possible, so I push for the best journals that I can get in that still meet my criteria (non-profit societies that have open-access at least after a year embargo). Google Scholar also ranks papers by how highly cited they are, so there are still viral-type effects and getting eyeballs on a paper early greatly affects later discovery and engagement.

edit: I took 'paid-access' to mean 'pay to publish' which was the original thread's wording, and wrote based on that. Some of this reply still holds for 'pay to read' but not all.

I definitely meant pay-to-read.

Sure: that's the case today. My argument is that the open-access world still has a quality bar due to social inertia, that this quality bar exists in spite of the current incentive structure, and that over time, the incentives will come to dominate outcomes.

yes, journals do depend on accepting a certain number of publications... the good news is that for a good journal, that number is far far less than the number of submissions. Journals care most about their brand - that is, if journal x gets a reputation for publishing everything, people will only send them crap, and/or will avoid publishing there entirely for fear of guilt-by-association. What open access journals are selling to authors is rigorous peer review, editing, and help with getting the word out. As more open access journals appear, the competition for high-quality submissions will only increase.

Why are you assuming the alternative is pay to publish?

How else do you fund curation? Research without some kind of quality filtering mechanism is just a bunch of blog posts.

Why not some type of model that has universities support it, and get interested parties to peer-review them (much as is done now, since peer-reviewers aren't paid). Make it a non-profit and basically the universities come together to subsidize the hosting of the articles. Get rid of multiple journals completely, and instead have a great tagging and filtering system.

>How else do you fund curation?

Academic institutions have financial incentives in seeing that their faculty publish. When faculty get grants, there's almost always an overhead component that goes to the grantee's institution.

Maybe colleges/unis could explicitly pay faculty for their occasional service as peer reviewers. And/or offer some "softer" incentive, like an incremental advance towards tenure. The financial component could come out of grant overhead. A combo of these could motivate and pay for good curation.

Non-profit member-run organizations come to mind. “Pay” for publication with credits earned doing volunteer review work, or something like that. Or even just a pay to publish with a non profit mandate and board elected by the published researchers would eliminate much of the complained about incentive problem.

The problem here is having a for profit publisher, not the way in which that publisher makes its revenue.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But even don't have them pay for credits. Have a set fee, based on the number of universities in the organization, and then those who help subsidize storage can upload for free and get it peer-reviewed. Let the reviewers work for free, or even use some of the money to hire reviewers, and have authors tag their work and then be placed in the correct categories.

The whole problem with money and profit can be solved in as simple a way as making it an NPO.

because thats what how open access mostly works today