The open access movement has taken over the world. Now pretty much every grant you get comes with an open access mandate, a requirement to publish the resulting papers in an openly accessible manner. It has also captured the public’s imagination, lay people now what open access is, and even those who are never going to read the papers find it suspicious in the rare cases where they are not open access.
We also have plenty of open access journals now. The best is of course Quantum, of which I’m proudly an editor. It is simultaneously of high quality and incredibly cheap (the fee is only 600€, and can be waived). Right now it is struggling with its success: the number of submissions has increased much faster than the number of editors, resulting in long delays. This is an eminently solvable problem, and Quantum is actively recruiting new editors, so this is not the failure I’m talking about.
The failure is that Quantum is pretty much unique. Other journals are usually either high quality and expensive (like PRX Quantum, which charges $3590), or low quality and expensive (like Entropy, which charges CHF 2600). None are cheap. Worst offenders are those that love to publish “high-impact” bullshit like Science Advances, charging $5450, and Nature Communications, charging 7350€. More offensive are those that adopt the “hybrid” open access model, which should be more precisely called “double-dipping” model, as they demand both a subscription and an article processing charge, for instance PRL, charging $4140, and Nature, charging an amazing €10690.
This is a failure because the main point of the open access movement wasn’t getting access to the papers. We have always managed to get access to papers somehow, either through arXiv, sci-hub, or simply asking the authors. I have personally done all three several times, because I was either working somewhere which didn’t pay the subscription I needed, or I couldn’t be arsed to configure the proxy.
The point was making publishing cheap. It’s obscene that the publishing industry has the profit margins of a literal gold mine, while doing almost nothing of the work: they don’t pay for doing the research in the first place, writing the manuscripts, or refereeing them. Sometimes they pay professional editors, sometimes they pay for (terrible) typesetting. Maybe they also print the damn papers somewhere, who knows, I haven’t even seen a printed journal for more than a decade.
The idea was that a closed-access journal had a monopoly on the papers it published, and a reader can’t substitute one paper for another: it really needs that one. This allowed publishers to charge whatever they wanted as subscription fees. With open access, the journals would no longer have any monopoly, but would have to compete with eachother, leading to lower prices.
It didn’t work. Profit margins are still commonly above 30%, and show no sign of decreasing. It amounts to billions of euros per years, and it is a significant drain on scientific research. Why? One might think that a reason is the double-dipping model of open access that I mentioned above, which prevents the “free market” from working. If that were the case fully open access journals would be cheaper, and they are not. It is in any case easy to fix, one can simply tweak the open access mandates to require publishing in fully open access journals.
Another possibility would be to forbid publishing in for-profit journals. That also wouldn’t work, as APS shows that it is possible to make a lot of profit even while being a non-profit. They simply can’t resist the amount of money authors are willing to pay for publishing their papers, and they gladly push their article processing charges to the stratosphere, and spend the money in the non-publishing arms of APS (as they can’t legally make a profit).
The fundamental problem is that scientific research is now a big business, managed throw objective metrics by non-experts. As any such system, it can be gamed, and oh do people game it. You want to get grants, you want to get a permanent position, you’d better publish a lot of papers. Publishing a bullshit paper in a predatory journal is beneficial to pad your CV, so there’s no surprise that companies like MDPI and Hindawi appeared to supply that service. CHF 2600 for a little CV padding? Apparently it’s a fair price, a lot of people pay that. Now publishing a bullshit paper in a high-impact journal? That can even make your career. No surprise that people are willing to pay 7350€ for a Nature Communications. For a permanent position, this is peanuts. People even pay it from their own pockets, in case there’s no funding available. And there usually is, because there’s nothing the universities like more than having their researchers publish in high-impact journals.
The solution is to turn such publications into black marks in one’s CV. Currently they’re not. Take for example the bullshit paper I was complaining about. It has been published in Science Advances. The authors got what they wanted, a high-impact journal in their CVs, their careers will benefit a lot from it. It doesn’t matter that everyone knows the paper is bullshit, because the evaluation is objective, all that matters is the impact factor of the journal. And that won’t be hurt either, the paper will get a lot of citations showing that it is wrong.
How to do that? I think one way is to go away from objective metrics of scientific research, and towards subjective evaluations by experts. Sure, there’s a lot of danger of corruption in the latter system, which is one of the reasons objective metrics are so popular, but I think it’s better to risk hiring somebody’s friends than for sure hiring professional bullshitters. And corruption can be mitigated by requiring the opinion of independent experts.
Another way is to boycott bullshit high-impact journals like Nature Communications or Science Advances. Don’t send them your research, don’t referee for them, don’t cite their bullshit papers. Write serious papers, and send them to Quantum instead. Ironically enough, this would make Quantum win in the impact factor game; currently it has a high impact factor, but it is not as high as those journals, and as such it is not worth as much to one’s career as the bullshit journals. We need it to have a high impact factor, but without turning it into a bullshit high-impact journal.
Another way is to make more of Quantum. Its model is eminently scalable, if a constant fraction of the people submitting papers become editors, it can easily grow to dominate all of quant-ph. But that’s a tiny fraction of scientific research, and the other classes of arXiv need their own journals to save them from greedy publishers.