Wiley/Blackwell have just launched “Chemistry Open”.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%292191-1363/
It’s described as a “fully open access” journal.
http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/view/browse.html?journalId=1377333&infoId=1239257
And it costs 2500 EUR to publish one article (in the UK we have to pay VAT, so read 3000 EUR or about 4000 USD.
I’m not going to critique the chemistry (though I’m competent to do so). I’ll critique the model and practice of “Open Access” and what authors and readers get for 4000 USD per article. (I’ll mention that there is some competition – primarily Beilstein J of Org Chem (Organic Chem is a subset of chemistry so only available for some of the articles) http://www.beilstein-journals.org/bjoc/about/aboutJournal.htm which is CC-BY, no author charges, no reader charges. Also Chemistry Central (BMC) http://journal.chemistrycentral.com/ which is CC-BY, 950 EUR (1200 EUR inc VAT). These are (in my expert opinion) highly reputable and equivalent in peer-review to any other chemistry journal. I declare an interested – I am (unpaid) on the editorial board of the sister BMC journal J. Cheminform.
I have provided the key links to Wiley info so you can verify my summary: Here are the instructions for authors
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/%28ISSN%292191-1363/homepage/2011_authors.html
- Chemistry Open is CC-NC. This is not compliant with the Budapest definition of Open Access or any other definition I have seen
- The author pays 3000 EUR
- The author assigns copyright to Wiley
- The authors signs a contract restricting their rights in PRE-peer-review material (e.g. they would be debarred from posting in ArXiV)
- The author signs an agreement that every copy of the article will link to the Wiley site and journal article
This is not Open Access, it gives almost no permissions beyond simple self-archiving. The NC clause forbids almost every serious type of re-use without applying to Wiley and probably paying additional charges:
- Cannot translate to a foreign language
- Cannot re-use the diagrams
- Cannot re-use the citations
- Cannot re-use the abstract
- Cannot re-use for text-mining and other information mining
Here’s Wiley’s FAQ for “demystifying” the author-side From Submission to Publication: Demystifying the Process
The most commonly asked question is “why should I submit the manuscript in the journal’s template?”. The answer is a simple one: to
facilitate the peer-review process. In our experience, a manuscript fares better in peer
review when it is well organised and formatted in an easily read manner. Using the template
ensures that our reviewers get a standard manuscript layout with the graphics appearing
in the appropriate place….
PMR: Rubbish. Scientists are used to reviewing from a wide range of sources and they have to get used to the unnecessary practices of publishers. As an example I reviewed a grant proposal last night. It was as complex as a paper and had its own particular set of questions and free text. I *enjoyed* doing it. For publishers to tell the world that only they can organize peer-review is rubbish. We review grants, job applications, software and data, theses, etc. *We* are the ones who know what to do
Of course, if a manuscript is accepted we ask for the production data in a completely different
format, often to the dismay of our authors. There is a method to our madness! When a
manuscript is accepted, revised by the authors and the final version received, the text
undergoes what we term “coding”. This process involves a number of technical steps to
standardise the presentation of units, symbols, non-breaking spaces, table formats and other
style requirements of the journal in both the print and online formats….
PMR: Do I need to spell out why the publishing industry is 20 years adrift and why the production costs are insanely high? It costs 6 USD to process a manuscript on ArXiV and lots of people read them!
Another commonly asked question is “why are figures embedded in Word unusable?” Again,
the answer is simple: quality! When a figure is embedded in Word, a certain amount of
resolution is irreparably lost from the image. While this is acceptable for viewing on screen or
even printing from your office printer, high quality production requires high-resolution
images. For this reason we ask authors to supply the graphics, including the image for the
Table of Contents, as separate files in their original format,
In an Open world authors can make images available in whatever forma they like. I haven’t heard the world complaining that Figshare http://figshare.com/ trashes images and – if it does – I expect Mark Hahnel would create a workaround in a week. An image in Word is processable without destruction – I have worked with Microsoft for 2 years. I suspect that the problem is in the publisher process which generally destroys considerable amounts of information.
With chemical structures and schemes, we ask that authors use our ChemDraw template.
Our copy editors will adjust all images that do not meet our requirements; if a chemical scheme
already meets our standards
Yes, and then Wiley destroys the Chemdraw files. Admittedly almost all publishers do this. Some because they aren’t competent to process them, some because it costs, some because they have downstream walled gardens of chemical information which can sell for hundreds of millions of USD annually (this is true of Elsevier, ACS and Wiley). Open information would be disruptive (I shall recount Elsevier’s correspondence with me elsewhere) . If chemistry journals published these, and the spectra and the crystallography in the form they received them and as supplemental information then the world would immediately gain huge benefit. But in http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1002/open.201100010/asset/supinfo/open_201100010_sm_miscellaneous_information.pdf?v=1&s=d34b9827460dd2e4675043163cdc1cd10d81793a they have reduced the machine-processable Chemdraw files to unreadable PDFs. This is “publisher added value”. Simple stick the Chemdraw files on the web site and *I* will show what can really be done with them. [Note: Wiley have a large market reselling chemical spectra data so they know how to do this technically.]
That’s enough for you to get the idea. Authors can pay 3000 EUR to publish in Chemistry Open. I wonder why anyone would?
I suspect the members of the editorial board – and I know a few – have no idea of what Wiley is imposing on authors and readers. I hope some of them will feel as angry as I do (if they feel 10% of my anger that’s good enough). If this is the “Golden heaven” of OA that we are moving towards I want none of it.
The sad fact is that the OA community doesn’t (yet) care. Gold is not necessarily better than Green or nothing if we still leave publishers in control.
The ‘The author signs an agreement that every copy of the article will link to the Wiley site and journal article’ part is really funny!
So, the author will ask a non-contributing colleague / friend to post the article *without* that attribution, as they are allowed with CC-NC.
Publishers often handcraft conditions and they often make a complete inconsistent hash of it. There’s so much rubbish in this contract that it’s bound to fall over. But who is actually going to challenge this?
Peter, this is somewhat of an aside to the main point of your post, but you say:
“An image in Word is processable without destruction – I have worked with Microsoft for 2 years. I suspect that the problem is in the publisher process which generally destroys considerable amounts of information.”
I’m pretty sure that MS Word messes with the resolution of any images you put in, which makes them inappropriate for ‘print quality’ publishing (you may argue that no one cares about printing at 600dpi these days of course!), and a pain in the whassname to process electronically (I don’t know of any software that will automatically extract images from Word documents — if you do, I’d be grateful if you can point me at it). Such rescaling/recompression is about the worst kind of destruction you can wreak on an image, especially as the algorithm used to do the re-scale isn’t publicly known (it may just be something vanilla such as JPEG, but there’s no way of knowing this, and in any case it’s effects aren’t reversible).
You can convince yourself of Word’s mangling with an easy experiment. Take a very high resolution image (I used one > 2000 pixels by 2000 pixels that hadn’t been through any lossy compression passes). Drop it into a blank page in Word (I used Word 2011 for OS X, but I’m fairly sure this has always been true). Resize the image so that it takes up quarter of a page or so. Save the Word document. Quit Word. Reopen the document (these last two steps might not be essential). Use ‘context click’ over the image to ‘save as picture’. What I think you’ll get is a significantly smaller version of your original image (I’m guessing that its rescaled to be 72dpi within the document) which also appears to have jpeg-like compression artefacts in it. I don’t know of any way to recover the original resolution image from the Word document, or whether its actually stored in the at all anyway, but if you do, I’d love to know the trick.
I have copied you into Alex Wade from Microsoft. If I am wrong I will admit it; the main point is that the publication process is completely flawed.
Most of the time you can get a decent image out of one embedded in Word, usually by going via PDF. Extracting one out sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t (though it’s been a while since I tried anything other than chemdraws); I think it depends on the way it was embedded. We ask for the native formats if the author has them, just so we don’t have to go back if there’s a problem.
Thanks Richard
> If I am wrong I will admit it; the main point is that the publication process is completely flawed.
No argument from me there!
I would like to suggest that as we embrace Open Access, we embrace free, open software too, so that we minimize the unpredictability of software like MS. I think authoring in the cloud (using software like Annotum) will be the norm before long.
I agree about Open Source – everything I have done (and I have released it all) is Open Source. I also like the idea of cloud-based authoring If we could develop an author-based resource we could shift the balance from the publishers
There is no possible definition of open access that involves restrictions on self-archiving or where the OA copy can be found. This is every bit as lame as Elsevier’s \sponsored article\ option. Authors should avoid this option, and it should not be included on the lists of libraries and funders willing to pay OA charges.
While I support CC-NC as an open access choice, this means at minimum that all uses except for actually selling the article are permitted – and, when the author is paying for publication, if there are any commercial rights reserved, these should belong to the author, not the publisher.
The current NC license is problematic – until this is fixed, it might be better to insist on either CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, especially in cases like this where the fee is clearly more than enough to cover the costs.
Wonder if PLoS could be enticed into branching out into chemistry? Peter, have you considered taking on a role as senior editor of a new journal yourself?
>>>There is no possible definition of open access that involves restrictions on self-archiving or where the OA copy can be found. This is every bit as lame as Elsevier’s \sponsored article\ option. Authors should avoid this option, and it should not be included on the lists of libraries and funders willing to pay OA charges.
What and where is this list?
In my experience most libraries don’t care about the details of Open Access. Most do not clearly indicate the rights that users of their own repositories have or do not have
>>>While I support CC-NC as an open access choice, this means at minimum that all uses except for actually selling the article are permitted – and, when the author is paying for publication, if there are any commercial rights reserved, these should belong to the author, not the publisher.
Then you end up writing the licence as NC does not define what commercial means. And hand-crafted licences are usually unworkable.
>>>The current NC license is problematic – until this is fixed, it might be better to insist on either CC-BY or CC-BY-SA, especially in cases like this where the fee is clearly more than enough to cover the costs.
The costs are irrelevant. Authors do not expect to be paid and it is up to the publisher to offer clear options.
>>>Wonder if PLoS could be enticed into branching out into chemistry?
I was with PLoS last week. We didn’t talk about this. If I had I’d say that PLoSOne might consider it. I think any Open Access journal in chemistry will have a hard time. Most senior chemists would say: “The library is there to pay for the journals – we give them enough money from the tax on our grants. We need the money for chemicals, not paying for Open Access”. But I have a conservative view of chemistry and its ability to adopt new practices.
>>> Peter, have you considered taking on a role as senior editor of a new journal yourself?
Yes, for 100 milliseconds – enough time to think “No”. I don’t believe in journals any more. I would join a new approach to science communication if I thought it was radical and had a 10% hance of changing the world.
Peter, I can’t help noticing that Chemistry Open is published in partnership between Wiley-Blackwell and ChemPubSoc Europe http://www.chempubsoc.eu/chempubsoc-eu_members.html. So it is these European chemistry societies who are ultimately responsible for agreeing to these unsatisfactory restrictions, and they also insist on excluding their burgeoning list of journals from the Wiley big deal that so many academic libraries subscribe to. Who are the people in these societies who are making these decisions? How can we get through to them that they making the wrong decisions?