It's Been Said Before, Just Not By Me: Discussions on Open Access

Open access is a big buzzword in the world of science these days. One Friday morning, I decided it was time to learn a little more. The idea of open access gets tossed around a lot, and it sounds good in theory, but truth be told I know little about it. What do I do when I need information? I tweet about it:

My followers (affectionately referred to as my Tweeple, or my Tweeps), have proven to be a valuable source of information with a diverse range of opinions. The first response was from a fellow graduate student:

Flippant at first glance, until further pondered. I was between institutions during most of the summer of 2013, after leaving a job as a technician, and before starting grad school. I was unaffiliated with a university, but still interested in science, and wanted to keep up with new research. There are sources for "science news" (Live Science, The Scientist, Scientific American, to name a few), but if I've learned anything about scientific communication (#scicomm), it's to check the original reference before getting too excited about a new discovery. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do this. I was surprised at just how often I was attempting to get papers I didn't have access to. Open access is more than not needing a library, but also being able to keep up with new discoveries and keeping current with the disciplines that are important to me. As I found out that summer, you can't do this without institutional access. 

My response (mostly playing devil's advocate), was that if the next generation of scientists all chose to publish open access, then the status quo would shift and the change would happen naturally.

We had a fairly predictable back and forth about needing high impact factor for grant funding, and discussing whether impact factor is really all that relevant. Some scientists, physicists in particular, seem to favor h-index, calculated by citations per published paper. It is the opinion of this barely-published not-quite-scientist that individual citations matter more than a journal's impact factor because impact changes year to year, but citations are the timeline of science.

From there, we had a different viewpoint chime in. a PI responding to the question of what open access means to him: 

He went on to remind me that he already pays overhead costs to a library that covers subscription fees, and that cost to him wouldn't go away if he published all his papers in open access. Despite his reluctance to the currently proposed model of open access, he still agrees that the public should be able to access the results of the research they fund through their taxes. But this model isn't going to get changed by people who have no incentive to change it.

Then I was asked the big question:

I'm stumped. It's one thing for rock stars like Randy Schekman to decry the luxury journals right after winning a Nobel Prize. But if I had a paper, as a graduate student, that was capable of getting published in one of the big names, would I turn down that career-boosting opportunity for a model that I think is "a pretty good idea, at least in theory?"

Should these changes be coming from top-tier scientists who already have a reputation and little to lose, or should the next generation give up the old ways and blaze a new trail?

Luckily (or unfortunately), I don't have to answer that question yet. However, I do think it's important for people even at my early career stage to be thinking about these topics. I'm part of the next generation of scientists, and if we don't think about what needs to be changed, who will?