Discussion: View Thread

Hi everyone,

I thought it might be worthwhile reposting my initial message with a new title (formerly [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access), as I think many OB listserv members who may be interested in the topic might not open those emails given that title. I've really appreciated the comments thus far, and hope to hear a lot more. As others have said, my post is not so much an attack on publishers as it is a call for more discussion and a request for those publishers to justify their prices to the people who provide them both their source material and the reviewing and editorial services that allow them to function in the first place. I understand that some people may be okay with the status quo, but given the changes in publication brought about over the past 10-15 years by the internet and Google Scholar, I believe it's time we collectively reflect on whether there are better options. Similar discussions are going on in many other disciplines as scholars reflect on why they are giving away the rights to their own work for seemingly very little in return. On a similar discussion on the RMNET, someone made the great point that we at the AOM say we want to have a bigger impact on practice, but then we make our research articles unavailable to practitioners at a reasonable price, despite the fact that they as taxpayers are funding much of those activities (particularly at state universities). I would again recommend that people watch the following video about the Open Source Movement: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533.

Sincerely,

Marc

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Hi Marc

As you mention AOM publications – I recently put this comment up on the Evidence-Based Management Google Group:  "I have a dream:  That one day all Academy of Management journals will be freely available through Open Access.  They really should be.  Shouldn't they?"

The AOM vision is to "inspire and enable a better world through our scholarship and teaching about management and organizations".  I can't see how locking up our scholarship behind a paywall contributes to this vision though I may be missing something.

Cheers

Rob

Hi everyone,

I thought it might be worthwhile reposting my initial message with a new title (formerly [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access), as I think many OB listserv members who may be interested in the topic might not open those emails given that title. I've really appreciated the comments thus far, and hope to hear a lot more. As others have said, my post is not so much an attack on publishers as it is a call for more discussion and a request for those publishers to justify their prices to the people who provide them both their source material and the reviewing and editorial services that allow them to function in the first place. I understand that some people may be okay with the status quo, but given the changes in publication brought about over the past 10-15 years by the internet and Google Scholar, I believe it's time we collectively reflect on whether there are better options. Similar discussions are going on in many other disciplines as scholars reflect on why they are giving away the rights to their own work for seemingly very little in return. On a similar discussion on the RMNET, someone made the great point that we at the AOM say we want to have a bigger impact on practice, but then we make our research articles unavailable to practitioners at a reasonable price, despite the fact that they as taxpayers are funding much of those activities (particularly at state universities). I would again recommend that people watch the following video about the Open Source Movement: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533.

Sincerely,

Marc

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Hi everyone,

I thought it might be worthwhile reposting my initial message with a new title (formerly [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access), as I think many OB listserv members who may be interested in the topic might not open those emails given that title. I've really appreciated the comments thus far, and hope to hear a lot more. As others have said, my post is not so much an attack on publishers as it is a call for more discussion and a request for those publishers to justify their prices to the people who provide them both their source material and the reviewing and editorial services that allow them to function in the first place. I understand that some people may be okay with the status quo, but given the changes in publication brought about over the past 10-15 years by the internet and Google Scholar, I believe it's time we collectively reflect on whether there are better options. Similar discussions are going on in many other disciplines as scholars reflect on why they are giving away the rights to their own work for seemingly very little in return. On a similar discussion on the RMNET, someone made the great point that we at the AOM say we want to have a bigger impact on practice, but then we make our research articles unavailable to practitioners at a reasonable price, despite the fact that they as taxpayers are funding much of those activities (particularly at state universities). I would again recommend that people watch the following video about the Open Source Movement:http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533.

Sincerely,

Marc

 

From: Anderson, Marc [MGMT] [mailto:mha@iastate.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 1:17 PM
To: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv
Subject: RE: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

 

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

 

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

 

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

 

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

 

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

 

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

 

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

 

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

 

Best,

Marc

 

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Xiao-Ping Chen
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 10:15 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Dear colleagues,

 

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

 

Xiao-Ping

 

open online version

<image001.png> For authors | About us Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access Dear Dr. Chen, Is it possible to publish an article Open Access inOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes? Yes it is. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers authors a choice in how they wish to disseminate their research - either by publishing it as a subscription article or as an Open Access article. All articles published Open Access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download fromScienceDirect. Permitted reuse is defined by the author's choice ofCreative Commons user licenses.   How do I find out more? For full information on publishing your paper Open Access in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, including publication fees, licenses, and more, please visit theOrganizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Open Access page and guide for authors. Funding Body Compliance To help authors comply with new Open Access policies and mandates, Elsevier has established agreements with many funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, RCUK and the Austrian Science Fund. Some funding bodies will also reimburse you for Open Access publication fees, making it even easier to publish Open Access. For more information on specific funding body agreements see our funding bodies agreements page. © Elsevier is a member of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, ORCID, CrossRef and COUNTER DATA PROTECTION NOTICE Data Protection Notice: This News for Authors e-mail has been sent to xpchen@u.washington.edu from Elsevier Science & Technology Journals, Elsevier Limited, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, registered in England with registered number 1982084. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please click here to add our address to your safe senders list. You are receiving this e-mail because you are a published author in an Elsevier journal in the belief it is of interest to you. If you no longer wish to receive communications of this type from us, you can visit this page to unsubscribe. For all enquiries, problems or suggestions regarding this service, please contact:stjnlsemarketing@elsevier.com. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. | Elsevier Website Privacy Policy