Open Access Scientific Publications

[BillTre]

An article I saw in Science today about the benefits of open access articles in science journals. The study was done by the Open Science Impact Pathways (PathOS) project, a European thing.

Mixed effects were found.

For example, open-access articles are cited more by other papers and in patent applications. And members of the public participating in research, so-called citizen scientists, learn more about the topic they helped on thanks to open science.

However,

the analyses also stressed it found little strong evidence that open science directly produced long-lasting and widespread effects on research or many economic and social benefits.

For more than 2 decades, supporters of open science have touted its benefits and authors have paid billions of dollars to publishers to make articles open access—half of newly published scientific papers are now immediately free to read, up from less than one-quarter in 2000. Additional funding has also gone to set up public data repositories of everything from protein sequences to seafloor sediments. But increasingly, policymakers, especially in Europe, have been asking whether this push is producing results.

It also costs money that might be used elsewhere:

The PathOS project concluded that requiring open science can have negative impacts—witness the growing complaints about the fees authors or their funders have to pay to make journal articles free to read.

My own thoughts on this revolve around the fact that I am retired and do not have access to university libraries. So finding real scientific articles is more difficult. I use these resources a lot for my somewhat obscure interests: ecology and phylogeny of species of Danios and origin of life issues.

If I was writing papers or scholarly journals, I would want to make them open access so more people would be able to see them.

It is however disappointing to me that more non-scientists don't make use of these resources when "doing their own research". This probably limits the quality of their conclusions.
I suspect that many of them are unaware of these open access articles or are too lazy to put in the effort to properly read a scientific article.
Making the public more aware of these resources might be helpful. Google scholar is not a common place for people to turn to for searches.

 

[Astronuc]

An article I saw in Science today about the benefits of open access articles in science journals. The study was done by the Open Science Impact Pathways (PathOS) project, a European thing.

I think it is a mixed bag, or nuanced, as much as subscription journals. The quality of journal articles depend on the author(s), reviewers and publishers.

I know that some organizations, e.g., government-funded institutions require open-access, while some papers are published in journals requiring subscription, although some journals published by Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor&Francis, may have open access articles in the same edition as those requiring purchase or subscription.

Most papers I read in the scientific literature are good, but I have seen some bad papers that should not have been published. There have been cases of falsified research papers, some of which have been retracted after the misconduct was discovered.

MDPI is open access.
https://ghostwritingsolution.com/blog/top-10-scientific-journal-publishers-worldwide/