Of course, with tenure there is no incentive to reduce the entry requirements; in fact, there is economic and political pressure within the university that demands accountability for tenure appointments. Young scientists can’t change, and old scientists have no motivation to. Depressingly, the change has to come from the top – from the very senior academics, many of whom are already entrenched in the editorial boards of major journals.

Certainly in Australia, there is a strong cultural bias to relying on numbers to justify any decision, rather than making a reasoned qualitative call and taking responsibility for it, which makes Publish or Perish, ERA rankings and other metrics the order of the day. Whether this is a product of increasing demands and austerity in the tertiary education sector, or part of the general cultural malaise afflicting Australia, I don’t know, but it seems a key part of the problem is that the tenure process in inextricably linked to that of publishing and journals.

Libraries need to be reimagined, and it would be my goal to reimagine them so that all the expertise and skills of current librarians are put to even more effective use in an open-access library. Smart presidents already know that digitization is not a magic recipe for cost-cutting on the labor side. It should, I think, yield cost savings in aggregate by cutting certain middlemen out of the loop, and I suppose that does mean that I think *somebody* will have a job on the line in this shift. But I think there’s even a big expansion of a certain kind of publisher that ought to follow: we should be turning back to university presses and using them as the primary vehicle for creating consortial-level investment in open-access publication structures that are fully under the control of scholarly institutions.

I think it’s always a bad idea, in contrast, to fight against change so that you keep jobs as unchanging museum pieces. That’s not good for the dignity of people doing those jobs, it’s not good for the bottom line, it’s not good for the ability of the institution to respond to challenges.

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On thm’s point, it seems to me that the longer-term move should be towards something like PLOS One. Let usage and citation sort between the major work and the minor finding, and let new genres of publishable work flourish in the space-in-between. I think what we could do to go alongside formal, final open-access publishing is something more like “open workflow research”–let scholars start putting up notes, fragments, in-progress summaries as a project progresses, and create platforms suitable for that.

PhD students entering the system cannot suddenly switch gears and go for the open source journals without risking their economic interests. It will take tenured professors and tenure committees who are willing to say that their own system doesn’t matter for things to change. Would you be willing to lose your tenure and offer more opportunities to an up and coming PhD, they could really use the job. That would be social justice.

For libraries, where do they stand if all information is suddenly made available without restriction. There would be many college presidents who can look at their budget, see that databases cost nothing, and start cutting funding from development and personnel.

You can talk about social justice, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.

By contrast, the American Chemical Society journals are just as closed as the for-profit journals, and my understanding is that as long as there’s a chemical industry that’s willing to pay for access to ACS journals, it’s going to stay that way.

I think what keeps many of the for-profit journals going is a sort of co-dependent feedback loop with marginal researchers: Quite a few, e.g. El*****r journals (in physics, at least) have very low standards for what they will accept, and often have no page charges. This makes them very attractive for researchers who have limited budgets and marginal results but who still need to produce publications. Of course, a single one of these journals costs a University roughly the same as the entire catalog of APS journals (on the order of $20000/year). The marginal researchers will continue to referee for, and cite, and defend their institution’s subscription to these journals.

I don’t want to deride the link between publishing and the progress of scientific careers, because publishing is how the whole collaborative enterprise moves forward. And there also does need to be a place for marginal experimental results, which could become more important in light of future work. So I would like to see the (non-profit) professional societies expand their publishing catalog and create new lower-tier journals, and create a more open and less burdensome outlet for marginal research.