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Open Library of Humanities: mega journals seeing from the south
M
arch 2013 is a very interesting month for publishing in the academic
world. Martin Eve on The Guardian published an article about his
project: the Open Library of Humanities. If he’s right, it could be a PLOS-like
revolution for social sciences and humanities. Before describing in more de-
tail the idea, also in March the journal Nature published a special issue about
“The future of publishing”. In February this year, president Obama adminis-
tration said that if a research paper is funding by the US government, then it
has to be open access. In the UK, from April this year (although discussions
began earlier) the same rule applies for all publishing coming from public
money. The journal FQS - Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Quali-
tative Social Research also published in March a selection of articles and
documents about open access journals through its mailing list.
My question is what we can learn from current trends in academic publis-
hing from the north, while being in the south. In the Social Science Faculty
(FACSO) at University of Chile we don’t have journals indexed in Web of
Science nor in Scopus. We have only one journal in a south driven project
called SciELO (
that could remain unnoticed to the north. My
fear is that we could be preparing to run a marathon that, by the time we get
there, has changed its route.
Let us be clear, we hardly exist for the international scientific community.
We don’t write in English most of the time, our journals are not indexed in
the two big ones and we put hardly any money at all in our journals. According
to the Chilean Commission for Scientific and Technological Research in 2010
Chilean journals published 0.3% of the world total articles (considering all
Chilean journals). That figure came from a Scopus database, so our FACSO
journals don’t even count in there.
So what we can do. We could copy the current journal model of the perio-
dicals we admire the most. The problem is that the model is under heavy fire
by a new species: the mega journals. In 2006 was born PLoS ONE
.
plosone.org/), today’s the biggest journal on earth: in 2012 published 23,464
articles. It charges about US$ 1,350 to authors (price varies) and accepts
about 70% of articles (after peer review). Far more interesting is PeerJ. It
charges US$ 299 per author to publish an unlimited number of papers for life.
Those mega journals remained unnoticed for the social sciences partly
because they were design for the natural sciences, until now. Thanks to Mar-
tin Eve, lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, now we
have it: OLH (
/).
So the newwords for us are: open access, mega journals, gold open access,
and green open access, among others. Old words are ISI (today’s Web of
Science) and restricted access (where you have to pay to read articles).
So my question, as a journal editor from the south, is what to do. Should
we create mega journals? Is open access the way forward? Should we conti-
nue to write in Spanish and disconnect ourselves from the English language?
Is Google watching us?
We have great academics in Chile and some of the best social scientists
are in this Faculty (not me). We have the same technology for publishing
journals and, possibly, some resources from the government. Therefore, is
up to us to remain as an audience or to fully engage in this conversation.
Dr. Francisco Osorio, Universidad de Chile
