seems surreal, but no, it is a firm proposal that is beginning to bite in the area of \u200b\u200bscientific journals. This is an unstoppable trend moves towards free access publishing, with open content over the Internet. The funding would come from the authors, usually from the budget of your research project.
This new model is being adapted by a growing number of scientific institutions to solve the problem of high cost of journals. The most prestigious journals Nature, Science, Journal of American Chemical Society ...- are financed by higher subscriptions paid by libraries of research centers. The overall cost to libraries is a scandal, and the worst is that very few people can access content. Formally
is not a new model. Had already been using paper in scientific journals, but restricted to publications with little or no peer review criteria and, therefore, with little credibility among the experts. These magazines are taking advantage of the fever of researchers to publish, whatever. When a job is rejected by prestigious journals, the author gladly pay for publishing in others because the items are the external measure of their productivity and are associated with their career progress. So see this as an indispensable investment spending. Thus, while the quantity-and quality-not only what counts as merit, there is always demand for space to publish all cost.
The idea that the author is reasonable pay, while ensuring absolute rigor in the selection of work. So far, the most prestigious journals rely on the credibility of its editorial board: the screening and do best editing, best compete. In the new model this criterion is perverted: the more work published, the higher the magazine. So there is the risk of succumbing to the "incontinence publisher" of many scientists middling and the publication of many articles insufficiently contrasted.
How to avoid? I think that appeal to personal ethics of the researcher filter is a sure way to perpetuate the monopoly of traditional journals. More reasonable is to maintain the rigorous system of peer review editorial, similar to the great prestige to the paper magazines. This is how I understand institutions as the Public Library of Science , free access, where to publish must pass a stringent review of the article, as in traditional journals and then pay from the issuing institution. This is ultimately cheaper than buying magazines and, of course, reaches more people. It is also a sustainable model for scientific publishing.
Another measure to control incontinence publisher is to limit the number of papers to be presented in public tenders. For example, ask a researcher to present only the ten most important work of his career, the most complete, most grounded, most cited, which have had a major impact in the scientific community ... In short, those who really deserve to be considered. This will avoid those memories bulky, full of items with few ideas repeated ad infinitum, again and again sent to conferences and journals irrelevant. These are publications in bulk, which only serve to feed the vanity and career of mediocre scientists. This explains why we have a system that generates and publications, however, less clear results, because the spotlight is put on the thickness of the personal curriculum, not creativity, innovation and transfer to society and the company's progress.
other words, the type of evaluation of research activity conditions I had some type of research being conducted. So far, the quality of work was associated with the publication that eventually agreed. If you change the evaluation system, quality would be given by the real impact (number of referrals generated, but also patents). And in terms of impact, Internet is the perfect channel, because it reaches many more scientists from anywhere in the world. So a quality editorial, like the big magazines, associated with a channel like the Internet, provide a great impetus to quality research.
