[Oa-italia] New England Journal of Medicine colpisce ancora

[Elena Giglia]

Buonasera,
segnalo questo strepitoso articolo di Lenny Teytelman (fondatore di
protocols.io) in risposta a un oltraggioso editoriale di NEJM - New England
Journal of Medicine, gia' distintosi negli anni scorsi per la polemica sui
"research parasite".
L'editoriale (https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms1900864) sostiene
che

   1. OA increases costs of publishing
   2. OA does not accelerate science because citations for subscription
   journals are higher
   3. Researchers still prefer to publish in subscription journals

Lenny ribatte punto per punto, estrapolo le parti più significative ma
l'articolo merita una lettura completa:
1. It is outrageous for this NEJM editorial to pretend that open access
increases costs, while the whole point of this piece is to maintain the
profit margins by lobbying against Plan S and the switch to open access.

And the parts about “we still want curated content and only subscription
journals can provide it” - I have a hard time responding to this without
profanity. First of all, it is equating almost
13,000 <https://doaj.org/>
rigorous open access journals with blogs and Youtube. They ALL DO peer
review and curate content!

2.  I am always wondering: which tools and services do not exist today
because we are mostly publishing in paywalled journals? How many tools are
weaker due to this? How much more efficient would our medicine, research,
policy-making, and grant-funding be if the people who needed access had it?
Aside from the billions of dollars that we pay to publish, only to have the
papers locked up behind paywalls, what is the full cost of subscriptions to
science and society?

3. Sigh. How subscription publishers love to peddle this line. “We have
open access journals, but our authors prefer to publish in subscription
ones, so scientists don’t want OA.”
Nope. You’re not giving scientists a true choice. Different journals.
Moreover, today, because our society pays to read, there is an illusion to
submitting authors that publishing is free. If you want to measure whether
researchers prefer subscription or open access, ask them on submission to
the same journal, “Would you like your article to be published for free in
our journal and be open access or closed to readers?”

E in conclusione
My timer is ringing. I’ll stop here. The end of the editorial:

"eliminating subscription-based publication models without having
alternatives in place that can reliably produce independently vetted,
cautiously presented, high-quality content might have serious unintended
consequences for the integrity of the scientific literature."

No open access advocate is proposing that. We've had reliable alternatives
in place for almost two decades now. This editorial is a classic piece of
FUD <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt>
(fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that I have been seeing more and more of
from subscription publishers as they panic about Plan S. NEJM should be
ashamed for publishing this, but given their view of good researchers as
“parasites”, I’m not surprised that they did.

Scommetto purtroppo che uno dei paesi in cui il vergongnoso editoriale NEJM
trovera' maggiore risonanza sara' il nostro, a causa della disinformazione
imperante.
Con buona pace dei matematici che quest'estate sostenevano che Plan S (su
gli editori "panic") fosse stato scritto con gli editori commerciali
appunto.

Buona lettura
eg



-- 
dr. Elena Giglia
Unità di progetto Open Access
Direzione Ricerca e Terza Missione
Universita' degli Studi di Torino
tel. +39.011.670*.4191*
Skype: egiglia
www.oa.unito.it

*NOAD OpenAIRE Italy*
https://www.openaire.eu/
noad-it a openaire.eu
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