FELD 01/2022

Interview WHO PAYS THE

Interview WHO PAYS THE BILL? The challenges associated with open access to research results. Mr. Dalchow, you are ZALF’s publication manager. Could you please describe your role? The performance of a research institution such as ZALF is largely reflected by the scientific articles its researchers publish. This involves the number of publications, but also the impact of the journals in which they are published. Here at ZALF, I keep an overview and, if necessary, advise our researchers on where and how they can best place their work. You see a major transformation coming our way in the world of scientific publishing. What exactly do you mean by that? To date, the publishers of scientific journals are still largely financed by research institutions paying to gain access to the desired articles. The price depends on how many people in an institution will have this access. The whole system is thus financed by the readers. The major system change is now taking place because open access is reversing this relationship. Open Access? Open access means that scientific results — in this case in the form of published articles — are freely available to everyone in digital format. After all, their production is largely financed with taxpayers’ money. Open access started as a grassroots movement, but now major publishing houses and research funders are increasingly establishing open access as the new standard. At first glance, this seems like a positive development. Why are you concerned? In short, someone always has to pay. Of course, the publishing houses and their employees still have to make a living. Under the new model, research institutions are paying a fixed fee for each article they are publishing with a particular publishing house. In the past, they used to pay for reading, now they pay for publishing. However, this means that only those with a sufficient budget will be able to publish. The funders will therefore have to provide research institutions that publish a lot with considerably more resources than, for example, a library. So far, this has hardly been taken into account, and financial redistribution is in any case prone to conflict But will the peer review process, i. e. the quality assurance of articles by independent reviewers from the same research field, remain unaffected? In principle, yes. It is enormously important for the integrity of research activities. But existing offers for open access publishing have also revealed new pitfalls in this regard. What do you mean by that? A scientific journal is no longer a printed volume, but rather a website. This is how open access becomes feasible in the first place. However, this also means that a new open access journal can be launched quickly. For many people, it is difficult to determine if a journal is reputable or not. There have already been thousands of cases in which researchers, who are under pressure to publish, have paid money to so-called predatory journals. In these cases, for example, the peer review was only faked. For me, this is another example of how careful we must be when making open access the new standard. The interview was conducted by Tom Baumeister. The campaign »Think. Check. Submit.« provides checklists to help researchers distinguish reputable journals from so-called predatory journals. https://thinkchecksubmit.org/ DR. CLAUS DALCHOW is in charge of the library and publication management at ZALF. 32 33