How open access is crucial to the future of science: A reply

Abstract

I explained how publishing wildlife research in open access (OA) journals like PLOS ONE makes wildlife science less reliable. Subsequently, several researchers rejected my explanation, opining that OA journals have top publishing standards and are crucial for the future of wildlife science because researchers in developing countries can access them for free, better enabling them to contribute. Consequently, some opined that research societies should consider remaking their society journals into OA journals, in particular the Journal of Wildlife Management (JWM) sponsored by The Wildlife Society (TWS) becoming an OA journal. In this, my response to them, I show that their opinions are misguided and explain 1) how OA journals unquestionably have inferior publishing standards; 2) why OA is not crucial to the future of wildlife science; 3) why wildlife science's investing its limited resources in certain areas other than OA publishing is crucial to its future; 4) why changing JWM into an OA journal would quite possibly result in losing both TWS and JWM as we know them, leaving us with much less effective replacements; 5) how universities push for open access not because OA leads to better science (it does not) but because OA saves university libraries money, serves egalitarian attitudes among faculty and students, and provides graduate students with the quickest and easiest way of getting their articles into print; and 6) how the goal of growing science in developing countries requires growing the countries’ economies as prerequisite to growing their science, irrespective of the availability of OA articles. As well, these ideas hold beyond wildlife science, including throughout the natural resources and environmental sciences. © 2017 The Wildlife Society.