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Rexford, NY
Marcus D. Hanwell | Marcus leads the Open Chemistry project, developing open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research. He completed an experimental PhD in Physics at the University of Sheffield, a Google Summer of Code developing Avogadro and Kalzium, and a postdoctoral fellowship combining experimental and computational chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Kitware in late 2009. He is now a Technical Leader in the Scientific Computing group at Kitware, a member of the Blue Obelisk, blogs, @mhanwell on Twitter and is active on Google+. He is passionate about open science, open source and making sense of increasingly large scientific data to understand the world around us.
Authored Comments
Thanks for sharing, I think this is a great illustration of why open science is important, and relevant. We need more tools for scientists where the code is available, and can be modified for when new approaches are needed. Research is hard enough without all of the reinvention of the wheel, we used to share equations but somewhere in the move to computational approaches we forgot about all the advantages of publishing everything we did to produce our results, and allowing others to build on our work. We encourage contributions to our open source code, and spend quite a bit of time putting in place tools to make that process as easy as possible while maintaining code quality metrics.
I agree that the upfront publication costs of open access publishing can be prohibitive, and working at a small company I feel it as much (if not more) than you might. You also demonstrate my point that to most academics the current system is essentially "free" as far as they are concerned (as I felt while in academia), thus creating a false saving that the institution indirectly foots the bill for. The costs of those journal subscriptions is becoming unmaintainable, even for the most affluent universities such as Harvard. Small companies simply can't afford the high subscription costs, and the per-article charges are too high to check if a paper is relevant by purchasing temporary access to the full text.
You can build the publication costs into budgets, and most of the journals will also grant waivers to those who do not have available funding. Most funding agencies are very supportive of funding publication costs, but even then timing can be a real problem (publishing while the funding is active etc). There are other options too, such as publishing preprints in arXiv for example, which costs nothing and makes your work available to all. We need to work as a community to improve the situation, and realize that publicly funded research outputs should not be privatized but made available to all.