Can you imagine a community that’s spending between £209,976,000 and £1.9Billion worth a year of unpaid labour for a commercial organisation? (via Martin Weller, the Ed Techie)

That’s exactly what scientists do by peer reviewing articles of other scientists for the academic publishers. Research being a tax-payer funded activity, one could expect the output is freely available. Wrong. Most universities suffer from an almost never ending subscription price increase. Last week, this resulted in the University of California considering a boycott of the Nature Publishing group (via Frederik Questier on Twitter).

So I wondered, me, being a junior researcher and a big fan of open access, who wants to publish 2 articles next year (*), would I be able to publish in Open Access journals only?

The answer today is ‘No’. I did some research, and it looks like in my field almost no journals are already indexed in the ISI Web of Science. So I guess I will have to spend some tax-money myself (by writing an article for free) in order to obtain my Ph.D. Disappointing.

(*) At my university, only articles published in journals who are indexed by the ISI Web of Science databases ‘Science Citation Index’, ‘Social Science Citation Index’ and ‘Arts and Humanities Citation Index’ are considered ‘valuable’ (**) for a Ph.D.

(**) Update: Only students who published at least 2 of those articles will receive their Ph.D.