Open acccess fiat

Harvard has mandated that its faculty will publish only in open-access journals. This is kind of a big deal. Here's the NYT story and some more commentary at Open Access News. I gather that in most fields the open-access journals are also the most prestigious but this not at all the case in biology. People are fucking crazy about the journals. I know of faculty that won't support tenure offers to colleagues who haven't published in any of the big three, Nature, Cell, and Science. Most researchers obsess over getting their work into these publications. As a result, the big three are in a very different league- with citations figures usually 2-3 times higher than the lower orders. The thing is, if I were a post-doc with a hot story in a lab that made its name in the pages of Cell, and my fancy boss told me we couldn't publish there I'd be furious ('course now I'd give my pinky for any kind of fucking story- just a big bar and small bar man!!). But this is for the greater good. It will force more journals to open up and its likely other universities will follow. Journals shouldn't have high subscription fees anyway- their costs should be plummeting due to declines in printing, etc.