Barriers to work in retirement

My experience at wishing to remain active as a scientist after retiring for Newcastle University has not been an unalloyed joy. On the positive side there is a scheme by Leverhulme Trust to finance original research by retired university staff. This is an excellent initiative but my interest is now in tying up loose ends from my years of active research rather than in original research. In attempting to achieve this I have encountered a number of barriers.

For example, access to the scientific literature through the Athens web sight is cut off at retirement. Furthermore, I am beginning to suspect that some universities in the UK have a 'spam filter' installed on e-mail that excludes messages that do not originate from another university i.e. with e-male address ending in 'ac.uk'. I hope I am wrong about this but it would explain a lot of the difficulties I am experiencing in communicating with academic colleagues. 

There is more. The new open access journals that are spring up everywhere (Nature Editorial 2012, Van Noorden 2012), offer a quick and easy way of publishing which suits me very well just now. But the costs of open access publication fall to the author rather than the readers. These costs are typically substantial, up to c.£500.00 per paper. Publishers expect university libraries to help authors with these costs but, at least in the case of Newcastle University’s Robinson library this does not happen. The result is that authors on slender academic pensions must pay the cost of publication. The problem is succinctly put by Christopher Smith (2012) and pungently by Jeffrey Beall (2012). I have just come across an encouraging change in this with a move to offer authors a lifetime’s free publication after the paying of a small fee (Van Noorden 2012). What good news.

There is no help in attending conferences. Costs, including registration fees, travel and accommodation are prohibitive. I would have liked to travel to Sweden for the 2012 meeting of the International Society for Behavioural Ecology. Before retirement these costs would be born by the home university or would be included in a research grant.

Because of all this, and after publishing two major reviews in a conventional journal and four smaller ones in open access journals, I have virtually given up attempting to publish and turned instead to Blogging. If my experience is a common one, it seems to me that the scientific enterprise is excluding its most experienced scientists. We will all be losers unless this issue is confronted.

References

Nature Editorial (1012). Openness costs. Nature, 486, 439.

Beall, J. (2012). Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature, 489. 179.

Smith, C. (2012). Open access: hard on lone authors. Nature, 487, 432.

Van Noorden, R. (2012). "Britain Aims for Broad Open Access." Nature 486: 302-303.

           

Van Noorden, R. (2012). "Journal Offers flat Fee for  'all you can publish'." Nature 486: 166.