Philica is an online
open access academic journal, which accepts articles on any subject.
History
Philica was founded in March 2006 by two
english academics, Ian Walker, a
psychology lecturer at the
University of Bath, and Nigel Holt, a lecturer in psychology at
Bath Spa University, which was a newly formed university that was barely a year old at the time.
Walker and Holt had become dissatisfied with traditional academic journal publishing. They regarded the publishers of scientific journals as essentially
parasites, making money out of something that they contributed little to themselves. Their case was that academics did the research work, wrote the papers,
peer-reviewed the papers of others, all for which the publishers paid the academics nothing. Another objection was that academics were compelled to go to profit-making organisations in order to get their work published, even though they were effectively public servants, because government paid their salaries and funded their research.
They believed that the underlying problem was that publishing companies held the
copyright over the work submitted by researchers, thus their solution was to leave the content under the control of the researcher.
Walker and Holt were also critical of the closed nature of scientific publishing, which they believed led to peer reviews that were simply wrong or motivated by personal feelings towards the author. Their solution was to publish the reviews of papers along with the papers themselves.
One area of Philica generating a lot of comment on web forums and blogs are the "Observations" http://philica.com/submit.php. Often amounting to little more than someone giving their personal view, usually unsupported by evidence or reference, they are tantamount to unmoderated forum entries. Other registered Philica users are allowed to comment upon them if they desire but most anything can be claimed there, without need of reference nor evidence, and comments would be no different to a reply in an open web forum.
Difficult to evidence with a direct reference, as it would identify specific individuals, is also the fact that some researchers using this facility are not the employees of formal academic institutions that Philica claims members have to be at http://philica.com/register.php. In at least one instance one individual is even given the "tick mark" confirming them as such when this is not the case (http://philica.com/status.php).
See also
Sources
