Slashdot Mirror

No big deal really.

ArXiv is not the only OA repository/journal around.

Check out http://www.plos.org/ for biology and medicine topics.

There's really nothing special about opening up such a repository, except that it's Nature doing it, and it's sort of a hybrid model to "compete" with existing OA sources.

The blog didn't reproduce, it directly (I assume screenshot, it has been subsequently removed) copied the source from the images. Since then she reconstructed the data from the source using her own graphs-- which (should) be perfectly fine. Most journals (not open access) require written permission (several weeks/months of waiting) to copy a figure from their paper. There are exceptions in some cases (e.g., if you are an author of the original work), but basically, you give up a lot of your rights to the material when you publish in a non open-access journal.

A brief read of the PLoS copyright compared to the present article's copyright Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture copyright really shows the difference between Open-access journals and others.

The Craig Venter Institute's Global Ocean Sampling Expedition has been collecting Metagenomic samples for the past couple of years. Among other things the expedition has doubled the number of putative proteins. An excellent video from the expedition is available at http://plos.cnpg.com/lsca/webinar/venter/20070306/ index.html and a set of recently published papers from the expedition are available for free at http://collections.plos.org/plosbiology/gos-2007.p hp

A website hosting the data from the expedition catered towards use on metagenomic samples has been developed by the Venter institute and is available at http://camera.calit2.net/

The issues of academic journals is becoming hugely problematic. Many institutions cannot afford subscriptions and the journals claim they have to charge such rates in order to stay in business. I would suggest that the enormous proliferation of specialized journals indicates that they in actuality are quite profitable. For those that do not know, there are also costs associated with publication in those same journals including costs for publishing images that can be stunningly high. One has to wonder just what the problem is with such high costs when organizations like PLOS and Molecular Vision have so much lower costs of entry, publication and distribution.

Note: I don't necessarily have a problem with profitability and am perfectly happy with a capitalistic approach to academic journals. However, what I *do* have a problem with is outrageous usage policies including DRM that is more problematic and slows progress, unfairly leveraged (illegal) monopolies, preventing fair usage and profiting from publicly funded science and engineering without fairly compensating the paying public or providing access to resources that have been paid in full for.

On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important.... On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding?
These, however, do not have to be exclusive. For example, the Public Library of Science (Plos) now has a number of journals which are peer reviewed. But they are freely accessible through the internet. In addition the authors maintain the copyright through use of the Creative Commons license. And their goal is to be at the level of Science or Nature. See http://www.plos.org/

...PloS

This is the whole idea behind the Public Library of Science which has really taken off in the last couple of years. It's peer reviewed, high quality research, and gives free online access to everyone.

"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."

So efforts to promote science to the general public by making the product of science available for the general public (improving scientific education, etc) are "government censorship" while locking things in overproced journals (Acta Chemica has a $1300/year price tag) is not? They look more and more like the RIAA every day.

Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.

This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.

This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.

Viva XXX and PLOS.

i am basically for stronger enforcement of copyright laws.. does this make me 'anti-tech' or 'pro-tech' in this survey view?

anti-tech, you douche.

http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1763
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=01 97

http://jorge.cortell.net/
http://www.benkler.org/
http://www.dklevine.com/
http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/
http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

http://swpat.ffii.org/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.piratbyran.org/
http://www.stealthisfilm.com/
http://www.cambia.org/
http://www.plos.org/
http://www.fsf.org/

Although it doesn't have textbooks, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) has refereed journals available. It would be great if they could add textbooks for the sciences, also.
see http://www.plos.org/

Too bad this work wasn't published in an open access journal like PLoS, PNAS, etc. Then everyone could read the article for free, instead of having to pay $170 per year for a subscription to Cell. http://www.plos.org/

In my current area of research (mathematical evolutionary biology), editors are indeed working for free (or for the glory/reputation). They are ordinary academics who volunteer some of their time. These are the select-the-reviewers, make-the-publish-or-not-decision editors. I presume that typesetting and layout are done by employees of the journal. So, of course, the content is not entirely free to the journal, nor is the infrastructure.

Commonly there are page charges - the researcher pays money to have their paper published. This all seems fair and acceptable, until we come to publishers like the (IMHO justifiably) much maligned Elsevier, who charge many thousands of dollars per year for modestly sized journals. (I don't know whether Elsevier pays their academic editors or has page charges.)

A new model is "open access" journals, most prominently those from the Public Library of Science. These typically have significantly higher page charges. Some journals have a mixed model - the researcher can pay extra to make their article open access.

The reason right now is that nobody would pay any attention to such a publication.

I'm confident that this will change. Scientists, as a group, are generally doing science for the love of it, to better society, etc. (they usually are not doing it for the money, that's for sure!). Thus, as a group they are remarkably interested in "doing the right thing." Hence the ongoing debate in the scientific community, with more and more scientists putting support behind the notion of open access. As more open access journals are created, and gain reputation, I think the status quo will change.

As I describe in another post, the highly recognized American Institute of Physics is experimenting with allowing authors to cover the administrative costs, thereby making the publication open-access. Also, the journals from the Public Library of Science are making significant strides towards becoming high-quality yet totally open access. This directory lists nearly 2000 open access journals online. Granted the quality is highly variable. Some are great, some are not. We'll see how they work out.

A noble sentiment, however there is no mechanism available that provides for making this material available for free yet also allows for the funding of the needs of scientific article publication. There are some pilot programs in place, but at least so far they are not proven to work. Until this evolves to a trustworthy process the traditional methods will have to continue.

There are many mechanisms that are being debated. Obviously there will be growing pains, and obviously the most important thing is for these new open-access journals to gain a decent reputation... and/or for established journals to start experimenting. Luckily both of these things are happening. Thus, the future is bright for open access in academia (in my opinion, at least).

But there is a reason for reverence for peer review - as a procedure, it weeds out a lot of bullshit. There are many scandals - but far more successes (the entirety of biology, from the sometime in the early 20th century to the present.) I'm a biologist, so I cannot speak with confidence on the impact in other disciplines, or where the corresponding institutions of peer review may lie on the continuum between old boys network and tireless defenders of the scientific method, for other journals in other disciplines. In Biology, in spite of some failings, the record is overall very good.

  The comments by the royal society are nakedly self serving. The fear at the royal society is that organizations like the Public Library of Science will sideline them. This will only happen if organizations like PLoS can maintain the same quality of peer review as the Royal Society (I will assert - so far they are doing better) without charging money. The implicit claim, that free journals deliver a lower quality of review, does not stand up to even cursory examination. I will say (and this is a subjective assertion on my part) that PLoS actually provides a better grade of peer review, and that a system where professional editors preside over large budgets and a permanent base of prestige breeds the sort of cronyism and corruption that the parent post is (legitimately) concerned about.

  From a moral standpoint, of COURSE research done at public expense should be freely available to everyone, now that the technology exists to easily do so. In sum: if the royal society doesn't want to adapt to a modern era where real publication costs approach zero, let them be sidelined.

The planet where scientists can and do fund their own publishing so that access is open to all.

Public Library of Science

I would like to see the scientific journals, especially The Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ start distributing their montly publications over Bit Torrent. There have been occasions of downloading their 150mb journals where there servers and bandwidth were clearly overwhelmed. It would, in my opnion, be a great front to publicize excellent and FREE scientific articles as well as popularize and legitmize bit torrent as a cost effective and fast way to distribute content.

I can't read a lot of the links from home but can if I'm on campus, which has a sitewide read license for many journals. I think Google Scholar is meant for researchers' use (like my lab's) more than it is the general public.

it IS annoying, however. Take a look at the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/ for an organization that believes in open access for everyone. I'm hoping that takes off.

I wonder which of these categories the Great Library of Alexandria falls into...

Planet Earth to Sharp'r: there are things that pre-date the US of A and (oh the horror of it!) even Capitalism! I know, unbelievable, but true.

The concept of a library is linked to free dissemination of information, which scientists and scholars since times immemorial considered crucial for development of knowledge. The "for profit" part is a rather late addition of the Capitalist era. It worked so "well" that shortly after most governments realized that they'd better do something or soon they will find themselves with a population of uneducated farm hands and all scientists living aborad. Enter public and government-assisted university libraires.

Unfortunately, as of late, this seems to be more and more forgotten and it appears that we will have to re-learn the old lessons all over again ... the hard way.

With peer review and intensive copy editing, there's often a fairly large difference between the initial pre-print submitted and the final research paper (at least if you're submitting to a worthwhile journal).

From http://www.plos.org/faq.html

Why should I have to pay to publish my paper?

It costs money to produce a peer-reviewed, edited, and formatted article that is ready for online publication, and to host it on a server that is accessible around the clock. Prior to that, a public or private funding agency has already paid a great deal more money for the research to be undertaken in the interest of the public. This real cost of "producing" a paper can be calculated by dividing your laboratory's annual budget by the number of papers published. We ask that--as a small part of the cost of doing the research--the author, institution, or funding agency pays a modest fee, $1500, to help cover the actual cost of the essential final step, the publication. (As it stands, authors now often pay for publication in the form of page or color charges.) Endorsing the view that biomedical research should published in a manner that is accessible without barriers, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has committed to supplementing publication costs (of up to US$3000 per year) for the scientists whose work it funds, so long as the work is published in an open-access journal.

From the PLoS FAQ:

What if I can't afford publication charges?

We realize that not everyone who does research can afford to pay publication charges through their grants. PLoS waives those fees, no questions asked, for anyone who can't pay. Our editors and peer reviewers have no knowledge of who can pay, so papers are accepted only on their merit. Authors may also qualify for discounts on publication charges via their institution or a funded program; see our institutional members page for more information.

In terms of the ethics of pay-to-publish and the possible dilution of scientific credibility, it is important to realize a couple of things:

1. PLoS is dedicated to being a highly respectable scientific journal of the same stature as the "biggies" such as Nature or Cell. Their review process is just as stringent, and their reviewers are scientists of equally high reputation, as other journals. (I'm getting this both from their "core principles" at http://www.plos.org/about/principles.html and also from talking to some professors in the Stanford biochemistry department--where I used to work--with which some of the founders are affiliated and which is one of the institutions where PLoS first got off the ground.)

2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds numerous biological sciences labs, will provide funding to support publication fees *IF* the research is published in open-access journals :)

3. PLoS says: "We realize that not everyone who does research can afford to pay publication charges through their grants. PLoS waives those fees, no questions asked, for anyone who can't pay. Our editors and peer reviewers have no knowledge of who can pay, so papers are accepted only on their merit." (http://www.plos.org/faq.html#openaccess)

So it's much much better than it might seem at first approximation!

In terms of the ethics of pay-to-publish and the possible dilution of scientific credibility, it is important to realize a couple of things:

1. PLoS is dedicated to being a highly respectable scientific journal of the same stature as the "biggies" such as Nature or Cell. Their review process is just as stringent, and their reviewers are scientists of equally high reputation, as other journals. (I'm getting this both from their "core principles" at http://www.plos.org/about/principles.html and also from talking to some professors in the Stanford biochemistry department--where I used to work--with which some of the founders are affiliated and which is one of the institutions where PLoS first got off the ground.)

2. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which funds numerous biological sciences labs, will provide funding to support publication fees *IF* the research is published in open-access journals :)

3. PLoS says: "We realize that not everyone who does research can afford to pay publication charges through their grants. PLoS waives those fees, no questions asked, for anyone who can't pay. Our editors and peer reviewers have no knowledge of who can pay, so papers are accepted only on their merit." (http://www.plos.org/faq.html#openaccess)

So it's much much better than it might seem at first approximation!

One of the things I really like about PLoS (Public Library of Science) is that they don't just make their articles free to access, they actually release them all under the Creative Commons license. You can do pretty much anything you want with released content, including derivative works and commercial use, so long as you give the original author credit.

Hopefully the new repository that the Wellcome Trust is setting up will use something similar.

BMC has waivers for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.

BMC has waivers for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.

Several journals are already implementing Open Access with different levels of success. I develop and publish a relatively successful online Open Access journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (apologies for the plug), and we use the author-pays model based on a $750US fee to cover (most of) the costs. Often this amount can be written into or otherwise covered by a grant supporting the research in question.

We also have additional sources of revenue, including advertising (albeit very little), and one of the most promising areas is what would traditionally be called "value-added" content. While the full-text of all articles is freely available, "extra" things like PDF versions, on-demand printed versions, etc. are on a fee/membership basis. This seems to work quite well in covering costs while not restricting access. As well, other journals such as BMJ use time-delayed access (ie. articles older than 6 months become open), which is just another way of creating "premium" content. Another interesting publisher is PLoS, who have several resources on the costs of OA publishing.

As some have said in other threads, the main cost is in the actual process of reviewing/copyediting/proofing, not the actual hosting/bandwidth. Open Source journal publication software such as OJS is lessening this barrier, as are other tools. For example, we use OpenOffice to convert articles to the NLM XML schema, automating XML/layout editing and decreasing the cost. By finding alternative, "non-traditional" sources of revenue (like tiered access/content), and using Open Source tools to simplify and automate the publishing process, bringing the overall cost of online academic publishing down to a level where Open Access is cheap is already being realized.

Several journals are already implementing Open Access with different levels of success. I develop and publish a relatively successful online Open Access journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (apologies for the plug), and we use the author-pays model based on a $750US fee to cover (most of) the costs. Often this amount can be written into or otherwise covered by a grant supporting the research in question.

We also have additional sources of revenue, including advertising (albeit very little), and one of the most promising areas is what would traditionally be called "value-added" content. While the full-text of all articles is freely available, "extra" things like PDF versions, on-demand printed versions, etc. are on a fee/membership basis. This seems to work quite well in covering costs while not restricting access. As well, other journals such as BMJ use time-delayed access (ie. articles older than 6 months become open), which is just another way of creating "premium" content. Another interesting publisher is PLoS, who have several resources on the costs of OA publishing.

As some have said in other threads, the main cost is in the actual process of reviewing/copyediting/proofing, not the actual hosting/bandwidth. Open Source journal publication software such as OJS is lessening this barrier, as are other tools. For example, we use OpenOffice to convert articles to the NLM XML schema, automating XML/layout editing and decreasing the cost. By finding alternative, "non-traditional" sources of revenue (like tiered access/content), and using Open Source tools to simplify and automate the publishing process, bringing the overall cost of online academic publishing down to a level where Open Access is cheap is already being realized.

It was just a matter of time before a project of this scope got off the ground. I would like to see them team up with Project Gutenberg (and perhaps archive.org) to provide images of the material. Throw in the little transcoder and perhaps wikipedia and we will soon have a killer information resource that can be cross-referenced to silly proportions. This is a boon for research. Projects like this and the public library of science will add much to collective knowledge. It would also be nice to see them team up with the newspaper project! Next stop--public domain LOC!!!

As a scientist, I think that this is a really cool. I have been wondering how long it would take Google to come out witih something like this. The current searching provided by the NCBI via PubMed is woefully inadequate. Scholar not only finds the relevant papers, it also tells you how many citations each has, which is very important when deciding the impact of a paper.

However, Scholar does highlight the problem with much of the Scientific literature. If you do a search, and find a paper of interest, you will be directed to that journals website, where you will need to pay for access. Big universities pay several million dollars annually for the right to have onlince subscriptions. Which is really dumb, since the content comes from those Universites in the first place! So, check out Public Library of Science if you want a free alternitave

What is the next thing Google should do here? Index the data, so if I want to find the picture of a gel that supports some theory, I can. That would be really nifty.

Check out the Public Library of Science http://www.plos.org/. They're doing this kind of open publishing for journals in biology and medicine.

• Scientists have to pay to get published. It's called page charges. Even the Public Library of Science does it: http://www.plos.org/faq.html#pubfee. $1500 seems a bit thick if you don't know that most journals charge $50/page, more if you put in colored figures.
• If the journal articles are to be accessible to the public, then they can't just be free; there has to be a major change in the writing of scientific articles so that a layperson can get the gist of the material. This can only be good. Right now, the stiff prose of scientific journal articles is about as fun to write as it is to read. Personally, I find grants much more enoyable, as they require a critical review of a line of research and an evaluation of its potential impact on the taxpayers funding the work; it's as close to creative writing as you can get in science.

First, it is unfair because it costs the good scientist more money to publish. A paper with great results deserves the highest-quality editing and the widest circulation possible, correct?

The ability of authors or their institutions to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish.

I just finished reading Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig's latest book. That was an interesting read, and I found it remarkably similar on some points to thoughts I've had on the subject lately.

The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.

He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons. I remember reading the philosophy section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.

The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.

I work for the Public Library of Science, an organization dedicated to Open Access publishing, and just wanted to clarify a few issues.

I've only briefly scanned the posts, but wanted to clear up a few things, at least about how we go about open access publishing:

1) ALL of our papers are peer-reviewed to very stringent standards. In fact, many of our editorial board members have worked with high profile for-profit journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). This is not simply a 'pay to publish' system.

2) Our publication costs are not necessarily prohibitive. We grant waivers to those unable to afford these costs. Incidentally, our publication charge does not currently cover even our own costs.

Currently, for-profit journals are taking advantage of a free labor pool (scientists who donate their time to perform peer review), and turning around and profiting from it. As several readers have mentioned, much of the research published in these journals is funded by taxpayers; the fact that these taxpayers, and even the scientists themselves, have to pay for access to this research is something which needs to be remedied.

Please refer to our website for more information.

I work for the Public Library of Science, an organization dedicated to Open Access publishing, and just wanted to clarify a few issues.

I've only briefly scanned the posts, but wanted to clear up a few things, at least about how we go about open access publishing:

1) ALL of our papers are peer-reviewed to very stringent standards. In fact, many of our editorial board members have worked with high profile for-profit journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). This is not simply a 'pay to publish' system.

2) Our publication costs are not necessarily prohibitive. We grant waivers to those unable to afford these costs. Incidentally, our publication charge does not currently cover even our own costs.

Currently, for-profit journals are taking advantage of a free labor pool (scientists who donate their time to perform peer review), and turning around and profiting from it. As several readers have mentioned, much of the research published in these journals is funded by taxpayers; the fact that these taxpayers, and even the scientists themselves, have to pay for access to this research is something which needs to be remedied.

Please refer to our website for more information.

It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science, a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.

The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.

So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?

Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.

We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.

What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!

Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.

Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
University of California Berkeley

Co-Founder, Public Library of Science

It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science, a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.

The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.

So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?

Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.

We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.

What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!

Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.

Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
University of California Berkeley

Co-Founder, Public Library of Science

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

pubmed

golden path

bioconducter

public library of science

gnumeric

cluster analysis

etc. etc. etc.

What's the BFD ??? A lot of scientists are on the open source bandwagon and have been for years. Walmart's coming to town and the Ivory Towers are falling.

The study by researchers at Duke in which monkeys with brain implants were able to articulate use of a robotic arm through their thoughts was recently published here (link to PDF download is in the right hand column) in the Public Library of Science. It's pretty amazing work. Wireless control, i.e. Bluetooth implants, are on the horizon. I think the really significant implication of going wireless is that this potentially allows for some sort of communication between individuals who possess the wireless implants. The hard part was whether the neuronal/electrical implant interface would work (i.e. whether a brain could send a signal to manipulate a robotic device). The question to consider is if this goes wireless, will electronically aided telepathy between wireless enabled individuals be far behind?

/joeyo

/joeyo

The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:

(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.

(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.

It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.

A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES

Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:

If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.

Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.

As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.

And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o

Is avalaiable asa PDF here.