Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Access to Scientific Journals
LMCBoy writes: "Nature is hosting an online debate on Future e-Access to the Primary Literature. There are points of view from scientists, librarians and publishers (both for-profit and not). It's a good place to get all sides of the issues." It's interesting, because extremely expensive and restricted journals are now competing with services like xxx.lanl.gov, and it isn't clear how peer review will work with more open systems, how they will be funded, etc.
Paul Ginsparg maintains the xxx.lanl.gov LANL e-print arXiv. Ginsparg has a position paper on his (biased, of course) opinion the situation; there is also an update.
Just in case some of you guys missed it during the past 2 years, http://www.researchindex.com has tons of computer science articles available, with authors homepages links, bibtex entries, etc.. Computer science is already freed, let's see what others will do...
This it, perchance?
30 seconds with Google.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Cryptography is my day job. Yet practically everything I know about the field, I got from papers downloaded for free from the Net. I've only paid for two things: Applied Cryptography and the proceedings of one conference (FSE2). I haven't had access to an academic library for five years.
Most papers can be found if you know how to search - find the exact title from CiteSeer, then search for that with Google, failing that search for the authors. If you get really desperate, as I have twice, you can mail the authors and ask very nicely for a copy - most authors want to help. I'm planning on offering hosting for some authors who don't have web pages of their own, because I'd like to see their papers online but they don't have time to maintain them. I go to a lot of work to make my online papers as useful as possible: see http://www.ciphergoth.org/ for examples.
This has to be the future. It's crazy to make amateurs like I was jump through hoops to get access to this information, there's no longer any sane reason for it. I hope the move away from print publications for academia happens as fast as possible and if there's anything I can do to hasten it, I'm there.
--
Xenu loves you!
Peer review works exactly the same; things are just sent electronically. Most of the cost, and a large chunk of the waiting time get removed.
Still, though, I'd send to a paper journal if it was ranked more highly for tenure purposes. All else being the same, I'll send it as bits, but I'm not risking my chances at tenure and promotion over the issue.
hawk
For research on programming languages and cryptography (two of my favourite areas of research), citeseer.com has all you need. It is a really beautiful system that allows you to traverse the graph of which papers reference which others, for example.
It does other kinds of papers in addition to those two areas that I mentioned, but I can't vouch for the usefulness of those areas.
Zooko
The best solution would be to charge for the print copies, and then release the contents to the web a year or so later. That way, anyone who NEEDS the info right away can get access to it. Everyone else will also be able to access it, but may have to wait a while for it.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Is Peer Review funded by the likes of Elsevier?
You're right, it's done on a by-request basis by others in the field (in some cases passed on to students by busy but well-reputed professors) in what amounts to communal work. Or you could say it's payed for by the same people who paid for the research in the first place, and the journal afterward.
And further, you're correct that we've smartly passed the point where cutting out the publisher as an editorial element and coordinating the process online would save everyone money. Maybe not books, but certainly all I ever did to with journal articles was to photocopy them and read them somewhere else; being able to download and print on demand would easily be preferable. Up until 15-20 years ago, I'd say subscription costs did match material and administrative costs pretty well. Since then, publishers have been squeezing a captive market for profit.
But it's not Elsevier's lack of benevolence that's the problem. Most scientists seem woefully unaware of these issues, and even younger ones say "but I must publish in established journals for the sake of my career." Many do take the 'P2P' approach to the copyright assignment and make electronic versions available anyway. But more need to take the next step and ask "how can we fix this?" and "when will those we can't convince retire?"
There is one argument against taking everything online. What many librarians will tell you about paper journals is their archive value. We know how to make books that will last for 500 years, and they'll be just as legible then as now. No system crashes, no technological obsolescence. Of course the exploding volume and cost of academic publications is making this a little moot, but it is one to think about.
My two bits, anyway.
Heh. Fools.
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
OK. It's more than an ego-trip. Are you denying, however, that it is one? True, it also increases your professional stature, and can occasionally be turned into $$, er perhaps job retention. But this doesn't mean it isn't an ego-trip. In fact much of that is components of an ego-trip.
OTOH, peer review is highly useful, also. I'm less certain that particular journals are, outside of the ego-trip factors (aka self aggrandizement).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
True. Massive internal uranium poisioning is no worse than massive internal lead poisioning. OTOH, it's no better.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I hope that you are correct. I believe that you had better read the contract carefully. Copyright law isn't the only thing involved (and I'm not at all sure that you have that right).
IANAL.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But a well-designed site could easily remedy this problem. Merely have a review option, ala slashdot. With a Karma point system, ala Slashdot. The difference would lie in the qualifications required to get an actual account. Or perhaps in the total amount of Karma possible. Say Karma could go as high as IntMax, and you could get an specific quantity by proving that you had a degree from a recognized institution in a field appropriate to the site. And you could earn and loose Karma in the traditional Slashdot manner.
This would get you your peer review.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's a good point. OTOH, research reports aren't exactly art. Still, the point is well taken. There should be an archiving system. If the site is well designed, and intended seriously, then that shouldn't be an insurmountable problem. If nothing else, provide a printer friendly format for each report, and have the site offer a for sale bound printed version. I suspect that most authors would order a few copies of their own work to share with friends, relatives, supervisors, and their office bookshelf.
/. and sourceforge. Citations of prior work should also be required, though they should be in the form of hyperlinks as well as the current form. And someone earlier suggested Google ... I think that a restricted version of Google would be a quite reasonable search engine. One that had a list of sites and their associated ... what can I say besides Karm ... which it used in figuring out which were the valuable links.
OTOH, though the electronic form wouldn't be as durable (without extra work), it would be more rapidly disperseable. I'm thinking of a site that is a cross between
This is no big step technologically. It's the sociology that may prove challenging.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's what the Karma, and the named accounts are about. If you don't have good Karma, then you aren't asked to moderate. This is just a computerization of the current process. It would make account security a bit more critical, however. And probably very few folk would use pseudonyms for their professional correspondence. (Though imagine getting your work moderated down by "Blind Turkey" :-).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but if it's not "more complicated than you think", it is certainly different from what you think.
While scientific publishing rakes in "hundreds of millions a year" (maybe a billion world-wide total (not net) revenue) the total costs of scientific research worldwide are a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than that. Counting both grants (close to $30 billion now at NIH alone) and salaries, that's a lot of money. From the publishing perspective, they are providing a communications, peer review, and ranking service to science, coming at a cost of 1 to 2% of the total spent on science. Is that such a terrible charge for such apparently useful services?
The "public library of science" provides only one of the three services I mentioned (communications), and simply assumes the other services publishers provide will continue on somehow even while they are forced to give up some or all of their revenue from their monopoly on communications. Where do you propose the money come from to support these services? Would you be willing to pay all the costs ($1000 to $4000) as an author? What about authors of important research with not so much funding (at institutions in Africa, say). Or should government grants support these activities? Without laying that support foundation, taking away journal revenue is a sure-fire recipe for failure, one way or another.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Yup. Though if the main site has blocked you, you should still be able to get in through a mirror site - we operate one at:
http://aps.arxiv.org/.
Send me email if you can't get in there.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Next time you might want to post as a regular slashdot user rather than an "Anonymous Coward" - most people here don't get to read AC comments unless they've been "moderated up", which is a shame since you've brought up some important points.
First, either 1-2% is way too much, or it's not, so I don't understand why you say it's ok but then "we are vastly overcharged for such services". You can do the exercise at your institution in fact - compare the total budget for research journal subscriptions in the library (probably under $1 million for a typical mid-size university) with the total research funding + university researcher salary numbers. The real problem is accessibility for smaller institutions and developing nations, which under the old paper-based pricing model would have to pay the same as a big institution for access to the same material. But electronic content means publishers can (and have already started to) differentially price so that the smaller institutions can get access to far more for the same price, or even get a discount.
Your second, and main point, concerns copyright. We've had this debate for a long time; the problem is that if a publisher gets only a license and not copyright ownership, the publisher loses the right to publication in new forms (such as bringing older content into the electronic world). Do you really want a system where each author has to be consulted (as copyright owner) before his content gets included in any new database, for example? In any case, our attempt at resolving this has been to be very liberal in rights granted back to authors, once they give us copyright; for example our authors retain full rights to repost their articles to web sites or on preprint servers. They just can't use the actual file we created for the article without our copyright notice and a link to the official journal version, and they're not allowed to provide it to another publisher who will resell it for a fee, without getting our permission. In the last 5 years we've had roughly this policy in place, we've not had any authors come to us needing more than these rights.
We've also made some attempts at liberalizing access as far as we could be comfortable with it. One of our journals has been completely free from its start 3 years ago, and is doing quite well; it's funding comes from national laboratories and institutions that "donate" for its support, rather than paying a subscription price. Something like that model would be great to generalize if institutions could actually be committed to it - even for a small journal it's rather a lot of work though. The "public library of science" could be interpreted as another route to this sort of funding mechanism - but it's a backhanded route; why not make it explicit and provide free access (in exchange for institutional "donations") from the start rather than waiting six months?
Anyway, I'll check out the debate you mention at the publiclibraryofscience site; probably worth bringing out some of the old arguments again in the new forum.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I read the Nature debate on this before it appeared here on /., and we've been debating something like this pretty strenuously online for the past 3 years over at Sigma Xi. The issue that has caused the Nature debate is a proposed boycott of journals that refuse to make papers older than 6 months available free online (specifically to the "Public Library of Science", but free redistribution beyond that seems to be assumed). As several people in the Nature debate have pointed out, this puts all the burden for paying for what journals do on the market for immediate "news" - quality articles, and is likely to have several quite serious detrimental effects.
Where I work (The Physical Review, published by the non-profit American Physical Society) we've spent the last few years scanning in all our old papers (going back over 100 years) to make them available online for a fee. Last month people downloaded over 150 Gigabytes of these old papers from our site (something like 200,000 individual papers downloaded) -- but these would never have been put online without a publisher with a steady revenue stream to sink a few million dollars into them. And in the long run we expect them to more than pay for themselves, so as we're non-profit that lowers the cost to libraries and other subscribers of the new material we publish.
What about those ridiculous journal prices? Some of the publishers are indeed for-profit companies (Elsevier Science being the biggest now) and many of them have Microsoft-sized monopoly profit margins of 30 or 40% on their scientific journal business. Which is why boycott or other proposals that strike all journals equally are going to weaken us with our 0% profit margin a lot faster than a commercial publisher...
But journal pricing is a tricky business. Unlike what has been suggested by others in this forum, except for very high-volume items (probably no journal in the sciences qualifies), printing and distribution are very far from dominating the costs these days. For us they amount to 20-25% of total costs, and are dropping quickly as our subscribers move to online subscriptions. Another big area of costs for us is the copy-editing process that turns whatever files or pieces of paper we get from the authors into a coherent component of a larger body of work. Costs in this area have actually increased in recent years because we are doing a lot more "tagging" of the content; everything we publish now has an SGML file behind it ready for re-use (for example in constructing reliable online links to other articles cited by the authors). This amounts to roughly 30-35% of total expenses for our journals.
The final piece of the cost for us, around 40-45% of the total, is in the management of peer review. We pay the salaries of a large number of editors (PhD physicists, some full-time, some part-time) who make the decisions about what hoops they need authors to jump through to actually get their article published. Often, particularly for the papers we end up rejecting, this involves mediating a strenuous scientific debate between referees and authors. This is hard intellectual work, and involves 1 to 3 or more hours of effort for each of the 24,000 papers we receive every year. And you need a support staff, building, equipment, etc. adding overhead to it all.
And then you have to divide these costs by the number of subscribers to get a per-subscriber journal price. Some of the very high-priced journals are that way mostly because they don't have many subscribers; it's a vicious circle. Which makes it hard to compare the real costs of one journal with another, unless you factor in total circulation figures.
Could this all really be done free? Certainly not with the same level of quality. Is this level of quality actually necessary? Well, we hope so: people seem to be still paying for it. Our goal is as far as possible to lower our costs, to lower the prices we charge, and to broaden the distribution of the information. We're definitely looking at new markets (the 100+ year archive is one of them) to help broaden our cost base and keep those prices down. Electronic publishing allows you to do a lot more - lower prices to developing countries for example is easy to do. The purpose of our parent organization is "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and any way we can do that better, we'll try doing it. But giving all our stuff away for free just doesn't make any sense, at least not yet.
Energy: time to change the picture.
It seems to me that the big issues that electronic journals face is archival storage and peer review.
Advancing technologies make storage media obsolete. When the demand for a format drops below a certain level, it is no longer profitable to manufacture the equipment needed to read it. Storage media have finite lifetimes. Much of the data collected on early tapes is not readable any more. Dead tree format is the only practical time tested format for archival storage in existence. Scientific journals MUST be archivable. The means to archive the web are not available to librarians.
Peer review of scientific journals is necessary for a variety of reasons. It prevents fraudulent data from being published. It catches many mistakes by authors. It is a necessary step in quality control - true scientific publication must include the information needed to duplicate an experiment. Without peer review the quality of the scientific record is suspect. Peer review is slow and costs money.
Electronic publication does not provide the revenue required to fund real peer review or publication in archivable format.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Well thanks to Google, most evey publicly accessable page is accessable forever (for now, barring bankruptcy) thanks to their cashing ablity.
Google and all other search engines are FAR from complete listings of the Internet. The best estimates are that Google has maybe a 20% indexed coverage of the internet. In addition Google does not cache pages that are excluded by request, or are generated from database searches.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
I'm a Ph D. student. I make a habit of providing pdf versions of what I publish on my web site. The reason for that are: I know what a hassle it can be to have to deal with libraries and I get most of the articles I read from the web as well (i.e. I'm returning the favor). In addition it is a way of promoting my work and the research group I'm working in.
The academic practice is all about money. You have to build relations so you can get funding. You have to publish to gain respect and you have to keep the university happy so you need to do all of the above or they'll cut your budget.
Unfortunately the system is obsolete. Traditionally you publish you're articles in a journal. Doing so means you go through a review process. And if you're lucky your work is published in a very expensive journal that in most cases will land in various university libraries. So where does the money go? To the publisher. The reviewers get nothing, the editor may get a small fee (I'm not sure actually), the paper writers get the honor.
At the university I work at it is required to spent a significant portion of your budget on library fees. The library uses these fees to pay for the journals, which nobody reads because the content is generally available online (though the author's homepage or through the ieee or acm sites). Some journals even offer free access! So what is it about? It is about pumping research money into publishers. Publishers aren't doing this for charity, they are making a profit here.
The only reason the system still works is that the academic world is very conservative. The CS department I work for is very characteristic. To my shock and surprise they have succeeded in making the secrateries use latex. Also they are quite clueless about such modern stuff as the internet. The department homepage design is very retro and no doubt renders perfectly in mosaic.
I think the single most important feature of journal publications is peer review. I think such a feature can survive in the internet age and in fafct I think it can be improved upon significantly. If reviewers and editors concentrate on putting their efforts online (after all they don't receive a penny for it now either) they may make the published content more accessible, they are not limited by such arbitrary measures as prining cost, they may attract a wide range of interested readers. In addition, providing a slashot like infrastructure to such an audience might also prove to be very productive. I'm not so much worried about quality. Time is a limited resource for anyone and no doubt new, reliable review systems will emerge to save others from reading badly written articles.
Jilles
For computer science papers, there's also:
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/directory.html
I get the idea that there's a couple of serious issues to deal with here:
* Journals are inconvenient due to distribution, format, and pricing.
* There isn't a consensus opinion on how to instatiate the peer review process online.
* Funding for research and the viability of the distribution systems are money issues that can't be ignored: people need to make money on research as well as have it peer reviewed, and information distributors MUST put food on the table somehow.
Basically, it boils down to political and fiscal issues. And this is not a case of greed; rather, people have needs, there are livelihoods at stake, and we're talking about a very important process for research that basically includes ALL human scientific advancement.
So, there are no easy answers.
Here's what I think:
Printed journals are good. They just need more availability, more participation, and a reduced cost. While Internet distribution sounds great, we have a current system that needs improvement. It's more beneficial... not to mention easier and cheaper... to improve the printed journals. Plus, we need the journals. Everyone currently reads journals, it's easier for most of the scientific community at this point to deal with printed journals, and I think the scientific community would suffer if we let journals degrade further or disappear entirely. So let's think of that first.
Next, we need a prototype/pilot peer review process online. It needs to make money (not all information can be free), it needs to be more effective and convenient than published journals, it needs to be robust, scalable, practical, and easy to use. (most people shouldn't have to type %man "Mayan anthropology" or something like that) And in the meantime, articles should NOT be published freely on the net AT ALL, as it hurts our progress in both printed journals (robs them of needed revenue) and online distribution (makes it scattered and sets a bad precedent for pricing).
Here's a sample model for an online peer review process, if I were to whip it up this weekend - a Slashcode-powered subscription website frontend, with a separate domain for each journal field. Professional groups, like the ones that put out journals, are responsible for setting up and maintaining their own domains... as in, they follow a cookie-cutter method for setting it up, and it's standarized for all domains, but each group moderates and maintains their own domain so that you don't have something like one website with ALL scientific articles being maintained by the same 6 computer guys. All actual articles are stored in a networked database. The front-ends access the database for the actual articles, you can do a very broad search on that one database easily, it's nearly infintely scalable to handle any scientific field, and it keeps the subscription model centralized. Individual users are charged one of the following ways: per article, retrieve article and have commenting/review priviledges for that article for a nominal one-time fee (like $3 per article, or prepay for 20 articles for $50, something like that); per domain, access to whole domain for a modest subscription fee (like $10 a month); all-domains access for individual user, large personal subscription fee ($100 a month); and all-domains for organziation, site and user licensing fees for libraries, universities, corporations, research groups, etc. where users belonging to an organization can access the articles at a licensed computing site or they can register with the database through the organization for universal access. Organizations probably should have per-domain licensing, too. Searching would be free to all, but obviously the results would be limited to subscribers (as in, they can find what they're looking for, but they can't get to it without paying... kind of if you used Google but the links it returned asked for your username when clicked).
You could do some nifty things with personalization, information linking, relevant searches, multiple domain cross-posting, etc.
Oh, and profits would be distributed like this: authors get commissions based on article views/participation (like, $1 per user participating in an article, one time), domains get 50% of per-domain subscriptions plus 50 cents for each non-per-domain subscriber article participation (all-domain and per-article users), the main database publishing organization gets 10-15% of all fees - that leaves about $1 leftover fees from each per-article view, per-domain subscribers have their subscription fees distributed after 5 article participations in a given domain (which means money is lost after the 5th article participation), and all-domain individual users fees are distributed after 60 (!) article participations (if you made it $50/month, it would be 30 participations).
This leaves organization fees: an organization could pay for all-domains, per year: $300 per licensed site (individual computer), and for universal access user members, something like $200 for up to 20 users, $400 for up to 50 users, $1000 for up to 200 users, etc. That means, every year, each site computer could access/participate in 180 articles, and each universal access user could participate in 3 - 6 articles and you're still making money. Now, per-domain organization access, that would be an agreement between the domain holder and the organization, but the main database publishing organization should still get $20 a year for each licensed site and 50 cents per universal access user. The main database publishing organization would be a clearinghouse for user fees and author/domain payments.
The logic behind all of this would need to be refined much further and some of it just doesn't scale well... it could get very complicated, because the overall system makes 30% undistributed profit on each per-article purchase, but a university like mine (20,000 enrolled plus faculty) would pay something like $125,000 per year to the organization for full access on all library computers (not counting other computing sites) and universal user access for all students and faculty, and that pays for 75,000 participations, or about 3 per person overall... yet if all faculty members plus 10% of heavy research students viewed/participated in an average of 20 articles in a year (not a lot of views if you have a lot of research) and the remaining students averaged 2 article views/participations, the clearinghouse (which uses %10 of the original payment to stay in business) pays out to domains and authors over $30,000 more than it recieved from the group. Reduce both author and domain fees by 50%, and you scale far better, but I don't even know if $1 for authors and 50 cents for domains per view is even enough payment to maintain the system... plus, the fees from users may be entirely too high to begin with, since $3 per article, $100 per all-access user, and $125,000 per large university are all rather high... more than journals cost (to a point) and redundant since the journals are out there already...
Overall, it's a decent sized project, but it's viability can be tested on a small scale... and from there, it's all math, statistics, and consumer interest studies. Maybe the top researchers could make enough money off of such a system to rival A-Rod, and maybe a lot of researchers would find the payments affordable and worthwhile... then again, maybe everyone will starve trying to publish these articles, and maybe everyone will balk at even $1 a month for articles. And the system becomes more valuable as it gets bigger, but it might lose money faster that way, and it's always a big risk to build something that would be successful only if it gets really big. But it's worth thinking about.
Electronic publication costs next to nothing?!?! I'll go with ya on the peer review costs... which is absolutely NOTHING, all you have to do is store responses and reviews, which isn't any more difficult to do than to store the actual articles... but electronic publication is VERY expensive. How about: buying the hardware, leasing the bandwidth, developing the software, and maintaining the network/servers? All that maintenance comes at a cost, not to mention the idea of a clearinghouse, advertising and marketing, etc. (I admit those costs would be minimal, but they're still costs) Basically, a computerized research network costs money... just like paper and printing costs money too. I was just throwing generous figures out, I have no idea what any of these costs are... and I said that first priority is to improve the current journal distribution methods anyway, since that would be easier and cheaper.
Second, page hits are meaningless. Basically, authors and research groups are paid every time someone BUYS an article to read or peer review. It's akin to buying a page out of a journal - one you buy it, it's yours forever. I don't think you can model this around page hits, since people have to pay before they look (other than an overview)... and the purpose of the system is for research and peer review, I don't see how counting simple page hits has anything to do with that. Basically, the first time someone accesses the article, they've bought it. They can look at it once, or a million times, but at that point the author and the research group (the people maintaining that server) are paid. Subscribers don't actually pay, but they've already paid a subscription fee and that money is pooled and used to pay the authors and research groups. One time buyers (per-article) DO pay on the spot, and have access to both the article and the peer review system, as do subscribers... but just for that article.
Yea, there are only cosmetic differences to what we have today... if you don't count the powerful search engine capabilities, the availability, the convenience, and the ease of use for peer reviewing. Basically, no books, full searching, available anywhere, and it's easy to review an article and have the review posted RIGHT AWAY for the whole world. It's a very powerful information system, compared to today's paper journals...
Oh, did you know, corporate resarch groups and universities ARE private businesses... the last time I checked, anyway. Research needs funding, period. The more funding, the better. But experiments cost money, and researchers need to eat.
Finally, I didn't intend to suggest a for-profit system... rather, I just wanted everything to pay for itself through a solid (yet kinda complicated, I admit) business model, and I thought researchers who write articles should be compensated modestly. One dollar from every subscriber who ever read/reviewed that particular article at least once does NOT add up quickly... and if it does, then maybe it's a powerful incentive to write GOOD articles, or maybe it's a target for cutting costs and reducing subscriber fees. I think it should all cost as little as possible, both to the subscriber and to the research groups... but there's a lot of money flying around in universities and in research groups which would be WELL SPENT on a powerful and effective online peer review and article publishing system. Once again, I advised fixing the printed journal distribution system first.
P.S. - I said information should not be free in this case, and that people shouldn't be posting articles for free on the Net. I stand behind that, and because of this: you can't walk in a library and grab a copy of everything you want and walk out with it. If libraries did that, they'd be really popular, but they'd go out of business quickly. But libraries do have books and publications (among other things), and in most cases any member of the public can go there to read them if he or she likes. It's the same thing with the Internet. Furthermore, a precedent of "everything is totally free" encourages business models that emphasize being cheap, fast, and prolific. In other words, crappy. Quantity over quality. I believe that authors do themselves a great disservice by setting such a precedent. I think a little patience in this case will prevent the peer-review process from being "Napsterized". But I think ultimately, the whole process should be public and available to all. Okay, so with my system, not everyone can log in from home and read whatever they want... but I specifically wanted something where universities and public libraries could subscribe (via site licenses) to the system so that it would be another freely available resource to anyone on-premises. Just like books and journals are today. And it's more powerful beyond that, too, but if you are just some guy off the street, you can get to it if you need to. So it would be free for everyone. That's why I like that idea. For now, though, it just takes planning and patience.
oh my, your particle accelerator is so big...
PNAS is the extreme example. Other journals, although theoretically peer-reviewed as well, have essentially the same problem: even if your results suck (but don't suck too bad), if you're buddies with the chief editor then you can get published most of the time.
NO CARRIER
I'm another econ Ph.D. student, and of course facing the same problem. I ran into an interesting fellow a few days ago who told me that he is the editor of an on-line, peer-reviewed journal. He's a general equilibrium theorist, so I'd guess that's the slant of the journal. He said that it is intended to be a "letters" sort of journal, in which one can write up preliminary results, report small findings, and generally air stuff too small for the mainline journals. His suggestion was that we could write up preliminary results in his journal and get the benefits of refereeing, then publish a complete paper in a traditional journal. Can't find any link to it online, so I'll see if I can find and send it along to you later. Don't know if this will solve our problem, but getting some prelininary results published sounds like a good start on something...
See what I've been reading.
In many fields when you submit a paper for publication, you have to pay a fee to the journal. That's not as common in economics, but what I will have to do is sign over the copyright of my paper to the journal pubishing it. In order to participat in the intellectual life of my chosen field, I am required to give some business entity control over my work for the next 100 years or so.
Now, I'd be happy to open-source it. I'd even be happy to make it public domain. But, release the copyright to someone else? I may not even be able to put a copy on my website? Why is that good for either me, or the field of study?
There's a classic paper called "The Nature of the Firm" by R. H. Coase. Yesterday it took me a while to hunt it down. It was published in '37 and is considered pivitol. My university has one copy in a book, which I'm allwed to borrow, but undergrads aren't. The paper isn't online anywhere (at least not legally). If this paper was public doamin, it would be mirrored all over the place.
There's argument that copyright was required for the journal to recoup its costs. But, yes, most of those costs are associated with printing and distributing paper copies. Now since we can distribute the papers more efficiently online, the costs plummet.
The real problem now is not free-as-in-beer distribution, but free-as-in-speech academic research. How do we accomplish that, while maintaining the system of peer review?
The only solution I've been able to think of, and I may try, is to base things more on individual initiative. When someone has a paper, they find a person with a reputation in the field, and ask the expert to play "editor". The editor picks a few anonymous referees, who do their thing. Maybe the author submitting the paper would send along a (hopefully small) check for the editor and referees. If everything checks out, the editor gets cited as such on the paper, and the author self-publishes public domain (or some open-text license). Then any online database can mirro and index the paper.
I can dream.
My jaundiced (and possibly innaccurate) view is that, but for the armlock of the incumbent players, it should be possible to replicate the workflow of journals on a web-based, subscription free basis; that what real costs exist in the system could be funded by the (already tax-payer funded) academic establishments; and that we might get to the stage where publicly funded research results are made available at no cost to the public.
On this score, kudos to MIT for deciding to release their courseware for free.
Let's say I finished my PhD studies and wanted to publish my work. Well, I would pay an application fee to a publishing company, who then gets peers to review it (usually for free), then, if they accept my work, I pay per page to have it published. Oh, and they retain all rights to the work I paid for. Then they turn around and sell subscriptions to their quarterly journal for $6000 a pop. Sounds fair, huh?
The publishers are putting up a fight too. Some Chemistry journals are refusing to publish scholars who publish online first.
This should be interesting to follow because there is nowhere that information should roam more free than in academia.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Closed Peer Reviews can lead to group think and political agendas
Open peer reviews opens the process to people who are not peers, which is fine by itself, opens up the speculations and discussions of experts among themselves to criticism buy others with other political agendas.
This is not restricted to the easily cited religious groups.
For example, there is always the competition for research dollars. In support of this idea there is this article over at Netslaves, not particularly a geek site, but certainly devoted to the run of the mill technology worker. To quote one snippet:
Here we have the vested interest for research dollars that corrupts the process. Opening up the peer reveiw process would make expose this. I do not know that this fix the situation. But it would make more resources available so that it could be fixed.Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So when we do our research on GOOGLE we can just hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button and use the first article we get.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Remember copyright pertains to the sale of the material. Merely giving with no monies exchanged doesn't fall under copyright.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Given the nature of scientific research, by the time it hits the journal the paper is out of date. So at that point the journal has already made all the money they're going to get. There's no point to keep the articles locked up for so long. Let's give the journals 2 years of having the print or pay-per-view website monopoly so they can justify the higher fees. After that open up and give everyone access. The industries and research universities that need the bleeding edge info will still pay the electric bill for the press and server.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
If I write a book and a publisher gains the rights to publish it all they have is the right to sell the material in printed form. I still have the right to show my manuscript to my friends. I just can't sell it to them.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
Sad but true.
I've just about finished my PhD thesis in Physics and found about that the hard way. I was negotiating my next semester funding with the head of our department, when I was quite bluntly told that my two Physical Review Letters and two Phys. Rev. B:s are, in fact, a lousy result. "Four publications isn't that good a result even for a lone researcher like you. You should have been able to publish at least eight papers like Dr. John Doe here." Well, he did have eight papers in 2000, but they were in sub-standard journals (two of them weren't even peer reviewed).
Do you really think that to "get validated by the community" is only of a psychological value?
It's much more than that. All scientific work is based on the idea that your peers review and test your hypotheses and results against the extisting literature before anything is made public. This process screens out the crackpots and people who don't have any idea of a scientific process. And when you get your paper published in an established journal it means that it has been deemed a scientifically solid piece of work that should be taken seriously. The more respected journal you get to publish in, the better work you have done. It's not merely an ego-trip as you seem to imply.
Where are the big costs with running a peer review process and putting stuff on the web? Couldn't an academic community as a whole in any given area easily carry it if they banded together?
Bandwith and storage are cheap, people are of course expensive... but if its true that peer review is usually voluntary there are no costs there, what remains is the organisation behind it. After initial costs a lot of the system should be able to be automated, leaving the task of assigning peers. I think costs should be manageable.
Like suggested here: http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/
Its of course a pipe dream, the academia working together in this day and age... what a laugh.
The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The xxx archive is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Many specialized western journals also cost thousands of dollars per year. Of two main journals on Schizophrenia, the one published by the NIH is under $100/yr and the one from a commercial publisher is over $2000/yr.
Journal publsihing is a strange market: the author does not pay for publication so she or he is as likely to submit to an expensive journal as a cheap one. Since the journal then holds the copyright, libraries are forced to pay the exorbitant subscription rate of some commercial journals or else they have a hole in their collection. Commercial publishers figured this out several years ago- their academic publishing arms make a quite high return on investment.
Every individual manuscript published is like a little monopoly for the journal on a slice of knowledge.
Curtains for windows?
Remember any discussion you had, and there was a disagreement of the facts? Remember when you were obviously right, and the other person was complete and total moron? Well, if it were possible to easily and cheaply (preferably, freely) access information online to prove your point, at a place that was garrunteed not to be full of "it," you could finally say, "Hey, check out freedoc.sci/physics/subatomic/w-particle.htm, and after you see I'm right, feel free to worship my A*, or fsck off!"
It'll be beneficial to large sums of people who've always been right, but were the only ones in the discussion with the physical proof, and in the online world, referring someone to amazon.com means nothing.
Why, if this kicks-off, we can outlaw idiocy! "Excuse me, sir, but we have reports your an ignorant peice of crap, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to fine you...hmm, oh, your Windows user...I'll have to fine you your life..."
WE CAN COUNTER FUD AND IGNORANCE WITH ONE SINGLE BLOW! HORDES OF CLUELESS MEDIA WILL FINALLY BE FORCED TO CHECK THEIR FACTS AT A SINGLE, VERIFIABLE LOCATION! This will also cause a drop in the number of articles produced by Ziff-Davis, but that's not a loss at all. Then again...it's not like they actually check with Open Bench Labs when the put out some unconfirmable or one-sided test result as absolute "fact." BUT IF WE COULD FINE THEM...
Linus Torvalds Outlaws Cluelessness
PHB on Trial for Mispronouncing Linux
Ziff-Davis Bankrupt
Slashdot Reduces User Overhead to Only 14
I see arguments are right
articles too
I see PHBs, shoved in a zoo
And I think to myself,
"What a Wonderful World."
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
To get through the tenure and promotion system you need grants and lots of publications. I have colleagues who literally could not care less about their students. The Deans and administrative types promote them with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge," because they bring in money and prestige from a small academic community. I would not send my own kids to a land grant institution and would encourage them to go to a smaller institution.
As far as resources to publish, it does take a lot. For each paper the publishers have to find reviewers. They have to check up on the ones who are late in filing reviews. They have to decide what parts the reviewers got right and what they got wrong. They have to make sure that revisions are sent back to reviewers and broker disputes. The process of putting together and preparing an article is very difficult. If you think my grammar is bad, you should see some of the stuff coming from people just learning to speak this whacked out language.
Completely off topic... but...
rant on
I saw someone on this board saying that MIT should be commended for putting their education materials on the web. MIT is the worst place to go if you are looking for an education. They produce research and create a place for smart students to be together. This is nice, but the last thing they should be commended for is what happens in their classrooms.
Also, they are the place that pioneered ways to take advantage of the Bayh-Dole Act to seek patents and royalties for things created using public money.
rant off
The academic environment has become so focused on publishing and getting grants that the focus is not on quality but quantity. At the same time resources are stretched so thin that the cost of producing these journals has also gone through the roof, and the prices that libraries are asked to pay is outrageous. Nobody seems to be questioning whether or not the current situation is good for science.
I had dinner a couple of nights ago with a guy who is one of the editors of an entomology journal. He said that it is now so difficult to get reviewers that they have had to reduce the number of reviewers per paper down to two, and it is still hard to find people! The publishers who included statements in the link above can rant all they want about "quality" and "integrity," but they should be asking more fundamental questions.
There is an old joke about a person's work, "Dr. Jones has filled a much needed hole in the literature." This seems to be a common compliment. The people in the academic community really need to rethink what their role in society is. It doesn't feel like the Deans and administrators in american universities care much at all about students and education.
This is already happening. Scientists (like me) routinely post electronic versions of their papers, making them freely available on their web sites. In my experience, typing the title of an arbitrary article into your favourite search engine will lead to a freely-available electronic version about 30 per cent of the time, and this proportion is increasing.
The key idea is legitimacy, which is touched on in the article ... that is, a researcher needs the work to be validated and published in a recognized journal first, to verify that the work is an important contribution, before making it freely available.
As an aside, I also have concerns with an online journal being freely available, because it's not clear who will be paying the bills - advertisers? donors? At my university there is already a great hue and cry about the independence of research being corrupted by corporate interest. The high subscription fees charged by journals may make works inaccessible, but they do pay the bills (in such a way that advertising is unnecessary).
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I love xxx.lanl.gov. Sure, the papers are preprints, but I have access to knowledge (in my case, of mathematics) that I can't get access to now that I'm no longer a college student.
The only problem is filtering through the good, the bad, and the ugly. When I saw Paul Ginsparg (the guy who started xxx) speak about five years ago, he mentioned that he fully expected other interested parties to create "virtual journals" -- peer-reviewed, if desired -- by simply commenting on and providing links to the best of the massive xxx database at lanl. I haven't seen this happen yet, which I find strange and sad.
So it seems to me that a slashdot-style discussion board/web-log would perhaps be the most effective tool for locating the best papers. In effect, a carefully tuned version of Slashdot could act as the ultimate virtual journal, using xxx as its database.
What thinks you all out there?
-ThreeToe
-(Two Lost In Struggle With Calamari)
For those who keep fretting about how peer review works in the world of open-online publishing, let me assure you that it barely works now. Any academic who has had to publish can provide a long list of "peer" reviews which have been off-target, inaccurate, and sometimes little more than ad hominem attacks. The problem with this system is that the reviewers are anonymous and the reviewed aren't. This leads to lots of irresponsible and unethical behavior. I've been publishing in scientific journals for 25 years now, and the number of really good peer reviews I've gotten amount to less than 10% of the total. These 10% were incredibly useful, after a couple of them I understood the subject of my paper better. However, this only partially makes up for the following sins: 1) Reviewers who have a self interest in squashing a publication because it conflicts with their view of a topic or may scoop their work. As science becomes more politicized, this can only get worse. These are usually the adhominem reviews. 2) Reviewers who pass on the substance of confidential material to other interested parties. 3) Reviewers who demand that the author include references to their work as the price of favorable review. (These of course do not remain anonymous.)Some have even solicited a junior author status. 4) Reviewers who squash a paper because it may make their own published errors more visible. Even well intentioned reviews can be utterly wrong, and act to retard the progress of science. For example, L.W.Morley sent papers to JGR and other respectible journals outlining the therory of plate tectonic years before matthews and vines, but he couldn't get his work past the reviewers. It was "too speculative." Finally, the last time I submitted a paper to a leading journal it took just shy of 9 months to get the reviews done, and one reviewer waited these nine months to inform the journal he was too busy. At the current pace of science this isn't reasonable. Could we struggle along without peer review? It seems to me that replacing it with a Slashdot-esque model is worth a try.
The sum existent papers in even one discipline can have any human agent reading forever. Peer reviewed, filtered papers evaluated important by people of repute will save precious time by presenting clear signal apart from inconsequent noise.
New papers don't have metadata in statistical metrics such as number of citations and may well not be worth your time, even if written by someone with statistical repute.
Therefore the peer review and prefiltering that is done at the scientific journal is still very valuable. However, in order not to create a straw man by ignoring the already implied delay period, the profit of the journal must still be taken into serious consideration.