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.

Comments

On the specifics of the debate at Nature

[apsmith]

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.

"open access" isn't quite open

[cretog8]

I'm a Ph.D. student (economics) and somewhere along here I'm hoping to publish papers. In order to keep my career options broad, I have to publish.

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.

How it works

[cvd6262]

This came up in a Graduate forum in my program. Some good points were exchanged, but no one could argue with the following point.

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.

Less Reason for Idiocy!

[Niscenus]

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."