Scientists Demand Open Access to Research

An AC sent in: "15,817 scientists have threatened to boycott all journals that refuse to provide free public online access to their articles within 6 months of publication. After all, the scientists provide the articles free of charge. What's the excuse the journals use? They claim that public archives introduce errors into the articles, making them unreliable!" We've run stories about the journal debate before; see this one or this one or this one. But it sounds like scientists are getting a bit peeved now - good for them. The lesson that "No, you don't have to give up all your rights to your work in exchange for publication anymore" is one that musicians could stand to learn as well. I guess the scientists are faster learners.

Comments

Let's get this straight.

[jd]

The scientists, who spend vast sums of money on their research, and who either get no renumeration or (sometimes) even have to PAY the journal to publish, and who's credibility (and therefore food supply) depends on being read & cited, are complaining because the poor, impoverished journals can't afford to maintain a reliable online archive...

The poor journals, with their $150 - $450 subscription costs have such poor circulation, that their bank accounts are suffering. All the digits (but one) are zero! You can't get any worse than that!

For those who can't spell "satire", I have absolutely no sympathy for any journal that really DOES have financial problems. The problems are of their own making. Price the rag out of the reach of readers, and you won't =HAVE= readers! Duh! True, you can't keep reducing prices forever. It follows a Gaussian distribution, and the "ideal", from the rag's perspective, is to find the maximum. But, as they have all the monetary wisdom of a whelk, you can't expect intelligence to play any part in things.

The archives, furthermore, increase mind-share. And, as any Microsoft dweeb knows, mind-share is market-share. You can't sell to people who don't know (or care) that you exist. Convince Joe and Jane Average that hand-held fusion reactors are vital to know about, and make good conversation pieces, and you're talking a circulation increase in orders of magnitude.

It's WORTH risking 10% of sales, if there's a better than average chance of acquiring 10,000% additional ones.

I may not be an accounting wizard, but even I know that 10,000 is bigger than 10.

Re:Scientists aren't faster learners...

[FallLine]

If your goal is to mass-produce and distribute music by building "brand recognition", then you are correct in suggesting that capital and marketing on the scale provided by the major labels is required. If on the other hand you believe that the enjoyment of music doesn't require brand recognition, then good distribution systems can be built with very little capital. You must be one of those who prefers music in a can to music in the flesh. So "merely delivering music from point A to point B" is a very worthy objective.

You miss the point. The point is that artists consistently choose to sign with the labels under, what many regard as, tough contracts, not because it is the only way they can get music to interested parties [as i pointed out, there are many other ways that would allow them more control and larger profits per CD sold], but because the labels offer capital and marketing as their chief offerings. Now say of market success what you will, but it is no coincidence that the vast majority of widely recognized artists choose to sign, despite the presence of supposedly equal or superior distribution alternatives. To merely write it off as the product of a monopoly on distribution is intellectually dishonest.

This is a very narrow view of what benefits scientists. You are assuming that you know better what is in their interest than they do.

Again, you miss the point. My point is not that the scientists care for the publishers' financial well being; my point is that the artists clearly want those publishing functions and if their demands make the act of publishing economically un-viable, then no one wins, not the scientists, not the greater public, and certainly not the publishers. Put simply, I do not need to know precisely what their objectives are to reasonably this.

Court transcripts are not of concern to lay people either, but they are part of the public record because public trust in the justice system depends on the principle of public access to the evidence and arguments presented in court. The same holds true for scientific research. We value the pursuit of scientific knowledge because it is a worthwhile human endeavor, not (solely) because it provides industry with better mousetraps. A large part of the benefit of scientific research is that any sufficiently literate person can avail themselves of the best research in the world. An informed citizen is a citizen that can participate in a rational way. Elitists, mandarins and aristocrats thrive on secrecy. Their political power depends on keeping the people in a state of ignorance. I find your sentiments to be profoundly undemocratic.

I would argue that the barriers to court records are truely not that much lower. Although the courts may make them available, they are not all accessible online by any means. In fact, Lexis/Nexis and numerous other services make a great deal of money because they are the only effective way to get to them electronically. With a little effort in both cases though, virtually any motivated person can gain access without shelling out a small fortune. (e.g., universities, public libraries, etc.)

Scientists aren't faster learners...

[sterno]

It isn't that academic research scientists are learning this lesson faster, it is a matter of the economics of their work vs. that of recording musicians. In the recording industry, a musician can be pushed into relative obscurity if the labels don't publish their music. There are many musicians out there and the recording labels have demonstrated a willingness to push lesser quality music and the public has shown a willingness to listen to it. So musicians do not have a lot of leverage to work with.

For scientists, their livelihoods are sponsored by universities, not directly through the act of publishing. Publishing is used as a benchmark of academic reputation, and although academic researchers are expected to publish, universities are much more understanding about this sort of protest than the landlord of a starving young musician. Such a protest serves to further the academic reputations of the scientists involved, by demonstrating their loyalty to the ideals that have driven scientific research to date. Also, if the protest is successful, the universities benefit through greater access to the materials provided by those journals, so why wouldn't they back the protest.

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Re:Scientists aren't faster learners...

[rgmoore]

For scientists, their livelihoods are sponsored by universities, not directly through the act of publishing. Publishing is used as a benchmark of academic reputation, and although academic researchers are expected to publish, universities are much more understanding about this sort of protest than the landlord of a starving young musician.

Spoken like a non-scientist. Publication is not just the measure by which scientists are judged, it is in a real sense the only truly valuable activity that academic scientists do. Research that is carried out an never published is wasted; it's the sharing of that knowledge with the rest of the world that makes the process worthwhile. And while the Universities that are the scientists' nominal employers are fairly tolerant, they aren't really the ones who pay the bills. The government granting agencies are the ones who pay the bills, and they are quite unlikely to give grants to anyone without a publication record to justify their trust. Promotions are also very heavily based on publication track record, so anyone without tenure who tries this is seriously risking his career; if you don't get tenure your first time around you're not likely to be given a second shot by anyone. An artist who doesn't sell any work for a few years is normal and won't suffer from it later in his career; an academic scientist who doesn't publish anything for a few years is pretty much through with his career. The situation is quite harsh.

Re:Perish, preferably.

[edremy]

Myabe they could learn from /.'s moderation system?

Dear God, let's hope not.

Academic peer review bears no resemblance to /.'s. A decent reviewer will go over a paper with a fine tooth comb: I've taken well over a full day to review papers before, adding numerous comments, correcting mistakes, making suggestions to add citations and the like. /. reviewers might take 30 seconds, if that. The horrible grammar, bad spelling and incorrect facts that litter /. articles never seem to prevent them from being modded to +5. An academic reviewer would return such articles with "Do not publish" written all over them.

Academic reviewers are also experts in their field. You don't get to review until your grad advisor thinks you should, and you probably won't get much until you have a publication record that other scientists respect. Here, I can make comments about articles I don't even understand and get modded up if I agree with the majority.

Eric

And the catch is...

[supabeast!]

Who will pay to put this stuff online? Such web sites would require huge servers, as they would almost instanteously become common research tools for students, journalists, scientists, and science enthusiasts worldwide.

You don't host that sort of thing on tiny intel boxes running Linux or NT/2K. This will take big servers, and big bandwitdth. That stuff is NOT cheap.

Beyond that are the setup costs. All of the articles will need to be entered into text or PDF format. Easy for new papers, but what about the thousands of old ones? And what about the costs of setting it all up? Sure open software can be used for most of it, but someone still has to set it up.

This kind of thing will require loads of funding from outside sources. Hopefully the government could get involved. Perhaps the universities of world will foot part of the bill, as their students, professors, and researchers could benefit immensely from such a tool.

I hope the scientists are willing to work on getting this the funding it deserves. Hell, if they can just get things rolling I am sure that many people will be glad to call or email senators.

anyway, this is running on too long.

which is why this boycott would be bad elsewhere

[mattorb]

Did you notice the little bit in the SciAm article about increasing page charges? This seems to be the "solution" some publishers are considering to the backlash against high subscription fees, their rationale being that it's better to charge the authors than the readers.

It's easy to see that they'll have a lot of support for this, from a lot of people -- vastly more people might have an occasional interest in reading, say, the Astrophysical Journal than have an interest in writing an article for it. And the publishers are able to defend an increase in page charges by saying it's paid for by researchers' grants, not by the researchers themselves.

I'm a co-author on a paper which will be submitted to the ApJ in the next few weeks; the page charges will be several thousand dollars. We haven't really bothered about it too much, because there's no real way to avoid paying it, and besides the grant money is there. It should also be mentioned that this paper is a somewhat extreme case -- around 20 pages, with a number of color figures (which are, I think, $600 for the first and $150 thereafter, but which are also unfortunately necessary). ApJ charges around $130 a page, IIRC, so you can do the math.

Does this strike you as absurd? It does me. $3000 is more than a trip to a great conference costs, more than the cost of supporting an observing run, more than a lot of things. It's only bearable because I happen to be doing space-based astronomy, where grants are big enough to support these kinds of outlays. But the problem is that a lot of research doesn't need big grants, or shouldn't -- I know plenty of people who do pure analytical theory which doesn't even require applying for supercomputer time. Admittedly, faculty at many institutions have to apply for grant money to pay their summer salary, so it's not totally indefensible, but still : a thousand bucks can take a pretty healthy chunk out of many grants. Some journals allow "hardship exemptions," whereby page charges are waived, but I don't know how easy/difficult it is to get them.

I've often suspected that a major driver behind page charges is their action as a "gatekeeper": ApJ probably doesn't get a lot of cranks submitting wacko stuff, b/c who the hell would be willing to pay a thousand bucks of their own money to see their article printed there? But I think page charges have the unpleasant tendency to constrain good research as well. Other things do this -- ie, there is already a tendency to work in areas where you know the money is easy to come by -- but that doesn't make it defensible.

As with all interesting things, there are no easy answers here. I don't think the ApJ (to keep using the same example) is an evil institution -- it's a publication of the American Astronomical Society, which is a non-profit organization that does many good things. And I'd be very surprised if the AAS didn't derive an appreciable fraction of its operating budget from ApJ-related charges; making the journal charge less overall would probably mean fewer activities funded by the AAS. It's also worth noting that astronomy/astrophysics journals (ApJ, AJ, A and A) are perhaps unusual in that they have no ads, so that's not a potential source of income. Note, also, that currently issues of ApJ more than three years old are available online without a subscription -- but see aforementioned bits about how much we pay for this privilege.

The point of my (absurdly long) diatribe is this: if researchers are able to "convince" publishers to supply online versions of everything for free with no negative repurcussions, great. But if the publishers recoup some of their lost subscription charges by increasing page charges, well, maybe that ain't so great. I don't know what page charges are for biosciences journals are these days, and I don't know enough about the culture of research in that field to know whether dramatic increases in those charges would have a seriously detrimental effect. If the current charges are low, would these folks be willing to accept charges similar to those "enjoyed" in the astro community? Would they be willing to accept charges running into the several thousand dollar range? I don't know, but I suspect we may find out.

Re:Um, "teaching"?

[rgmoore]

Touche. I'll admit that education is an important role of an academic scientist, and there are even some schools (mostly of the 4 year Undergraduate only type) where teaching is the primary factor used in judging their effectiveness. That was a big mistake on my part and I should have written it better.

The distinction that I wanted to make was between a pure researcher, who is investigating phenomena in the pursuit of abstract knowledge, and an applied researcher who works in industry. For the "abstract knowledge" type of researcher publication of results is a critical part of the overall research effort and not just an afterthought as some people seem to think. Work that is not published, or is published somewhere so obscure that nobody ever hears about it, is essentially useless. The strong emphasis on publication as a measure of productivity is an accurate reflection of its importance. Publication is the product of a research scientist in the same way that tangible goods are the product of an engineer. The effort put into the research is wasted if it's not published in exactly the same way that the effort of designing a product is wasted if it's never built.

Re:Why don't scientists publish to web, not journa

[TGK]

In any academic circle the publication date is the date that a researcher sets his/her claim on the findings.

If someone else publishes before you, even if they stole your work, it's very hard to demonstrate that the discovery really was yours.

But why do scientists care if they are credited with the discovery? Well, besides the simply fact that we all like to be rewarded for our work, most Professors (which is what most scientists are) are expected to keep up a publication rate as part of their job. Failure to do research (i.e. publish research) usualy won't result in being fired (the joys of tenure) but can result in loss of raises etc.

So what scientists want is a way to publish their work in a manner that dates it and garuntees recognition of publication by an outside authority. They also want to have these papers, which they provided, available in a small number of searchable formats to allow for quick access without thousands of bulky journals filling their offices.

Just a clairification... Sounds like the parrent poster got screwed over by a Prof... so perhaps this is a litte less biased

This has been another useless post from....

The background of this:

[markmoss]

Scientists working for universities use these journals to exchange information and to build their reputations. That is, they write up the results of an experiment, a study, or (very rarely) a new discovery, and send it off to a journal covering that field. The journal gets other scientists to "peer review" it, that is to check for errors and to rate how interesting it is. (Sort of like /. modding conducted by snail mail.) If it passes, then eventually it is printed on dead trees and mailed out. At salary review time (or the academic equivalent, whatever that is), the scientist points to published papers as evidence that he has done some worthwhile science. And now and then, who sent a paper in first becomes critical in deciding who gets the Nobel prize.

Other scientists refer to these journals so they will be building on work already done rather than duplicating it. However, a relevant article may have been published in one of dozens of different journals, so indexing journals and searching for prior work are difficult, time-consuming, and error-prone jobs. And once you have located possibly interesting articles in the indexes, you still have to obtain the articles themselves. University libraries are not able to buy or to store all the dead-tree journals, so you have to try to borrow journals from somewhere else, or pay for reprints.

By putting whole articles into an on-line database, the scientists can do a full-text search if necessary, can download interesting articles immediately, and scientific research should progress just a little faster. The authors also benefit from better exposure. (At least the better articles get better exposure, whether this is a benefit for a particular scientist or not depends...)

However, the journals fear that this will bite them in the pocketbook. The specialized journals get some advertising revenue, but not nearly as much as news magazines. So they depend on subscriptions to cover part of the editorial and peer review expenses as well as printing and postage. And so the subscription prices are high, and if the same articles will soon be appearing on-line, many people will save their money and wait. And of course the journals also lose those reprint fees, and fees for when they re-issue last years 12 issues on a roll of microfilm, etc. On the other hand, journals get the scientific articles free, aside from editing and peer review which only cost about 10% of their budget. While I understand the journals' financial concerns, I think that ultimately the on-line articles are going to be far more significant than the dead tree issues; somehow journals are going to have to adjust or else perish.

And it's a good thing to see authors of any sort banding together and insisting on keeping control of their work.

Online archive of reports has been done...

[vidarh]

... allthough experimental, and only for computer science material that is freely available via the web anyway. But it's a great example of what can be done if the material is available via the web, and to me at least Research Index has been an invaluable resource.

The source for the system is even available (though restricted).

The only thing it really lacks is a feed of articles from assorted print media, in addition to what it robot indexes from the web.

If you're doing computer science work, you should really take a look at it. And if you're not, but are interested in seeing a good stab at automatic indexing and archival of material, go look anyway.