The Future Of Scientific Publishing

KjetilK writes: "The Nature web site carries a section with a debate on the future of scientific publishing. Prompted by the Open Letter on the Public Library of Science, this important subject has been brought to the surface. While arXiv.org for many years have provided services similar to that wanted by the Public Library of Science and services such as Astrophysics Data System has been developed to support researchers find what they are looking for and crosslink papers, it is not before now this debate has really taken off. /.-ers will find papers submitted by people they know well, such as RMS, Tim O'Reilly and Tim Berners-Lee, but papers have been submitted from publishers, scientists, database maintainers and so on as well. The whole site contains many very interesting articles. My personal perspective on this, is that I love things like ADS and arXiv.org, and it is fine if the dead-tree publishers are obsoleted, but it is very important that institutionalized peer-review isn't undermined in the process." We've linked to this Nature debate before, but they've added a lot of new content since, and this is such a nicely written submission I can hardly refuse it.

Comments

Re:Peer Review Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

[Louis Savain]

There's a lot of group-think and unwillingness to consider ideas that aren't fashionable in a particular discipline. What really matters in scientific research is the ability of others to replicate the results. More emphasis on that and less on the politics of peer review would benefit science in the long run.

Well said. Paul Feyerabend was one of the most famous philosophers of science in the last century and one its most ardent critics. Here's an excerpt from his acclaimed book 'Against Method'.

"And a more detailed analysis of successful moves in the game of science ('successful' from the point of view of the scientists themselves) shows indeed that there is a wide range of freedom that demands a multiplicity of ideas and permits the application of democratic procedures (ballot-discussion-vote) but that is actually closed by power politics and propaganda. This is where the fairy-tale of a special method assumes its decisive function. It conceals the freedom of decision which creative scientists and the general public have even inside the most rigid and the most advanced parts of science by a recitation of 'objective' criteria and it thus protects the big-shots (Nobel Prize winners; heads of laboratories, of organizations such as the AMA, of special schools; 'educators'; etc.) from the masses (laymen; experts in non-scientific fields; experts in other fields of science): only those citizens count who were subjected to the pressures of scientific institutions (they have undergone a long process of education), who succumbed to these pressures (they have passed their examinations), and who are now firmly convinced of the truth of the fairy-tale. This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else about their business, but without any real disadvantage: they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society."

From 'Against Method' by Paul Feyerabend.

Open Journal and Education

[under_score]

There are lots of interesting things going on with publishing and the web. The thing that traditional journals have is that the editor and the editorial board are all acknowledged experts in the field of the journal. This has benefits and drawbacks obviously: crap is usually weeded out, but radical ideas are also often weeded out. Journals are not "open" or "free". The web on the other hand is a very open and free publishing media. This has reciprocal benefits and drawbacks to the journal system.

So that is all stuff everyone knows.

What is really interesting are those web environments that try to balance openness with peer review. Slashdot is obviously one such environment, everything2 is another, etc. But what they lack is subtlety and organization.

So, even though it's probably a karma bad, I'm going to do a blatant self promotion: oomind is a web system that balances openness and peer review but also provides subtlety and organization. It is brand new, so there isn't much content yet, but please check it out. Here is the philosophy of oomind, and here is the more functional introduction.

Thanks.

http://www.oomind.com/

Conference on Open-Access Publications

[Bizzaro]

Here are some of the issues that scientists (and publishers) are dealing with:

• Copyright on scientific communications (published articles and so forth) belongs to publishing companies and not to authors, for most publications. Scientists wishing to share relevant communications, even their own in some cases, face legal challenges from publishers.
• Publishing companies charge expensive subscriptions to access scientific communications. Scientists in developing countries and poorly-endowed institutions, although intellectually on par with their peers, are severely hindered by this.
• These two problems have prevented scientists from gaining any access, even for simple searches, to the full text of these communications.
• Scientific communications are published in journals segregated by topic. This has resulted in confusion as to the best place to publish, retrieve or extract (using computer automation) information (e.g., mathematical biology communications could be published in either a mathematical journal or a biological one).
• Communications are also published in journals differing by publisher. This has caused the segregation of communications by the prestige of the journal (e.g., how difficult it is to be published in the journal and the composition of the readership). This has also allowed room for personal politics in scientific communication.
• These two problems are compounded by the first two: with a limited budget, to which journals should one subscribe? What we are left with is an artificial selection, by publishers, of which communications are best suited to a scientist's field of study.
• This may be the result of a competitive marketplace for readership, but is there an alternative to profit-based publications? Should there be? Can an alternative publication model be profitable for a publisher?
• Additionally, even with the advent of computers, databases, and the World Wide Web, scientific communications are published as they were 100 years ago: as linear, printable text. And they are archived this way. While this makes good reading, it is not the best format for information retrieval or extraction.
• All of these problems restrict information retrieval, extraction, and scientific inquiry. How do we resolve them? As the ultimate solution, should future communications be published in an "open-access, global knowledge-base"? Before or after information extraction techniques are applied?

Bioinformatics.org, an organization committed to freedom and openness in the field of bioinformatics (a very commercial field), is hosting a joint conference on open-access publications and informatiion extraction in the biological sciences. We have sought several speakers who can address how the above problems might be solved. They come from the Public Library of Science, BioMed Central, and PubGene (mentioned on Slashdot before).

The conference will be in Copenhagen, Denmark, and there is room for more attendees. The first 50 can in fact register for free.

--
This sort of thing has cropped up before. And it has always been due to human error.

Citeseer

[JPMH]

Another impressive site worth looking at is Citeseer (now the more prosaic 'NEC ResearchIndex'), which has saved me a number of trips to the library for papers on Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Compression etc.

Citeseer spiders the web looking for postscript and PDF scientific papers, cacheing whatever it finds, and cross-referencing all the references -- so that even if it doesn't have a particular paper, you can still read what was said about it when other authors cited it. Citeseer also offers documents which it thinks are related because of a similar citation history, and an 'active bibliography' of the most cited documents which cited this one. And wherever it has found a document, its cached copy is available for download.

For a typical Citeseer report page see eg http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/heckerman96tutorial.htm l.

I have been very impressed by how much value such a system can add, compared to just the dead trees.

Peer Review Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of group-think and unwillingness to consider ideas that aren't fashionable in a particular discipline. What really matters in scientific research is the ability of others to replicate the results. More emphasis on that and less on the politics of peer review would benefit science in the long run.

Re:Peer Review Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

[jmorzins]

Of course experimental reproducibility is important, but don't knock peer review.

How is a journal editor supposed to tell if an experiment is reproducible just by reading the submitted article? They ask a third party, "does this paper look reasonable?". That is peer review.

Some papers are theoretical papers. Theory is right so long as the equations are right, although "right" is not the same as "useful". How do the editors know which theories to publish in the front of the journal as the significant ones and which ones to dump in the back? Ask a third party "what do you think of this?"

Peer review weeds out crap. It's a lot like slashdot's moderation of comments, except that peer review happens before the article is published rather than while it is published. Asking for more emphasis on good journal articles and less emphasis on review is about as useful as asking slashdot for more good comments and less moderation of comments.

(Yes, I'm a scientist. Don't get me started about academic karma whores. They exist.)

More references

[td]

Remarkably, Nature doesn't appear to have talked to Andrew Odlyzko, who, over the last 5 years or so, has written a large pile of the best papers on the subject of the future of scientific publishing.

Re:The problem with Scientific publication on the

[Chris Johnson]

This is an interesting perspective: I'd like to expand on it a bit.

The trouble with search engines is that, as you say, they've got reason to have an agenda and punish non-revenue-generating content, being slow to list it or possibly ignoring it completely. When the Internet is seen strictly as a marketplace there's no way around this: the benefits of being 'featured' in a high-rated search engine are too significant for the search engines to not monetize this. It's a mirror of earlier forms of media where there WAS no access save through a narrow channel. The search engines you speak of replicate that narrow channel.

However, the notion of a narrow channel on the Internet is a _myth_. It's an assumption carried over from earlier forms of media, and in at least some forms of internet content (certain musicians, 'all your base' etc) the proliferation of awareness about content takes place without _any_ reliance on a narrow, tailored channel.

It becomes a problem of promotion in a context of wildly prolific choice. There is so much hype, so much promotion from so many directions, that it all cancels out... in a situation of such deep choice the only real 'magic bullet' is content itself. Publish or perish- work on your 'performance' rather than your publicity.

When this is done, and a basic minimum of initial publicity is given (like telling your friends, mentioning what you've done to your peers), the content gradually takes on an popularity roughly equivalent to its real significance- if you average it. Wild bursts of publicity and insignificance are also to be expected, it's not anything like a steady 'readership' or listenership. The pattern actually resembles the fractal distribution of noise in signal transmissions... very striking fluctuations. Again, this is without external publicity such as featuring in search engines.

Your last point is well taken- people who do not live long enough to see their ideas adopted are liable to lose out. Interestingly, this corresponds with the assumption that intellectual property must be defended- if only the creator is permitted to control the expressions of their ideas, then it is wrong to take them and post them willy-nilly elsewhere, and so when the person dies, their own little web page is no longer paid for and the content is erased. If there is no intellectual property, it only takes one person to copy the data to preserve it, and that person also winds up capable of redistributing the material, rather than being legally barred from doing so. In essence, part of intellectual property is to guarantee that a creator's works die with the creator unless proper arrangements are made.

This is somewhat non-intuitive :)