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.

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.

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