Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Gearing Up to Publish Unrestricted Journals
Ender, Duke_of_URL writes: "Genomeweb reports that scientists are gearing up for the Sept 1 boycott of science publishers, because only two publishers (Genome Biology and PubMedCenteral) have met the demands of open and copyright free access to science articles. As part of this process they're developing a means to publish their own journal articles." If you missed the history of this showdown, slashdot has published a few previous stories. Great news for science if they succeed - awful news if they fail.
if they were sports figures, pop singers or actors in hollywood, then people would support them. but in most of the "civilized" world, people just have disdain for anyone smarter than them (scientists). only pop culture figures are respectable
VERY bad news if they don't succeed. Given so much scientific research is funded by tax dollars, the results should be available to the taxpayers and not filtered through a protected commercial monopoly.
"Why haven't market forces, supply and demand, driven the price down?"
Think about the nature of those forces in this case:
* Supply: How many of these generally well-respected journals are there in a given field? The ones which are, are, until someone takes the time to start another one and it aquires the editorship and history to become respected.
* Demand: Researchers who need the papers published in a respected journal so the researcher gets name recognition/ professional respect / career advancement.
Until another set of well-regarded journals are started, the ones which exist now are the whole game, and can expect to fight change until the competition is stiff enough. What you're seeing is the result of supply & demand under a certain set of conditions (high demand for a limited supply).
2. The dramatic increase in the subscription price of scientific journals is not due to increasing costs or anything like that. In the 1980's a few international publishing companies such as Reed Elisever, a Dutch outfit, began buying up large numbers of publishers of scientific and medical journals. At the time, this was noted in the business press, and many scientists and journal editors complained about it without much effect. The subsequent increases in subscription rates was predicted and is easily explained. The money comes from, you guessed it, see paragraph 1 above.
3. Archival availability of scientific papers is a legitimate concern. However, the solution is not far off. PubMed is run by the National Library of Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health, which is a agency of the US Government. Given the facts set forth in paragraph 1 above, it is entirely appropriate for PubMed to maintain a web site for bio-medical research. The Library of Congress should be responsible for maintaining archives and both PubMed and LoC should work with their counterparts in the EU and other G-8 nations to mirror these resources in several world wide locations. A beneficial side effect of such a system would be making the latest bio-medical research available to physicians, public health officials and researchers in the third world where western prices for journals have made them effectively unavailable.
nuff said
Even if this particular effort fails there will be another. The greed of the established journal publishers will rightfully go down in history as an abonimation.
Is how do you tell person from person, and who has the ability to moderate.
/. over the last 3 years.
We've recently had a 15 year old get to be #3 online legal advisor... I'm sure you've noticed dumbing down in
This is not good if you're a respectable journal.
Even if you only give out tokens to real researchers, how do you keep those tokens/passwords from getting stolen?
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
I work in the humanities, and for us its precisely the archiving that's giving us headaches when considering electronic publication. We would dearly like to move on to a model of electronic publishing, since it would cut the (crippling) publication costs, and allow even the poorest of universities access to our findings. Our main worry in doing so is the ability to find today's published research a few years from now.
I'll give you an example: I'm a historian, and my sources are four hundred years old. But I also use historical works published during the last 150 years. Historians often refer to these articles as "dated, but still" usefull. And I can find them in most university libraries. Contrast that with articles published on the web. In 1995 a Dutch professor told me he could guarantee that articles published at his website would be available for the next 20 years (short timeframe for me!), but he got cancer and now it's all gone. It lasted 5 years. That makes web-based publishing seem like an awfully fragile way of distribution.
Of course, just because and article (or book) disappears from a website doesn't mean it's gone forever, but how can you trust that it hasn't been changed when it appears somewhere else? If you think that's not a major concern, you're wrong. Several histroical subjects are stil highly controversial (for instance the Holocaust, the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, American gun ownership, etc.). There are plenty of people out there who for a variety of reasons would love to change our work if they had the chance (including the authors after they have had time to reflect!).
These concerns are the main ones behind the reluctance to move to electronic publishing in my field, and I know them firsthand since I edit a historical journal. (Yeah, peer review is also important, but not the main consideration) The printers bleed us dry, while webspace at our local university is free. But we have no idea if our stuff is available in five years time if we don't put it on paper.
So we also want our articles to be kept free and open electronically, but with guarantees that they will stay so for decades without tampering. Nobody is neither able nor willing to guarantee that, so we'll stick to dead trees with electronic editions as an expensive afterthought to the more prestigious journals.
Posted by polar_bear:
Clout? Peer review publications don't waste much time with trolls. You have to have a reputation, or do something for someone with a reputation, to be considered for review. Your article is sent out to a random selection of peers who offer suggestions or approve your article, then it's published. Oh yeah, none of the reviewers is paid. That's as much clout as you can get.
I guess you didn't read the entire thread. I wasn't strictly referring to the scientific journals, I was talking about authors (who get paid) in general.
For instance, the average reporter who slaves away churning out stories five days a week doesn't typically have any rights to those stories. However, after years of being a reporter they may actually develop some standing and be able to write a column or books - at that point, they have a little more clout and they can negotiate higher rates, and retaining the rights to their columns.
Posted by polar_bear:
Many writers, whether they be scientists or freelance columnists or journalists, are forced to sign draconian contracts where in order to get their work published, they are forced to relinquish all rights to it.
Um, while it's true authors often relinquish the rights to a work for a limited period or even permanently, they're never forced to do so. It's a voluntary thing. I write an article, I sign a contract giving the publisher certain rights and a while later I get a check. If I want to get paid for my work, it's not unreasonable to expect a publisher to want some rights -- possibly all rights -- to the work in exchange for money.
The shameful thing isn't that authors have to sign contracts - it's that in the case of scientific journals the authors aren't being compensated and the works that they essentially donate are being restricted.
The only way for an author to get paid and and retain all rights is to become established and have the clout to negotiate a decent contract.
Instituational licenses typically can start at $2000, and go as high as $10,000 per year; this may or may not include access to the online version as well.
Also, going up to the root of this thread, most journal that charge you for all this send you several (25, typically) final proofs of your article, as it would have been printed, which you may 'freely' distribute as you wish. Any more, and you have to ask the publisher for more permission.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Even today you would have to look rather hard to find a drive for 5.25 inch floppys and even harder for 8 inch floppys. Finding a punch card reader will be even harder still.
Seems to me that you need three categories of submissions:
Papers/articles and peer-review responses can only be submitted by those given "peer-review" status. Such people can moderate any of the above categories. Discussion messages can be submitted by anyone and moderated by anyone.
Peer-review involves both moderating a submitted paper/article and submitting a response, the purpose of which is to justify the moderation. Discussion can be in response to peer-review or to the paper itself.
Peer-reviewers can be meta-moderated by other peer-reviewers, and a "credibility score" is kept for each peer-reviewer. This score is available for all to see, and the site should generate a list ordered by credibility.
It'll probably be necessary to compartmentalize the peer-reviewers by field, so that they can peer-review articles and papers submitted only by others in the same field (and can only meta-moderate people in the same field). It might be easier to just run multiple field-specific sites, but searching might be more powerful if they were combined.
I suppose there might also be a "credibility score" associated with everyone and computed strictly from moderation done to discussion messages, but it's important to keep that separate from the "credibility score" computed from the moderation of papers and peer-review responses.
How to grant peer-review status? Good question. One way would be to allow an existing peer-reviewer to "approve" a new peer-reviewer. Another might be to grant everyone the chance to submit one paper/article and, if it gets moderated high enough, they are granted peer-review status. This will probably require a lot more thought, so feel free to chime in!
Thoughts?
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
This is why you want the archives to be mirrored across the world. This should happen automatically for any new content that appears on the site. Many here seem to be concerned about how electronic media formats (like DVD) tend towards obsolescence and aren't terribly resistant to destruction. In the computer world, I think the best safeguard against that is active maintenance of the mirror group. As long as at least a couple of sites remain active, the data will remain safe.
It seems obvious that the archives should be "append only". They'll grow over time. But I suspect storage technology improvements will remain ahead of the amount of data that need to be archived, at least for a reasonable amount of time.
--
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Let's say I write a paper (which I'm supposed to do anyway, because it's part of my job). I send it in to a journal - without getting paid anything by the journal - to get the result out, and to get another line in my CV. They farm that paper out to a reviewer. That reviewer is sometimes paid, but more often than not, they only get _their_ datapoint in their resume. If it's accepted, I edit the paper and resend it. After a few iterations it is accepted in its final form. Then I often have to format the paper according to the standards of the journal (sometimes the journal does this step) and sign over all rights to that text to the publisher. Eventually it gets printed.
After all this, where most of the work is done unpaid and outside of the publisher, they can still charge enough for the journal that my department cannot afford to actually get a copy... And today, prices are getting high enough that not even the university library will take in the more expensive journals without a massive interest among employees.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I have to wonder how this will effect the 'For-Pay' re-distributers of this type of information. Is this kind of initiative going to cut into Ovid's (www.ovid.com), ISI's and Silver Platter's (www.silverplatter.com) margins?
Yes, but whats that got to do with the price of tea in D'ni?
The one thing you missed is the part before #1 where all the science is completed. Do you know how much scientific hardware costs? All those cadavers and genes and rockets and chemicals. It's bloody expensive and most papers take years of labour to produce, sometimes even a lifetime of the researcher. Honestly, I believe that the publishing and peer review part is a small fraction of the cost of the actual science that is really happening.
I beieve that the initial setup may be capital intensive but the benefits that come out of it will be substantial.
An exploration of mixology, spirits and bartending.
A lot of libraries can't afford the exorbitant prices to get the journals... so they'll have a select few. Anything else, you just can't get. Freely available shouldn't mean "freely available to those within driving distance of an extremely well-off university library". The _large_ university I went to had issues with keeping some of these journals on the shelves due to costs. Any small university is pretty much out of luck.
Besides, the real issue here is that if scientists are going to pay for research, spend the time, write it up, edit it, etc... they should have some say as to how that information is made available. They're basically donating their time and effort to the journals, for pretty much zip in return.
I frankly can't see that taking the computer files used to publish the journal and running them through a quick web format would take even a small chunk out of the journal's profits.
~ Leilah
Because scientific papers are dead dull to someone who hasn't followed the specific field. I've read some mycology and uredinology monographs, and they're just plain hard to read if you don't know what they're trying to say. Science News does a good job at summing things up in a scientific way, but I can't imagine any of the papers I've seen would go over well in a newspaper.
Article: "Look! We've discovered that plant rust is different from this other plant rust!"
Reader: "Zzzzzz...."
~ Leilah
I hate to post a simple 'me too' kind of message,
but i will anyway.
I must congratulate you on having the courage to state the truth in such plain and simple terms. 'Evil' is exactly the right word, thank you for not shying away from using it in all its glory.
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
So you'd need to be a bit more careful about moderation points. To reasonably model the current system, new moderators would need to be approved by the current moderators. And they might need to provide some proof for any credentials that they claimed. And one would need to use a secure communication protocol where the emphasis was not on not being read, but rather on not being modified by third parties. Etc.
/., but to maintain much of the same flavor. One of the major differences is the existence of the circles of levels of approved moderation. These would provide a strong conservative (i.e., tending to preserve the tenor of the current system) thrust. This is a bit opposed to the design of /. which is, comparatively, designed to encourage excitement about items of the moment. As such, it would tend to encourage a different pace of discussion, and less flamboyance.
And approved moderators should have a special status when posting, possibly a +4 posting bonus, available (though not on by default). And non-approved moderators should be able to earn a posting bonus of up to, say, +4 (though they could loose it, too).
There should also be an inner circle of moderators (say, automatic +5 posting bonus) that have the right to post articles without being pre-reviewed. These should need to be nominated by the approved moderators, and approved by the inner circle (or vice-versa).
Also, approved moderators should be able to choose to use their posting bonus when posting anonymously.
As usual, anyone should be able to earn moderator status, but earned moderation never takes one to the "approved moderator" status. That requires approval by the existing moderators.
This is intentionally designed to be a bit more conservative than
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am not claiming that the evil is necessarily consciously schemed for and long intended. That isn't necessary. What is necessary is the examination of the consequences of the action on both individuals and on society at large.
I contend that the current structure of the copyright law acts to widen the economic gaps between the levels of society. That it tends to increase the social stratification. That it is heading toward creating classes with access to specialized knowledge the access to which is controlled by a very few. (That's why the I mentioned the time-limited DVDs.) That it is favoring the development of a new class, call them GnososLords, who operate from the ability to allow or deny access to information. And that it is so acting as to vest the membership in that class not in those who are willing to learn the information, but rather in those who "own" it. As the Land Lords, friends or the King, were granted dominion over the land without working is, these new lords would be granted dominion over knowledge without bothering to learn it. And the term over which they would be granted that dominion would be in perpetuity. (Usually these would be corporations, or I would have added something about their heirs, but as things stand, that seems a bit beside the point.)
And I say that this is evil. The land lords were evil, and only the superior arms of an invading force could have created them. These new lords are ostensibly not an invading force, but they are acting as if they were. And this is because the current legal structures, that we have inherited from that ancient invasion, have already created, or maintained, as I feel is more likely, though I haven't done the research as it is a side issue, an economic stratification such that the rulers of the corporations have no desire to accomodate those who are not of their class, but only to hire sufficient "public relations experts" to sufficiently mould public opinion to prevent large scale civil disturbance. (Note that I did not mention laws here. The laws tend to be interpreted to mean what these people want them to mean, but when they can't be twisted, then they are just ignored. I'm sure you can recall several instances within the past year, though probably most of them were too small scale to get beyond the local news, so I can't tell you what they were.)
The long and the short of it is that people tend to act first in their own perceived self interest, and then in the interest of whatever group they identify with. And there exists a small group at the economic top of society that have powerful methods of acting. And they tend to cause things to happen to ensure and extend their control. They are not consciously and intentionally evil, but to over 98% of society their actions do more harm than good. This is evil. Their actions are intended to vest all control of social goals and customs within their own small insular group. This is evil. Evil even to themselves, though it may be to their short term benefit.
And the whole problem is because of a particular social design that was imposed on Britain by the invading Normans (and before them by the Romans, though that had been in the process of ameliorating itself). This was a social design intended to allow an invading army to control an indigenous civilian population. And it is evil. Not maximally evil, one can easily observe many worse choices that were possible, but certainly not good, and certainly partially evil. If it isn't good, and is evil, then it's balance must be evil. And therefore actions intended to strengthen its tendencies and maintain its grip are evil.
This was not a term use carelessly or unthinkingly. It was the only word in English that seemed to be approximately appropriate. I truly doubt that there has ever been anyone in history who thought of himself as evil, so it would be rediculous for me to accept a constraint that someone must think of himself as evil in order to be evil. Actually, most of those who choose to portray themselves as evil appear to be searching for attention, and unable to figure out how to get favorable attention. And most of them are fairly harmless (though not all).
The ones that are actually evil are generally the "control freaks", and they generally consider themselves to be normal people. Perhaps a bit more moral than average. Some of them consider themselves to be much more moral than average. It depends on the exact form that their psychosis takes. Even the most extreme examples that we have didn't consider themselves evil, at least not from the evidence that we have. Adolf S. was certainly a truly terrible character, and quite evil. But there is no evidence that I have seen that indicates that he thought of himself as evil. He had factories that made lampshades out of human skin, but he thought of himself as someone who had taken on the heroic task of restoring German greatness. He was a patron of the opera. Crowds cheered him. It's true, that I'm sure he felt that some of the things that he (felt he) needed to do were regretable. But he felt that they were necessary. So he didn't see himself as evil. I do. I see all control freaks as evil. Some of them are more powerful than others.
More: I see the desire within people to control as an inherent evil. A necessary component, but an extremely dangerous one. The definition that I use of a "control freak" is someone who allows this necessary component to assume a major share in the decision making process, such that the desire to increase the ability to control is, of itself, sufficient to justify a decision that will cause measureable harm to other people. If I were performing experiments, I would need to refine that definition further, but as it is, that suffices.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The journals being discussed won't be found at your public library. Even the University of California (Berkeley) has had to trim the journal subscriptions substantially, because they were just too expensive. I don't know what the researchers in the areas cut do. Probably they have to buy their own personal subscriptions. Ouch!
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The existence of evil is no reason for it's acceptance. An evil being common is no argument for it's maintenance.
With the changes in the copyright laws in the last decade, the requirement that scientists give up copyrights to their work in order to publish has become a vile evil. Actions to avoid this are now easily justified that would have been difficult to justify earlier. Right now, with the recent example of Adobe in front of us, and a reasonable extrapolation of current trends, I'd say that nearly anything short of physical violence would be justified in trying to halt this juggernaut. And I'd probably just that on a case-by case basis.
It's probably true that the publishing houses have not yet acted in ways grossly in violation of basic human rights. But there have been clear movements in that direction. Consider textbooks with CDs that have a part of the text. Or example code that is necessary in order to understand the book. These already exist, and are common. Now suppose that someone replaced these by a time-coded DVD. Not a big change. You might not even be able to tell it by visual inspection. But now the text becomes useless after... well, after however long the code was set to.
Now suppose that professional journals started to appear in this form. There are lots of benefits, but the cost, given the current laws, is almost unbelievable. Yet there have been clear movements in this direction.
The DMCA is evil. Those who support it are, to greater or lesser degree, evil. The only time that I will accept it as having any virtue at all is when the copyright is totally vested in the author, and he licenses the right to use it to other entities on a non-exclusive basis. And even that is a bit dicey. Some things should not be inheritable.
The original copyright laws were pretty reasonable. But anytime that a monopoly of any nature is granted by the state, then we are entering into dangerous territory. The currently extended copyright laws are purely and simply evil.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
True, but for science to work, there must be a free exchange of ideas. Copyright law is getting tighter, and terms of use on electronic forms bites even deeper.
Why haven't market forces, supply and demand, driven the price down?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
There is an existing version of this which is used extensively by the Computer Science field - CiteSeer
This site indexes hundreds of thousands of papers, journal articles, and other publications (dissertations mostly). Each is cross-referenced and linked to the others through a widearray of pattern matching steps (sentance similarity for example)
Imagine if this was extended to all other fields of research - it would probably move the fields forward by leaps just by making it much easier for researchers to locate and reference related work by their peers.
Shannon
-- Join us in Chicago May 1-4th for MeshForum -- writer, historian, tech geek, entrepreneur, internet junky since '91 --
I work in particle physics and e-prints (electronic preprints) have been the standard
way of communicating work for the past few years.
( See http://xxx.lanl.gov/ ). It's still usual to submit to a paper journal, but after the e-print submission. The paper journals do still perform a usefull service however, because the submissions are then sent out for peer review, so the final
paper version may be of higher quality (although
the changed versions are usually re-submitted to
the e-print archive). It also looks better on future jobs applications to have papers accepted
by established journals.
The one example I know of an all-electronic
refereed journal is http://jhep.mse.jhu.edu/
but it hasn't really managed to build up it's
reputation to the level that it needs to compete
with the paper journals.
Definitely. This is why ISI and publishers including Elsevier put so much effort into lobbying congress, through the Software Information Industry Association, to cut funding to the PubScience database project. They've got their sights set on PubMed (as distinction from PubMed Central), next.
Still, up here in Canada there isn't anything resembling the "medical industry" that there is in the USA - frankly I thought that's what I was arguing against.
I like to think of it as my mother, father, and people like them who benefit from my concerns. As to my ignorance, Sara-san, you'll have to complain to Simon Fraser University's faculty - they're the ones who taught me my physiology before I started CS.
_________
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
You may have been joking, but a lot of people really do feel like this, and it's a serious problem. The British Columbia Cancer agency just stopped providing testing for Breast Cancer susceptibility genes to all BC families because "the BC Cancer Agency, through the Ministry of Health Planning, received legal notice from representatives of Myriad Genetics/MDS asserting patent rights for sequencing of BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes". They priced the patent such that the BCCA can not afford to pay for it.
My mother may carry these genes, and if she does, then I probably do and any children I may have might as well. Generations of my family could go through surgical amputation, toxic chemical treatments, and even risk death, if these genes are present in our DNA and if it manifests.
So please, don't give me the argument that people are entitled to make money. They're actually not, because withholding this information is morally repugnant. How much does a mature, capable human life cost?
I've often heard the argument that monetary compensation is offered to spur the investment of time and effort into scientific endeavour, and that if we were to stop this from happening then scientific progress would stagnate due to lack of interest. Right, okay - well, according to this study that I just found if your mother lives to be 65, she has a 1% chance of dying of breast cancer within ten years. Hey CmdrTaco, how many people visit this site in a week? Let's say it's a million, and let's say none of you share a mother. One thousand of you will have a mother die of cancer if she lives to 65. Pretend you're one of those thousand unlucky people. How much of your time would you, personally give to see that that didn't happen? If your mother had cancer and you were not locked into your career (say you were in University, not 45 and in middle management) would you consider choosing a career related to cancer diagnosis or treatment? I sure am. And if you believe I care if I don't get a dime from it, you're wrong. I'm not required to do it, but I will work on it even if I have to work another job for my money.
Some of you may wonder what I do that helps - I'm making my career in the area of human information access; intelligent searching, visualization, etc. In part, this is why I am extremely interested in the consolidation of information and its liberation from the greedy. If successful, I predict it will be the largest boost to research since well before the Internet, and probably for years to come.
- It can evolve and change as this initative grows.
- It is without cost and without proprietary encumberance.
- It is stable and has unparalleled technical support.
- It is already built mainly by people who have at least as good moral as buiness sense.
Here we have an opportunity to provide an example of what can be done with the Free Software movement. It cannot be ignored as a serious foray into an enterprise-scale environment, and if the initiative succeeds it will be used by at least half of the scientific community. Proprietary software makers will be forced to be compatible with us for a change.More importantly, here we have the opportunity to catalyse scientific advancement. Try this: think of your friends, family, and coworkers and imagine that work you did help save that person's life, or made that person happier, or enable that other person to help you somehow. Heck, you can even think of the children - it actually works this time!
I urge you to head on over to http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ and read up on it. If you can, offer your help, and mean it. If you can't help, tell your friends. It's worth it.
_________
The Signal/Noise ratio can be improved in two ways. Remaining silent is the OTHER way.
A good portion of grant money is set aside
for library or administrative costs. These
are used to purchase these journals, often
at an extreme price/use ratio. So the tax
payer actually pays more now as grants already
have this built in the budgets.
And as for those 'crappy papers', that depends
in large part on the reviewers.
When /. implemented the karma system much was talked about the concept of reputation servers, sites like Slashdot where a contributor's veracity could be marked up and marked down by their peers according to the validity of their words. Bruce Sterling used it as a minor plot thread in 'Distraction' but it seemed to quickly lost its impetus IRL - I guess it's relatively easy to get an idea of someone's rep on Slashdot but it's not a driving factor of being a contributor. I'm not a Kuro5hin reader but if Scoop offers 'reputation' over 'karma' it has a better basis for publication for peer review (and indeed a potentially important influence over individuals' lives).
Sigh. Other than his failure to notice the original posters (nice!) troll, I fail to see anything extreme in the post to which you are responding.
Mockery! Smockery!! Dickory Dock!!!
I think Gallup polls are a mockery of scientific method. So nyah!
*Moons the Heavens*
I don't think he was forcing anyone to do anything. Just an (misdirected, it was a troll) appeal to see the benign power of The Method. Science is not about religion, and neither should politics be. Maybe that's why politics and religion are always out of place in a social setting, because they get all mixed up in eachother. Maybe Science and religion should be treated the same way.
Science = Orthodoxy - Mysticism
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Or, in old school parlance (yeah, I'm old school :)
10th grade == 3rd grade
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
What efforts is IEEE making that might be construed as being against their readers' interests, might I ask?
(Me being a reader and IEEE member)
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
It gets even worse than that:
PI#1 is well known in field X, and reviews journal submissions for JournalY and is on the editorial staff of same.
PI#2 is an up and coming researcher in field X and has recently submitted a manuscript for publication to JournalY.
PI#2's manuscript is given to PI#1 et al. for review.
Said manuscript isn't quite strong enough for publication in JournalY, but is an excellant candidate for JournalZ (or some other journal).
But topic of manuscript is regarding a new gene and makes remarkable observations relevant to Field X.
It also happens to be the same gene recently found in PI#1's lab, for which virtually no work has been done (it's only known to be active in tissue X, and binds to transcription factor X)
So PI#1's response is to sit on the manuscript (that way, it cannot be resubmitted to another journal, like Journal Z) and show a copy to the undergrad working on the new gene in question.
damnit. This isn't science anymore. it's politics!!!
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Can someone with mod points please do this one up???
:)
Thank you
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Cool!
.PNG converter for inlined math formulae in web pages...
Incidental to my reading of Knuth, I've been looking at TeX, and am hoping to do something rather strange like a TeX to
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Odd thing though, at the bottom of most articles is the statement, paraphrased, that publication of this article was paid in part by NIH grant #whatever, and is an advertisement
What's that all about, anyway?
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
I came back to this post 'cause I was thinking it said threshold=6
<BAG>
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Quite right. Scientists are required to publish stuff, and the most valuable piece of the publication process is not the dead trees but the peer review, which is provided for free by other researchers.
As I understand it, the process for a paper to appear in the journal goes something like this:
/. style engine - which is an excellent plan, actually - but the rub with that idea is that such a site, in order to handle the number of viewers (which could get quite large - especially when /. gets wind of the URL!), you need a central server site - which costs money - which leads back to step 7.
1. Individual writes paper.
2. Individual submits paper to journal.
3. Journal sends paper for review to peers.
4. Paper may be rejected or need changes, goto 1.
5. Paper is accepted.
6. Paper is printed in journal.
7. Individual buys journal to see paper.
Now, the expensive part (for the individual) lies in step 7 - that expense is to recoup the cost the publisher of the journal incurs for steps 3-6 (staff, mailing, printing, etc).
All this still has to be replicated (well, aside from the printing and buying part) for internet distribution.
Someone mentioned doing all of this via a k5 or
What doesn't cost money (or at least - what only costs the money that the individual submitting the paper is willing to go through)? Personal web site for the paper! However, how do you get peer review?
What about a something akin to a webring - but with posting, moderation, peer review - basically a distributed Slashdot! Could this be done? Personally, I think it could - each individual who wants to publish would set up a node, on which papers could be reviewed, published, updated, moderated, commented upon, etc - the owner of the node would be responsible for its upkeep. These nodes would be connected to each other in groups - possibly by "area of interest" (biology, physics, etc) - all could be connected to each other, or possibly through a central node (maybe hosted by the NSF?) - and all nodes would communicate to each other ratings, etc - of the papers on the individual hosted nodes.
Now, the only ones bearing the cost are the individuals - by bringing in moderation, meta-moderation, karma (or whatever else you want to call it) - you could open it up to everyone - scientist, laymen and geeks alike - thus you would gradually get a collection of "peers" - composed not only of scientists, but of really smart laymen and geeks, giving you feedback on the papers, etc - those same laymen and geeks would also be able to set up nodes of their own, if they are so inclined - allowing the various garage scientists to collaborate as well, amongst each other, and with the more "monied" scientists (both corporate and grant-funded researchers).
Does this sound like something that would be useful? Does it sound reasonable? Does it sound like something that could work?
Comments?
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Yes - you and the other poster have a good point, and one that I missed - the research and materials involved _do_ cost a lot, and thus the actual paper and publication is probably only a small fraction of all that.
As far as moderation by "smart geeks" and "laymen" is concerned, the way I would want it structured would be the more "insightful", etc type posts, the higher the karma (with no karma capping), and you would gain higher status for the review. Established practitioners could come in with a preset karma, while laymen/geeks would come in with zero karma, and have to work their way up. Hopefully some of those with the highest karma (ie, the scientists) would moderate those with bad ideas, suggestions, etc - down, and hopefully some of those would be meta-moderators as well.
Just because someone is considered a layman (ie, doesn't have phd tacked onto the end of their name), doesn't mean their intelligence and ability to reason is any less than someone who isn't - it just means they have gone down a different path in life. I am not saying all laymen are fit to review such papers - but I would wager a fair percentage are smarter than you would think (though having a background in the subject being considered would be much more helpful than just being book taught).
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Which is one of the reasons why I suggested a web ring approach, with a central server run by the NFS - there would be the archive.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Not all that extreme, apparently
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
I publish and I hate the system. But the reality is there are no respected 'free' journals in the fields in which I publish. In order to get promoted and obtain tenure, I (and many like me) MUST publish.
So a campaign to write all of us published ones will go nowhere.
I'll note that I do publish my work in altered form in accessible places. It is easy to write a friendly version for public consumption and then write a deadly dull, dry journal article. Often the style (and price) of the journal makes the material pretty inaccessible to anyone who would actually use it.
-- Multics
Female Prison Rape in NY
Unfortunately this does not necessarily happen, as I can personally vouch for.
Female Prison Rape in NY
What's irritating is that you can have >30 karma, and the lame filter will still reject your posts.
------
Uh, yes, indirectly. Without publications, your stream of grants will soon dry up. Also, as I think Bertrand Rusell has argued, people are not driven by money, but by power (and you can get the latter by having the former, though not necessarily the other way around).
Without publications, you'll have no standing, so no power.
BTW, being driven by power does not imply being a total asshole; it's natural because with power you have more freedom. Kindathing.
I used to be a representative on the Library committee for the science library at Oxford University. The annual subscription to journals cost almost one million pounds (I think this was in 1995), with the subscription costs for some specialist journals as much as 10,000 UKP per year. I am fairly sure that the median price for printed journals at any reasonably well-stocked science library will be well over $200 per year.
As a researcher, you do your research (your money and time)
Not really, it is after all your job, and you do get paid for it.
Next, you submit it to the journal, maybe even by FedEx or similar (your money)
I've never known anyone to pay for these types of expenses out of their own pocket - there is money allocated for these types of things in the grants.
I won't go on, but you get the idea. All the costs you mentioned are covered by grant money, and as for the time, it's part of the job - it's like a secretary bitching because he/she has to type a letter and answer the phone.
Anywhere from a couple hundred (Science and Nature are in this range) to several thousand USD/yr.
While I am sure journals aren't exactly pots of gold,
Actually, they are. North Holland, the scientific branch of Elsevier is responsible for a large art of the groups profits. As regards the costs: the non-profit American Physical Society publishes high quality titles that are two orders of magnitude cheaper than Elsevier and Kluwer, they charge only the actual const of printing and overhead.
What is more, because of the importance of their titles, they can charge exorbitant subscription fees. Libraries just can't afford to not subscribe. But they increase their fees by amounts of the order of 10% each year, forcing ibraries, with their fixed budget to drop some of the competing journals.
In some fields (e.g. physics) most actual communication of results already takes place through the so called 'preprint servers' e.g. xxx.lanl.gov. Publication in a paper journal only serves as an 'approval stamp', a year after the actual publication.
If someone were to add a peer review system to these preprint servers, you could do away with the paper titles altogether.
The system screws scientists in every way. The only reason it lasts is because of the reputation of the titles, which creates a vicious circle. Sooner or later scientist will have to break this circle.
If scientist don't wake up, I guess they don't deserve better.
There is also a significant risk for each individual researcher participating in the boycott. The new "free" journal has not yet an established reputation, and papers published in there might not be valued as highly as papers published in traditional journals. By shunning the traditional journals, the researchers deprive themselves of recognized publications, which could have an impact on grants, on diplomas (for young researchers), etc. And probably, many will (understandibly) consider their scolarity, their career or their lab's funding more important then some political cause. And, the less people participate in the boycott, the more likely such adverse consequences will be, which will again dimish the number of participants...
Say no to software patents.
To address your modification concerns, do an MD5 hash on it and chisel the hashcode into the floor of the Library of Congress. Sell the DVD to the public at cost; there probably would be thousands of takers. There would almost certainly be a few disks still around 200 years from now. (They might need to be special gold DVDs due to reports of old aluminum CDs rotting already).
Will MD5 hashing be able to stand up to quantum computers?
The shareholder is always right.
Yes, with more scientific research we might one day come up with a working sarcasm detector...
--
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
Hey, if you can patent the software for silicon, why can't you patent the software for cells? :-(
The only good weather is bad weather.
I for one sincerely hope they can accomplish this. This is just another little skirmish in the major battle of our lifetimes, that of the individual over corporate control, and copyright is probably the single most important area of that fight.
In the coming years, we will either see more, harsher, more corporate oriented copyright laws or we will begin to see some improvements in the current system.
http://www.redpolygon.com
http://www.hyperpoem.net
hyperpoem.net
You don't know how right you are. A lot of scientific literature is total crap. Sure, peer review weeds sets a certain minimal standard, but much of what is published is redundant, verbose, pointless, or just plain wrong.
And it wouldn't be too hard to set up. All you would have to do is wrap xxx.lanl.gov with a system that provides discussion, moderation and meta-moderation. The hard part, collecting and archiving articles, has already been done.
The biggest problem, I think, would be getting enough people using the system to make it effective.
Sourceforge project anyone?
This was started by a lone eccentric^H^H^H^H visionary genius named Paul Ginsparg, a physicist employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (yes, tax dollars at work!), in 1991. The site is nearly self-maintaining and serves up hundreds of thousands of e-prints a year to physicists and mathematicians worldwide. For those who are interested, this report gives Dr. Ginsparg's view of the archive circa 1996.
The New York Times had a nice article about the archive on May 1 of this year (now only accessible via pay at the "Premium Archive"... how's that for irony?) and how it has levelled the scientific playing field for researchers in less-developed countries who cannot afford premium journal subscriptions.
The most important point, though, is that this free e-print service coexists with the high-subscription journals (Phys Rev; Science; Nature; ApJ) that serve these communities. Young researchers bucking for tenure submit to the prestigious journal... and also to arXiv.org. That way their research gets both respect and the broadest possible distribution.
This sort of compromise is going to be harder to achieve, I think, in fields where publishing is an even bigger-money business (MoBio comes to mind). But it does demonstrate that full-scale war is not the only alternative to all-out capitulation to commercial interests.
-Renard
In any case, there are great advantages to collecting all of the literature at one site - you can do better search and retrieval, and enable systematic cross-literature studies. Even if the journals did make their own archives publicly accessible we would probably want to collect the literature in some noncommercial space.
Nobody's asking for something for nothing. But when you've done the research, and payed to have it published, you'd like to think you could make it available in a free public forum (if you wanted to).
-Renard
Why not set up a Free and free peer-to-peer scientific publishing system based on Freenet, with one difference: documents do not get deleted from the cache?
How would it work? Simple:Each participating University provides a server and bandwidth, and each paper is just posted onto their server, signed with GPG. As people search for documents, the docs will gradually propogate around the network, until everyone has a copy. Everything is signed, so if you doubt the integrity of a document, just go and get someone's public key and check. Of course, to eliminate the possibility that someone in the future would forge someone else's key to repudiate a document, you'll need to spread keys far and wide as well. Perhaps professional societies like AIP would be better as a key repository.
Of course, if this is too method of document dissemination is too slow, a few of the big universities could set up rsync servers; littler ones could rsync themselves to one of these big servers each night, say.
such a bloody problem? First off wasn't the whole point of the internet that infomation could be shared - easily? And again, this was in a day and age where BIG IRON ruled. Now with commodity equipment it should be no problem to host this stuff on university, personal, WHEREVER sites. And as far as "publishing", I do believe that was the reason for SGML and heirs, no?
And if it's dead-tree format that's the problem, I'm sure the same folks who convenienly print paper format of "personal poetry" would be just as willing to accept bucks from the sci community to print dead-tree copies of whatever "thesis/theory-of-the-day" is desired.
This could have the desired effect of cutting out those useless publishers- I'm hoping so anyway..
You may be true in your words, but your conclusion is wrong. If the information is still useful, needed or wanted, it can easily be copied to future optical terrabyte storage.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Bullshit. :-) Evil is just a word people use on things they don't relate to, fear and don't want to understand. It is not a word you use out of understanding, courage and love. Does anyone here actually believe Bill Gates, or whoever your arch-enemy is, wakes up every morning wondering who he'll screw with next? If you do, you require some serious introspection.
;-)
These people are seriously misguided, I'll give you that. But so are we all, just in different ways. That's why we are here, to show eachother in what way we're mistaken. Calling someone evil, even just their actions, will turn them further away from you. It doesn't help anything but your own ego and sense of belonging to an opposition.
If someone screams and yells at you, being very rude. What to do? Kick back, and you'll justify his anger. You've just let someone have power over you. Ignore him, and he'll continue for a while until he lose interest and goes away to hassle someone else. You'll still feel battered though. Instead, you might try smiling and be polite. He'll become very confused and ashamed of himself and his actions. You'll give him no justification for treating you the way he have. We are all our own best teacher and judge.
I'm not saying you shouldn't stand up for yourself and your opinions. However, there's a polite and confident way of saying "No Sir, you can't have my wallet. Please don't take my money away from me." and there's not. Calling someone "lad" is condescending and will turn them against you. I believe this can also be applied to IP-laws.
This was just an illustration though, there are no "rules" to follow other than your heart. If you dare
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Well, it was just an illustration of the principle. Not like good things always magically happen in RL when you're "good". The key point then, is to not expect, thereby not be disappointed either. If you succeed in that, bad events won't affect you (well, not in the same devastating/troubling manner anyways). However, this is not the same as positive-thinking. "Gee, I lost my house, car, wife and daughters, but at least I got insurance money and can build a brand new family without so many mistakes! My next daughter is going to be president!". Positive thinking is a misused technique because we need to go through our emotions, not flee from them and lie to ourselves, in order to be free of them. It's good to be angry, but just observe it when/if you "lose control", and you'll be able to deal with it much better. Learn about yourself, meta-thinking could be an appropriate term for it.
In the bible, Job learned this lesson the really hard way. Of course, few people now realize this was why he was stripped of everything in his life. They can't see behind the actions of this "unjust" and "vengeful" God, or just don't understand it but believes in it anyways. To understand the bible you have to look past the superficial logical flaws. I'm sure those who wrote it had a higher purpose than spouting religious fanatism. (Aka, believe US not THEM. But in fact, it doesn't really matter what you believe, it's the principles behind that are important.)
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
What you have discovered, and call evil, is that being a "control freak" is a major character-flaw while the rest of society generally look up to leaders who can lead the most. This problem is prevalent everywhere on this globe, and not suprisingly religious and spiritual centers are no exception. Maybe calling it evil will raise awareness of the issue. But without clarification like you provided here, you will likely confuse the real issue. "Evil" is not a good word for anything other than creating emotional reactions.
In many cases, being a control freak makes a person incapable of being a good leader. However, in the right circumstances and/or for a person with great charisma, they might pull through with it. There are also a differences, eg. between the lone leader and the club of leaders who cover eachothers backs. You have the front-figure leader and you have the leader pulling strings from behind the scene. I'm sure there are much to cover here, but we should remember that being a leader is not inherently a bad thing. We should also remember that often people will want a leader to govern their lives.
If you reread my previous post, I'm sure you'll agree that my argument about people being different, coming from different backgrounds and thus doing different things that may conflict with eachother, is just something we'll have to accept. If we continue fighting the way we have, opposing the other side, the war will never end. Instead, we should see that they are just the extreme end of something that is within us all. We're all capable of hideous actions when we're in bad circumstances.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Of course, it would be best if this were done anonymously, with an opt in by researchers (don't want Big Brother or rivals snooping, now do we?). Could also be a good way for counselors to keep track of candidates' research...
In fact, many scientific papers are marked as "advertisement", since the authors pay to print their results. I would think that the costs of archiving and online publishing are realtively small as compared to the high-quality paper that characterizes scientific journals.
Furthermore, most of the publications that I'm familiar with have searchable indices of published work in HTML, text, and .pdf format. Some even maintain archives that go back 10 years or more. So it's already being done- it's just that you have to pay to access it, *and* you have to pay to publish it...
Of course, if you actually work in a lab about half of the apparatus you use is very likely to be patented even if your lab coat isn't. The material might be this or this, unless you work with radioactive material, in which case it's likely to be this It might have been washed using this.
You can console yourself further that you're writing with this... the point being, if you start looking for patents you realise just how many of them there are. And there probably is one on a lab coat... somewhere. There certainly was one on your fly (zip fastener- US Patent 5, 791, 023)
Patenting lab coats was yesterday's job ;-)
For example, if I wrote a document about the use of quantum dots in advanced semiconductor electronics, I'd be considering getting it published in, say, Semiconductor Physics, Quantum Electronics and Optoelectronics. If that one fell through, I might rewrite it to get a more generalist angle and then send it to the American Journal of Physics.
In case anybody's wondering why scientists spend so much time trying to get published, it's not just ego. Many universities are very strict about the minimum number of publications they'll accept from their researchers - friends of mine tell me that the Uni atmosphere has become terribly competitive, since the department directors decided to evaluate employees based almost entirely on the number of publications.
Furthermore, it's a totally cruel world out there. Whatever you've heard about caring, sharing academics, it's only half true. Most people would like to work that way, but they're constrained to hide their information jealously to avoid copying by other academics. I've even heard professors asking their PhD students to lie about their current progress, to misdirect enquirers, and so on.
This sort of thing seriously holds back progress, along with the 'No cooperation without a 60% share in the winnings' attitude of many research groups. Biological research suffers terribly from this (and with it, artificial intelligence - nobody can afford to get the data required to make anything better than intelligent guesses).
The only way for an author to get paid and and retain all rights is to become established and have the clout to negotiate a decent contract.
Clout? Peer review publications don't waste much time with trolls. You have to have a reputation, or do something for someone with a reputation, to be considered for review. Your article is sent out to a random selection of peers who offer suggestions or approve your article, then it's published. Oh yeah, none of the reviewers is paid. That's as much clout as you can get.
Good luck to those loosers trying to bust libraries now. The American Publisher's Association has been picking on libraries for sharing $1000/month scientific journals. Let all of those libraries host projects like this and the publishers will have to beg them for content and the Public rip off will end. That's right, you end up paying for those publications otherwise.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are plenty of dimes to be found if public libraries could simply share the cost of electronic publication. Why kill trees to fill shelves with much needed, but hardly visited magazines?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I wonder if libraries will be able to digitize dead journals for sharing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ummm...just to clarify. I never argued for it's maintenance. I only pointed out how common it is for authors to both publish their work and retain their rights to it.
Regardless, I enjoyed reading your post.
- tokengeekgrrl - tokengeekgrrl
Unfortunately, this type of outright ownership by publishers and distributors of other people's work is quite common. Many writers, whether they be scientists or freelance columnists or journalists, are forced to sign draconian contracts where in order to get their work published, they are forced to relinquish all rights to it.
Hopefully, the Public Library of Science Initiative will have an effect and take hold, starting a new trend in publishing practices.
- tokengeekgrrl
How about taking this issue to the public? After all, it's some of their tax money that is funding academic research. How are they benifitting from it? Oh I know...the research is held in confidence by private enterprise. Couldn't the populace be at all persuaded those monies go to work FOR THEM directly? Or would this be just an exercise in futile public relations?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
That's a damn good idea. All the women of the world will be mine!!!
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Contrast this with the normal practice when a freelancer sells an article to a magazine. Usually, the writer only sells the first serial publication rights, giving the magazine just enough rights to publish the article. The author retains all the other rights, including the right to republish elsewhere.
When I discussed this with a working magazine writer some years back, she was amazed at the lousy deal academic periodicals give their authors. You get a better deal when the magazine pays you.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
Actually, 2000 is a pretty accurate survey, statistically, if they are picked completely randomly.
I would, however, like to see the original survey to verify the numbers.
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Well, at least *one* person caught it!
I swear, I never expected to be taken seriously, let alone have people agree with me!!
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
You know, I didn't plan on being taken seriously when I made that post, let alone have people actually agree with me ;)
;)
My ranking of people in general, and more specifically slashdotters, has just gone down a few notches
How could people honestly believe that modern science is all fake? When we're in such a skyrocketing technological boom? I think the problem is actually more of a growing education gap. I think most people would, rather than believe a scientist who knows what they're talking about in a particular field, to quote Troy McClure, "just ask this scientician!". Ask someone who will give them an answer that fits into their concept of the world better, instead of someone who's actually done extensive amounts of research built on extensive amounts of research, ad nauseum, every step confirming the previous.
The scientific method is what got us to where we are, people! Its had a few failings, but millions apon millions of successes, each confirmed over and over.
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Um, how does that work?
If you don't believe in it because of a soul, then why do you?
Picture a week-old embryo. It doesn't even have neurons (~2 weeks), let alone synapses (~1.5 mo), let alone remotely complex synapses (~2.5 mo), let alone human-level complexity synapses (arbitrary), let alone measurably unique human level complexity synapses (arbitrary). It is the mind that makes us who we are, not the body. There is no mind.
Its obvious that people don't have an objection to killing human cells - we do it all the time.
Its obvious that people don't have an objection to destroying unique DNA combinations - we do *that* all the time.
Why is it suddenly that, when we combine the two, people have a problem? It isn't DNA that makes us who we are - it is our *mind*.
BTW, if you're pro-life: never have sex again. Seriously. 60% of fertilized embryos never implant. So, odds are pretty good you're committing "murder".
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Academic research is an ongoing process played out by thousands of people. They all give to the common good, so why not take it a step furthur and have each researcher run a Freenet node? Most universities already supply computers for each researcher or for each department, and these computers are typically hooked up to a broadband dedicated net connection. Freenet seems like a perfect match.
In addition, an open review board could be formed, similar to the open group that develops Debian. Also, just like Debian has standards for packages entering into unstable, testing, and stable distributions, the same could be done for research papers in this Freenet scholarly research paper archive, so that material available in the "stable" archive is assured to be of high quality and passed through strict peer-review.
Its important to form a system that is not only open and free, but the system should also allow smaller research departments to chip in (run a freenet node, help review papers, and submit new research papers). Linux is free and open, it supplies the proper networking capabilities, document editing apps, and more.
And that $250 price is for the individual subscription. The institutional price is substantially higher, probably in the range of $1000 per year. And Science is by no means the most expensive journal out there. The Journal of the American Chemical Society is $2296 per year for an institutional subscription, for instance, Biochemistry is $2486, and those were just two that I was able to check quickly. Most of the journals' web sites were interested in discussing on-line institutional access, with prices on the order of $500 per IP per year.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
That's not really relevant to scientific journals, though. Subscription prices to journals are much, much higher than prices for popular magazines like Popular Science. Subscription prices are routinely over $50 per year for monthly journals and $200 for weekly journals, and 5 to 20 times that for institutional subscriptions. Most journals are scarcely free from advertizing, either, and it's generally well targeted advertizing for expensive items- the kind that's most likely to generate really big revenue. Plus many journals add per-page charges to the authors as an additional source of money. In fact, some journals (PNAS is one I particularly remember) are legally required to print "ADVERTIZEMENT" on each page containing an article because their page charges are high enough that the articles are legally classified as paid advertizements!
It's not as though the publishers are crying for money. Big publishers like Elesvier are very profitable (Elesvier's pre-tax proft margin last year was 25%) and are hardly crying for money. Somehow non-profit publishers manage to put out their journals for substantially less- even when they contract with one of the bigger journals to do the actual physical publishing. There's a reason that the big, for-profit publishers are starting new journals very rapidly; they wouldn't be doing so if they didn't think they'd be profitable.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I also work in molecular biology (or biochemistry; the line is a bit fuzzy) and I've had essentially the same issues- except for one publication. I helped to write several units for Protocols in Protein Science and was then completely bowled over when it turned out that in exchange for turning over their copyrights, authors received:
I thought that was a pretty good deal, even if my employer did make me sign over the check because the writing was done on company time; at least the money went into an account that was under my boss's control rather than into the general pot. OTOH, those chapters were the one piece of writing I've done where the publisher solicited the authors for work rather than the other way around, so the apparently had to offer incentives to get people to agree.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, no, no! If they read about something on a public forum, the original publisher could bring forward the date at which it was submitted as proof of prior art. There's no reason that publishing on a web site would be treated any differently than publishing in a book, provided that you could demonstrate a date of publication. In any case, if they really wanted to patent it, they could apply for the patent before submitting it. Hell, most physicists currently make their articles that are under review available on preprint servers (like http://xxx.lanl.gov and nobody's going around and stealing their ideas. The web was invented by physicists specifically to make it easy for them to make their work available before it was formally published on paper.
This is the key point that so many people are missing. We have very strong evidence that what the biologists are requesting would work becuause the physicists have already tried essentially the same thing and made it work. There's no good reason to think that the result would be any different in biology.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Okay, so an individual subscription for Cell, one of the prestigious ones, would be $230 for me (international price). An institutional subscription is $800. And that's without online access, this costs extra. Another perstigious journal would be Nature, there, it's $163 for a personal subscription(again, only the print issue)... couldn't find the institution rates right now.
While you might say, after all, that's not so expensive, remember that a well-stocked library must keep subscriptions to many publications (my estimate would be at least 50 to 100 to be current on molecular biology), since relevant articles are published in diverse journals.
Hope that helps a little
I compared costs to the researcher/grant agency and costs to the publisher.
The argument that it isn't my money we're talking about was brought up before and the way I originally meant it is explained by me and others in the replies. I don't want to add to that except that in my case (a Ph.D. student), talking about "job" and "paid" is relatively sarcastic. We definitely don't do it for the money, but to get it over with and move somewhere else (many even move out of mol.bio.) where you get "real money".
I grant that publishers do the work of publishing and should receive recompensation for it. I concur that nobody would do their work for free. What is odd is that the researcher pays to publish and pays to read afterwards. And that it's expected for a researcher to do part of the journal's job, for free (I am talking about peer review).
Currently, Eisen said, "We volunteer the material, the reviewing, the editing, and then we pay to get access to it"--a process he likened to a midwife who delivers a baby and then charges its parents to visit it. "
It is worse:
As a researcher, you do your research (your money and time), then you write it up in a suitable format for the journal you consider submitting it to (your time) and the guidelines to authors are sometimes quite intricate to get right. Next, you submit it to the journal, maybe even by FedEx or similar (your money). After the editor receives the manuscript, he is going to send it out to peers to have it reviewed (your peers, i.e. your time). If the paper is accepted for publication, the journal will then do the layout and insert the figures etc (their time). Then, after you OK the galley proofs, it will be published. For this, you have to pay page charges (up to $90 a page, color figures cost extra). You will have to order reprints, another $700 maybe. And your work is published in the prestigious journal, of which you will need a subscription (quite expensive) to view the results.
Summing it up, the researchers spend a lot of time, money and good-will on the publications, whereas the involvement of the journal publisher is not that great after all.
I work in the molecular biology field myself (which the article is relating to) and we have often jokingly considered opening up a journal, since this is a way to make money without much effort ... everything is done and paid for by others. While I am sure journals aren't exactly pots of gold, the distribution of who does what and who pays for what is a little odd.
Second, you might read a bit more about breast cancer and probabilities. The BRCA genes much increase your chances of getting breast cancer. That's it. Like crossing in the middle of the street increases your chances of being hit by a car. But you can still cross the street and reasonably expect to live.
Whether you've got the genes of not, you can take preventative measures to avoid breast cancer. First and foremost of those measures is diet: low in saturated fats, high in fresh (cruciferous) vegetables and fresh fruits, and ideally organic. You might also include some vitamin C supplementation.
The $100 billion/yr cancer industry benefits from your ignorance and fears.
AFAIK, scientists aren't asking for their work to be copyright-free, just available without paying.
I agree with the researchers' intent, but I fear that it could backfire. The worst thing that can happen, if the journal and the initiative fails, is that the boycott could essentially prevent scientists from being able to access each other's works online.
But somehow, I don't think that will happen. The market for journals is essentially its authors; the authors benefit more from a journal business model such as this. As long as the academic community is aware of their options, this should succeed, and the other publishers will have to fall in line, or find themselves without any submissions left to publish!
This idea is becoming a necessity which will not be abandoned. Journals themselves make this completely unavoidable. The physics community (probably because of their technical background) has long used postscript documents as a way of distributing and obtaining papers. Libraries, who are often the ones who are forced to handle the real costs, have fought this by using interlibrary loans and other sharing techniques.
The ONLY way for this to work is for established, respected scientists to publish major works in this fashion. Us young squrits, well understanding the issues at hand, have no impact on the way the scientific community operates. In a field where publications are your reputation, where you publish matters. This must gain the air of respectability. That will take time.
That time will be taken, however, because of the abuse journals have made of their reputations. I have faith in that. How long will be a question, but if some big name schools put their weight behind this it will help. I await developments with excitement.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
This is another way to free the data provided by others in an altruistic manner.
Fight Spammers!
Unless their solution has some form of serious paper rating system (sorry, slashcode won't do it) and/or peer review guidelines, having a free for all form of publishing will be very bad news for science.
There are many more wanna be scientists, pseudo scientists and profiteers out there than real hard core scientists. The ones that really contribute to human knowledge.
I know information wants to be free, but we need to remember that these pseudo scientists want free publicity. How will we konw where the well written, well tested, well reviewed papers are? It's already hard enough to read your email with all the spam.
These are just my thoghts of course.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Seriously, don't you think (or better yet, hope) that we researchers have better things to do than crawl around libraries for hours on end? It's called "productivity."
Here here! I'm greatly in favor of increased productivity in my research environment. Like when I "productively" lurk around Slashdot, instead of finishing that paper I should be working on....
but how can you trust that it hasn't been changed when it appears somewhere else?
Asymmetric cryptography?
--
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grep "xercist"
CiteSeer combines paper library and citation database allowing one to, for example, search for free text search, find appropriate papers and, for example, rank them on the number of citations those papers have received (and in what context).
The full text is often available especially for computer science papers and the paper downloadable in pdf, ps etc formates.
You get to not only see all the papers but critically see the links between them which is somehting that is non-intuitive and very time-consuming on paper journals.
There is also a nascent comment on this paper fuction
It is very cool.
James
Very amusing, Newbie-san! ;-)
:-)
NEVER check to see if you will be the first to post a comment -- in the few microseconds that it takes for you merely to *glance* down the page, just to NOTICE that there are no comments showing --> at least six people will be pressing their "SUBMIT" buttons! (At 'threshold=0' I counted six posts before yours, anyway...:-)
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--Me seriously considering 'threshold=5' these days...too easy to spend 36 hours straight at the computer screen, reading all the comments accompanying merely 3 interesting new topics...(Am I getting old, or what???
~p
People, on an induhivual basis, can't remember to back up their Great American Novel on a $0.25 floppy disk... so I don't believe for a minute that a LARGE group of people will be any better about backing up responsibly.
Academic environments are especially prone to political infighting and committee-itis. Based on my experience in that scene, all the publications would rot on one unsafe temporary server because the Inter-University Technology Search Committee would spend 8 years evaluating what OS to use for the backup system.
Wish I knew what the solution was. Despite my libertarian leanings I sort of want to get the government involved. They already have stewardship of natural resources; the fruits of our collective research is a national treasure too, of sorts.
It seems to me the reason that dead-tree works are dependably archived is that even if one university doesn't have it, another probably does. With electronic media this could be made even more redundant if a good large group of universities made a policy of periodically mirroring the content of PubMedCentral - probably not all that expensive a thing to do.
Why would you need it to? MD5 isn't encryption, it's a verification device. It works on the principle that any small change in the source will result in a large change in the hash. Odds are that anybody trying to make a 'revisionist' copy with an identical hash code would end up with what's effectivly rubbish, a bunch of random characters. There might be ways around that, but on the whole, it should be easy to detect. If it turns out to be a problem, you might end up with 1k+ bit hashes, or doing each article individually, with a md5 hash of the md5 list. Now that'd be tough
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, it does.
I'm working on my Ph.D., and I can tell you that many, many professors are aware of this. However, just like the Dmitry situation, they are either too lazy, or too stuck in their ways to really care.
This issue was brought up in a forum and one of the faculty asked, "If journals are free, what would motivate scientists to publish?" We answered him by asking another question: "What motivates them now to publish? Not money."
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I just don't see those kinds of protections in the Slashdot/kuro5hin models.
I can't offer a perfect solution, however I would suggest that using ultra-strong (100 kb key) public key encryption (to prevent future computers from readily eating it up) to provide authentication. This would go a long ways towards stopping people from tampering with the material, once it was submitted. The papers could be archived in two forms, one which is encrypted/authenticated, and one which is plain text for fast processing. If there's ever a dispute that something was changed, go to the authenticated one (so long as you still have the public keys archived somewhere they can't be changed).
The problem with archival to CD-ROMs, besides the obvious lifetime problem, is that they might be able to be easily tampered with in the future (readily available nanotech, etc). I guess the only way to counter this is to make a *LOT* of CDs... that way you'd have to fake thousands instead of just one.
Just my two cents.
PS I konw that the proposed key size would be computationally intensive. It's just a rough estimate, 128 bit keys are so... wussy! (think quantum computers, guys)
I'm pro-life and do not believe anything has a soul.
"The worst of it is that this particular idea isn't being propounded by a scientist with data that might prove his theory correct, it's being pushed on us be people who believe in a supernatural Creator who exists outside this universe."
How would a scientist be more apt to prove something has a soul, when a soul itself is by definition supernaturual?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Centralized science publishing does accomplish a useful purpose: peer review. Articles submitted to journals are sent to experts in the field for analysis and go through a lengthy revision process with the author. Slows down publishing quite a bit, contributes to the cost of overpriced journals, but serves as a pretty damn good moderation mechanism: review by people who know wtf is being discussed. Do you want formal scientific review to take place at the level of a slashdot discussion?
Democratic, decentralized review: good for normative discussions (deciding ethics/values), good for creative discussions (incl. software development), but hazardous to scientific inquiry on existing phenomena.
These people need to setup sites running scoop or slashcode.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
The article itself and the write-up are both wrong to say that "only Genome Biology and PubMed Central" have accepted the terms of the PLOS.
Of course, the costs of processing text and organising peer review need to be covered somehow. BMC plan to charge for non-primary content (e.g. review articles) and we are considering introducing a fee for publication (which would be waived for scientists with limited funds). The cost to the biomedical community of funding research communication by this type of fee would be an order of magnitude less than the current model of charging for access to published work.
The big advantage of making science articles open-access is that indexing is made a lot easier. A biological version of ResearchIndex (aka citeseer) would become possible. Also, you can find open-access research using Google and you don't need to be in an institution with expensive subscriptions to journals to read it.
perhaps someone should write to those scientists who do publish in the publications not meeting the demands, to make them aware of the issues.
I don't think this boycott has the high profile in the scientific community we'd like.
/..sig file not found - permission denied.
This is the sort of thing that you knew would have to happen. It's hard to day weather this iteration will be successful but eventually such a move will be nessecery in the scientific community.
If you missed the discussion, the journal Nature has an ongoing discussion on online scientific publication.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Given that Elsevier is charging an obscene $1893 a year to nearly every major academic library in the world for the Journal of Econometrics, why doesn't someone come in and undercut them? Well, it's not so easy. Journals have reputations that are developed over many years, and for researchers, it matters that your article gets published in a "good" journal. That's really the whole point of a journal: it acts as a kind of stamp of quality. If you start a new journal, besides all the usual costs associated with starting a print magazine, there is a chicken and egg problem with developing a reputation: in order to get a high standing in the field, you need to get the best quality articles submitted to you; but no one wants to submit a good article to a new journal without a good reputation. In economic terms, it's not a classical market where many suppliers can produce identical commodities. Instead there is a lot of product differentiation, and associated with the product differentiation are major barriers to entry.
Also, the market can only sustain a few journals in any specialized area. There have been some big mergers in the academic publishing industry lately, and some people argue that the industry is now so concentrated that the DOJ should consider antitrust action; see here for instance.
Academic publishers are really just middlemen, and with the possibility of publishing directly on the web, it makes sense to try to cut out the middleman altogether while maintaining the peer-review and archival properties of traditional journals. The key is figuring out how to overcome the reputation problem, but given how dissatisfied people are with journal these days, that really should be doable. If I were Elsevier or one of the other major publishers, I would be (a) making a lot of money, but (b) worried about what the internet will eventually do to my business.
Yea- I saw that after I posted. An offline website wouldn't be very useful, I suppose. Even slash code couldn't fix that problem.
I would love to see something like this happen.
However, while I have a fair amount of experience coding in perl, I have zero web programming experience per se. So I'm not sure I would be of much help. Maybe some, but not much in the nuts and bolts department.
I've often wondered if it weren't possible to modify slash code or whatever kuro5hin uses to start an online web site.
If you think about it, kuro5hin's model is very similar to that of scientific publishing: peer-reviewed submissions. If you replace "news stories" with "papers" you get a peer-reviewed online journal. Make posts abstracts, include a link to html/ps/pdf forms of papers, and there you go.
It isn't nescesarily that hard. I have several 5.25 drives in storage in case I need them. And I know numerous people with card readers and 8" drives. If you can send me computer media, I can probably get it read. Oh, there are several companies that still sell and service card readers for companies.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Uhm, if you are designing a small networking system for a few academics, network connection cost isn't really an issue. I doubt that TBL was picturing the web as it now exists when he did his initial design.
And you know, how hard can it really be to make changes? Just sneak a better system into apache and mozilla, and wait for things to spread from there. OK, maybe if Netscape hadn't screwed up so badly this would work. At this point, mozilla is such a minority that doing such wouldn't make it a major win, but it couldn't hurt.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
You obviously did not bother to spend 30 seconds to even skim the article referenced. Since you are apparently lazy (and possibly whiny) I have brought the article to you, at least in part...
The demands of the initiative don't stem from purely idealistic or financial concerns, however. Eisen said the idea had its roots in the emerging effort to apply text-mining technology to the body of biomedical literature. A single, free repository of scientific articles would be as valuable a resource as GenBank is for genomic data, Eisen said.
Have any idea yet that this issue has nothing to do with laziness? How about this:
We believe that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be made freely available
Oh and by the way, they are not asking the publishers to operate or fund the aforementioned online repository.
One Bourbon
One Scotch
and One Beer
Nothing guarantees profits. When you start a business, there is always risk that you may not succeed. The scientists need someone that is willing to disseminate their ideas, not make a profit. If it's possible to do both, wonderful. If not, tough luck.
This should be on CNN, MSNBC, etc etc.
Lately everything that the unwashed masses hears about copyright issues involves some compent of ilegality (hacking, mp3 piracy, etc) that a lot of conservative bastards are going to instantly dislike anyway.
Having respectable people, scientists no less, getting up in arms about copyright issues helps a lot.
On the other hand, maybe the old conservative bastards don't respect the scientific community. They certainly plug their collective ears whenever something about evolution comes up!
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___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
Public universities subscribe to thousands of journals. I don't think the journal publishers should be forced to create and pay for web sites just so the scientist doesn't have to leave his desk to get a paper. They can go to the library like everyone else has been doing for the last 100 or more years.
It seems that even some scientists are not immune from becoming whiny and lazy as a result of the internet making things more readily available.
What's missing from these demands is any guarantee for the conventional publishers that they will be protected from the inevitable loss in revenue that will result from having their content freely available. Scientific articles are not like MP3s: a scientist does not read an article, say "that was great" and go buy the journal. For the most part, either a person or institution subscribes or they don't. The demands of this group are unreasonable. Science publishing is a high cost activity requiring a preponderance of expertise in the editorial staff compared to other forms of periodical publishing, and it does not have the same acces to advertising revenue.
I'm usually on the other side of the business versus freedom debate but get real: It's getting hard enough to get industry or the government to pay for actual research. Someone has to pay the cost of publishing scientific articles. The editors made the right choice, and its up to the The Public Library of Science Initiative to prove that journals can be sustainably published under a free content model.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I hope that they succeed. It seems to me that the scientists have a good point here - the current system is pretty outrageous.
On a side note, there's another step they could take. Have each person who's signed the letter send a letter of cancelation to every magazine, such as Science, that they subscribe to. In the letter they should state that their reason for cancelation is due to the magazine's failure to meet the demands. If that many scientists dropped their subscriptions, the magazines and journals would have to listen, because then it truly affects their bottom line.
In matters of $, it's often better to let your money do the talking instead of your mouth.
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
The scientists want the articles to be kept free and open electronically. If they mean kept on the web by the publishing journal, then I disagree. The journal should not have to foot that bill if they do not want to. Now, if they mean that some site should be allowed to post the articles for free access by the public, I'm all for it.
I'll assume they mean the latter. Overall, this is a disturbing trend in science. In the past science tended to prove theories, practice on applied science, etc. Engineers tended to find practical applications, which then would be patented. Now we have humans gene sequences being patented. What's next, patenting lab coats? (Ok, a bit extreme, but you get the point)
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
> Humans do NOT need science.
They do if they want to have more than a few hundred million people living at any given moment. They do if they don't want large portions of the population dying from simple diseases.
> We as a species have quite well survived our own
> stupidity for far longer [than 600 years of
> science.]
I have issue with the "quite well". As a species, certainly. As individuals, well, enough barely survived to reproductive age, I suppose...
> It's odd. When someone disproves something that
> is stated in the Bible or the Koran or by
> members of their religious institution...it's
> held up as proof that the Creator doesn't exist
> and that religions are a farce.
Well, as Carl Sagan once said, if two religions are in conflict, one must be wrong. But if one, why not both?
Remember that religions typically have a sacred text that must be 100% true, the word of God. If some of it is false, then how do you know any of it is true? You don't.
Secondly, it's long been a joke that science should be proud that it is so powerful that, every time it looks, it makes God hide.
It's ironic that religion, born of superstitious behavior on observations of the real world, should eventually turn the concept of God or the Creator from one intimately involved in daily life (floods, good or bad crops, storms and rain, the moon and sun going across the sky, conception and birth, throbbing life itself) to one reduced to a scardey-cat who refuses to show his face any time someone with a notepad starts to pay attention.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
here's an interesting idea - why dont they try to get papers published in major newspapers, like say the nyt and washington post, etc. they could add a whole science section to their papers, which would probably increase readership among scientists, it would encourage scientists to write in a language more accessible to the public, and it would put the scientific journal monopoly out of business. obviously, yes, the papers would want to do the same thing the journals do, but if atleast one major paper accepts the terms proposed by the scientists, others will soon follow..
Ratio of replies to old sig content : replies to actual post content > 0.5. Sig changed.
I think the folks behind the Public Library of Science movement are attempting to draw a line in the sand on this issue, so their perspective is intentionally extreme. I know that information wants to be free, but in the interests of balance I feel compelled to point out that the current nonprofit journal publishing system is not necessarily greedy and exploitative. Science magazine, for instance, is published at substantial cost by a nonprofit organization called the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). When you subscribe to Science you join the association. The membership dues and the advertising revenue from the magazine pay for a wide range of activities that are of tremendous benefit to science and society.
As paper publishing becomes less and less relevant, I think that it's going to get harder and harder for journals and their sponsoring organizations to come by revenue. Making it even harder by clamoring for completely free and unrestricted access to high-quality peer-reviewed material is at least partially a bad thing, isn't it? Somebody's got to foot the bill, and journals and their sponsoring societies add a lot of value to the science community.
Final note: Science has adopted a compromise position on this issue; issues older than one year will be freely available on the journal's website.
Of course, the obvious and oft-mentioned drawback of this kind of thing is the lack of peer review (hey, you get what you pay for), but it's really incredibly neat, and there are precedents for papers on this site being cited in accepted journals.
It is my opinion that peer review isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be--lots of good papers never get seen because of politics or one really dense reviewer out of, say, ten, and lots of redundant and low-quality papers get published, often in conference proceedings. The journal system has to change. It's way out of hand.
Another thing you can do is simply refuse to do free reviewing for journals and conferences that have the most restrictive copyright policies. Don't kid yourself: reviewing work doesn't make any significant difference on your resume, it takes a lot of time to do well, and you are basically doing unpaid work for a publisher that's profiting handsomely (or some big "non-profit" organization that runs through large amounts of money). It is the editors that are in the hot seat if they don't get reviewers, and they are also the ones that can perhaps cause their publishers to alter their policies.
The IEEE has been lobbying on the issue of H1B visas. Many foreigners feel that the IEEE position was characterized by narrow self-interest of US engineers, to the detriment of both foreign born professionals and the US economy as a whole. US engineers are, of course, fully justified in engaging in those kinds of lobbying activities. What is not acceptable from my point of view is that the IEEE effectively uses membership numbers, subscription fees, and membership dues from inviduals who are IEEE members purely for scientific/technical reasons to support such activities. IEEE professional communications and IEEE lobbying activities should be two separate organizations with separate funding and separate membership lists.
Can you point me to some references on this?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In the EE and CE fields, the main journal publisher is the IEEE. I'm pretty sure that they do not claim exclusive rights to publish research, or if they do, everyone in the field ignores it. The result is that many researchers (myself included) post all their publications on their web pages, which increases access and exposure to important works in the field. Furthermore, it permits free document search engines based on these web posts, such as Citeseer. The net result is, if you take any IEEE publication, and type the title in your favourite search engine, you will find a link to a free copy of the paper about 30-40% of the time (and this proportion is growing). I can't imagine a scientific discipline in which this wasn't done.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
scientists aren't asking for their work to be copyright-free
Of course not! As a scientist I am very happy to let anyone peruse my results for free (in fact I encourage it), but I want to maintain control over how my results are presented. This is because I want to retain control over changes to my work -- I don't want someone taking my work, making trivial changes, removing my name as an author, and claiming credit. The system of citation is the accepted means by which scientific work is modified and advanced, which gives credit to the truly original and fundamental works in the field while preserving them unchanged. It's difficult to maintain such a system if copyright is completely abandoned.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
So scientists may be able to control their own work - while artists have yet to solve the problem for themselves.
I have a hunch they're going to succeed. Fred Durst would be proud.
In part .. The Public Library of Science wrote in an open letter
We recognize that the publishers of our scientific journals have a legitimate right to a fair financial return for their role in scientific communication. We believe, however, that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned nor controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library.
As a social scientist I agree fully with this stance. We cannot leave the open publications of intellectual property "scientific journals" in the hands of publishers. It's a form of censorship IMHO.
Actually, the title would be "Worlds Greatest Minds F***ed by Business... Again"
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
Humans do NOT need science. The modern form of science has not been around for more than 600 years. We as a species have quite well survived our own stupidity for far longer.
Yes, and what a great job we did. Childbirth death rate 90%, average lifespan 20-25 years. I find the fact that you communicated the sentence above using about 50 different scientific breakthrus amusing. Sure, _now_ we can diss science as our lives are already comfortable.
btw, Science never has proven or disproven the existence of a soul. Never will either.
Absolutely correct. Of course, as 'soul' is defined as "something unprovable by science", that is not really a surprise.
Yan
Gilina: "I can't believe you're not Sebacean."
John: "Human. It's kinda like Sebacean, but we haven't conquered other worlds yet, so we just kick the crap out of each other."
Farscape, PK Tech Girl
I think this line's only filler
I'm in San Diego at OSCON this week, and yesterday I attended a great tutorial on home, or "micro" publishing. The presenter's web site is at www.genericbooks.com. This site has quite a bit of info on how you can make your own books for the price of materials, from layout to full "perfect binding." It also has links to other folks out there that are binding books on their own for fun and profit.
You can build, even as an individual, the means to bind well-bound books that will last. Full hardback, paperback, stiched, or almost any type of non-patented binding be done using everyday workbench tools. If you work at a univeristy and can get a bit of extra money or a grant, you can buy better equipment and pre-built, low cost binders and material and create semi-professional looking books. This is a good way to get around a publisher's stupid intelectual property philosophy or to distribute opinions that might cause a mainstream publishing house to lose face.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
If scientists want to distribute their own papers without journal publishers getting in the way, let napster set them up with a free paper-sharing service.
LaTeX should be the platform-independent format, of course. Oh wait, no one knows what LaTeX is, anymore, because that bloated unreadable corruptable .doc format has taken over! Well, then, perhaps SGML or XML/XSL/DSSSL/XYZUGHL?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
why can't we use dublin metacore to create the necessary reference strucutures to index, create citations etc, use traditional means of peer review to check works before they are published, and give an online repository the status it requires? i hate that private companies are publishing so much of academia. publishing should be returned to universities, who would not require that they make millions of profit on journals like the other companies. an online system, administered and hosted by a consortia of universities, is the way to go.
Then again, I'm a bit of an antique collector. I've got literally dozens of 1980's computers. But there will always be collectors like me who can COPY these formats (does anybody need a few thousand punch-cards converted to ASCII-text and burned on a CD?). So I don't think there's much of a problem here. And the more widely used a format (think Zip vs Orb vs plain CDR) the more of us will have one around (or a box of 50+ of them).
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
A central repository for such information (although it seems like this would just be bio publications - correct me if I'm wrong) would be exceedingly useful to those doing research on the peripheries. Even those at the University of Arkansas at Hooterville could get the same acess as someone at Caltech (albeit with a delay of six months or so). As it is, the artificially high costs of publishing and reading journals keeps research striated - only places with money can do real research.
This would level the playing field, and probably have less turnaround time from research to publication.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Well, Rei, I need science. You need science. The people down the road need science. Granted, there are scientists cooking their data to suit their agendas, but at least other scientists can dispute corrupt data with their own. Would you prefer to live in the good old days when all the knowledge of the world came from Aristotle and anybody who challenged orthodoxy was a servant of Satan fit only to burn? So scientists with an agenda are trying to tell people that there's hole in the ozone layer. I hear people like Rush claiming that human embryos have souls. Imagine that: an embryo lacks a sentient mind and a set of instincts, but we're supposed to believe that it has a soul. The worst of it is that this particular idea isn't being propounded by a scientist with data that might prove his theory correct, it's being pushed on us be people who believe in a supernatural Creator who exists outside this universe.
******
Matthew Lovelace Graybosch
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
The problem, as the article notes, is that scientists want/need to have the prestige afforded to them by getting published in the well-known/copyrighted journals. However, if these scientists, 25000 so far, can put together a great journal, then those wanting prestige can get it!
Most scientists support this initiative because their goal is to spread knowledge and support a greater good. It is the journals who adopt the greedy attitude!
Electron Pulse...indie rock/jazz/blues
Knowing a few students, I know how hard it is to get access to all of the journals needed to compete a project, paper, experiment etc. unless the university shells out large $$ to subscribe.
Even worse is that online or electronic versions of the print they alreay have is often $80-100,000 extra.
So let's say they do go open source which is a great idea and I'm all for the concept. I think that page costs would go up for researchers submitting work. This comes from grant money and some tax dollers depending on the researcher. This might increase the grant request of a researcher and could reduce the number of grants an organization gives out. Web published journals are likely to lack a critical peer review. There are plenty of crappy papers (in a scientific content sense) that get published with peer review anyway. It's probably the most important aspect of the scientific process. It also isn't as if the information published in scientific journals is hard to get, just go to a library at a University. Besides, how much of a demand is there for copyright free scientific publications are there? I know that people get irritated about the concept of copyright free material that they should have a right to see since it's likely that their tax dollars helped pay for it. I completely understand where that logic is, and I actually agree with it. However, can we really afford to belittle the scientific process to provide publications that people aren't going to read anyway? Chances are is that the people who read the articles have relitively easy access to them anyway.
hello - I'm a journalist, and I'm working on a story about fingerprint technology, specifically about Napster's agreement with Relatable to use its TRM technology. I'm trying to find people to interview to get their perspective on the issue. If you have opinions you'd like to share, could you please email me at bk05403@aol.com and let me know the best way to reach you (phone is preferred!)? Many thanks! Beth