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.
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:
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:
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.
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 --
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.
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.
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!
What's irritating is that you can have >30 karma, and the lame filter will still reject your posts.
------
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.
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.
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.
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
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..
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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
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.
overrated? wtf? how the fuck do these people get mod points?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Matthew Lovelace Graybosch
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"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"