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.

Comments

Re:Depends on who does the archiving

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The journal world is bizarre

[JanneM]

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

Re:The journal world is bizarre

[mcfiddish]

Journals do actually do quite a bit of work. You submit a paper to them. Then they need to decide if they want to publish it, first of all. That takes some expertise to begin with.

Then they need to find other scientists in the field with the expertise to review it. This requires that the journal has staff members who are up on the current research in the field, and who's doing what.

Once the reviews come back, and you respond to the reviewer's comments (which often involves some disagreement), the journal needs to make a decision regarding the readiness of the paper to be published. If not, either it goes through another reviewer iteration, or it gets rejected. Again, this requires scientific expertise by the journal's staff.

Finally, it gets published on paper and sent out to subscribers.

All of this takes effort, and much of it is non-trivial. Granted, the scientist does the science, and writes it up, but the journal provides a service. Some journals have exorbitant subscription rates because they have few subscribers (libraries, usually).

Scientists could get together and run their own free journals with quality research in them, but that's that much less time spent doing science. And as many scientists will tell you, much of their time is already spent doing non-science activities like sitting on committees and writing grant proposals.

Not to diminish journals in any way, but "the world needs ditchdiggers, too!"

Re:The journal world is bizarre

[Megasphaera Elsdenii]

Journals do actually do quite a bit of work. You submit a paper to them.

No they dont, not given the amount of money that they get for free. I happen to know the operation of a leading title in bioinformatics. Apart from the editors and reviewers, it is run by 1 (one) person, the secretary.

Then they need to decide if they want to publish it, first of all. That takes some expertise to begin with.

Which is done by the editors and reviewers, who are not paid. Editors (who choose the reviewers, and who under whose auspicies the paper finally is published) do get paid but only a litte, as being an editor is more a prestige thing (and rightly so) than anything else.

All of this takes effort, and much of it is non-trivial.

On the contrary; most of it is trivial in the scientifici world . You simply can't compare it to another, say commercial effort.

Scientists could get together and run their own free journals with quality research in them, but that's that much less time spent doing science.

Firstly, it seems to have worked out quite well in the physics community. Secondly, ask any department what they'd rather have: the current situtation, or shifting $10,000 from the library to the research budget + free access to all literature in exchange for a bit of work to get/keep the free literature initiative going ... go ahead, I'm waiting :-)

The big question, indeed, is why the researchers and libraries in Medicin and Biology (and humanities etc.) haven't gotten their act together in the way the physicicts have ... but it's coming.

The existence of evil is no reason for it's accept

[HiThere]

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.

Capitalism

[Mike Schiraldi]

Why haven't market forces, supply and demand, driven the price down?

Re:Depends on who does the archiving

[Xofer D]

Hey, if you can patent the software for silicon, why can't you patent the software for cells? :-(

Prior art. You may have found the software for the cell, but you sure as shootin' didn't write it. What are you going to patent, "Method for creating life"? I think most companies patent "Process for identifying [PHENOTYPE] using genetic code analysis" (a phenotype is the result you get from a gene, like red hair - kinda like the difference between the binary and the output).

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.

/. is a focus for a lot of people who are interested in Open Source and Free Software. Most are interested in a way to get their work done, or a way to learn about software, or just a stable platform. Some want to make $$$ fast! Here, however, we have an application which Free software is uniquely suited to:

• 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.
_________

common publishing practice

[tokengeekgrrl]

Excerpt from the article: 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. In response, the initiative has proposed that publishers should be paid to produce the manuscript, but should not own the material after publication.

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

Research is a Concurrent Distributed Thing

[Jagasian]

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.

Re:They have a real point

[rgmoore]

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:

• A per-article and per-page payment for their units,
• A free copy of the book- which is very useful and normally fairly expensive- for each co-author, and
• Free updates as long as the unit remains in the book (in exchange for updating the units as needed)

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.

Re:slashdot/kuro5hin model?

[rgmoore]

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.

They have a real point

[Apogee]

I think the situation is even worse than what Michael Eisen said it to be in the article:

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.

Re:They have a real point

[multicsfan]

To play the Devil's advocate:

They have cost of publication, printing is not free.

They have to cooridinate all the submissions, the reviews, track subscriptions, layout every issue, find advertisers (if the journal has any), pay people for the above, do all the accounting, billing, etc.

Pay postage/shipping.

I remember reading many years ago that for many publications, the subscription price is pretty much the cost of the postage to send you the journals, all the other costs are covered by the advertisers (Popular Science, etc). If you have a scientific journal with little to no ads, then the only source of revenue is subscriptions.

In the electronic world, the cost of servers, maintenance of servers, system administration, web design, bandwidth may replace the physical print costs, but all the others are still there. You still have layout (page design), and equivalents of the other expenses. A college or university may publish a journal and put it on the web at no charge to viewers, but those expenses are being paid by someone. It may come from the endowment, it may be part of the tuition you pay as a student, it may be a government grant (tax money), it may be a grant from a company (consumers who buy the products).

Remember: TANSTAAFL

It may seem free, but somewhere, someone is paying for it. You may not be able to determine who, but someone is. That dime you found on the sidewalk was lost by someone else.

Copyright-free?

[Wesley Felter]

AFAIK, scientists aren't asking for their work to be copyright-free, just available without paying.

I hope it doesn't backfire.

[Rimbo]

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!

Re:After the boycott

[cvd6262]

I don't think this boycott has the high profile in the scientific community we'd like.

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."

After the boycott

[jungd]

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.

It's just a matter of time

[hillct]

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

slashdot/kuro5hin model?

[kriemar]

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.

Define Greed

[nanojath]

While a free and searchable database is a fine idea, I think the publishers of conventional journals are right to be leery of these demands. Scientific publishing is not exactly the cash cow of the publishing industry. How many university libraries would stop carrying a significant number of journals if their content could bne accessed on-line on demand?

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.

Depends on who does the archiving

[bryan1945]

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)