Slashdot Mirror
Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing
Black Parrot writes: "Just got a message that was sent to several mailing lists used by machine learning researchers, announcing the mass resignation of the Editorial Board of one prominent ML journal (i.e., the scholars who make a peer reviewed journal work). The reason? 'Times have changed. ... We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers.' It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small. You can see the full text of the message at the UAI archive. This sort of thing has been bubbling for a couple of years. The letter mentions other cases, and I know that several thousand biological researchers have threatened to go on strike against any journal that does not make their articles downloadable for free after a fixed delay from the date of publication. The trend toward more toll booths is not the only force at work in the Internet Age!"
... this won't solve many of the real problems in getting published.
/.ers would agree is a BAD THING.
During my time in academia I was incredibly frustrated by the senior staffs refusal to support certain PHD and post-Docs in their attempts to get published, for fear that a refused paper would sully the reputation of the department within that journal.
Further, they refused to allow these individuals to publish their work directly online as it was copyrighted to the department, even though they did not wish to put it to use.
We need a far reaching rethink of the whole publishing cycle to be led by a small team of forward thinking academics to route out these issues and propose a new system.
You may be thinking 'poor diddums not getting published' but there is a good ercentage of the output of the worlds academic research that is valid, moves the knowledge forward, but fails to get published. If it ain't published a corporation can come along and re-invent it under a patent - which most
I'm doing a PhD in Mathematics, and as such I'm hoping that I'll be writing papers that might be publishable at some point in the near(ish :) future. Because of this, I've been looking at the publishing terms of some of the Maths journals -- and they're absolutely terrible!
For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web. I could perhaps understand some of the restrictions if authors were paid for their work, but they're not (except in academic kudos).
I first noticed the problem when researching using (which is basically google for CS & applied maths papers -- give it a try!) -- all the papers you can find are preprints, and many of the ones you want just aren't freely available. Even when your employer (or the university) does sign up for the site licenses to get electronic copies of the articles, they're difficult to get hold of, and almost invariably in the annoying PDF format... (hard to manipulate, impossible to extract data from).
All of these small journals are owned by one or two massive publishing conglomerates. The fees and restrictions imposed are *utterly* archaic and obscene. We need freely available, peer reviewed, reputable academic journals.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Press Release on the Journal of Machine Learning Research site gives a partial answer to the question how they will finance this. In addition of getting money from printed version and paid electronic edition (with additional features) on the CatchWord, SPARC helps them. SPARC is an alliance of universities and research libraries that supports increased competition in scientific journal
publishing.
...I remember attempting to convice my mother (a PhD mol-biologist researcher with Stanford at the time) that this *was* the way of the future and that she should be an early adopter.
I was sternly rebuffed... apparently Stanford has an indoctranation lecture that all researchers are *required* to attend before commencing *any* research in labs at Stanford. Anyway... to make a long story short, the put forward a killer pitch at protecting the researcher's research efforts, while maximizing the commercial and prestege impact that Stanford can offer. After exiting the 3 hour indoct, every last researcher is completely adverse to anything that is not lock-step with Stanford's status quo.
Reality turns out to be a little different once the politics are factored in. Get enough researchers pissed off and the only way to contol them will be to control the grant doll lists that may of these second rate academic hacks subsist off of... the rest exit academia and find a good patent attorney. Overall, peer-review and university poltics are an excellent darwinian mechanism by which the best and brightest are push into industry where they can have the most impact.
As for all the dot-commers that are going back to Uni (or just going to school for the first time)... I think the academic status quo is in for quite a surprise. I mean once you've actually experienced Work Made for Hire, Non-Disclosures, Agreements for Non-Compete and other instruments of legal torture, you'll be less likely to enter the academic intellectual property meatgrinder willingly... After all, holding a degree or the ability to complete your education harassment free over your head is a hell of a lot less impressive than fscking with your ability to find work (academic work transfers easily... law suites linger for *years*... any time a university puts a contract in front of you that allows them to engage you ouside of their academic turf, just say "No!")
I think Andy is right, last poster wrong
/., and people don't constantly recheck the January edition of the journal to see if there is a chance for first post)
i was doing the sums on this a while ago. A friend of mine asked his father (a prof of Gaelic) what the distribution of a journal in the field would be, and the answer was a couple of hundred copies a month. This is tiny tiny load for a server (and Andy is right that the content will generally be too dry to encourage slashdot effect). Even a couple of thousand is still small traffic really (there are not nearly so many articles in a monthly journal as there are stories in a month of
Hosting such a journal on the Uni network would be a drop in the ocean compared to the bandwith used by students for porn. Main cost would be making sure there was someone qualified to run the box and keep backups. Unis pay huge fees for paper journals as it is, i think they could stump up the small costs of hosting a journal or too on their networks!
m
Physicists have actually started bypassing the reviewing/printing system by putting up arXiv.org long ago. Mathematicians have then followed, and other scientists are starting doing it now. Daniel Bernstein has some very useful advice for authors at his web page at http://cr.yp.to/bib.html.
Loads of papers, refereed and non-refereed are available at arXiv.org . The site is mainly for physics, math and related 'hard-core science'.
Many people submit their papers to arXiv immediately after getting it accepted to a refereed journal. When I try to keep up to date, I do not use paper versions that come out months after they have been published at arXiv. I look at the relevant sections of arXiv. If something is not on arXiv, it is not news.
Exact same peer review we have now, but infrastructure requirements no worse than Slashdot's. To make sure that the people behind the keys really are who they say, use Verisign. Total expense for each participant is a Verisign certificate plus a subscription fee to support the database, which together will probably amount to less than a single journal subscription.
As far as I know, you don't need a licence to produce PostScript. Just get the language reference and start churning out PostScript, like you would with LaTeX. Heck, a whole lot of word processors can either save to PostScript natively or via a printer driver, which is often free. (For example, PS is the lingua franca of printing on most Linux platforms AFAIK.)
HTML is not such a good idea for wide parts of the scientific community IMO since it doesn't include good support for things such as equations or special symbols, without the need to resort to images for all those things. At least not until more browsers implement MathML or a fairly well-stocked Unicode font (which would help with symbols but not with equations that go beyond <sup> and <sub>).
Cheers,
Philip.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
I have to strongly disagree with the following statement: "Any journal with 'Letters' in the title typically is little or no peer review since the articles there are for fast-track publication -- this is typically where you'll see junk." Most 'Letters' journals are "short and sweet" articles, describing one or two definative experiments, and are fast-tracked for review and publishing. I can say that the following 'Letters' journals are of excellent quality: Tetrahedron Letters, Nano Letters, Organic Letters, Applied Physics Letters. Now, these are all chemical or physics journals, so maybe the 'Letters' journals you refer to of a different scientific field which I haven't read.
Now I do like your idea of the Slashdot-based review system, but implimenting it will be difficult. Right now, the scientific community has the momentum behind it of anonymous review. It has not been unheard of for scientific peers to get a competitors paper, absolutely butcher it to slow it getting out, and then use that edge to push their results out first. Scientists can be just as petty and nasty as the rest of humanity. Occasionally you'll find a good anonymous review, where you can tell the reviewer actually read it. However, the anonymous peer review has been going for so long that it will take quite a bit of effort to remove it.
Also, most of the scientific community (at least the ones I know) view article reviewing as a chore, not an opportunity to improve science or learn something new. Therefore, for such an online system to work, there would have to be some incentive. Let's say we offer pay for review, but then you're back to the problem mentioned in the original post, that money is needed to run the journal, and to get people to pay, you have to restrict access, because if its free access, who's going to pay to support it? Now there is another incentive which I don't think has been mentioned - that free access to journal contents is given to the reader, provided that reader reviews X number of articles, non-anonymously and makes themselves available for comments on the article. This way, you ensure a motivation to access the article, and, you improve the whole-peer review process. By making the reviewer available for comments by the original author, the article can be improved, or, the author has the chance to explain his conclusions or clear up language in the conclusions. Again, the article is improved. Idealistic yes, but technically feasible.
I'd like to see the scientific review process greatly improved, as I have never been satisified by the experience I have gotten for all of the papers I have gotten over my scientific career. Out of 30 publications, I can think of only 2 that went somewhat smoothly, but they each took 9 months to get the review comments back. All the others had unhelpful anonymous reviews or in a few cases, just nasty comments. The system does need to be fixed, and I think with time, especially as a new generation of scientists, willing to try new things, comes into prominence, the system will change to a more open system.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The arXiv is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
It is true that both PostScript and PDF are proprietary formats (owned by Adobe), but it does not cost any money to generate documents in those formats. In fact, it can be done entirely with free software.
When you write a paper in LaTeX, how do you print it? It is very likely that you run LaTeX/TeX to create a DVI file, then dvips to convert the DVI to PostScript, which you then send to a printer. You could equally well run dvipdf to convert the DVI to PDF. Both dvips and dvipdf are free software. Converting TeX to PostScript and/or PDF with open-source tools is not only possible; it is a natural part of using TeX.
There is a nice front end for the math articles in the arXiv. This FAQ has info about contributing math preprints to this well-run electronic preprint resource.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I'll be able to place these in upper journals. Three or four of those will lead to tenure, giving me close to ten swings in the pre-tenure period--some of which will miss.
If I send those to a slashdot-style forum, my boss will laugh. They'll count something less than a one-line quote in a small town newspaper.
Also, given the areas aI work in, there are only a small handful of people world-wide qualified to comment. [I don't think a single member of my committe understood my entire dissertation, but I usually had two of the three major professors {yes, with a joint degree and resarch funding from an outside department 3 of the 5 committe members are major professors; it broke the latex style sheet} understanding any given point]. I really don't *care* what most of the readership of such a site would think of the paper--hopefully folks might learn something, but almost none are qualified to comment. (Ironic sidenote: the current project stemmed from violating my rule about battles of wits with unarmed persons here on slashdot--the proof that he's wrong is actually interesting . .
On the other hand, there's clearly room for traditional peer review with on-line publication. I'll continue submitting to the theft-style journals, as they're the "A" journals [and most even have submission *fees*] until tenure. Post-tenure, I still wouldn't toss things off to slashdot-style sites, as publication still matters for raises and full professors--but I'll certainly be in a position to keep ownership.
doc hawk