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Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing

Posted by michael on from the courage-of-your-beliefs dept.

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!"

4 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Of course... by squaretorus · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... this won't solve many of the real problems in getting published.
    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 /.ers would agree is a BAD THING.

  2. It's not just biologists by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:It's not just biologists by PrimeEnd · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.


      All the journals of the American Math. Society allow you to keep the copyright to your papers, and hence do anything you want with them. Of course, if you keep copyright you have to grant the AMS the right to publish your article. I know this is unusual, but I doubt it it totally unique.


      There are numerous small journals which are not owned by conglomerates. In addition to those owned by professional societies like, AMS, SIAM, MAA, there are many which are "owned" by departments, e.g. Michigan Math Journal, Illinois Math. Jour., etc.


      Good online versions are often lacking, I agree but, to a large extent, this need is met by the LANL preprint server (look here). If you post your article here at the same time you submit it for publication, it will be available for free to everyone in a variety of formats. Just make sure you submit to a journal which allows this.


      This allows everyone access to your work and you still get the "kudos" when the paper is formally accepted and published.

  3. Has been done by Caid+Raspa · · Score: 5, Informative
    Disclaimer: I have written three refereed papers to international science journals. Two more papers are in the writing phase. I am a Graduate Student, but I also have a 'real' job.

    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.