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!"

Comments

So What ?

[da5idnetlimit.com]

For years people had problem publishing.
Now they say they want to remove an editor from the chain...

Good, but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...

Maybe the Internet will help with a peer review system, but this asks for organisation and good practice...

Will Scientists be able to apply this instead of the usual bickering ?

Re:So What ?

[CaptainAlbert]

> but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...

True, but sometimes not true enough. :) When I was at uni (humble undergrad) I joined one of the many reading groups run by academic staff in their "spare" time. We would pick papers relevant to the work of various group members (students and staff alike), make sure everyone had the background information they needed, and spent an hour or so picking through recently published papers.

On maybe one occasion in three, we came to the conclusion that "this shouldn't have been published"; "This was clearly written up from a grant proposal"; "We did this last year and *we* got it to work", and so on.

On the other hand, if it weren't for "dodgy" journals, a lot of final-year student projects wouldn't find their way into conference proceedings - a really good morale booster for overworked, underpaid students!

I think they've done the right thing. Bringing the barriers to access down is a good thing. Hell, if they want free access with a perr-reviewed ratings system, they could always use Slashcode...

Re:So What ?

[TheMidget]

For years people had problem publishing.

The initiators of this movements were not mediocre scientist bickering because they couldn't get there papers published, but rather the whole community, who was fed up with having to feed a middle-man that was adding no value. And by middle-man, I don't mean the reviewers (who also worked pro bono...), but rahter the fat cat corporations that contracted out everything except collection to volunteers.

The new "free" (as in beer...) JMLR will also be peer-reviewed, so quality will still be ensured. The point is not to make a journal where every first year student can publish, the point is to cut costs and ensure free distribution of papers that are accepted by the reviewers.

Re:So What ?

[KahunaBurger]

Well, no, not really. The whole idea in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is that the people performing the editing are experts in the field (ie peers of the person/people submitting the article for publication), not employees of the company which publishes the journal.

There's no suggestion of doing away with peer review.

well, except that the opening blurb distinctly talks about a bunch of peer reviewers quiting. The implication that they are "the middleman" is obviously wrong if you apply outside knowlege to what's said, but not from a plain reading.

The article could have been far more clear about what the good thing about this is (putting pressure on the journal to provide free downloads through their resignations) instead of implying that lossing the peer review staff of a major journal is a good thing.

The final problem of course, is that peer review IS a middleman coming between scientists and their readers. It's a GOOD middleman for just about everyone involved in science education and advocacy, but similar review/endorsement plans (such as the WHO proposal for a approval based .health domain) have been lambasted here as "censorship". So the idea that /. is attacking the important process of peer review is not unprecedented.

Kahuna Burger

Online conferences too, not just journals...

[Ami Ganguli]

I worked on an online conference about this time last year with a couple of researchers. It was pretty cool actually. Two guys who worked at universities in different continents did most of the organization and I did the technical work. We put about thirty papers on the web site and set up a nice forum system for participants to discuss the papers. Think Slashdot, but instead of short blurbs there were long detailed articles complete with diagrams and photos, and the discussion was much more on-topic. Signal to noise was excellent. We ended up with about 300 "participants".

The interesting thing is that it could never have happened as a "physical" conference. The subject discussed (trypanosomes) affected mostly developing countries and the researchers wouldn't have been able to afford to fly from diverse parts of the world to present their work in person. And a physical conference could never be organized on a shoestring by three people living on different continents.

Online conferences aren't nearly as much fun as everybody getting together and partying for a weekend, but it's a great way to get researchers from around the world together in one virtual space for constructive discussion.

Peer Review Online

[under_score]

The internet/www is one of those really nifty technologies that changes the whole way of doing many things. Because the internet allows for incredible amounts of interactivity (not taken advantage of by most sites), peer review suddenly becomes much more "real". Traditional journals have a small number of peers who serve to review any given article, and constant discussion is not generally published.

The internet of course can completely change that where any peer can review any work. And why stop at scientific publishing? And why stop at publishing for that matter. Much published work serves an educational purpose as well as a documentary purpose.

So, here is a plug for my online educational community, Oomind. It allows anyone to publish, and to review, and to have that review reflected in an educational context. Basically, you can write a "courselet", and post it on Oomind. The courselet is initially given an evaluation by yourself, the author based on 10 attributes including practicality, information content, beauty and creativity among others. Once the courselet is on the system, others can also review it and the attributes have scores based on a weighted average of all the evaluations. The educational part comes in when you or others add quiz questions to your courselet. These questions are also weighted based on peer evaluations, and those weights determine how much credit one gets for the courselet when the question is answered correctly. Your educational credit is cumulative rather than percentage based. There are many other features to the system as well which create a democratic and more importantly meritocratic system.

If you are interested, you can check out: the main oomind site, the philosophy of oomind, and a general introduction to oomind.

It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, the Internet provides for the removal of the middle man. Specially on a highly coherent group such as scientists.

Plus, most scientific publishing houses charge premium for periodicals whose authors don't get much (or don't get paid at all).

Kudos for the scientists. I hope this becomes an epidemic.

Setup a peer review site like slashdot.

[MongooseCN]

Have everyone post their scientific journals, then other educated people can rate the journels. Why limit the peer review process to the opinions of a select group of people? And when people are selected into these groups, they are usually choosen because they have the same opinion as the rest of the people in the group. Then the journal published by that group becomes biased, which isn't very scientific.

There should be some kind of registration process so some 12 year old kiddy can't submit a journel on UFO study and get all his friends to rate it up. The registration won't stop that, but most kiddies won't bother going through a registration to screw with a website.

Giving up rights to your own work

[RavenDuck]

I'm a social scientist (criminologist), and while I'm not widely published, I've got a couple of papers out there. It's always seemed disturbing to me that you are required to sign away copyright to your own work to be published in any of the major jornals. You need to get permission from the publisher to even reproduce a section of your own work.

Academic journals have a curious role in modern world. They are incredibly expensive to subscribe to, receive all their content at no expense to themselves, and even the peer reviewing is usually on a volunteer basis. However the "publish or perish" attitude of many in academia ensures that they are able to continue making a killing.

One wonders how much longer these publishing companies are going to be able to get away with it, especially now when so many people are publishing themselves online first, and submitting them to journals later.

My idea for research publication...

[Masem]

Peer-review is very much necessary for research papers; there is a lot of 'junk' science that makes it way through the process and thus contributes little to the field at large (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).

I had an idea a few years ago, but no way to develop it further, was to create a large on-line research journal site with community moderation akin to Slashdot. That is, you would create your article (PDF format), post it to the site, and then allow anyone else to look at it. Others can then post commentary on it and given an overall rating to the article (However, these would not be anonymous; any comments you posted or rating given would be promenently displayed as to avoid abuse). In addition, there could be a time where you would post the article but only limited users of the site would be able to view or comment on it, thus leading to the initial peer-review of the article, allowing you to make changes and improvements in the paper based on these comments.

Obviously , there's a lot of mechanism details that would have been worked out, but I feel that a concerted effort to do this would improve the research in the academic community. Not only do you gain free distribution of the work to the mass public (or at least some minimal fee for running the site), the authors would retain their copyright on the article (as it is , most journal gain copyright for publishing it). Downside, of course, is a chicken-and-egg problem; you won't have promenent researchers using the resource until it had some reputation, and the resource wouldn't have reputation until promenent researchers would use it.

In a sense Censorship, in a sense Policement

[purduephotog]

But in a sense, not a bad thing.

I know that sounds all odd, but ... having watched my professors pull out articles that were being reviewed and RAG on the people that wrote them for stupid, stupid mistakes.... and very poor science to boot, I think that journals must be policed.

Now as for revenue streams, well, yeah. Vendors place ads. When I have to design a piece of equipment, I grab the latest journal and flip thru it for whatever I need. Those scientists may not need to worry about who makes their equipment, funded thru uni's and what not, but for people that actually do the designing, it's very useful

As for free download after a certain time period... Napster couldn't pull it off ;P Maybe this is one that the courts can decide (rightly) that ... even if it's published, the author can still require downloads as free.
*sigh* Knowledge is power... and it's for sale ;P

Scientific Publishing: Burst the Chains!

[Mentifex]

The sooner the old system is destroyed and all scientific publishing is moved on-line, the better, not just for human researchers but for the intelligent artificial minds emerging from http:// /projects/mind -- where several hundred Open Source AI projects are bypassing the antiquated, fossilized, mercenary money-grubbing anti-freedom mobsterality of extortionary confiscation of the entire acquisitions budget of every good research library.

Verbum sapienti et cognoscenti: If some distinguished Netizens feel that Mentifex AI memes have been hyped overmuch via Slashdot, Usenet, Salon, E2 etc., they may please be advised that the original Mentifex theory of mind submissions were rejected by Establishment journals operating under publish-or-perish peer review.

Then came the widespread availability of Internet access and the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Suddenly anyone anywhere could publish anything, including the long suppressed http://www./~mentifex AI memes for AI minds evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and superintelligence beyond any human IQ.

So let the Editorial Boards of all the mainstream scientific journals resign en masse and then re-establish themselves on-line in the manner and tradition of the Los Alamos archives for not just physics but all branches of modern science.

Re:finally..a matter of will

[hebertrich]

The reasoning is good.
Middle men are there to make money.
Same in audio/video.The companies that are there
to print the record and sell it make a fortune but the artist is comparatively not.
Middle men in the information age is a nuisance.
Many years ago i had in mind that the artists
should each have a comp a good connection and sell their stuff directly to the user.CD burners are meant to burn cd's /../
What would be better than have the user swipe
a card on his kb download the media and burn to cd directly ?
Goodbye middle men...
Some say im dreaming ..but the technology is
close at hand to enable this to be a reality.

Stop with the RIAA comparisons!

[Junks Jerzey]

This is _completely_ different. The RIAA represents for-profit businesses. Everyone is clamoring for music; it's a big commodity, a multi-billion dollar industry.

Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich. And for the most part the people who read them _like_ them. The simple problem is that someone takes months or more to write a paper, then that paper ends up in a journal that's only read by 100 people (e.g. The Journal of Southwestern Soil Science). _But_ if that paper were available on the web, then it would find many more readers, would be much easier to point colleagues at, and so on. Doing so, though, puts the reasearcher--in many eyes, anyway--right up there with high school students that start web sites for their pretend companies ("I'm the president, lead programmer, and web designer").

For the record, some journals ask for first print rights only, and the author is free to put his or her articles on the web aftwerward. There's not much to complain about there.

Here's a peer-reviewed Ecology E-Journal

[jcc]

Check this out: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/

They started publishing a few years back, instigated by a well-known ecologist (C. S. Holling) and sponsored at first by an NSF grant, if I'm not mistaken.

I should also say that there were, and are still good reasons for having traditional paper journals, such as permanent archiving, and also having a publishing house take care of all the details of printing and distribution, it frees the scientists to do more research.

With self-publication, whether in print or web pages, they have to divide their time, or pay someone else to do it. Of course this is becoming much less of a problem because of easier to use software and the Internet.

One huge difference with e-journals is that they can become much more widely available. With many print journals, only a few hundred or thousand copies are ever printed, they go to libraries and scientific association members. It takes time to get a hold of an article, and searching through abstracts on-line can reveal less about the article than searching through the full text, so you might miss information that is relavent to your work.

The system of having a journal retain copyright, I presume, has functioned as a cost-control mechanism, since if only a few hundred copies of a journal are printed, they are necessarily expensive, so the best way to ensure the per-issue price is kept down, and to make it worthwhile for the publishing house to keep a stock of reprints for those interested, was to give them a monopoly over the work. At least, that is a theory.

Anyway, another issue that maybe noone addressed here, is that you have to ensure that scietific papers are not altered for mischevious purposes and redistributed. That could cause chaos.

To be fair

[big.ears]

To be fair, although there is a lot to academic publishing that is from a different era, and the copyright assignment issues really anger me, there is also a lot of infrastructure that a professionally published journal provides. I often wonder how some of the more poorly-subscribed-to journals can afford to make any money, given the costs involved. For instance, there are a lot of menial costs, such as postage. An editor who receives even 50 articles a year will have to mail out hundreds of manuscripts, accept/reject letters, etc. This is often done by administrative assistants or secretaries whose salary is supplemented by the journal. Of course, a lot of these costs could be reduced by dealing totally with electronic copies, but a reviewer likes to hold a paper in hand, and so the burden of printing would be moved from the author to the reviewer--who is volunteering.

Then, once everything has made it through the review process, the costs have just begun. Have you ever looked at a copy-edited manuscript? Even a very meticulous author will have their manuscript returned with red marks everywhere. This is an incredibly boring job that requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of time--one that you can't get people to volunteer for. A do-it-yourself for-free journal will consequently suffer from misspellings, grammatical errors, incoherent styles, etc. Then there are legal issues. For example, every time you publish a figure or data that was published elsewhere, you need to get permission in written form. Publishing companies allow this to happen, but they pay lawyers and others to make sure everything is legal and kosher.

So, if you grant me that there are costs incurred, then you have to have accountants and bookkeepers--trained and trustworthy ones who won't abscond with the funds or "lose" them, as often happens in volunteer organizations who handle their own money. And someone to coordinate sales (to libraries and individuals). There are a lot of important, detailed things the publishers do, which can not be easily replaced by volunteers.

I have a feeling that anyone who decides to create a high-quality refereed journal will soon find that they are doing many of the same things a publishing company does, which in the long run is bad for academics, because the scientests/authors are wasting their time on administration instead of extending knowledge. The APA publishes their own journals, and they are no better (and in many ways worse) than the for-profit publishing companies. They won't even publish .pdfs of articles--everything is in crappy .html

no cost reduction yet

[peter303]

I have been involved with e-publishing efforts of several professional societies. The result is so far is e-journals cost almost as much as their paper counterparts because it is not cheap to properly maintain web servers, both hardware and labor costs. In fact, the cost increase if one tries to maintain a dual web & print presence. Some societies are dividing the chores- heavy duty papers in print and lightweight news and proceedings abstracts in electrons.

If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost. For examples, journal subscriptions for $10 a year instead of $100s; low-cost web meetings instead of thousand dollar conventions. But we've seen little of this. Its not like the entire science world is in the chains of an evil publishing conspiracy. Almost everyone would like to see the cost of science cut, so they could focus on doing science.

A positive aspect of electronic communications seems to speed up the time it takes to get to print, dropping many of the former snailmail stages. Also, e-publishing has broadened the audience somewhat to students and third world scientists who wouldn't have as easy access otherwise.