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

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.

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.