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!"
> Good, but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...
:-)
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.
> Will Scientists be able to apply this instead of the usual bickering ?
No, they'll still bicker...
-Andy
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
... 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.
Maybe the subscription fees currently being paid to the dead-tree publishers would help?
Also, a fat pipe may cost you, but most academic institutions already have them, and anyway how fat a pipe do you need to host a website whose content is of real interest to at most a few thousand people worldwide? We're not talking google (or even slashdot) here.
-Andy
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
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.
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.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
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.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
...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'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.
- Published papers are available virtually forever. Go down to the Bodleian library and book out articles published by Michael Faraday or Robert Hook. Whatever they do here has got have the same sort of permanence.
- Remember all those tapes that NASA has that they don't have the drives for anymore, or don't know the format? Paper doesn't have that sort of problem. Again, they need to ensure that whatever they produce can be moved on to whatever the current technology is
Other than that I think it is an excellent idea. I hope it scares the shit out of whatever the journal publishing equivalent of the RIAA is.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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The new open journal, JMLR that replaced the old one is a great solution to the problem. However, I'm dismayed to find that they publish using proprietary formats. Namely PDF and Postscript. Wouldn't it, thus, cost money to save to those formats? I think they should use open standards *only*. Why not use LaTex or just plain old HTML 4? This would better allow scientists from developing countries to publish their work rather than wasting precious money buying licenses of Adobe Acrobat. It seems they are fighting closed proprietary standards in the first place and should not be supporting them.
Furthermore, I could actually read the articles much easier than saving to a file and launching a bloated Adobe application or, gasp, use that annoying PDF plug-in that usually crashes my browser.
What I don't understand about all of this is why are there so few people who can see 'the big picture', including our law makers, businessmen and leaders.
.com boom and bust as demonstrating that the internet isn't as important as was generally thought, because they assumed that what would happen is just a variation on what went before. They don't understand that the internet is causing fundamental changes to the way the world works.
Many people stupidly saw the
The world now has a new a new set of rules which over the coming decades are going to completely change the business landscape. Record companies - which currently make money by duplicating, distributing and promoting physical manifestations of music - are going to die, because duplicating, distributing and promoting music can be done at virtually zero cost by anyone now.
Software companies that create and charge high prices for infrastructure and very widely used software are going to die out because their software is so widely used that it will make more sense for their bigger customers (companies and governments) to contribute programming time to open projects than to pay for products from a single company.
General travel agents are going to die out because they are middle men that will serve no useful purpose in the future. Ditto with publishers of scientific journals.
Unfortunately some of our law makers seem to think this natural progression is unjust and are creating laws to restrict or outlaw the technology. There is historic president for this type of response - the Luddites, who smashed machinery during the industrial revolution because it threatened their professions. Hundreds of business types and professions died as a result of the industrial revolution. The same will happen over the coming decades of the Internet revolution.
Unfortunately our leaders and lawmakers, under the influence of the threatened professions, are acting like Luddites in a very literal sense.
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.
all your paper are belong to us.
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.
But a bunch of creationist adults will devote 5 hours a day every day to doing just that, but with papers sufficiently well written that they seem scientific to a casual reader. And all the sudden, you have a bunch of "peer reviewed" highly rated anti evolution creationist BS* sitting on a respected journals lap. NO WAY!
And don't even tell me that the negitive ratings from all the good scientists will ballance it out. Even if they suspect its BS, a decent scientist will not moderate something down until she has taken the time to look it over and check the methodology to make sure she isn't rejecting it out of hand because she has tons of experience that the end result has to be wrong. As for "peer reviewers are biased against some conclusions", sure you get biased after the 20th time the same conclusion turns out to be supported by sloppy work, wishful thinking and all out lies, but you still check the methodology to see which one it was this time.
But the point is that honest work takes longer than lies. Debunking lies takes more time and effort than presenting them. Moderating down conclusions that contridict your holy book takes less time than the propperly designed research it took to come to them. And the people who care the most about spreading lies are often devoting most of their lives to it, while the people most motivated and qualified to correct those lies are doing other possitive research and don't have the luxury of playing wack-a-mole with the latest psuedoscientific voodoo all day.
Nutshell: TRUTH IS HARDER. In an open marketplace of ideas managed by libertarian principles and voted on democratically, the truth will get its ass kicked. I'm sorry that we don't live in that perfect world where "the solution to bad information is good information, not supression" or "the truth will out" or any of those other nice thoughts with no basis in reality. Really sorry.
*and just to not pick only on the biggest target, lets not forget perpetual motion, psychic healing, ESP, alien visitation, racial infer/super-iority, gender work from both sides of the fence, conspiracy theories, power lines cause cancer, soil theory, homeopathy, dowsing, ok just put "Flim Flam" table of contents here....
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
> It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small.
If I don't want to buy new CDs (especially copy protected ones) I can still listen to live music, music recorded by my friends, second hand records, the radio, CDs I already own, etc..
Doing science that way doesn't work.
rant
Uh, I think folks are missing some fundamental points. The Scientific Method completely negates any need for Peer Review.
[flame on]its hard to "miss" a point thats completely wrong, now isn't it. [flame off]
The point of peer review is to confirm that the scientific method was actually followed. Anyone can say that their methodology was sound, and some of them will lie. SM on an honor system is pretty well as useless as no SM.
Hacking academia is not entirely unknown to happen, even *with* peer review...
And people dying in fires is not unknown even with fire departments. Therefore fire depatrments are bad/unneccassary. Think about it.
Peer review is totally neccassary, unless you want to push voodoo science. Then its bad.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
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.
Tommi Jaakkola
Michael Jordan
Leslie Kaelbling
Returning to the NBA and striking a blow for academic research at the same time. Way to go, MJ!
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
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.
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
An illustration...
Step 1) Come up with nifty idea
Step 2) Decide whether you want to do it yourself, or hive it off to a phd student [see 2i].
Step 2i) Apply to department for a phd student, hoping that your prior publishing record is strong enough to secure the funding for such from the department, dependent on the number of papers and the ammount of research funding you bring in, department infighting and so forth.
Step 3) Write a Proposal to the relevant Research Council/Charity/etc. There a commitee of experts in that field decide on your worth, the idea's worth, whether it conflicts with how they want to help push forward their particular field, whether they got out of bed from the wrongside, whether you've pissed them off in the past.
Step 3i) Get the funding! Yay! Now try to keep your department from getting their fingers on it.
Step 3ii) Fail to secure funding, back to 1 and take step further towards being pushed towards teaching, away from the stars of the department who have a light/nonexistant load and spend all their time researching.
Step 4 Do the work, avoid any fellows ripping it off (and that includes your superrvisor if you're a phd student). Many long repetative and perhaps futile days ahead.
Step 5) Poster/Conference time. Yay! an opportunity to meet up with your peers and consume a variety of toxic to edible food stuffs with them. Incidentally an opportunity to listen to others talk about their research, hopefully being selected yourself to give a talk or a poster.
Step 6) The results look good, hopefully you thought about their potential analysis before you started actual experiments, chat to fellows in department about such, hoiping the head of department will recognise your potential brilliance and renew your short term contract.
Step 7)Write it all up. This may be a combination of work of a couple of your fellows whom you've spent the last three years or so working very closely with: decide who gets the top billing, primary authorship, oh and yeah you'll have to tack on your head of department/supervisor even if they didnt lift a finger to help.
Step 8)Choose which journal you would like to try and get published in. In the world of academia such are much more presdigious than others, on some weird relative scale worth more points if it were to publish in, are the heights of Nature for you? Perhaps a more specialist journal, or something really obscure (oh well)?
Step 9)Send of your paper to the editor of that journal, along with the fee for such. He then flicks briefly with your paper and decides whether its worth his time, whether its suitable for his journal. If so he selects a couple of people whom are friends/experts in the field/owes a favour too and sends of a copy of your paper to them.
Step 10)Your paper is peer reviewed, by at this time by a small number (1-3) hopefully knowledgeable, impartial anonymous experts in the field poor over your work, looking for any flaws or areas which need to be explored further. Hopefully they're not too red pen happy! Now choose either 10i, 10ii, or 10iii
Step10i) Yay! Your paper is excepted without question. This is the buzz the reason your spent months crouched over hazardous/smelly/expensive chemicals/creatures/equipment for! Time to break out the champaign. Recieve a pat on the head from the Head of Department and take a step towards dropping your teaching load! Woot! Procede to 11
Step 10ii)Erk, red pen, flaws in your work! Hopefully it just means you need to reanalyse something, change a graph, though you may have to go back and do some more research. Resubmit to the editor once you are done: goto 9
Step 10iii)Paper rejected, try an less popular journal: goto 9 or break out the shedder.
Step 11)Time to cough up the goods and pay the editor per page, graph and so forth to include your paper in their journal! Order some reprints (at your expense) so if some freeloaders, I mean fellow scientists write to you directly you can send them a copy of your paper directly and something to pin to the board outside your office, a talisman against the damoclean sword of dismissal (we're reorganising the department... yes thankyou for your 40 years working for us... sod off now, clear your office by Monday...)
Step 12) Presuming you've got your paper in a journal your university has payed (a lot!) to subscribe to, bask in the glow of you work being perused by your fellows and students in the library reading room.
Step 13) Other researchers read you paper, muse on it, write letters to the editors pointing out potential flaws, embark upon their own reasearch to either demonstrate the flaws in your hypothesis, or push the field you've opened up a little futher. This is the gist of peer review. Goto 1
A summary of the problem:
Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
Fun-fun.
troodon.net
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.
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.
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
The whole problem is a simple economic problem. In the old days communicating peer reviewed papers to colleagues involved getting a printed copy to them. It was not more than logical to use the services of publishers to take care of the logistics and naturally they were in it for the money. In addition the publisher needed copyright in order to be allowed to print.
:-).
Nowadays there is an alternative means of getting the scientific content distributed: the internet. Many scientists have already discovered the internet as a means of distributing and obtaining papers. I can't remember the last time I actually had to go to a library to look up a paper. The internet totally eliminates the need for a publisher and could potentially greatly reduce the cost involved with publishing articles without affecting the level of quality of peer review in any way. In addition the internet provides additional possibilities in the form of for example moderated forums, mailinglists etc.
Unfortunately the publishers have built up an enormous power and are very reluctant to release it. Scientific journals are very profitable since they require a minimum of investment on their site and they have a small but loyal audience who are willing to pay relatively large amounts for journals. However over the past few years there has been a pressure to move to an internet based distribution of papers and journals. Despite this publishers still receive enormous amounts of subscription fees. At our university department, the library sucks up obscene amounts of our budget for online subscriptions and regular subscriptions. All this money (mostly coming from our government) flows to the publishers who add little or no value to the scientific product since they completely rely on external input (voluntary peer review, editing and academic authorship).
Most journals of significance in my field are either associated with ACM or IEEE, both of which are non profit organizations, both of which are charging significant amounts of money for membership and access to papers. A step forward would be if these two organization would abandon the publishing process and focus on internet publishing only. If those two organizations set the necessary steps, the rest would have to follow. As an author who has contributed to several IEEE conferences and who has even been a IEEE member (I have resigned because of the outrageous lack of value added by a membership) I would very much like to see this happen. After all they are supposed to represent our interests rather than work against us.
Basically I would like to see two things:
- Authors should retain copyright over their articles. The arrangement proposed for the ML journal seems reasonable, perhaps some GNU like legal document could be created to formalize it.
- Papers should be available and searchable at no cost. Currently I have to pay to be able to be able to download my own articles from the IEEE. I find that offensive (luckily I have copies on my homepage
In addition I would also like to see some innovations:
- XML based structure for papers to enhance searching.
- Addition of the before mentioned forums.
- distributed storage of content ala freenet.
If these requirements are met (even minus the innovations), I'll gladly renew my IEEE subscription and sign up for the ACM as well. I'm fully confident that with the logistics of the physical publishing process eliminated the membership fees can be reduced significantly. Alternatively this money can be used to set up more conferences and finance promising researchers.
However, currently I feel that neither of these organizations are working in my interests.
Jilles
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
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.
As a student, how is it affordable for me to pay $100-200 per year per journal for online access? That's $1200-2400 per year I'd have to pay for the journals I'd like to have access to. For a yearly salary of $17,000 (pre-tax), I don't think I'd be able to spend that. Moreover, the library cannot provide full online access for a few journals because, I know for a fact, that the library pays more per person to provide online access than if the person went out himself/herself and subscribed. How is this possible? Wouldn't one think that "buying in bulk" would save the library money?
What I find even more annoying is that because publishers find that this business is so lucrative, each and everyone of them are enacting their own standard of distribution and dissemination online--e.g. Elsevier Science, BioMedNet, CatchWord, Lippincott (just to name a few of the large ones). Instead of agreeing on one good standard of dissemination (i.e. PubMedCentral), they're all broken up and if I wanted access to each publisher's site, that's an entirely different login name and password. Additionally, some publishers are notorious for not providing access to individual journals--access can only be provided via the university library at outrageous costs. Either way I'm SOL, because for certain journals, my library cannot provide access, really just because of the cost.
So from my perspective as a graduate student trying to learn as much as possible, how does the current publishing system benefit science? This is how I see the current University earning and spending cycle: the huge budget that our library carries comes from the university; the university generates a large proportion of its revenue via licenses of its intellectual property (some only comes from the state, even though it's a state university); the intellectual property (IP) of the University comes from it's staff of scientists which do go all the way down the hierarchy to and includes their slaves, the graduate students; IP can only be generated and formulated by the scientist via a fusion of past knowledge and literature provided by the library. Imagine cutting the time in this cycle by provided faster, more consistent, cheaper access to the literature.
The current publishing system is stifling my progress, when it needs not to be. Publishers cannot be dinosaurs of the past, the privatization of their dissemination model is not a good example of how useful they can be, especially when one takes into account the efficiency of training new scientists.
Linux at home