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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.
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.
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.Why limit the peer review process to the opinions of a select group of people?
/. -- very often comments are moderated up as "insightful" or "informative" even though the comments are actually *completely wrong*.
Because there's a lot of idiots in the world.
The purpose of peer review isn't so much to decide if results are interesting enough to be worth publishing; the purpose of peer review is mainly to decide if results are *correct* enough to be worth publishing. For an average paper in a major scientific journal, there might only be a few dozen people in the world who are qualified to make that judgement. Fortunately, the journal editors know who does what research, and thus the journal editors can send papers to the right reviewers.
If you open up peer review to the masses, you'll have people "moderating up" papers because "they look interesting", even if the papers are complete BS -- because most people can't tell the difference between a scientific paper and BS. We see the same thing on
At an absolute minimum, peer review should be restricted to people who have published papers in related fields; ideally, it should be restricted to people who have published several major papers in related fields... which is exactly the status quo of peer-reviewed journals.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
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.
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."