George Soros Funds Open-Publishing Software

blair1q writes "BBC has a story reporting that George Soros and his Open Society Institute are funding "open access" media for scientific publishing. These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide information to researchers whose institutions can't afford to subscribe to large numbers of overpriced periodicals. Part of the funding will go to improve the open-access enabling EPrints software, which is under GPL."

Comments

Re:Wonderful

[Daemonik]

Just because it's open doesn't mean that it is unedited.

Consider another open publishing project: Nupedia, the open encyclopedia. All the submissions are reviewed by the author's peers. The biggest advantage however, is that subsequent authors are free to quote from and add too the material without fear of a cadre of copyright attorneys descending upon their home.

Open sourcing scientific journals will greatly increase the dispersion of scientific information into the greater pool of human knowledge.

Good studies on journal costs

[TheMatt]

To let people know the costs of some of these journals, here are a couple of sites to look at.

First, a general overview of costs in the mid-90s (done in 2000, so just imagine how expensive they are now!) can be found here.

A more recent review of chemistry journals can be found here. It is amazing to think that some of these journals cost ~$4.50 a page (neuroscience journals are even more expensive!).

Re:Is 'science' ending? An opinion.

[aardvaark]

I don't think so. What you say has always been true. Companies try to hold on and patent the things they do, then other companies reverse engineer it when it comes out. Anything that has government funding however (read NSF), almost _must_ fascilitate data sharing and publication.

For instance, I am in seismology. My research group puts out arrays of seismometers in the western U.S. The data we obtain is only proprietary (even though we did _all_ the work) for a couple years. After that it is open to the world. If we haven't published yet, tough luck., and if we don't publish, don't count on another grant in the future. This is because we took NSF money to do it.