Slashdot Mirror
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."
"They say that researchers write and review papers for free, so the journals should not charge to read them."
/. get than Yahoo! Internet magazine or Wired?? I would imagine a lot more...
I find it interesting that areas other than programming are showing signs of the opensource movement. I have to wonder though, would it not be a cheaper endevour to combat established commercial publications with relevant, fresh, quailty content on a new website??
How many more readers does
Just my $.02
As a grad student, I would love for this happen...as long as standards don't fall the the wayside. If Soros could get free journals with peer review, I'd support it with every ounce of my body. My university pays up the nose for journals and every year I read about how some journals need to be cut to meet the budget.
In fact, I've often wondered why universities pay an outrageous institutional price for the journals, when an individual can pay a lower price (albeit still exorbitant).
This is one of the true monopolies I would love to see end.
Fortran programmer...oh yeah. Array math for life!
Dunno about you, but the last few major scientific releases have been first through a journal then to the world. Successful cloning, stem cell research, and most recently the artificial womb.
Right now, there's increasing pressure for scientists to close themselves off, mainly coming from their employers (companies).
What's happening to science is what happened to software. At first, the source was available, because the supplier didn't know if you could run the binaries and besides, you probably could help improve the code as well. Then, Ma Bell shut off the flow of source and caused the balkanization of Unices. After that, almost all software was binary for a particular platform.
Science started with open information sharing, and is perilously progressing towards a proprietarization of knowledge. Trade secrets are becoming more popular than patents because secrets are more protected. (Trade secrets are highly protected as long as no one else figures out how to do what you can do independantly, whereas patents are open to public inspection and expire. )
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Plus I think the that the point they make, saying: is quite valid. Didn't the NYTimes have to remove a bunch of content from their (paid subscription) database because the people who submitted the articles still had the copyrights, etc? I know those were editorial pieces, and that when you submit journal articles, you give up the copyright, (pretty sure about that part) but isn't the principle of the thing the same?
I really like this part : Thats music to my ears.
I'm going to take a stab that you are American here.
.... it's everything that's wrong with capatalism and globalisation!
If you lived in one of the countries shafted by Soros and his fellow currency speculators you may have a left rosy opinion. How many homes in the UK were re-possessed after our currency crashed in the early 90s and interest rates shot up for the next 5 years?
In fact your comments sicken me. It's rare that has happened on slashdot.
I'm sure the free software movement would generally be appalled by the support of someone like this
Actually he is far from an uncritical fan of capitalism. His latest books include 'the crisis of global capitalism'.
Soros was a student of Karl Popper. The Open Society institute is kind of a memorial to his tutor whose most important book was 'The Open Society and its Enemies', these were Plato, Hegel and Marx.
Above all what Soros is opposed to is any group of idealogues who believe they have absolute truth. So having made a fortune from capitalism he goes on to explain the many ways in which it falls short. It is pretty hard not to take notice of his critique of Randian 'free market mania' that infects the GOP. Soros has demonstrated empirically that he understands how markets work and how they fail.
It is also notable that Soros has scored his biggest market coups betting against right wing governments. In particular betting against John Majors attempt to keep the pound overvalued in the ERM.
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Come off it, George Soros almost singlehandedly pulled the UK out of recession by forcing an end to the policy of overvalued exchange rate + excessively high interest rates. It was only after the government was forced to abandon its exchange rate policy that the economy started to pick up again.
You might not like the idea of currency speculators making economic decisions, but the fact is that in practice they do a much better job than most governments.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The biggest problem I see with this proposal is that the creators of this effort have neglected to give the journals enough credit for the services they do provide: quality controll and topic selection.
A person who reads Journal of Academic Subject X does so partially because that journal has cultivated a reputation for quality in their field. Researchers are busy people, and they don't want to read every article by every crackpot out there. They want to keep current on the groundbreaking research and be aware of the new work that might apply to their own.
In other words, it's probably not enough to just 'get a critical mass' of work, especially if the critical mass is composed entirely of articles rejected for publication by journals. It's also not enough to just have a lot of information available - there must be some way of determining the quality of the work as well.
It seems to me what these guys really need, more than anything, is some sort of peer review process, similar to the moderation process here, that could help to filter out the bad stuff, make the truly groundbreaking work visible, and make sure that articles are categorized correctly. This would be an affordable way of providing the services that the editors of these journals normally provide while keeping the advantages that come with having a large electronic archive.
A large part of the problem with the established journals is that they have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and will not publish anything that may impact that.
For example, many branches of mathematics are fundamentally the same, but use different terminology. Any attempt to publish a paper that provides a dictionary to convert two branches is met with hostility from all sides, yet there are "researchers" who have their own private versions of such dictionaries and use them to translate other peoples work into different branches and call them their own. Furthermore, what they do is well known at the universities where they work.
Everyone in academia and at the industry that serves them is after dollars just like everyone else.
If these publications publish random pseudoscience then they will end up competing with the Weekly World News. If they publish real science, then they may make a difference.
>
> Obviously I am not the Ayn Rand fan I once was.
Not necessarily. I, too, respect Soros, both for his trading skills and for what he's decided to do with his money now that he's earned it.
But I'd think that even the hardest-core Randroid could appreciate what Soros is doing.
1) He made his money. It's his. It pleases him to do this with his money, and who is anyone else to say he ought to do otherwise?
2) The other simple argument: Soros values the recipients (scientists) of his generosity. It is appropriate for him (in the Randroid sense) to help them.
3) If it's productive virtue that buys self-respect and happiness, and Soros wants to see science done, then this is a way of producing more with his money than he could otherwise produce. He's got enough to satisfy his material needs (and the needs of those for whom he cares) for the rest of his life. Sure, he could probably make a few billion more, but those would be just bits in a database somewhere. Instead, he chooses to use it - to produce something of value (more scientists, by reducing the cost of "becoming a scientist"), and in return, has the satisfaction of knowing that the things (ideas, discoveries, theories, technologies) the scientists go on to build were things he (as a nonscientist) would never have been able to build himself.
If that isn't fair, mutually-beneficial trade, I don't know what is.
(Or to put it another way, producing demand is easy, but boring -- he could spend billions on toys like tourist trips to the Space Station, an OC-192 and 50" plasma display to every room in each of his houses, and he'd probably be bored after the orgy of spending was complete. But producing supply - new scientists to develop space hotels, OC-192s for $50 and 3D holographic displays - is hard. He's chosen to do the hard, but rewarding, thing.)