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

Wonderful

[Toby Truman]

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.

Sort of like how Slashdot competes with the quasi-monopolies held by the magazine industry in order to provide information to geeks who can't afford to buy magazines that check their facts, etc. :-)

Scientific journals serve a purpose, despite the rants by frustrated pseudoscientists who can't get their work published. Though the system may not work perfectly, at least they make some attempt to review articles and weed out the crap. Words like "free" and "open" and "no censorship" are not necessarily good for science, because it really just means "hey! we'll publish your manifestoes on how the world *really* works, even if those self-proclaimed scientist types keep telling you to talk to a psychologist..."

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.

Re:Wonderful

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Scientific journals serve a purpose, despite the rants by frustrated pseudoscientists who can't get their work published. Though the system may not work perfectly, at least they make some attempt to review articles and weed out the crap. Words like "free" and "open" and "no censorship" are not necessarily good for science, because it really just means "hey! we'll publish your manifestoes on how the world *really* works, even if those self-proclaimed scientist types keep telling you to talk to a psychologist..."

You've obviously never published anything in a scientific journal, or you wouldn't equate "costs several thousand dollars for a year's worth (four) issues" with "checks their facts."

The economy of the situation is that you as the author typically pays the journal to have your work published. This is ostensibly to cover the cost of printing/typesetting at about $20 to $50 per page. The journal charges exhorbitant amounts for a subscription, and the editors and reviewers typically work for free. (Well, in practice that often means that their PhD students work for free.

The only one making any money out of this (and in some cases it's serious money) is the publisher (Springer Verlag is notorious in this regard.)

And that's only when it works the way it's supposed to. In the field of biology for example, there's been a recent outcry about the reviewers actually stealing results and publishing them as their own, from papers they were set to review. It's gotten to the point where papers submittet will be intentionally falsified, to be able to track who's trying to steal what research from whom.

About the only silver lining is that they (at least ACM and IEEE, don't know about Springer) even though they have you sign over the copyright, still let you publish on your own, i.e. via the web. And let me tell you that they'd have a real revolution on their hands if they didn't.

That's why there is growing pressure to revolutionise the system of academic publishing. No-one's talking about doing away with peer-review. It's not like we haven't noticed that no-one doing the actual work isn't getting paid by the publisher anyway! We might as well just publish electronically and be done with the middle man.

If there is peer review, I'm for it

[TheMatt]

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.

Is 'science' ending? An opinion.

[d.valued]

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. )

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.

Here's what they should do ...

[jspey]

First, reviewing or editting an article for a journal should get you a free copy of a similiarly priced journal. Often scientists review articles that are not in their field of expertise in order to maintain impartiality, so getting a copy of the journal that the article you reviewed is in isn't always worthwhile.

Second, the "Open Access" movement should organize it's own journals. These journals could be formed at any tiem for free by anyone. The journal would mainly consist of a review board that reviews articles. If the review board considers an article to be of a high enough quality and within a certain subject area then the review board can mark the article as being "included" in said journal. This way, while anyone can still publish a paper by uploading it or whatever, people can filter searches by particular journals, giving them a quick way to weed out lots of crap.

For those of you who are wondering about who pays the review board for their time have stumbled onto the problem that faces the open access movement. You need a lot of very smart people to review enough papers to make up good journals, and those very smart people quite often have better things to do with their time.

Mr. Spey

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!).

The credit problem

[Zeinfeld]

The problem is that the scientific litterature has become more of a performance index for academics than a useful information resource. To get tenure you have to achieve a certain number of publication units in prestigeous journals. To get grants you need the same, publication rates are used by most government bodies to measure research output.

Problem is that number of publications says nothing about quality.

I have not read a journal publication in the journal for at least five years. I generally read articles as pre-publication preprints or from the author's web site. If the only publication is in dead tree form it might as well not exist in my field.

The problem that online journals have faced is that it takes some time for an online journal to establish prestige and hence attract the type of publication that generates prestige.

Another problem has been that the HTML browser folk were never interested in implementing the HTML math markup which has left scientific publication to pdf form which is pretty useless as a dialogue medium. I can't cut and paste and equation from pdf to mathematica as MathML would allow.

What I would like to see is the rise of different modes of academic publishing that take advantage of the electronic mode. I would like to see enterprises that are structured in the manner of a dictionary or encyclopeadia, providing a systematic and structured description of the state of the art in a particular field as a whole.

professional society must buy into it

[peter303]

One professional society I belong to had a break-away journal promising "all the efficiencies of modern technology"- cheap, quick, etc. However, they never got a critical mass of scientists to submit articles. There's a catch-22 problem: if you dont have a quality body of people submitting articles you dont have a quality journal; if you dont have a quality journal you dont have people submitting articles. The journal failed after a couple years due to lack of quaity submissions.

Its not like people haven't thought of cheap web publishing before. Many thought they could start their own maverick journals for "almost nothing" on the web. But the human intertia of buy-in can be tremendous.

Re:Putting wealth to good use

[Zeinfeld]

Y'know, this guy is a preeminent capitalist. He made his billions (mostly without any moral ambiguities) and has gone on to change the world in positive ways. His generosity and nobility are prime examples of why the "society benefits from selfishness" is such a load of crapola. Soros did it for himself, now he's doing it for others. *That* is a capitalist, my friends.

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.

Could /. help?

[FleshMuppet]

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.

Re:Cool... Can he do it for music?

[voinageo]

Don't even think about Soros not making profits. He fucked a lot of people in Estern Europe with his schemes. In Romania for ex. he created several non profit ISPs to offer Internet connection to school. After several years he was obliged to transform them in companies because it was proved that in fact they were registered as nonprofit only not to pay taxes.

Re:Putting wealth to good use

[Tackhead]

> Y'know, this guy is a preeminent capitalist. He made his billions (mostly without any moral ambiguities) and has gone on to change the world in positive ways. His generosity and nobility are prime examples of why the "society benefits from selfishness" is such a load of crapola. Soros did it for himself, now he's doing it for others. *That* is a capitalist, my friends.
>
> 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.)

EPrints.org GPL Software

[elseware]

In a surprising "coincidence" version 2.0 of the eprints archive software has just been released by us monkeys at the University of Southampton working for Stevan Harnad (who proposed self archiving).

The software is pretty generic, it does research papers by default but can be configured *lots*. And it's designed to add your own scripts and stuff (perl).

At one end of the spectrum (what it's funded to do) it generates archives of research papers, although you could practically implement mp3.com with it (and a huge server or two).

Links of interest:

EPrints Home: http://www.eprints.org/

Demo Archive: http://demoprints.eprints.org/

Soros' Legacy

[raduga]

Quite a pretty puzzle here. There's wealth, and there's mega-wealth, and then you have shadowy god-money folk- suchlike Gates, Carnegie and Soros. Most people who reach the super-mega level get there by similar processes; they discover some unexploited con, and exploit it for all its worth, and get lucky repeatedly (early on) and then proceed to exploit, strangle and swarm over their competitors. Soros arguably used some of the classic techniques of power to get there, but where he got is another matter entirely. In their old, febrile age, moguls like Carnegie and Rockefeller unleashed gobs of money on establishing charities and endowments to assure that their name is remembered for something other than ugly, ugly thuggery. Bill is starting to do some of the same, though at this stage hardly anyone is paying attention.

What makes Soros different, how he stands aside from the other giants is in his thoughtful, abstract approach to the mechanisms of profit, and the rise and fall of economies.

His "public works" have taken place throughout his career, not merely as an afterthought. He appears to be quite intelligent, and seems to surround himself with intelligent, critical advisors. Most of his oddball adventures and forays in Europe have been profitable, or at least, had the intention of bringing back some compensation, but there seems to be a broader plan at work.

A naive western observer might see the Hand of Soros offering charity and kindness to a world that desperately needs his help. The natives who've endured his schemes probably see him as a standard-model Ugly American, his interference in their culture and economies don't seem to be quite as welcome as advertised. He appears to regret (sincerely?) the harm he's caused, but his answer seems to be... try new schemes. He quite baldly treats Economics as an Experimental and not a Theoretical science. He seems to take the broad perspective, in his field, that a Machievelli took in the realm of Renaissance politics, though he's had far more success.

I suspect history will look on him with more interest than his contemporaries do; he's one of the most influential single humans on Earth today, but tries to work stealthily and quietly. Whether they will approve or disapprove... ultimately depends on who gets to write those histories.

Re:Soros' Legacy

[DodgyGeezer]

Isn't he the guy whose predictions and currency speculations forced the Pound Sterling and the Italian Lira out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, at great expense to those and several other countries?

More Soros funded open source projects

[phitar]

In connection to this article, Soros also funds media oriented projects.

Trying to follow the links can be tedious, but the structure is interesting (snippets cut and pasted from the various websites).

George Soros funds a network of foundations. Among them, Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) assists independent news organizations working in difficult economic and political climates. Of which Center for Advanced Media-Prague (C@MP) has been bringing new-media concepts and solutions to independent news organizations worldwide since 1998

Camp is developing and diffusing cost-effective, open-source solutions to independent media through its CAMPWARE initiative. Which brings us to another open source ongoing development project: CAMPSITE, an automated web-publishing environment for news media.

/philippe