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. )

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.

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.