Slashdot Mirror
Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web
bhoman writes "The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) has an article today about Stanford biochemist Patrick O. Brown, who helped develop low-cost DNA microarrays for gene research. He is seeking $20M to start a foundation that would fund peer-review of research papers and then make them available for free over the web, thereby avoiding the high-cost of subscriptions common in existing research publications. Predictably, some publishers seem to be warning that their publishing model is hard to improve upon.
The article mentions that a previous effort by Brown and others, The Public Library of Science garnered the signatures of 30,000 supporters, but then implies that it basically failed, suggesting that academics need the journals more than vice versa.
Sounds like Brown's idea is exactly what the web is made for."
Good idea, but the article says it all:
"It's publish or perish," Stern said. "As long as we have promotion and tenure tied to publishing, change won't work."
sadly.
That would have been great.
http://citeseer.nk.nec.com/
Papers are linked by citations, as well as similarity based on content. Much citations can be considered as good paper.
Yes!! I heard many years ago about efforts to replace the completely broken journal/subscription of today with a peer-review/web-of-trust. Problem is, there's a market of sci. journals for a reason! Scientific excellence became a screwed notion immediately after the WWII years, when the Iron Courtain broke in two (reasonably equal halves) the older web of trust. Scientific excellence has now to be quantitatively defined, by number of articles published, especially. This is very wrong, of course.
:-/
Thus, we first need to change our perception of scientific excellence and _then_ put in place a peer-review mechanism. And the new perceptions needs a peer-review mechanism in order to be reformed properly. Hen or egg?
The journal publishers provide nothing more than a peer-mating service and copyediting.
The question isn't whether that can be done more efficiently in electronic form, because clearly it's a slam-dunk economization.
The question is whether it can be done at a total cost lower than one at which the journal publishers can afford to compete. Their marginal costs are minimal, as their capital and organization are already in place. All they need to do is reduce their profits to non-greedhead levels. If they're forced to eliminate the hardcopy publications, that's probably a minimal net cost, too. The tax benefits of the writedowns would pay for the capital expansion of the new network and server capacity.
I don't know what their margins are now. A few bucks per issue? Half?
While most of us would love to receive Phys Rev Lett A for $3 a month, I don't think it'll happen whether or not it's on the net. The demand just doesn't exceed the supply.
--Blair
"Well, I would love it."
Yeah, I can see how that model is about as close to perfect as it could be.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Publication is more than just printing edited and reviewed summaries of research; which publication accepts and publishes your draft plays a big part in the respectability and visibility of your research, and thus the respectability and visibility of your career. While publishing on the web probably will have a great effect on letting anybody who wants to publish low-cost do so, by the very "everyone can do it" nature of it, many researchers, I imagine, will only publish their very best work in currently respected paper journals. Some may not publish on the web at all.
I will probably get modded down for proposing this, but it seems to me that the notion of "peer review" for academic research has no longer ceased to be of much use, but now may actually act as a disincentive to innovation and discover in academia.
The peer review system dates back to the turn of the century, when leftist ideals based on serving the greatest "public good" enjoyed a surge in popularity. The theory was that all of mankind should be able to offer suggestions and reap the rewards of any research done in university and business contexts. And, for quite some time, it worked as planned. As long as scientists were chosen (and to a degree self-selected) for their devotion to public wellbeing, peer review created a kind of egalitarian pool of discovery and invention.
These days, however, most, if not all research, is performed with profit as a significant motivation. This isn't worse, but it is different. In today's modern age, peer review simply serves to weaken the profit potential of any given line of inquiry. So researchers hesitate to introduce their most promising results to the public. As a result, scientific journals tend to be increasingly filled with uninteresting and dead-end research. In the worst case, good research (that would benefit society as a whole as well as generating profit) is passed by altogether, because no one wants to break his or her back on something that won't pay off, thanks to peer review.
Today's capitalist economy has no place for peer review. Hopefully, we can leave it behind with labor unions, as a good idea, necessary and beneficial at its inception, that has outlived its useful lifetime. It is an anachronism, and should be met with disdain by the research community.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Researchers have been clamoring for this since at least 1995.
It's about time. Entire libraries should be digitized and and available to all by now - the least we can do is make lifesaving biomedical technology available without a torturous middleman content industry.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
I agree, that the journal publishers provide nothing more than a peer-mating service and copyediting.
That's why I find it a scandal that they charge that much for a copy. It is not, that they actually have pay to much for, because AFAIK peer-review is done for the fame alone. As I see it, they get copyright on articles, written by tax-funded researchers... and earn quite well on it.
I would be very much on favour for kind of a GPL for research papers. Anyone knows about such tendencies?
(By the way: I always found this link quite useful)
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Not that Geometry and Topology is the only one, but this is a very good example.
Why is he asking for $20 million dollars for free research....Distribution may be free on the web but not the creation of the information
Well what the heck were you expecting them to say? "Oh, do please go ahead, because we're sure this is all for the good of science and mankind?"
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
They will, anyway have limited funding for the reviews and can never cover everything, so why not target it based on demand. Or...is this how it works already? :)
Speaking as someone who just submitted an article to Science for review, I would have to say the primary hurdle that Brown will have to overcome is pedigree. Journals like Science and Nature have a history and an editorial board that ensure a rigorous review process that ultimately presents the best of the best and the most significant science to the scientific community. Publication of ones work in journals of this caliber are important to your career, and given their wide distribution can be critical in obtaining funding.
The implications of this are far more than simple "peer mating" and "copy editing" as one other poster suggested. Granted, there is nothing that can keep an online journal from eventually becoming the place to publish, but it will take time and a commitment to excellence that will have to be maintained for scientists to become comfortable in submitting their hard earned results to. Publication of observational science will not cut it. The implication of this is that since most scientists view Science and Nature (among a select few) as the pre-eminent journals, they will be concerned about submitting the most significant scientific results to a new online journal. Typically from what I have seen, when one gets rejected from the more prestigious journals, you start moving down your ladder of preference until somebody accepts your article. Of course results targeted for specific journals with a readership that would be interested in your results always matters and this is where online journals stand the best chance of making it as opposed to large pre-eminent general interest scientific journals such as Science and Nature.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The whole point behind science, its entire reason to exist, is to provide us with a predictive explanation of the world around us. It needs the "many eyes" approach more than just about any other human endeavor, because the entire point is to model the real world and you can't do that without a lot of observation.
Of course, science has also proven to be useful, and that's been something of an anathema to it. The reason is that things which are useful are things which people (corporations in particular) want to capitalize on in an exclusive way. It seems to me that there was a time when everyone recognized the truth that public disclosure and widespread collaboration is necessary for science to advance.
That no longer seems to be the case from where I sit. Today, corporations fund a great deal of research at the university level, and there is a great deal of pressure from both corporations and from the universities themselves to keep ongoing research under wraps as much as possible, in order to maximize the chances not just of publishing but also of getting patents on the results (which are probably then transferred to the corporations that funded the research).
Those people in the scientific community that I've spoken to believe, to a man, in collaboration with their peers in order to further science. They're held up by the people that fund their research.
How does this relate to publishing on the web? Well, publishing on the web removes a lot of the exclusivity that currently exists, so there will naturally be opposition to it from those who benefit from the control they have over scientific publishing right now. And my cynical mind tells me that there's a good chance that those who fund research exert an additional level of control through the current publishers (it would make sense, right?). It's my hope that research over the web will help in reducing the amount of exclusivity that seems to exist currently in the scientific community. But then, that's probably wishful thinking.
As long as that level of exclusivity exists, our understanding of the universe won't advance as quickly as it might otherwise. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just pining for better days that have never existed. But if there's even a chance that publishing on the web will improve the amount of collaboration and peer review, I think it's worth doing.
But this proposal doesn't do much to help with that, because it still concentrates the power of peer review and publishing into the hands of a few. What prevents researchers from collaborating with each other, getting peer review from each other, and publishing on the web directly, instead of going through middlemen like they do now? Seems to me that they're being held up by those that fund the research. And unfortunately, this proposal wouldn't change that.
Yes, it's a step in the right direction, and the current scientific publishers need some competition. But it shouldn't be seen as the end goal.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
This is also a problem with software-engineering papers. Probably one of the reasons for the lack of real software-engineering skills among programmers is the fact that, unlike coding tutorials which can be found en masse and for free on the net, most of the seminal SE papers are not freely available. They are only available against payment. Most self-teaching programmers are not able/willing to pay that much. Additionally many seminal SE papers from the 70s and 80s are not available on the net at all. In order to read them you will have to have access to some Computer Science faculty that has the old issues of the journals (and who has such access?).
If SE researchers really want their studies applied by the community, they should not publish them in journals that require payment for access to the papers.
Much of this has to do with CS researchers forcing the conference publishers to allow distribution of papers via personal webpages. Once you have that, the rest follows.
But in fairness, Nature is only $160/year ($100 students), which covers 52 issues. Of course, you have to put up with advertising and pay a subscription...
See Stevan Harnad's page and SSRN for examples of progress. The problem is very simple: inertia. Scholars have no interest whatsoever in propretary journals. The web could totally replace scholarly publication. People make up all sorts of reasons not change, but that is the nature of people. It will happen. The objectors have to die off first.
This is already happening in Artificial Intelligence. The Journal of AI Research (JAIR), and The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) are peer-reviewed journals published on the web for free.
I'm not sure what the $20 million is for, since (at least in AI) peer-review is done for free anyway, as a service to the community. The big journals charge money while getting editing, review, and often even typsetting for free from their editorial boards or authors.
Since peer-review is the main service provided by the big journals, it was only a matter of time before the reviewers organized themselves. The tenure issue is a bit of a problem, since untenured faculty will want to publish in the best established journals. However, that should work itself out over time, as tenured researchers choose to publish in the new free journals. Eventually the new journals will be well enough established for young researchers to feel comfortable publishing in them.
It seems that the article does not mention the advantages to having research be centrally located. Granted this is more about a theory than an implementation, but I think that the ability to search through the actual *text* of many different areas of science could be useful.
This is all unnecessary because we don't need research. Look at the economy. Technology is dead and will never come back. Science is useless. Just watch baseball and work in nursing homes. OP.
I think that the current method of publishing findings is going
y /uarep_hist opathology/content_index_db.html
. ht m
to be kept alive indefinitely by the people who thrive in the
environment. Prestige is important, and those who filter through
the peer review 'moderation' of the important journals certainly
deserve it, and will get the funding to publish again during
their next study. The only people who are left behind are the
people who have brilliant insight, but don't have the patience or
skills to jump through academic hoops and climb the academic ladder.
The magic of the web is that people are going to be able to
transcend the limits of paper publishing.
Online laboratories where traditional researchers can share not
only their results, but the material at issue itself in digital
form. Check out the University of Iowa's virtual microscope,
which is currently used for educational purposes.
http://www.medicine.uiowa.edu/patholog
There's another demonstration site, where people can point out
phenomena in huge images created from a microscope...
http://neuroinformatica.com The implications of online images
of this size and quality are huge.
One paper which is tied up by Elsivier IP is a PDF file which
shows regions of the Macaque brain dyed with six different stains
that each show different phenomena. In the PDF file are links to
the full-size full-color images, which very much increases the
value of the publication.
Not only is the whole peer review process going to be
accelerated, but an online simulation of the phenomena being
studied will be able to grow and get more accurate with each
researcher's contribution.
Purdue has several simulations of yeast growth online, with the
source available.
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/cfpesp/models/models
My dream is of an online simulation where people can add little
hypothesis in the form of python scripts. The scripts which pass
peer review as properly reflecting the physical phenomena are
kept, and can accumulate into an accurate simulation of complex
systems (maybe even parts of the human brain eventually)
Even once the web pages let collaborators/peers accelerate the
scientific process, the results will still be published by the
traditional methods for years to come. (in my humble opinion)
To many researchers, scientific work has not been done until it
shows up in the prestigious journals.
Celebrate Excellence!
Anyway, I wish Brown all the best success, but as others have mentioned, it's a somewhat harder problem than it first seems (at least he's asking for $20 million, which is somewhat realistic for handling real peer review for a substantial number of articles - 10's of thousands at least).
What's behind this nebulous "peer review" concept, at least for us, is a complex and historically based system of checks and balances involving communications between authors, editors, and (anonymous and non-anonymous) reviewers; we're essentially a legal/court system for scientific articles. There's a lot of information-related issues in there, and information technology helps a lot (that's the part I'm involved in). But fundamentally, at least the way we do it, there needs to be a paid, responsible human being reading most communications and monitoring the process, and as far as we've been able to work out, you can't get the cost under about $500 or so per article.
Now, just distributing the papers can be done essentially for free (to as many people as would want to read for about $1-5 per article, for hardware, software, disk, network, etc.) which is what the famous physics e-print archive does so well. Of course it doesn't cost publishers any more than that to distribute articles online either - the costs are in the review part (and whatever copyediting they do), not in distribution.
You'll hear about journals now that are essentially free - this is almost always for one of two reasons:
Given the $500/article cost, the other question is does science really need this level of peer review, or can it get by with less? Well, we've already seen a couple of instances of scientific fraud that slipped by in physics in the last few months even with the current level of review - is skimping really a good idea? And is the $500 minimal cost or even $1000-$2000 typical cost per article now all that bad, compared to the typical $50,000-$100,000 research grant that generally funded such research?
Yet another proposed solution has been to publish fewer papers in those journals that receive the full peer-review treatment. Unless authors miraculously constrain themselves somehow, the only way that would save us money would be to reject a lot of things without review (because the costs are in the review process itself) - but then you've thrown out the whole "peer" process you're using to determine what's published!
So, maybe Brown has found a way through this morass - but the scientific system has a complex, little studied dynamic in which peer review as it currently stands plays an important role... if we really can't afford it (the old way) any more, we're headed into some uncharted waters...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Maybe two years ago .. oh wait .. wasn't that about the time when the dot-com bubble started bursting ? now is it me or hasn't history proven a solid point > FREE is not a good business plan. DUH. what crazy assed lunatic is going to give this other crazy assed lunatic 20M to give shit away for free ? NO-ONE. Oh wait I get it, blind_them_with_science mode initialised.
The article doesn't mention who would be the peer review board in the online journal system.
/.
I think Brown could learn a lot from the open discussion forum used by
Anyone could "publish" an article. People would receive alerts when an article was published in a topic area of their interest. Readers would be able to rate the article on several points, and would be able to add commentary, notes, etc.
Commentary, ratings, etc., could be sorted according to the evaluators' verified academic credentials (maybe I only care about what Harvard academics think of article X on particle physics, but someone else may be interested in what the general public, or for that matter 8th graders think of article X).
Any new system would have to preserve the aspect of the status quo that generally dictates that unless the big shots in your field think you are onto something, you don't get recognition.
Amazing magic tricks
20M, you meen 19.95M and .05M for the web developer:)
Check out the Free Online Scholarship Newletter for very interesting discussions about "how the internet is transforming scholarly research and publications." Also James Morrison's interview with this project's founder, the net-savvy philosopher Peter Suber.
"Get Your Research Peer-Reviewed, just 19.95!"
Table-ized A.I.
I really hope this idea does take off and soon becomes a standard in the science/research communities. Let us not forget, back whenever the Internet was still something about enhancing humanity instead of about expanding wallets, this (well, maybe not THIS exactly, but things like this in general) was the point of the Internet. The whole thing was invisioned as a way to better and expand human thoughts, ideas, and foster new/better technologies through improved and cheaper research and methods. However, now all the Internet community usually seems concerned about (With a few exceptions like /.) is getting mp3's and pr0n, hence the development of Internet2, which, hopefully will never be opened to the general public so that it doesn't lose its vision and become corrupted like the current Internet did.
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.
The new Journal of Biology http://jbiol.com/ seems to be heading in this direction:
Journal of Biology is a new journal edited by Martin Raff and an internationally renowned editorial board. The journal aims to publish outstanding research articles from all areas of biology and make them immediately accessible to all, free of charge.
It will be a long time before these journals approach the momentum and importance of Science or Nature, but it's a nice start.
Short of top secret technology, that which the public pays for should be available to the public for free. Period.
It is immoral to ask the public to fund research with their tax dollars and then ask them to pay for it again if they want to see its results, via subscription costs.
Journals such as Science seem to think that this is some crazy idea, that what the public pays for should be made freely available to the public. They also try to say its impossible, since there are costs involved in what journals provide, which is essentially peer review. Please. Don't tell me it costs $500 dollars for top researchers to read a paper and offer criticism. That can be done for free.
What's needed is to set up an organization of reputable scientists willing to offer peer review to papers submitted; the organization would have some sort of signature verifying that their members reviewed a paper and deemed it publication-worthy. Then the organization would publish the paper on-line for free. Pretty simple.
In the meantime, government action is needed to mandate that all papers eventually be made free to the public; perhaps six months after initial publication, perhaps 1 year.
At any rate, nothing justifies asking the public to pay for something twice.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
In the past, when subjects like this have come up on slashdot, i frequently see people claiming that most of the articles making up the content of peer-reviewed journals are either bad research or obvious filler, in either case published not because of the scientific value of the article, but simply so that the person paying for the article to be published can say that they had their name in a published article in a scientific journal. (I had a link to a post like this a moment ago but unfortunately now cannot find it.)
I am writing this becuase i am curious: given your unique perspective, what would you say in response to people complaining about this quantity-over-quality-emphasis problem with the mainstream scientific journals? Would you say that this is a real problem, or are the people making these allegations misguided? If the latter, what can be done about this? If the scientific journals can successfully validate the accuracy of research, but are unable to discern whether the research actually has any value or not and filter based on that, does that lessen the value of the journals?
-- super ugly ultraman
One never actually fell back to the journals unless the paper predated the early 90s. People would reference other peoples work via the e-print archive reference number. e-prints circulated so widely that most major papers had already been read and reviewed by the relavent people long before it actually hit the official peer review process at the journals. By the time a paper made it into the journals it was VERY old news.
Yes, people still submitted their papers to the standard APS journals for publication, but nobody read them. Everybody read the e-print archive. Most people couldn't even tell you what journal most of the articles had been published in, nobody cared.
SPARC is a library-led effort to introduce competition into the peer-reviewed journal marketplace. Because of the outlandish rise in peer-reviewed journal prices, libraries and their acquisitions budgets are now not able to afford all of the content their users need. So libraries are now moving into the realm of publishing. Some call this a socialist approach, but I view it as capitalism at its best....
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
until you read In Oldenburg's Long Shadow (For those who miss the reference, Henry Oldenburg is the man created the first peer reviewed journal.)
It is long, but it leads through how the Science Citation index has been used as a tool by unscrupulous publishers to first create a locked in academic market, and then milk it for all the revenue that they can get. It also discusses possible alternatives, and various approaches that are being tried to break free of this stranglehold.
Oh right. And if you want to see what online peer reviewed journals might look like, look at First Monday. Be warned that you may spend some time browsing through past articles.
Citations are a strange measure of quality. The median paper gets exactly one citation. The next largest citation number is zero. However, the mean citation rate per paper is on the order of ten, so you can imagine the distribution. Most papers "sink without a trace", and a very few are cited by a huge number. A study done over a decade ago examined the reasons for the citation rate of different kinds of papers.
1. There are the papers that do not interest others. These, obviously, have very few citations.
2. There are the seminal papers. These, equally obviously, have a flood of citations - from tens to thousands.
3. The most cited papers are those that are spectacularly, fragrantly wrong. These are the only papers which get cited more than the best work in each field. (Think, say, Cold Fusion, to take a somewhat atypical example.)
Any publicity isn't good publicity.
High Energy Physics isn't all of physics; also our publication schedule is fast enough now we can get things up online a week or two after we receive them, if it's justified. Do people read everything in the arxiv? Maybe in those fields that are limited enough. But what we in the journal business do is sift through those submissions and try to point out the ones that are important. The arxiv caused us to do our job better - as far as I can tell, we seem to have reached a sort of peaceable coexistence...
Energy: time to change the picture.
The revolution has started. The Journal of Biology is a prime example of a new free online journal with an excellent editorial board and the goal to rival Science and Nature. I personally hope that others will follow.
t /edboard.asp
http://jbiol.com/
http://jbiol.com/info/contac
The impact of scientific journals are ranked by the science citation index, which boils down to who and how many people cite you. Tenure decisions for scientists are strongly affected by the overall impact of their research - which means how many papers you have in how many prestigious journals.
Journals maintain those impacts by publishing papers that they think will be cited. The result is that there is pressure on journals to not just validate, but also to figure out what is going to be cited.
For more on how this system works and why, I highly recommend reading In Oldenburg's Long Shadow.
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
It seems to be down now, but essentially the Soros foundation is studying this problem (and recognizing that the standard publishing model may be impeding scientific progress.)
The Best part about this: they're funding stuff too! So if you have a great solution to this mess, please go and ask for money!
Science and Nature are problematic. Their high prestige makes publication in them desireable, but the fast-tracking of submitted articles often results in shoddy reviews. Their punctuated writing style is rather lackluster, lacking in detail and depth.
Frankly, it is often better to publish in a journal specific to your field to get better reviews and have a bigger impact. These flagship journals look nice on your CV, but the recent splintering of Nature into a vast array of smaller journals with better expertise (Nature Neuroscience, etc.) implies that there is a demand for more detailed coverage and more in depth reviews.
Why do academics need journals?
Find free books.
I didn't read the article, but does anyone know what the heck they are talking about? Its like you have to be a rocket scientist to understand this stuff. Is it a new peer-to-peer review network of some sort where I can review wares?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
that a "+5 Insightful" on slashdot will count towards tenure and promotion?
One point not mentioned yet is that many/most journals have free online access to articles older than ~one year. Journals that don't do this such as the Journal of Molecular Biology can come under a boycott (in their case primarily for double-billing I believe: paper and online subscription = 2 subscriptions according to them). Currently there are many labs/universities who are refusing to publish, purchase, or participate in refereeing in that particular journal. It's hard to say what the effect has been even though it's relatively easy to find a competing journal to submit your work to, in contrast with the concluding statement timothy wrote. I just hope that Brown's idea wouldn't place all publication under one roof--that would be too easy for someone to control and censor (ie the Bush administration's suggestion that materials and methods sections not be published).
I agree with you. Also, I think you forget one most critical point, of why the closed system has so much support from *whithin* the scientific community. The so-called ``peer review'', which is neither, and ought to be called ``editorial censorship'' helps some researches in high-places to *slow down* research, so preserving their preminence. Some researchers have a big investment (their whole careers!) in a theory or a paradigm; they ceratainly don't want that proven wrong. So, revolutionary, *disruptive* research is silenced---the `peer review', controlled by these well-placed once-scientinsts, allows them to censor the new results, and also (publish or perish) to strangle those innovators, and oftern drive them out of science entirely (I hape personal knowledge of this). So, the best ideas are repressed for up to *several decades*. Check the history of science, the one subject noe being taught to scientists. DNA as heredity vector: suppressed from 1920s to late 1940s. Plate tectonics: supressed from 1900s to 1940s. Postdarwinian evolutionary theory---still supressed.
Far too many examples.
Publish FIRST, review later what is already in the open for all to judge, and review by peers not by `editors'.
Do people really read everything in AIP journals? Nobody I knew did. But I did know several people who would go to look at what was new this morning on arxiv.org in their field ( and possibly related fields ). They'd scan through a couple of pages of new preprints looking for people whose work they knew to be worth reading, or for abstracts that sounded promising.
Perhaps the AIP has gained some celerity recently. I would hope so, but I suspect the value proposition offered by the traditional AIP journals is wearing very thin in many subdisciplines ( like hep-* etc. ).
pre-screen online before advancing to the "costly journals"
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I am one of the few graduate students who published in a journal as an undergrad, and I think you should know what goes into the publishing process (for IEEE publications, which covers almost all respected peer-reviewed computing journals).
Traditionally, you first have to have the article published in a conference, which requires for you to
1) Write the article
2) Go to the conference and present your work
Submission to a conference usually happens approximately six months before the actual conference. You get acceptance about a month after submission (or you get rejection). Most conferences have an acceptance rate of 50% or worse, meaning that they turn away HALF of the applicants.
The process of selection is done by assigning reviews to major professors in the field who are not submitting to the conference. These professors sometimes pass the review work along to some of their best grad students (this happened several times in a lab that I worked in).
After you are accepted, you send the final version, which includes any changes you may have made to the rough draft, and then go to the conference.
The next step is a journal article. This usually includes some additional fleshing out of the article. Most conference procedings are between 4 and 8 pages; journal articles can be as long as you can get it to be. You want it longer, because the longer it is, the more likely that the people reading it will understand and want to use your idea, because you can explain it upteen ways and provide numerous examples of why your [whatever it is] works well, which always leads to good things for a journal article writer's career.
That often takes a while as well. Once you submit the journal article, you get a preliminary acceptance contingent upon making changes after three months of review. Of course, once again acceptance is less than 50%, usually, but if you publish in a conference first, your chances are significantly higher than if you don't. You have an incredibly powerful idea to make it without a conference first.
The reviewers in this case are required to make a very careful inspection of the article to ensure that
1) the theories presented are useful
2) the theories make sense
3) the paper is written well enough to be readable
Reviewers are also required to find ALL spelling and grammer mistakes, and they have to understand the methods presented within the paper well enough to make a summary of the journal article. Also, reviewers are the same as before - experts in the field (college professors) who are not submitting to the journal at the time of the review.
These reviewers give you a report, accepting contingent upon meeting their requirements (or defending why you can't).
You then have to submit again and your article is once again edited for approximately 6 months.
If you REALLY rush, this entire process takes one year, however realistically, it usually takes two. (Yeah, I started the game as a junior in college).
Now, I don't care if we do this online. IEEE has a research engine called IEEE Xplore, which is often purchased by research institutions such as Universities. It has the whole database of IEEE publications within it.
But I don't know how to get a much better peer-review process than this; its pretty darn strict. So professors can't just whip of papers like nobody's business - they really have to put some work into it. If they have a lot of papers, it means they've done a lot of stuff that at least six other experts (for each paper - sometimes more) believe to have merit.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
But from his website, it says:
"Patrick O. Brown
Ph.D., 1980, M.D., 1982, Chicago."
How in the hell did he get his MD so fast?
I work for APS, not AIP. Two quite different organizations, though related. AIP journals are mostly in applied or interdisciplinary areas.
Anyway, the point was of course nobody reads our journals cover to cover (though I used to do that with PRL about 10 years ago) - there's too much! That's exactly why a well-known authority in the form of a journal is needed in most fields. People do browse through the titles and abstracts, and they search for particular subject areas they're interested in. Helping that somewhat now are the Virtual Journals that provide a subject-specific cut through a series of high-quality peer-reviewed journals, and seem to be quite popular.
The "value proposition" may be wearing thin, but interestingly enough Phys Rev D (which covers the hep-* related areas) has seen faster submission growth than most of our other journals the last few years, so there must be a lot of authors that see some value in going through our processes...
Energy: time to change the picture.
There is another reason for paper format journal articles that every posting I've read here has missed -
ARCHIVING!
Who knows if we will be able to read pdf burned onto a CD in 10 years?
Certainly I know that we can still read Gutenberg's first printing efforts.
However...a better, and perhaps more enviromentally sound model would be to have only a few dozen paper archives around the world, and then make everything available through the web as well.
I sure hope my words of wisdom can be enjoyed in a couple of a 100 years...
After all it would be so much more usefull if the text was searchable, the footnotes could be implemented as popups and the references could be hyperlinked to the actual articles! And the whole idea is to have the articles be usefull to researchers, right?
Blair wrote:
a ge=c0
"While most of us would love to receive Phys Rev Lett A for $3 a month, I don't think it'll happen whether or not it's on the net. The demand just doesn't exceed the supply."
You can view and print for free from "Physical Review Online Archive" from the American Physics Socity
http://prola.aps.org/
SPARC - The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition also works to encourage new solutions to scholarly publishing:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/index.asp?page=0
Go here to find a list of SPARC partners many of ehich have free and open access
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?p
I don't know what kind of science you have experienced, but peer-review is most certainly done by peers in the bio-sciences. Walk into any competent academic's office in the bio-sciences and I guarantee you there will be at least one manuscript for reviewing in the inbox. There is still a fair amount of crap that gets published that probably shouldn't, but at least the peer review process weeds out a goodly amount of unsupported conjecture (eg "that's why science is diying [sic]") from the better journals.
PS - Science is not a model, it is a process that creates models. It will not be exhausted so long as humans have both intelligence and creativity on their side.
Take note that the real goal of this initiative is not to overthrow the time-tested process of peer review. Rather PLoS supporters are vested in changing the publishing process - away from the pay-per-view mentality and towards an open source type of license for scientific literature, where FULL TEXT articles can be viewed and re-distributed.
Of course the marginal costs for publishing and peer review remain. The PLoS leaders propose shifting the cost burden from readers to authors - by charging a certain fee to publish an article. Their reasoning is that since government agencies such as the NIH already pay millions of dollars for journal subscriptions within research grants, those funds could be used to subsidize the author's fees instead.
In case this sounds like "selling out" quality for profit, consider that it's in a journal's best interests to achieve prominence through a high citation rate. So quality would be ensured by recruiting high-profile scientists on editorial boards. Some journals are starting to adopt this paradigm, most notably the Journal of Biology and Genome Biology
How would journals reap profits then? By charging subscriber fees for insightful commentaries and research reviews - but still allowing free access to the fruits of publicly-funded scientific research.
Can this new crop of open source journals rival the industry behemoths? Such revolutions have already rippled through the CS, physics, and math communtities, thanks to the strong support among authors. A $20 million investment, along with a firm commitment from biomedical researchers, sounds like the kick-start needed.
In my mind the best solution to the problem would be adding more journals to the SPIN data base (or some similar base)
I would like to point out that not only traditional publishers are challenged, but even the peer review process is under consideration, as there is no great evidence on its usefulness (BMJ 1999;318:44-45).However, it's still difficult to find something to substitute it...
Furthermore, Brown's attempts are not so new. PubMedCentral has been created for putting scientific papers (of traditional publishers) on the web for free, but it also includes a number of autonomous publications, which are free for readers; unfortunately, they are not free for authors, as administrative expenses (which exist for web-based journals too) are covered by a submission fee. Anyway, every research project includes publication costs, so this is a way for using them.
Enzo
Just last week I received a box of photocopies of an article I published in one of Elsevier's journals in March. Apart from the fact that its nearly half a year late, what the hell should I do with 25 crappy photocopies of laser printer output of one of my own articles? We do have printers and copiers at our office.
.... Elsevier. Natuarally their own journals are on this list.
The whole process from beginning to end is so obsolete. I initiated contact with the journal editor more than a year ago by sending him a pdf of my article. He mailed back to thank me for my interest and asked me to send him three doublespaced paper copies to his office in the US (BTW reading doublespaced copies sucks IMHO). I did this, then I heard nothing for a long time. Finally I got a request to review a paper for the journal (this is quite common, most reviewers are also submitters). Finally after about half a year the paper was conditionally accepted (Yay!). This required an editing round and another submission of three paper copies. And several months later I was notified that my paper was accepted.
I submitted a final version (by paper and electronically). That was the last I heard from them (a letter/email would have been nice) until I received the box full of photocopies. By monitoring the site I found out which in which issue of the journal my article was to be published.
The editor of this journal is probably receiving a small fee for his efforts, which mostly consist of allocating reviewers to papers and putting stamps on envelopes. The actual technical editing is done by a bunch of latex monkeys provided by Elsevier. All communication is done by snail mail, communicating by email confuses both editors and elsevier staff (even though it would save loads of time).
The worst thing of all is that their journal is far too expensive for individuals to subscribe to. Hence the only subscriptions go to university libraries who mostly store packs of unread dead trees in their archives. In my country, a significant portion of government research funds is used for this purpose (i.e. money intended for fundamental research is flowing directly to the pockets of publishers) which I think is outrageous. I'm pretty sure the situation is the same elsewhere.
Now back to the role of the publisher. The publisher wastes everybodies time with a stupid editing process and by producing dead trees nobody reads anyway. It pays the editor a small fee and thats it. Apart from wasting everybodies time and funding the editor they do not actually contribute anything else. It is the editor who handles the peer review (100% volunteers as far as I know), it is the authors who deliver the content (100% volunteers). Taking the publisher out of the loop would save enormous amounts of money. Public funds could be used to fund editors and electronic hosting of journals for a fraction of the money currently flowing to publishers. This would not hurt the peer review process since it already depends on volunteers anyway.
I have no other choice than to either comply with this obsolete process or pursue another career. The productivity of my university is measured in terms of number of articles published. One of the parties involved in annually creating a list of acceptable journals and a nr. of publications per dutch university is
Jilles
is to have the authors pick up the cost. As you point out, $500 is nothing in comparison to the cost of the research, and publishing is clearly the payoff for modern academics.
In fact, I was under the impression that most quality academic journals were already charging authors substantially more than $500.
Either everybody switches to a new model, or nobody does. I don't believe there can be any in between.
If information online is to be recognised as having scholarly worth, it must be made permanently available. I'm sick of checking over references for my thesis, and finding that half the ejournals have moved or disappeared. This is not creating credibility for a new model of distrubution.
Tenure review committees need to acknowledge the move to online publishing, and recognise it more fully before researchers will embrace it.
If everybody switches to online, someone has to make sure that that information will always be available - in print AS WELL AS electronic. Not everyone has the Internet still. Print is still vital to a large body of researchers, and the availability of print may dissuade concerns that some researchers have about publishing in a new forum.
Lastly, they need to pay careful attention to indexing, because databases are where most people find information, and where most tenure review committees get their list of approved publication journals from.
It could work, but it really does require a massive committment on behalf of the academic community.
Pedigree and its offspring prestige are of course the vital ingredients of important journals.
Mathematics is fortunate in that the most prestigious journal is owned by a university with a quite enlightened outlook. Annals of Mathematics is now an overlay of the matematics eprint arXiv.
Other less fortunate disciplines may not be able to make such a leap without switching favourite journals.
Anyway, I wish Brown all the best success, but as others have mentioned, it's a somewhat harder problem than it first seems (at least he's asking for $20 million, which is somewhat realistic for handling real peer review for a substantial number of articles - 10's of thousands at least).
It's well worth considering that this figure ($20m) isn't going to be enough to fund a large-scale initiative like this. Bear in mind that the large journals like Science and Nature spend in the region of $8m dollars a year each on the peer review and editing process (very few papers are accepted without any editing or revisions at all, most undergo significant revision as part of the peer-review process for these journals), and that's without paying referees a cent.
I had this idea a while back of publicly modifiable webpages, using some kind of addendum system (original webpage with comments, changes etc overlaid/added [in a different colour if need be]).
:)
:( ).
/. style I didn't have time to read it :)
Originally I thought this might be usefull for simple spelling checking...usefull for slashdot articles, for example
Imagine my surprise when I surfed across to xerox, and found they have an actual system for doing this! (not the first time I've thought of something which had already been implemented
To me, this is exactly the kind of system which can be used for public peer review of online publication; you publish your paper online, and let everyone at it. You might even filter by IP adress to make the comments of proffessor x at university y (who would have to make his comments from a university computer) have a higher priority...
I don't know if this has been touched upon in the article, but , in true
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
found this kinda funny:
"More than once I've wished I could go back in time and not press the send button on an e-mail or suck those words back in my mouth," he said.
I just published two papers at the "Clinical Medicine and Health Research" site which was pioneered by British Medical Journal and Stanford's HighWire project in 1999. URLs are
2 080004 2 080006
:-) ..trevor..
http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/200
http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/200
However, it seems my two papers were the only ones submitted in August 2002. The site was started in 1999, at the height of the bubble, and initially proved popular, but papers have fallen off significantly since then.
They use online 'peer review'. Anybody that disagrees with your point of view can post a comment, which, after manual reading by an editor at BMJ, is then posted online under your original paper for all to see.
You may submit your paper to the print publications regardless of it already being posted at the Clinmed site.
--> a bit like SlashDot I guess
I wanted to emphasize on and add a number of things to this discussion. I have some experience with the publishing process having worked in an academic environment where we worked on changing this process, as well as having developed an electronic journal browser for a major publisher, and looked at setting up my own company to do electronic publishing.
Publishers have been around for a very long time, for example one of the oldest is Elsevier Science, they were around when Galileo Galilei published his books and, indeed, published one for him outside Italy when the Pope made it clear that no Italian publishers were to handle his material. We can safely conclude that they are most likely doing something right, and by right I mean that they, for better or for worse, fill a need in a market.
The core of what publishers bring to the market is a structure in the form of an editorial process to filter and organize materials that are subsequently distributed out to whomever wants to buy them. The work associated with that is huge because of the number of papers received, the coordination tasks that go with distributing these papers, reviewing them, getting the reviews back to the authors to make corrections, getting the corrections back, organizing all this into an issue, getting it printed and sent out. Add in the fact that most, if not all, editors do this for free, and all reviewer do this for free, making motivation a difficult thing to impart. The advent of email and electronic has presumably made this process a little, but the organizational and coordination issues exist whether you use email or snail mail, and the delays are not in the transmission of information. All this is expensive as is detailed in the post from APSmith here.
What publishers also bring to the table is a brand in the shape of a journal, this is very important as people will want to publish in recognized journals and will want to read recognized journals. They do this because they trust the quality of the articles in those journals. This is not unlike people filtering articles based on ratings here on Slashdot. This touches on another task performed by the journals which is aggregation. They collect and organize articles making it easy for me to read about particular subjects in one place.
You may think by now that I am on the side of publishers, not true, I have only illustrated one side of the picture here. Publishers know their position in the market and have been very good at exploiting it. They have been very skillful at cost shifting, putting the cost of journals on libraries rather than on authors (page charges notwithstanding) and on consumers. So the people who generate and consume the information pay very little directly. This is very skillful. Because of their monopoly position in the market, this allows them to increase journal prices considerably without losing too much revenue.
So I hear cries from people all around, why not transfer the process back to the authors/consumers and publish on the web and the publishers be damned. This is a great idea, except for the fact that it does not seem to have happened so far. There have been a number of very good papers from a large number of (very smart) people as to why this should happen with all the usual arguments (I wont rehash them here), along with a number of service providers getting into the business and free software released, but, save for a few small success, this mass migration has not happened.
There have been a number of very interesting developments in some niche areas, the most famous one being the arXiv maintained at Los Alamos. There have been others successes modeled on that effort in small communities and small associations. I believe they have been successful for a number of reasons. First the community in question is small and the number of papers produced in small, making it very easy for the members to assess the quality of articles themselves, this is simply not possible in larger communities. Second the materials published have a very short shelf-life making it imperative to cut out the traditional publishing cycle which can take up to a year or more. Fast moving sciences (like physics) lends itself particularly well to that.
But as I said above, a mass migration has not happened.
My personal feeling is that there is a co-dependent relationship between publishers and the tenure system. publishers seek to build up their brands (journals) by publishing the best articles which they will attract, and academics seek to publishing in good journals because it improves their chances of getting tenure. Who would want to publish in a second or third tier journal when you can publish in a first tier journal. Until that relationship is broken, there simply is not going to be a mass migration. Where the system is fragile (in a relative sense of course) is the brand (journal). They key is to maintain the value, in all senses, of a brand (journal), and the publishers will protect that to the end. Witness the controversy when the NIH started to talk about putting together a repository for published materials called PubMed Central. The publishers were worried because the NIH brought along a brand, a sense of quality, dependability and permanence, something which could challenge the publishers.
I realized this when I was working to put together a start-up to provide an entirely electronic publishing process as a service, there is so much more you can do in an electronic environment than in a print environment (duh!), but it was clear that it would take a long time (hence money) and a lot of work to built up a brand that would self-sustain. Even then there are costs that have to be met, if you remove the publisher and the library from the process, leaving the producer (author) and the consumer (reader), you have effectively taken out the party who bears the brunt of the costs (the library). You cant ask for the producers to pay (a lot) for publishing and it is difficult to ask the consumer to pay for the information when they have been used to getting it for free (a perceived notion, but a very real notion nonetheless).
So my advice for anyone who wants to enter this market is as follows: have plenty of cash because it will take you a long time (read years) before an brand is established; start small, associations are a good place to start because they frequently do things manually and they talk to each other, referrals are important; understand who your customers are, they are not the producers or the consumers, they are the associations or sponsors; understand the market well, there are many publishing models out there, publishers, pre-print servers, personal web sites, associations, special interest groups, etc...; and last be prepared for the fact that the economics of publishing on the web are not all that different from publishing in print, just look where your costs are.
Finally, if you have made it to the end of this piece, I would be interested in talking to anyone who wants to get into this market, I have some expertise in the matter and am looking for something challenging to do.
1) My employer, ScholarOne is an ASP providing an on-line peer-review application for journals and meetings for the last three years. Our ultimate goal is to provide colaborative space, peer review, composition and on-line publishing through one application. Since we're not the lap dog of any of the big publishers, like Cadmus or Elsiver, I'm sure we'd be happy to licence ManuscriptCentral to Brown for his movement. A small part of $20M is still pretty big.
2) Seems the one thing Brown forgot is that journals pay the copy editors. In my experience working on ManuscriptCentral, we've found that just because you're a brilliant scientist, doesn't mean you know how to write a paper. In fact, many review forms presented to reviewers to fill in about a paper asks them to rate the quality of English!
Journals pay flocks of copy editors to turn the papers into something like standard English and format the papers consistently. Now, the formatting could be done through some kind of wizard, but that would require the scientist to also have some level of computer skills. Ususally, these folks have developped their professional skills at the expense of all else, including computer skills and sometimes manners! It'll be a while before a piece of software can correct grammer in a sci-tech paper.
Actually, the current Elsevier company was founded in 1880 - the name was based on the 16th century Elsevier family publishers, but there's no direct connection that I know of - see the Company History
Other than that, I thought your comment was interesting - you're not on the side of the publishers, but you're trying to be one anyway? It's a funny business... good luck!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Most journals are the proceedings of professional scoieties, though a few are from publishers themselves. The socities are the "peers" who select and review the papers. The professional society then may publish itself or team up with a publisher than specializes in journals.
Now if this scheme made it EASIER, CHEAPER, FASTER to get the papers out, then the socieites would be jumping at getting to do this. The new e-media appears to be evolutionary in its advantages rather than revolutionary.
It is only because (to be blunt) nuclear physics is not a major subject that you found the Physical Review to be a monopoly journal.
In what I publish in, nonlinear dynamics, I can try for Phys Rev Letters for short articles, Phys Rev E, Chaos, Physics Letters A, Physica D, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos; if I were more mathematical there are numerous math journals, and then for engineering applications there is IEEE transactions on circuits and systems, plus the optical science journals for optical applications...
Among all of them, the Physical Review is the best and I choose willingly to submit my paper there. I am amazed at the general quality and efficiency of the editorial process given what meager financial support they have and the large amount of work they have to do.
The non-profit APS gives better results than the for-profit journals.
The idea that somehow an "electronic journal" will suddenly save costs and be cheaper than a regular one is really silly dot-com-thinking. In practice, thanks to the APS's good web access, the Physical Review *is* an electronic journal!
Most people submit electronically and most people download PDF articles that they want to read.
The competency in the journal is in the brains of the editors who know good reviewers and understand science enough to make sound judgements and adjudications, as well as the linguistic and technical skill of the copyeditors who can make the text read well and look good.
A web journal doesn't make any of that cheaper.
I am a native English speaker and thought I carefully proofread my manuscripts but the APS editors always make them look better and read better; I am surprised and impressed by what they can do.
This is highly skilled labor and it doesn't (individually) cost that much to the submitter---the commercial journals are much more expensive to the libraries. In the ratio of value to cost, the Physical Review is the best deal in physics academic publishing.
Publishing has little to do with putting ink on paper and everything to do with words on brains.
I was a graduate student with Pat Brown and I can shed a little light on a number of issues the chronicle didn't address well. First, the web is just a vehicle, it is a cost saver. One of the most important scientific reasons for PLoS is that currently biological researchers with an informatics background cannot use computers to mine the scientific literature. Journals do not give their content for analysis. There are already pretty good symbolic algorithms for searching full text papers to figure out what they mean. If we had access to the text we could really get somewhere. Second, there is an issue of fairness. Almost always, tax dollars pay for research in the biotech field. It is reasonable that everyone should have access to that knowledge. Third, at least in some cases, journals make an outrageous profit. Reed Elsevier (NYSE RUK) has an annual profit (PROFIT, not revenue) of a half a billion dollars, much of that coming from journals paid for by tax dollars, for content generated by tax dollars. Now we come to what keeps PLoS from working... Publish or perish is real, but at least in biomedical research where you publish is much more important than how much you publish. Two good papers a year in the best journals would be worth twenty in the bottom journals. New journals are always at a disadvantage. People have to become convinced that they will be good journals. So the twenty million dollars is to provide a marketing effort to prove that PLoS means business. That it will do a good job. It is chump change compared to the seven billion in revenue that Reed Elsevier brings in each year.
I don't follow the argument. As you say, there's a market of scientific journals for a reason. There are too many articles for scientists to read. So we delegate the responsibility of pre-filtering to the journals. As you point out, we also delegate some of the responsibility of career-filtering to the journals. It's not a perfect system, but it works pretty well.
So why do we need to change our perception of scientific excellence before putting into place a peer-review mechanism? I don't follow the argument. Nor, for that matter, do I follow the bald assertion "This is very wrong, of course." Why? We need some measure to help us separate the wheat from the chaff? Why is the journal measure a particularly bad one?
Obviously, it can be gamed, but people are pretty savvy to obvious gaming tactics such as publishing in shoddy, uncritical journals.
"Sounds like Brown's idea is exactly what the web is made for"
It was, of course. In my physics undergrad days, not long ago, I was responsible for downloading selected "preprints" from http://xxx.lanl.gov, now properly http://arXiv.org Just the ones which the professors had picked out. Of course, back then it took a bit longer to download.
Seems like all we would need is an electronic peer review system, much like slashdot. Where certain individuals given authority could rate the articles according to their merit, so that the best research would float to the top more quickly.
For some related information have a look at
www.eprints.org
which is aimed at making research freely available. I am developing a system called GNU EPrints which is currently an online research archive but may well get peer review functionality in the next year or so.