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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."
CiteSeer is great but mostly links to articles published elsewhere. A better example (physics, math, computer science, and nonlinear systems) is lanl.arxiv.org (also at xxx.lanl.gov). Does anyone know a good history of this database and how these disciplines have seemed to escape from published journals as being the only available source for published articles?
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Not that Geometry and Topology is the only one, but this is a very good example.
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!
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