Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals

Declan Butler writes "I thought I'd let you know that the journal Nature is currently running an online special on the debate over access to the electronic scientific literature. It will be updated with two to three new articles each week, and will run until around mid-May. 'The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities.' Best, Declan Butler, European correspondent, Nature"

Comments

Mags?

[baudilus]

Until they start publishing Maxim magazine online, I don't care.

a good start

[untermensch]

I'm glad to see that Nature is at least taking an interest in Open Science, since right now the high profile journals like Nature are the most difficult to get access to. The university I attend has a subscription of course, but only for the dead-tree version. I've asked the librarians about getting online access and they say it is simply prohibitively expensive.

I think that Scientific journals should take a cue for the mistakes of the music industry and embrace the abilities of new technology. By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously, hopefully to the levels where they can survive on ads (or other non-subscription means) alone. Also, unlike the music industry there's none of this controversy over file-sharing and authors not getting paid.

Re:a good start

[purdue_thor]

Are you sure of this? The last two institutions I've been at have had Nature online for anyone to access... it's the journal "Science" that seems quite a bit more restricted online. Maybe it's a dig at them?

Re:a good start

[lukewarmfusion]

My University had subscriptions available online for anyone with a valid University acct. So our entire school population could read the online journals for "free." It still cost the school a ton of money each year to keep the subscription. Is that what you mean by "online for anyone to access?"

I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions. That would lead to less exposure, and increasing obscurity. Of course, this is me not knowing the exact details of how much it would cost for a submission, but I guess it would have to be substantial in order to foot the bill for their journal in the first place.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

Author pays is an awfule model. People from poor countries, graduate students and researchers without grants are unlikely to pay $1500/paper.

What I don't understand is why journals charge so much for subscriptions. After all the reviewers do their work for free, so their only expense is the editorial stuff and printing. These are expensive but not expensive enough to justify the exorbitatn subscription charges.

Re:a good start

[kisielk]

Don't most authors already have to pay to have their papers published in a scientific journal? Except that in a paper copy the authors and the readers both have to pay because of the cost of print.

Re:a good start

[s20451]

Are you sure you want ads subsidising the publication of scientific research, especially in medicine?

This paper entitled, "Viagra causes withered genitals," is brought to you by the makers of Cialis.

Better yet, there were two separate instances at the University of Toronto where two separate researchers were pressured into suppressing their research when it was unfavorable to one of the university's sponsors. The investigator in one case was Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who faced a possible lawsuit and discipline when she spoke out against Apotex; the other one involved Dr. David Healey, who had a job offer rescinded when he spoke against Prozac.

So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.

Re:a good start

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that either the author pays or the subscriber pays. If the subscriber has to pay, the author receives limited coverage because fewer people are able to afford to read said journal. If the author has to pay, then fewer authors receive coverage because fewer have the ability to pay publishing costs.

So, the best solution is to have multiple publishers with multiple business models.

Re:a good start

[untermensch]

I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions.

Agreed. A flat rate required for publication would certainly be biased towards wealthier institutions. Perhaps a scheme could be established whereby the publication fee would be a function of your funding /institution wealth, so that the cost would be greater for the big corporations than the small university labs.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

That is not the case for most journals, as far as I know. However authors often have to pay for color illustrations.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

It is not about institutions, but individual researchers. Your institution typically will not cover the cost.

Re:a good start

[rocket_d00d]

Today, the scientist/the author has to pay the journal to have his/her works published (plus, you cannot publish without handing over the copyright and your firstborn to the journal). Then the readers must pay for access to the journals, be it on paper or electronically. Plus, one has to pay for access to science index databases like ISI to search the scientific literature effectively. To participate in the "scientific debate" in the journals, you really must be able to afford all three, which becomes very expensive if you want to include the must-have prestigious journal like Nature and Science. For the past two years I have been working at a research institute that does not have access to a citation index database, and believe me, it was a pain in a certain part of the anatomy not to be able to do effective and exhaustive literature searches :(

Scientific journals in electronic format are definitely a Good Thing and a must-have for any serious university or research institution. However, getting the journal on paper offers the subscriber one very big advantage, namely that one still has access to the paper journals already received after terminating a subscription. Not so with the electronic versions, where you lose all access, even to the volumes you already have paid subscription fees for. If all you can afford is the electronic subscription to a journal, you cannot stop the subscription as long as it is on these terms. Perhaps good for the journal, but definitely very bad for the subscribers. Let's hope this debate will bring about some change in the distribution practices.

Re:a good start

[V_M_Smith]

I don't know what field you're in, but in my area of research, almost all journals have significant page charges.

Example:
Electronic manuscripts: $120.00 per page
Paper manuscripts: $150 per page
Color figures: $600.00 for first figure, $150.00 for each additional color figure

You're looking at ~$1000 minimum for a typical paper.

Re:a good start

[wass]

Anybody know who 'owns' the article? I would guess the journal does. But on the homepages of some researchers they have the PDF files available for download. I wonder if that's technically legal or not.

Also, AFAIK, it still costs money for the author to publish in many journals. But the subject matter is not subsequently free for all to read. But in the old days the authors would usually get a stack of preprints, and send these to various colleagues upon request.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

Interesting. Are you in biology? In CS people typically don't have to pay.

Re:a good start

[eaolson]

I don't know what field you're in, but in my area of research, almost all journals have significant page charges.

I'm in materials science, and most of the journals I've published in, that page charges are optional. They request it, and many scientific grants have a line item for it, but whether or not you pay does not affect publication. The notable exception to this, however, is for color figures in the paper version, where the charges appear to be mandatory.

And this is as it should be. Science should be about the objective and rational search for truth. Cold-hearted, even. When you start bringing money into that equation, you're just going to mess it up.

Which is why I don't think open-source journals are ever going to work. If they can keep the page charges optional, and still make enough money to keep afloat, then it might.

A large portion of the reason why is that the people that actually *use* these journals (researchers, students, etc.), at least in the academic world, are insulated from their cost. A journal might be free, or it might cost a bundle and I would never know. I'll use the best journals I have access to for my research, and I'll publish in the best one's I can, cost of the journal be dammned.

Re:a good start

[V_M_Smith]

I'm in Astrophysics. There are a couple of page charge-free journals, but most have fees in the range I gave above.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

So what do researchers without grants do?

Re:a good start

[shelleymonster]

Reviewers do their work for free, but editors and editors-in-chief are paid. And, even relatively small journals have a good size administrative staff (10-12 people) on hand to manage author submissions, distributing papers for peer review, subscriptions, and all sorts of other stuff. Software to manage papers is expensive because it's to specialized, and many journals still fed-ex papers around the world to get copies to reviewers. So, you're looking at running an entire business based off of subscription and author fees. So, the charges might sounds exhorbitant to you, but think how many subscriptions it takes to keep a dozen people on salary.

Re:a good start

[rainwalker]

Frankly, you don't do research. It's just too expensive to do decent research without grants, at least in molecular biology (my field). $600-$1400 for publication and copies is a trivial part of any reasonable project. Our (small) academic lab spends about $30k a year on various expenses.

$1,500 for a paper is very reasonable, especially as the author would retain copyright.

Re:a good start

[Theory of Everything]

You list the costs associated with "mainstream" magazines (i.e. Time, Sports Illustrated). However, there is another cost that Scientific Journals have that those don't--archiving.

Scientific Journals are expected to keep archives of their works for hundreds of years, and put a lot of effort into making sure there is no way that past issues will be lost. Commercial magazines certainly prefer to have records of old issues, but it is not as devastating to them if archiving fails.

Because government money goes to the page charges, archiving is a necessity, not just a nice option.

That being said, I agree that there must be a better solution than paying $1500/paper.

Re:a good start

[B'Trey]

This issue is actually getting some high level attention. The British Royal Society told the House of Commons that open publishing was " ... a threat to the vitality of the country's scientific community."

Open access publishers quickly rebutted the claim.

Re:a good start

[Chucklz]

As a biologist, I can share that most biology journals have page charges. It's just something you accept and live with. A couple hundred dollars on a publication is nothing, considering how important pubs are to your career. Frankly, I can spend upwards of a thousand dollars in an afternoon in reagents and supplies, so in the grand scheme of things, paying for publications doesnt really seem that bad at all.

Re:a good start

[cinnamon colbert]

because they r 4 profit and can...the publishers know that ANY "scientific" journal, no matter how bad or worhtless, will be carried by a certain number of librarys that buy anything most of the scientific lit is garbage, whose sole purpose is promotion of the authors; not a great game, but no worse then all theothers

Re:a good start

[pjt33]

So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.

Reader pays. However, access is by subscription only for a limited time - 6 months, say. This is the best model I've heard proposed - there's some income from universities who want to get the papers immediately, but the papers are generally available.

As things stand, when I find a paper is subscription-only, I check the authors' home pages, and can usually find a copy.

Re:a good start

[Chucklz]

The purpose of any Journal is not promotion of the authors of a study, but to disseminate their results and interpretation of data. Scientists don't "make a name" for themselves for doing poor work, regardless of what journal publish it. Sure, ambitious scientists strive to be someone everyone knows by name, but to say that is the ends of most literature is simply rediculous.

Re:a good start

[flossie]

The rules vary between different journals, but many of the papers seen on researchers' web pages are pre-prints. It is often the case that journals allow pre-prints to be distributed, but retain all rights to the post-prints which have been through the editorial process.

Re:a good start

[snarkh]

Right, depends on the area. If you are doing theoretical research in CS or math and don't have a grant to cover the expenses or have limited grant money, $1500 might seem like a lot. In the experimental areas, as you say, the cost of the project is a lot higher, so $1500 is just a minor expense.

Re:a good start

[e.smith]

OK, there are a lot of misconceptions here about how scientific publishing works. Let's try to straighten some out.

1. What is the current system? Most journals don't charge authors to publish, some do, some charge only for material that is particularly costly to reproduce (color photos as opposed to text or B&W graphs). In no reputable journal does author payment determine whether or not a paper is published (only, sometimes, how speedily). The decision as to publication is made by an editor assisted by peer reviewers (experts in the area of the paper). Submitted papers can be processed without much concrete expense (some clerical/administrative costs, a few thousand to tens of thousands honorarium to journal editors, no payment to peer reviewers). Typesetting, printing, and mailing cost money too. As a rough approximation to those concrete costs, consider that most journals are offered to individual subscribers at rates of $30-a few hundred per year. The big bucks come from library or institutional subscriptions, which range from a few hundred to many tens of thousands a year.

2. Why does this insane system survive, where scientific publishers basically have a license to print money at the expense of the libraries? Branding. The top journals have hard-earned reputations, due to consistently publishing high-quality, high-impact papers over the years. Authors want to publish in those journals, to advance their own reputations, and to reach the widest range of readers. Others in the field want to subscribe to those journals or have their libraries do so. Without this factor, internet distribution could make the whole peer-review, editing, and distribution process much cheaper (although not zero-cost), bypassing the scientific publishers.

3. Why should authors pay? Because they are in the best position to cover those remaining unavoidable expenses. Consider that scientific research can't be done for free; it is currently funded, often by government or industry grants, sometimes by universities themselves. They could simply add the costs of publication (which might be 5% of the cost of conducting the research in the first place) to their funding for research. Subsidies would have to be provided for papers from poor countries or from independent (non-university-affiliated) researchers. If author payments mean that the product of research is generally available on the internet, the resulting savings to universities in library subscription costs would be considerably greater than the extra costs of subsidizing publication.

4. Who would suffer under an author-pays, free-subscription system? The scientific publishers (commercial enterprises), and many scientific societies, who often own the journals that are published by commercial publishers and share in their profits. These are real issues. But on balance, the broader distribution of authors' ideas and the faster advancement of science due to more open communication is probably a more important consideration.

These comments don't address more radical changes in the system, e.g., going from the current peer-review arrangements to a Slashdot-style moderation plan. But I hope this post will help orient readers to some of the facts and issues.

Re:a good start

[cinnamon colbert]

AS a practicing scientist, all i can say is tht you r wrong. You do get tenure, or promotion or whatever for work that is not interesting or novel or worth reading - its not tht this sort of work is wrong, it is just that it is not worth the effort of reading either because it is mostly repetitive, or boring or whatever. lot of science falls in this catagory proof: most of the literature is never cited in another paper Actually, you are more wrong then that: frequently th purpose ofpublication is in fact precisely promotion of the authors. sorry, scientist are people - they are often vain and self promoting

Re:a good start

[jezmund]

HA! It's even worse than you think! "author pays" is already the model. As it is, they charge authors to defray "printing costs", I believe. In fact, the last 2 papers I've seen published have had costs in the area of $1500 dollars to the authors. It varies based on how many figures you have, and whether or not they will be in color.

So it works like this:

1)Charge authors to publish
2)Charge people for access
3)Sell ad space
4)????
5)Profit!

Re:a good start

[Noehre]

As a scientist, I can tell that you aren't one.

Besides the fact that you can't spell or type, you seem to be unfamiliar with the entire concept of peer review. This can be seen in your statement that most papers are "mostly repetitive." Half of the point of publishing your work is so that others can duplicate your results. Without replication of results, the scientific community ends up with Cold Fusion-type fiascos. You may not find them worth reading or very interesting, but that doesn't mean they aren't an integral part of the system. Or important to someone else.

My personal collection of papers includes hundreds of papers that are "boring," yet contains small pieces of data that have proved critical in piecing together research that I was conducted.

And like another poster mentioned, writing a bad paper isn't going to do much to promote oneself. It might get you tenure, but only at a rather poor institution.

Re:a good start

[lineinthesand]

> By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously

Yes and also printing costs; the group I'm working is about to publish an article in Nature Materials (already accepted). They had to pay a few hundred dollars to support the printing of the coloured figures and also 200 $ for a copyrighted figure (which I guess they would have had to pay anyway).

Despite these facts I'm not quite sure whether it's really an advantage to have all the publications accessible via net only. (Although I can't think of any except for 'having a nice properly printed hardcopy in your hands' right now)

Information says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Information says, "Can't we all just get along?".

academic library

[SoupGuru]

How does the 'free' model differ from the one already in place? Most peer reviewed journals are read by academics and other people that have a vested interest in the materials. These people typically have access to university libraries where they can research and read these journals for free anyway. And by "free" I mean no added cost for specifically viewing the journal. I think it's been proven that scientific literature is hard to sell or maintain rights over. It's a prime example of the 'information wants to be free' principle. News items decribing the lastest scientific finding give me all the details I really want anyway.

Re:academic library

[fshalor]

As a person who works at a research instutite with publicications in JFM, AMS, Nature, etc... And one of the best COMPLETE JFM collections (Journal of Fluid Mechanics) in the country, this is a big deal.

It goes down to the "communication" pillar of the Scientific Method.

Take our 400+ publications, for example. The're searchable online, but are in a database. Which means they don't show up on google.

Most of them are old, but in this field (fluid mechanics) a "recent" article may be in the mid 80's. I worked on one this morning which has sources from 1911 fluid mechanics work. Most of the cutting edge stuff just happened back in the mid 80's, and now, a few other groups are starting up again with this area.

Now, unless you either:
1. have an ip address at a school with a subscription
2. have a subsctiption yourself
3. have a catalouge, or a print out of all the journals AND have lots of time...

You will have a hard time getting at the bulk of the information availble in these types of fields. Take Chemical Engineering for example. Other than major applications and some computer simulations, little has changes since like the 70's. This means that you have to go to old print journals to get comparitively cutting edge stuff in some cases.

This article is right up there with making the descision of "profit or communication, or both."

By the way, we'll have all out publications indices up where google will be able to find them soon. And we have a policy for passing out reprints upon request, if we can.

Re:academic library

[stuph]

I'm one example of a person who would love to read these journals but no longer can as I'm not attached to any university or institution. In my undergrad and graduate research I was involved in a very new area of chemistry/materials science and like to see new developments in the field. Since I dropped out of grad school and am working in a completely different field these days, I'm not able to freely read the articles like I could back then.

I realize I'm a minority, but there are plenty of high school kids who are interested in science that would love to have access to this type of stuff.

Re:academic library

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it were so! I teach at an university in the US, and we do have several libraries that subscribe to numerous journals. The costs of subscribing to each journal keep going up year after year. Every year that forces heated debate within the university concerning which journals we can live without. We have just decided, for example, we can not afford to carry the complete line of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, which publishes results in many major CS conferences worldwide.

Notice we do not argue about which new journals or new books we can afford to buy to our collection. There isn't enough money to subscribe to the journals we already carry. (Please do not bring up the additional $10M we are spending on the athletic program next year.)

We (the faculty and the nice folks at the library) would love to switch to an electronic subscription for all our journals. But that does not cut our costs! The publishers actually want more money for the electronic version. Amusingly, they charge varying amounts depending on what the university currently pays for their print collection. The more the university pays in print, the more it is charged for the electronic edition. The result is that some universities -- and possibly ours in the future -- have decided to cut back on journals to a bare minimum, and then come back a few years later to try to subscribe to the electronic version. It is absolutely insane.

The irony, of course, is that most colleagues would be quite happy to post their results on their web site, or to submit to electronic (and freely available) journals. But since these are not "quality" venues for publication, it hurts their chances of getting tenure. So they _need_ to publish in journals and conferences that are not as accessible, just because they are more "prestigious". Go figure.

Re:academic library

[Anonymous Coward]

News items decribing the lastest scientific finding give me all the details I really want anyway.

Usually this is true for me, but there are times when I want to read the paper in the journal, and not having access to it is very irritating. I just can't think of one good reason why I should be denied access. So what if I am not a college student or professor. I still have a brain that is worthy of this information.

Re:academic library

[wass]

Most of the cutting edge stuff just happened back in the mid 80's, and now, a few other groups are starting up again with this area.

I thought fluids was still a relatively fresh field with the recent research of 'complex fluids'. I've even seen several colloquiums and lectures in the condensed matter group of the physics department here at JHU on such fluids.

Re:academic library

[datababe72]

The other answers in this thread are all good examples of some reasons why your comment isn't really correct, but there are a few things they miss:

1. Someone is paying for these subscriptions, even if it is not the individual researcher. This is the university or research institute. This money comes from: overhead on grants (your tax dollars), student fees (your tuition), and perhaps some general donations fund (money that could otherwise fund more research or improve facilities). Free to you doesn't really mean free, and isn't even really free to you: your tax dollars and tuition are almost certainly helping fund the subscriptions.

2. Not all scientists work in academic institutions! Scientists who work at a company whose main purpose is research (drug companies, for instance) usually get access via subscriptions paid by their company. Again, someone has to pay for them: this is just another expense that must be offset by income (from drug revenues, for instance). So, as a consumer, you're probably also paying some portion of these researchers' subscription rates, too.

I am a scientist, and I need to keep up on the scientific literature in my field and related fields. I don't work at a company whose main purpose really encompasses my field, so I have to buy my subscriptions individually. I can either pay for them myself, or try to get reimbursed by my company. Right now, the cost is less than $500/year, so I am still paying for them myself. For the things I need less often, I make a trip to the nearby academic library. This is not convenient, really, so I only do this if I *really* want to read a paper. I sometimes wonder what I miss due to my laziness.

3. If you're working as a scientist, I hope news items don't give you all the details you need! Many advances in my field are not newsworthy for a general audience, or even a general scientific audience, and hence not covered by news sources. Besides, I can't evaluate the work if I can't read the original research article.

Re:academic library

[mrogers]

Just because it's free at the point of use doesn't mean it's free. The universities have to get their money somewhere - either from tuition fees or from taxes - and that money ends up in the pockets of publishers like Elsevier, who in many cases don't pay a penny to the authors or editors of the journals! Instead, the authors and editors have their salaries paid by universities, who once again get their money from tuition fees and taxes.

This is starting to change in computer science, although other fields are a long way behind. I'm studying for a PhD at the moment, and most of the papers I need are available online, either on the authors' websites or on Citeseer. Even in CS, older papers are less likely to be available, but most of the work in my area was published in the last four years or is still awaiting publication. That's the other advantage of publishing online - the process of getting a paper reviewed and published can take years, so in fast-moving fields the journals are really an archive of significant work rather than a news medium. To keep up with recent work you have to look online.

Of course, the problem with self-publication is lack of peer review. However, Citeseer does a pretty good job of finding significant papers based on the number of citations (think Pagerank), and the database of citations also helps you to find papers that might contradict or reinforce the conclusions of the paper you've just read. This makes it less important to have editors filtering out biased or unreproducible results.

I hope that authors in other fields will start to embrace online self-publication. Unfortunately, many institutions see publication count as a good measure of an academic's standing, partly because the peer review process tends to ensure that a frequently-published author is well respected in his or her field. If insitutions started to pay attention to citation count instead, self-publication would become a viable alternative to journal publication, saving students and taxpayers an awful lot of money.

Re:academic library

[Crispy Critters]

"I think it's been proven that scientific literature is hard to sell or maintain rights over. It's a prime example of the 'information wants to be free' principle."

I never violate copyright by putting journal articles on the web. On the other hand, I am elated when I find that some article I need has been put up on the web illegally by someone else, thereby saving mea trip to a library with a bag of quarters for the copier.

Re:academic library

[fshalor]

ah... but geophysical fluids isn't as far along in many respects.

We're talking like corn syrup and water here. (What I was dealing with this morning. Inject a drop of water in a tank of cornsyrup. Can you tell wat the water will do? Not really. If it was oil, yes, I can tell you analytically exactly what the drop of injected oil will do. But water's miscible with the cornsyrup, so it's not just momentum transfer, there's mass transfer too...And neither of the two limiting models; Stokes and Hadamand-Rybzynski, work....)

There's a lot of good computational stuff going on. But the crux, "core" equations and such for much of it's archaic. Well, compared to physics and chemistry for example.

I can't wait to see what type of impact all the current numberical work is going to have on the eventual analytical models we're going to get out (I hope) someday.

Just take something as simple as an adsorption problem of a solvent on a charcol filter. There's about 4 methods for dealing with the situation. And those are mostly only accurate in isothermal conditions. There's a linear fit, which requires experimendal data and doesn't work well for some solvents when you try extrapolating. At the other extreme, you have some corrected linear stuff, which DO allow for the fact of a maximum number of "sites" on the charcol where things can adsorb. But, depending on your solvent, it may be completely impracticle, and it isn't analytical....

The story goes on....

Re:academic library

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's violating copyright when the person who wrote the article found in some journal publishes the article online on his/hers homepage. At least thats what I have seen people do lots of times.

By google you can get access to quite a lot of articles from journals located on the homepage of the author(s).

Re:academic library

[Likes Microsoft]

I don't think you're a minority. In physics (my area) at least, many more Ph.D.'s are produced than than can possibly be employed permanently in research. Many people go on to careers in the private sector, but I'm sure maintain their interest in scientific developments, and have the training to read the scientific literature.

Fortunately, though, in physics there is the network of prepring/eprint servers where many papers go prior to publication. (See Arxiv.org, for example.) However, they have the disadvantage of not having been peer-reviewed yet. I would like to see a respected, true Open Access journal in physics. There are many "free" physics journals available (see Directory of Open Access Journals), but none fit my desire for a respected, peer-reviewed, open access journal.

New business models?

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

So instead of peer review, we have peer-to-peer review! :)

Re:New business models?

[MrRuslan]

I Could only imagine people seeing The Nature Jurnals on Kazza or Gnutella and thinking its p0rn

Might cause information overload

[steelerguy]

My only concern about this is that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing, even if it is just online. It is getting harder and harder to find pertinate information because it is so easy to to just put up a page or article regardless of the facts or fallacies it may contain. Having to submit your research to a journal that has production costs means they don't want to just print everything they get.

Unfortunately, I think they would still need a subscription service to pay for the bandwidth, storage, and personnel to maintain an 'open' site.

The debate should definately be interesting and full of both great and harebrained ideas.

Re:Might cause information overload

[4of12]

that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing,

Absolutely.

For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.

So what's the equivalent?

Papers get digitally signed by their authors.

Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].

To put in /. terms, it would be a more refined moderation system, so that you could see where the mod points came from (a +3 from some new friends of gnaa or goatse posters would not be as valuable as a +1 moderation from the real Bruce Perens or Alan Cox, for example.)

Re:Might cause information overload

[M. Piedlourd]

Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter (pdf) to the Journal of Algorithms elaborating on the excessive costs to libraries and universities of peer-reviewed journals. Peer reviewers volunteer their services, and authors do much of their own typesetting thanks to the magic of desktop publishing, so the only production costs are the printing, postage and shipping, some clerical support, and an editor-in-chief. Yet Journal of Algorithms, for example, costs a budget-busting $731 per year for libraries. Libraries must economize on journal subscriptions, limiting access to the latest research.

I'm not overly fond of the current subscription model, since it encourages a publish-or-perish mindset amidst academe's stately groves. A system where the organization funding the research also pays for its publication (instead of the reader paying to access it) might put the brakes on excessive publishing, both in the sciences and in the humanities, and greatly increase readership, and therefore the dissemination of knowledge.

Re:Might cause information overload

[eaolson]

For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.

In any decent journal, ALL articles have been reviewed by experts in the field, the experts have commented and suggested changes, and the authors changed their papers accordingly. This is the peer-review system, and it's basically the whole reason scientific journals exist. The actual paper (or online, these days) publication is probably about only half the work.

Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].

I'd have to disagree. In my experience, the peers that review your paper do so in secret. Since everything goes through the publisher as a middleman, you never know who is reviewing your paper. As part of the submission process, you supply a list of suggest reviewers, and may request that a particular author not review your paper. But you never know who they are. This keeps the whole process objective. Take that away, and you'll constantly have people asking for a presigious reviewer's signature, or people trading theirs around, and so forth.

The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.

Re:Might cause information overload

[Theory of Everything]

concern about this is that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing, even if it is just online.

An officemate had a solution to this a few months back: download slashcode, and apply it to online journals. We have a perfectly good peer-review system right here!

Re:Might cause information overload

[4of12]

The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.

The horse has already left the barn on this one. Tenure processes in many academic departments essentially dictate a heavy publishing record, which is not necessarily synonymous with publishing quality.

I appreciate that some reviewers would feel hesitant to give a brutally honest assessment of an article if they weren't guaranteed anonymity (let's just assume competitors abusing anonymity to pan articles of colleagues that compete for the same funding sources is not a problem).

A digital signing and certificate system could still be used to preserve anonymity. A designated editor with some level of trust and prestige fields prospective articles, distributes them to reviewers, and adds up points and presents articles making a Score:4 or above.

Maybe long after the fact, when a specific correlation could no longer be made, the editor might thank a very long list of reviewers. The aggregate prestige of the reviewers would reflecton the prestige of the journal.

Re:Might cause information overload

[Chucklz]

Your concern of peer-review is probably not a concern for most of the respectable scientific community. Articles that have not been peer reviewed simply lack a certain credibilty, even if you personally know the PI.

Re:Might cause information overload

[eaolson]

A digital signing and certificate system could still be used to preserve anonymity. A designated editor with some level of trust and prestige fields prospective articles, distributes them to reviewers, and adds up points and presents articles making a Score:4 or above.

But this is exactly what the current peer review system does. The publisher distributes a paper to reviewers for comments; they send corrections, suggestions, and questions; the authors make changes and respond to the reviewers; repeat as necessary until everyone is happy. Finally the publisher does the publication.

There really is no reason for the digital signing, other than the fact that it's cool and geeky. Once the peer-review cycle has been completed, there is no longer a need to be able to determine the identity of the reviewers.

Re:Might cause information overload

[Dashing Leech]

download slashcode, and apply it to online journals

There are several problems with this. Ranking is not the same thing as peer review. Slashdot ranking might be better than the way citation indeces are used nowadays, but it is not a "review" in the same sense. Peer review is both a judgement in quality as to whether it is worthy to be published, and also performs "editor" and "critic" functions. All of these functions are pre-publication, i.e., give the author a chance to fix up the paper before publication.

Any slashcode application would be post-publication. The author has missed the chance to "correct" their paper before letting the public see it.

I think a better model is "beta" software. In this model, authors could deposit their "beta" (draft) papers for public examination that provides feedback like beta software. Then the author fixes the "bugs" and releases the "1.0" paper. For it to work, beta papers can't be referenced (since they aren't considered finished works).

At this point of release perhaps your "slashcode" idea would be useful for ranking the quality of work, the way citations are often used nowadays. (Which has many complaints since it isn't a good way to judge the quality or importance of work.)

I'm not sure if it'd be good or bad to allow versions beyond 1.0. On the one hand, they could update mistakes or from feedback, and not screw up references to it because they'd refer to the reference number as well. On the other hand, at version 5.0 would it really be the same paper anymore or a different paper?

Just some thoughts.

Re:Might cause information overload

[scrub76]

Might cause information overload? In almost every field I'm aware of (virology and immunology are mine), there are already too many journals, each publishing more information that any one person could ever hope to read. One example is the proliferation of Nature and Cell 'sub-journals' in the last few years. Material that used to be published in Nature (and eventually) and Nature Medicine is now spread across Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Immunology, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Nature Reviews Cancer, Nature Genetics, and Nature Biotechnology. And these journals are all 'top-tier'. The morass of less prominent journals seem to exist primarily to be searched out for individual articles resulting from citation searches, not to be 'read' in the conventional sense (as one reads a magazine or newspaper).

We are ALL peers

[Anonymous Coward]

peer review requires openness
science happen outside the ivory towers also

Re:We are ALL peers

[crem_d_genes]

Well - no we aren't all *peers* in all subjects -
Yes we are *citizens* or *stakeholders* - sure -
but I really can't hold a match to someone in an obscure (to me) branch of fluid dynamics or quantum mechanics, while my own specialities of earth sciences I would find tedious having reviewed by *democracy*.

As Socrates said - in parapharase - if your horse is critically sick - the last thing you want to do is bring it to the Assembly for a democratic vote on its care - You want to bring it to a specialist.

And someone who devotes years of their life studying something to make that knowledge *accessible* is hardly someone in the proverbial ivory tower.
There are in fact its antithesis.

Public grants = free publication

[dillon_rinker]

If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

If you don't want everyone to read your article, don't accept government funds. If you don't want to give your journal away for free, don't publish publicly-funded research.

Now, let's imagine a world in which corporate tax breaks were considered public funding...

Re:Public grants = free publication

[GileadGreene]

If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

Unless the research is classified...

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Aardpig]

If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

You've totally missed the distinction between making research freely accessible to the taxpayer, and publishing the research in a paid-subscription journal. All of my taxpayer-funded research papers are available from my website; however, in order to ensure that my research is widely disseminated, I also choose to have my papers published in a peer-reviewed journal. Since journals are private enterprises who don't receive state funds, I see no problem with them charging money for subscriptions, in order to cover their overheads etc. The fact that my papers appear in such a non-free (as in beer) journal does not change the fact that my research is freely available (as in beer and speech).

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Tsiangkun]

I think you are making the point that the scientists are making. Most of us publish our work to share with other scientist, and to justify funding. Once published a journal is now holding our information away from those without the cash for a subscription.

We don't care who has access to our information, but we do care that the journals are preventing access to information we released to the world.

A large group of scientist believe that all researchers should have access, at least in electronic form, to all the published literature.

--Tsiangkun
That single button mouse is my gateway to the Terminal app

Re:Public grants = free publication

[eaolson]

If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

I just recently came across an example of a paper written by a government agency, but can't find it at the moment. At the bottom of the title page, it had a disclaimer that read, "Work done by the US government. Work is in the public domain," or something to that effect.

I agree that work done BY THE GOVERNMENT should be in the public domain. By non-government researchers working entirely or partly on a government grant, I disagree. What do you do if the work is done using funds partly from the National Science Foundation (govt.), and partly the American Chemical Society (private org.), as mine is done? Just copyright half the paper?

Also note that, while the copyright is usually transferred to the journal for the purposes of publication, the author reserves the right to distribute copies of his paper for research and scholarly work. The same usually goes for posting the papers on the web, if you include a little copyright message.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[eille-la]

WHY a research should be classified?
is it for developing new weapon to kill more people in less time with a new technology?
How a country's governement can hide things to his own population while it is his own funds!?
Is it secret because the people would be AGAINST such researches? That is not democracy.

It was never showed that cooperation helps to developping ANYTHING?

Re:Public grants = free publication

[GileadGreene]

I never said that research should be classified. I was merely pointing out that for some folks there is "room for argument" regarding the public availability of taxpayer-funded research.

With regard to the "why" of classified programs, the answer is typically less to do with the fact that "the people" would be against the program, and more to do with the practice of "security through obscurity". The government wants to hide its true combat capabilities so that potential adversaries will not know what to expect. By a similar token, they want to hide their true intelligence gathering capabilities so that potential adversaries will not know whether or not they have been observed. That is the rationale. I'll make no comment regarding the wisdom and truth of that rationale.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Pvt_Waldo]

But not in the real world.

Though true in theory, this is not what it is in practice. I've seen multiple occurances where requests for data were not blatantly turned down, but tons of roadblocks thrown in the way. People who don't want their data out will find ways to block it despite what's right.

Currently I'm working on a collaboratory system paid for with NSF funds for NSF funded research. And yet the design as given has methods for blocking/hiding/"protecting" research built in by design.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[marcilr]

Having worked for the goverment I can say that the bulk of information is classified for CYA activity, to limit liability, and to simple hide stupid decisions from the general public. Alas...

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Dros68]

So, if my paper gets rejected from a journal I can just tell them it is publically funded and MUST be published? If I can't find a journal that wants to publish my work, I must somehow order a print run of my work and bind it and pass it out on street corners? If the government decides that all publically funded research must be publically available, then it better develop a publishing system for doing just that. No one else is obligated to do anything.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[dillon_rinker]

These journals that restrict access to information - do they have their own staff of researchers? Do they publish research done by people they control? In other words, are the creating the content they are selling?

Or is their anti-science behavior enabled by the scientists who submit articles to them?

If you want people to have access to what you create, then do so, and withhold content from those who would restrict access to it.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[dillon_rinker]

So if give you money to buy me a coke, you might come back and tell me "John gave me money for a coke, too, so I gave both cokes to him."

I can't imagine why you'd transfer your copyright to a journal unless they paid you for it, so can see why you might want to maintain the status quo.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[dillon_rinker]

If the government decides that all publically funded research must be publically available, then it better develop a publishing system for doing just that

Idiot. They already have. You're reading this response on it.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Dros68]

I guess I am an idiot. So a scientist must write up every single thing they do and put it on the web? That sounds bizarre to me. And then they must use their grant money to host a web server to put their research on for anyone to browse? I may be an idiot, but I don't think making scientists, who are trained to do science and not web publishing, responsible for making their research accessible is an efficient use of taxpayers money. If you want all research to slow down, then your system is a good one.

Re:Public grants = free publication

[Tsiangkun]

The "staff" of researchers are peers of those publishing in the journal, generally volunteers to review the works. Their behavior being enabled by the scientist is a black and white approach to a complicated problem. Unfortunately, a 'cell' publication will look good when applying for funding . . . whereas "we did this and put it on this website" does nothing. . . As much as I want the information to be free, I want to eat too. --Tsiangkun

Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Trillian_Angel]

Perhaps I misunderstood something about this, but why would any writer pay to have their work published? I know it happens -- usually by con artists -- but is this a realistic measure? How does the writer then support him or herself? I saw a mention to this in one of the articles in the set, but it did not give enough specifications to really make any firm judgements on.

From what I've read of several of the articles, readers would pay for the value of the content. In one case, and only for not-for-profit, writers would pay for their own articles... but it didn't give any information about that. But if Open Access is a writer pays model like the slashdot comment suggests, then the professional writers will not be able to afford to write *and* pay for the right to have their work published, especially if the readers are receiving the content for free.

Isn't the point of business, afterall, to make money? I know I personally only donate writing to causes I really agree with, but I would not pay to have my work published, ever.

Especially not after the PublishAmerica scandles and the likes. Perhaps I missed the point, but it seems like there isn't enough information on the specific proposed business model to really be an effective tool to inform people how these writers would make any profit at all, instead of just losing time and money.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[stuph]

Actually, in scientific publications, writers never really get paid for their publications, at least I never did. You do however pad your publications list, which helps you get better jobs, more respect in the community, more speaking engagements, etc...

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Trillian_Angel]

Not getting paid is a lot different than paying to be put into the publication list. I definitely see the uses of freebe articles in publications, especially to get your name out there and to grow your reputation. But, I would not *pay* for this. Then I've lost both time and money into attempting this publication.

Perhaps I am being a little over suspecious, but something just doesn't feel right about the concept to me. Donating writing to a cause is one thing, but paying for that donation of time, research and effort already invested in the writing is the step over the brink I don't think I'd take, personally.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[utopyr]

In the standard scientific/mathematical/biomedical publishing deal, for the more high-impact journals (that is, those whose articles are most frequently cited), the authors do pay--to cover, they say, typesetting, images, etc.

The universities have usually paid three times for an article in a journal to which they subscribe, with salary, grants, and subscriptions.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[stuph]

I think you misunderstood me. In the hardcore science world, nobody gets paid for the articles they write in journals. It's all prestiege, getting your name out, etc. It would hurt smaller labs, independant researchers, etc., but articles would still get published by the big researchers (all of the people I ever worked for would have paid at some point or another, I'm sure). See my other comments in this thread for what I feel is the real problem.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Trillian_Angel]

That makes sense. I suppose since I'm a small name in my writing field, I don't have the petty cash to throw at getting articles published in a journal. So I definitely agree that it would hurt those smaller labs, definitely. I'll have a look at the other comments in the thread to find out more. :)

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Jonathan]

No journal would publish something *just because* someone paid page charges -- it still has to be accepted by peer review -- page charges are just a way that some journals use to defray subscription cost (theoretically). For instance, I've had to pay page charges for my paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[crush]

If you look at the small print inside eg. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences it says something along the lines of "this paper is an advertisement".

A portion of every scientific grant is reserved to pay the publishing fees. For journals like Science, Nature, PNAS this is about $600 per article and color illustrations up the cost.

So, scientists already pay to publish their work. Similarly in the humanities a large number of PhD theses are published by what are effectively "vanity presses", so that the authors can look better for sabbatical review.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Chucklz]

Scientists have payed page charges for years, it is nothing new at all. If you only publish in journals that don't have page charges, you risk low readership of your work, and low numbers of citations. Publish or perish is NOT what most people think it to be. The number of citations your paper receives is more important than the number of articles you write, so paying a few thousand dollars to get your paper into a more respectable journal is easily justified.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Trillian_Angel]

For scientists, yes. They have other sources of income. But for a professional writer, it would be "Publish, pay fee, starve".

Or not publish and starve, either way.

That just gives me twice more reason to avoid that specific market, but eh. thats just me.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[flossie]

Scientists are not professional writers. Writing papers is an essential part of the job, but that is not what researchers are actually paid for. Scientists are paid to do research - publishing papers is just one of the (most important) ways that the research is judged.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Bad D.N.A.]

Get serious here. I publish in both types of journals and I much prefer those that are open. The little bit of money ~2k that it costs me to publish a paper verses the exposure that the paper gets in an open journal is significant. "usually by con artists" come on now. The (e.g. astrophysical journal) is a widely published peer reviewed journal that has all articles on the web for free download via pdf files. I publish in ApJ as often as I can because more people read my papers. It's not the money, it's the exposure.. More visibility == more funding opportunities.

Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free?

[Trillian_Angel]

Perhaps in *that* writing field, yes. But other genres, that is the sign of a con artist. As I am not a scientist, nor am I overly educated about being one besides knowing a little bit about the basic invention process... eh.

I'm a writer. Not a researcher. If I were to do that and only that, I'd go broke, regardless of how well known I got to be.

I still don't think it'd work well for small time people who don't have the extra 2k to throw at getting into a journal.

Money talks?

[insecuritiez]

If the author has to pay for the paper to be published who is speaking? The ground breaking work they have done or their money? I have a feeling that having the author pay will greatly reduce the quality of scientific journals while skewing the research to fields with money in them.

Re:Money talks?

[gnuLNX]

I think the quality is already lacking. People with established names can get published very easily...those without established names face an uphill battle. The system is already very corrupt. To make it truely fair we would need to remove all names and orginaztion information fro submitted manuscripts...only after they have been accepted would that information be added back in.

Re:Money talks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many respectable journals already require authors to pay. The cost isn't so high as to prevent good research from being peer-reviewed, but it is high enough to ensure that all submissions are serious. That said, I do have qualms about having to pay large sums of money to have my work published... but in the end, the money comes from grants which take these expenses into account. In the end, the utility I would gain from being able to read articles at will far outweighs the relatively minor annoyance of having to pay when I publish.

Finally, it just occurred to me that a lot of this won't matter at all. Right now, most universities pay to have campus-wide access to journals at no cost to the students/faculty. If they no longer have to pay that fee, then they might as well pay the publication fees.

Re:Money talks?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be nice in the case where the reviewer really does not like the person submitting the review, as well, which happened to me once, where my advisor and one of the reviewers had a personal war going on. Not so hot to be in the middle of...

Re:Money talks?

[Dr. GeneMachine]

To make it truely fair we would need to remove all names and orginaztion information fro submitted manuscripts...only after they have been accepted would that information be added back in.

That would only work for some fields. In my area of research for example, which is protein NMR spectroscopy, most groups know each other, know what the others are working on, know their style. I cannot imagine a way to truely anonymize papers for peer review.

I agree with you that quality is lacking, though I would not call the system corrupt per se. But how could anyone design a peer review system circumventing the power of reputation?

Re:Money talks?

[rainwalker]

Not really. There's some comments above about this. Publishing a paper in any journal runs about $600-$1500 as it is, and you don't retain copyright, you have to pay for reprints, other people have to pay for access to your work, etc. This is a much more interesting model, IMHO.

Re:Money talks?

[gnuLNX]

Very good points indeed. And I agree that as scientists we build our careers on reputation...However I think that publishing should be independant of reputation. I think that you should have to try just as hard to get your 1000'th publication as you did for your first. I agree that your field is farily small and this might not in fact work, but it would be better than not at all. I am a computational chemist so I actually use they data you guy's put out all the time....BTW you guy's/gals (your field in general) do some really really nice work.

I also agree that it might be hard to build a system without any corruption, but hey we might as well try. I hope journals like elsavior (spelling ...good thing I am not a writer) go they way of the doddo bird...pure gread driving those journals...Hell Harvard actuallky dropped them...any way I am going to stop before I get into a head long rant.

They are open and believe me, the scientist pays

[Neil Blender]

Anyone can go to any public university library and make copies of articles from journals. Articles which the scientist has paid a good amount to get published in terms of research not to mention paying the journal to publish it (even if a journal accepts your article, you still have to pay the costs of the layout, figures, reprints, etc.) I worked in life sciences research at the University of Washington for 10 years and I have seen this personally.

New business models?

[Anonymous Coward]

"New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user."

I've seen these before, they're called advertisements.

LOL

Publishing in Journals

[stuph]

Opening access to scientific journals to a more general population is a good idea. However, having the author pay for publication is a terrible one.

The best thing about scientific journals is that within each discipline, there are journals that carry more weight than others. These are journals that are harder to get published in. By limiting the amount of information they publish, they're telling the reader that, "this information was important enough that we, a high-profile journal, felt it was worth publishing." If these journals switched to an author-pays method of publishing, my fear is that this filter would be turned off, as money tends to do.

"Here's $50,000, publish my article, even though it's based on bad data and is in fact a near-copy of something published years ago."

The best journals require peer reviewing of any submitted articles before they are accepted, and these peers are generally people working in not only the same field but in the same area as the submitter. These are the people most likely to know if the data presented makes sense, could happen, has been published before, etc.

I guess my fear is just that allowing authors to pay for articles to get published opens up a new area of question in terms of an article's weight. No longer will you have to only look at the journal to know if the material is worth reading, but you'll have to check and see if (and how much) the author paid to have it published.

Having published a couple of articles on chemistry in the past, I would much rather see some other type of method in which information would be free. I just have great doubts about allowing people to buy their way into having more things published (and increasing their publication list)

Re:Publishing in Journals

[Dr_LHA]

Opening access to scientific journals to a more general population is a good idea. However, having the author pay for publication is a terrible one.

Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page. See here:

http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/pcharges_te xt .html

Re:Publishing in Journals

[Dr. GeneMachine]

There are already publishing fees in various journals. Some charge you for colour figures only, some take a fee per site and accordingly mark each article as "advertising" (PNAS does so, if I'm not mistaken). The business model of scientific journals is deeply and disturbingly flawed in my opinion - take work stemming from publicly funded projects, charge the authors and sell it back to the public for ridiculous prices.

Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have cancelled their online access as protest. Great working conditions, I can tell you..

Open scientific literature is a great idea, but it has to be done consequently. Cut out the publishing houses completely, organize peer review as a network of individual scientists. The big journals have long overdone their ripping of of the public.

Re:Publishing in Journals

[stuph]

Ouch. That hurts. Over in chemistry we were never that mean to our people, at least in journals I sent stuff off to. :)

Re:Publishing in Journals

[Too Much Noise]

Totally agree. It's bad enough that there are already journals with poor peer review that accept mostly anything (meaning stuff found not rigorous enough for specialized journals) - like ...umm ... Nature? I know at least one case where Nature published an article rejected by Phys. Rev. Letters peer review as based on a flawed assumption and then, later, Nature rejected a refutation by another researcher from the same field as 'too technical to fit our profile'. This will only make things worse.

Besides, there are already free archives like arXiv.org (and the various mirrors) where people would send articles prior to journal publishing - so scientific information is mostly available (at least some of it). Peer-reviewed (i.e. with a good guarantee of non-garbage) information is paid-for. However, the point is that for the average taxpayer the actual scientific articles are meaningless (too technical) - unless you're working in that field, in which case your employer pays for your access as one of the tools for your job. What the journals provide for free is the article abstracts (and maybe extra stuff like references) - and for the vast majority of people outside that particular field that is enough.

Re:Publishing in Journals

[Aardpig]

Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page.

...which is why I almost-universally publish in Monthly Notices. They don't have page charges, unless a paper needs colour; and even in that case, the expense is pretty low (400 pounds sterling for the whole paper). The fact that both ApJ and A&A have page charges is a major offputting factor for me.

Re:Publishing in Journals

[rainwalker]

Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have canceled their online access as protest.

Are you sure? I don't have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but Nature and Science are pretty cheap. In 2002, Nature was $US845/year, and Science was US$390/year for the institutional rates, which are among the lowest in the industry.

Re:Publishing in Journals

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Citing the Nature homepage:

For an academic institution the price for Nature is based on the full FTE figure for all staff, students and researchers. Please provide details to your sales representative.

Which would, according to our librarians, amount to about 20.000 Euro/year for our university. A sum we simply cannot afford - mostly due to the horrible research funding in Germany. But don't get me started on this topic...

Re:Publishing in Journals

[tburkhol]

Cut out the publishing houses completely, organize peer review as a network of individual scientists. The big journals have long overdone their ripping of of the public.

And yet, the number of academic journals has grown exponentially over the past few decades and the business model shows no signs of weakness. Academics succeed through publication-in some places, a paper in Science or Nature as good as guarantees tenure. The power of those publications is entirely based on the reputation of the journal, often as quantified by ISI Citation Reports/Impact Factor. Today, no one would cite a web page in an academic journal, so no web-only journal can acquire an impact factor capable of attracting decent articles. Catch-22.

Approaching Singularity

[imgumbydamnit]

Verner Vinge wrote of the "Group Mind" in 1993 as a path to Sigularity see http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html. The free posting of the advances in knowlege is an accelerant to Singularity. If one buys into the Extopian worldview, then the debate takes on some profound implications.

wired article

[enrico_suave]

from the dead tree edition a few months ago

open source in other arenas (than software) scroll to bottom to see beginning paragraph on the section about 'open source' scientific journals.

*shrug*

e.

and one day...

[me98411]

... you will ask me to pay to post on /. ?

Re:and one day...

[Rick.C]

... you will ask me to pay to post on /. ?

You already do... or do you consider your soul to have no value?

The preprint archive

[manobes]

Virtually every paper published in the last ten years in high energy physics is online at the preprint arxiv. People still publish in peer reviewed journals, but very few people I know read them anymore. It's faster, and more current, on the arxiv. More and more physics papers in other fields are showing up there as well. The debate about open access in physics appears to have been settled already.

Re:The preprint archive

[gnuLNX]

I envy you guy's/gals. I am a computaional chemist in the pharma industry and I would love to do away with our archaic methods....

Re:The preprint archive

[Anonymous Coward]

Just start ...

Re:The preprint archive

[V_M_Smith]

The problem with arXiv.org is that as it gets more popular, the signal-to-noise goes way down (a la slashdot), as anyone with a pet theory can throw it onto the preprint server. It can take a lot of energy to sift through papers to decide which ones contain crackpot ideas, and which ones are simply ahead of the curve.

Re:The preprint archive

[manobes]

The problem with arXiv.org is that as it gets more popular, the signal-to-noise goes way down (a la slashdot), as anyone with a pet theory can throw it onto the preprint server. It can take a lot of energy to sift through papers to decide which ones contain crackpot ideas, and which ones are simply ahead of the curve.

Not really. At least the high energy sections are pretty crank free. The general physics section gets a bit of crank stuff, but not much. They have a filter, so you have to have an institutional email address (or a sponsor who has one) in order to put a paper there.

Re:The preprint archive

[wass]

The high-energy theorists I know here at JHU still publish in other journals. In fact, several physicists here publish something in the arxiv first, to 'get it out first', and then work to get it in a journal. But some journals, (Nature, IIRC) don't let you do this.

But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessions, just shouting down the speaker with false claims, or saying the talk is obvious (when it's not), etc. It's kind of weird to see 'professionals' trolling.

But back on topic, the arxiv has lots of articles, and anybody can publish there. But peer review is worth ALOT. At least with the condensed matter people I work with we all strive to make it to the standard journals.

Re:The preprint archive

[jabberjaw]

Just remember to take what you find on arXiv with a grain of salt. It is a preprint service, which means the papers are not peer reviewed.

Re:The preprint archive

[Anonymous Coward]

Arxiv is great (it's certainly NOT just high-energy physics; it includes everything from high-energy physics to general relativity to biophysics), and there's another preprint server called SPIRES which is also very good.

The philosophy behind these preprint servers actually closely mirrors the open source philosophy. When I want to publish something, I post it for everyone to see on arxiv. Then over the course of a few weeks, I get tremendous feedback. It tends to be constructive, since it's obvious who's making the comment. In the end, I get to submit a much improved paper for formal publication, at which point peer-review becomes much less of an obstacle.

Re:The preprint archive

[V_M_Smith]

I've seen some pretty wacky stuff in gr-qc and hep-th as well. Maybe that's actual M-theory research though... ;)

Re:The preprint archive

[habig]

One thing which has kept the S/N rato up on arXiv.org is the use of latex instead of Word. Now that they allow .doc format, many of us expect things to get worse.

That said, the S/N can be horrible and the system can still function. You might not be able to read everything over your morning coffee, but with a good search feature you can find the results you're looking for pretty easily.

Re:The preprint archive

[Idarubicin]

But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessions, just shouting down the speaker with false claims, or saying the talk is obvious (when it's not), etc. It's kind of weird to see 'professionals' trolling.

I suppose the important thing is that the speakers themselves are screened. (At least in most cases, and at all good conferences.) There isn't anything to prevent obnoxious idiots scrawling notes into print journals at the library, either--though it seems quite rare. Perhaps trolling is more common in some fields than others...?

A word of advice: I've found that the AIP Physics Desk Reference has just the right amount of heft--light enough to carry; heavy enough to silence most trolls. For the most persistant and pugnacious ones, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics always does the trick.

Re:The preprint archive

[Anonymous Coward]

SPIRES is not a preprint server, it's just a database of references. All the actual preprints reside on other sites (like the arXiv).

Re:The preprint archive

[Likes Microsoft]

The preprint servers are not true open access, merely free (as in beer) access. We need to distinguish between these two things.

Also, Arxiv is a fast way to "publish", but it completely lacks peer-review. The only thing resembling peer-review is that you have to be sponsored by an existing member to be able to post a paper, unless you joined before this rule went into effect recently.

I use Arxiv personally because I like to make sure that my family (who are not associated with Universities) can access my papers when I publish them, and it makes a good way to send around revisions of a paper to co-authors for criticism (as opposed to sending out a dozen e-mails with PDF attached).

A thought.

[baudilus]

One would imagine that the writer has a vested interest in having his submission published. A truly unique idea can generate quite a bit of money, much more than it would cost to publish such an idea.

One must also remember that these journals are the prevailing vehicle for viable discourse for the scientific community. A move towards Open Access would benefit the community; the idea is to increase access to the information, not lower the cost of submission.

Besides, doctors can afford to pay for publishing. :P

Well put

[mao che minh]

I am a science buff with a subscription to Nature, amongst other journals. I know many people (well, like four) who are intrigued by science due to popularizers such as Shermer and Sagan, but never take the next step and read the journals due to the subscription fees. Nature, being the premeire science journal, really needs to step up and do some popularizing now that Sagan is gone, and what better way than making the content free?

Re:Well put

[rokzy]

could you explain WHY they need to do some "popularizing"?

no offense, but who cares about people like you? if you're interested, then pay.

wouldn't a similar argument be "I know some people who think films are good, but they can't be bothered paying for the cinema. They need to make them free." ?

Re:Well put

[Anonymous Coward]

" could you explain WHY they need to do some "popularizing"?"

If you really need to ask that question, you're too ignorant to understand or comprehend the big picture, and it would take too long to explain it to you. No offense.

Re:Well put

[abigor]

Because greater awareness of scientific study and method is good for our culture in general? Because it's an effective way to combat pseudoscience, superstition, quackery, and so forth?

Sagan's role wasn't just as a scientific entertainer. That's why your film analogy is flawed. He tried to teach people to think skeptically and to recognise the wonderful world and universe we live in without resorting to fringe-dwelling nuttiness, religion, or whatever.

I know, there is a capitalist argument here: if there was sufficient widespread demand for the magazine, then prices would drop and profits would increase due to increased sales.

I guess we won't know until those magazines make it easier to subscribe or to get information from them. Paying is fine, but it takes a really massive enthusiast to subscribe at their current rates.

To be honest, I don't know what the solution is. But making access to original scientific research easier for everyone is only a good thing.

Re:Well put

[rokzy]

I don't think access to papers will do anything to help people to understand. the stuff in journals is probably way too hard if you aren't properly trained.

what the public needs is New Scientist/Scientific American and popular science books such as those by (I think) Graham Greene and Paul Davies.

there are costs associated with publishing (journal or electronic) and I far prefer subscriptions (usually covered by institution anyway) to anything else I can think of (bringing advertising into it would be absolutely appalling). so I don't think:

"making access to original scientific research easier for everyone is only a good thing"

is at all true. imo the important thing is easy, quality access for researchers. access to the public should only be pursued so long as it doesn't affect researcher access.

Re:Well put

[flossie]

There are many people who could benefit significantly from access to scientific journals. For example, many people working in industry could make great use of knowledge of the latest academic developments. In an ideal world, businesses would pay for access to journals, but in practice, they don't. If some of the taxes taken from business by government were used to make access to academic research freely available, everyone would benefit.

Re:Well put

[rokzy]

I can't imagine a situation where access to journals would actually be beneficial and management wouldn't pay, except if the managers are retards in which case they will either be fired or the company will die. problem solved.

Re:Well put

[flossie]

It is actually fairly rare for engineers and senior management to agree on what is beneficial to the company. Engineers are typically interested in doing a good job and consider the long term interests of the company. Senior management typically are interested only in tomorrows stock price.

Don't forget that scientific journals are very, very expensive. One of the main drivers for "Open Access" is that many university libraries can no longer afford to continue paying the subscription fees for all the journals that their users need access to.

Good for everyone

[jgercken]

I would love to subscribe to a number of scientific jornals but at >$200/year there's no way I could justify it. I understand these are small distribution publications that don't have the economy of scale that say newspapers enjoy. Although the material they print is donated (correct me if I'm wrong on this), publication & distribution is expensive with little commercial space to offset the cost. By using electronic distribution maybe the prices can come down to the level at which your average Joe could afford them.

Re:Good for everyone

[hopemafia]

You're correct, nobody gets paid (directly) to be published scientifically, although the # of publications indirectly controls how much money you can make.

The problem is there are still too many old profs out there who want a paper journal. Once biology weeds out the paper dependent scientists, then a revolution in publishing can take place.

Re:Good for everyone

[sugar and acid]

I would say that even the old profs are changing, especially as the older thay get the harder it is to walk to the library. I know plenty of profs in the range of 60 to 70 years old that have stopped going to the library to read a paper journal, or subscribing to their own personal copies of journals as they can get everything online. They do print out everything before they read it though.

Journals Need To Open

[LabRat007]

I am research scientist who has worked in big Pharma (Pfizer, Pharmacia & Upjohn) and I am currently working in a small startup biotech company. While working in big pharma we constantly had problems with our service that made all the journals available online (intranet). It was always a pain in the ass to hunt down that 'last paper' but we "People" who could take care of it for us. This is, by the way, how big Pharma handles most problems; throw ridiculous amounts of money at the problem unti it goes away. At the time I rather enjoyed that power - but I always felt a bit uneasy about it.

Now that I'm in a small Biotech the issues are very apparent. Many scientific journals, that we absolutely need, cost more then $1000 each for a years subscription. If you only new how many different journals we need. With start up monies of less then $500k and insane prices on lab equipment and supplies we need every break we can get. If we didn't already have an "alternate"(in other words shady) method of literature acquisition we would be screwed.

While it is true you can find just about any journal in some library - good f-ing luck finding one with everything you need. I hope that a solution can be worked out. Many researchers could benefit from an environment were the data/methods/protocols they need are just a few clicks away - instead of a 4 hour drive or expensive contract away.

Re:Journals Need To Open

[Idarubicin]

If you only new[sic] how many different journals we need.

Indeed. To maintain a well-stocked library at a modern comprehensive university requires literally tens of thousands of subscriptions. The University of Toronto has the second-largest library collection in North America, after Harvard University. In April 2002, their library system received 33409 print serials, and subscribed to 19385 electronic serials. I can only assume that the number of journal subscriptions has increased since then. Incredibly, I still run across references to articles published in journals to which the university does not subscribe. It's utterly mindboggling.

The university spent in 2002/2003 $12 million on serials--nearly fifty percent more than the $8.3 million spent on books.

Re:Journals Need To Open

[Chucklz]

I know I would welcome some kind of database of techniques and protocols. Current Protocols is great, but im just a poor student, I certainly cant not eat for a few months to afford CP in anything.

Author pays?

[Anonymous Coward]

Journals where the Author pays? As things are now the authors already pay to publish in most journals (the number of pages, color illustrations and so on). I think its a good idea to make the articles open to the general public (and not just to those connected to university libraries). However, to put more of the economic burden on the researcher seems like the wrong way to go... Most of us are hard pressed for funds as it is.

Page charges

[darby_smeed]

Lots of people are saying it's bad if the scientist has to pay to have the work published.

This is not something new. It describes the current situation.

Do a Google search for "page charges" and your favorite discipline. If you want reprints it's even more.

Re:And the next study ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you were joking, but actually cigarette smokers need more vitamin C than non-smokers.

Vanity press and career advancement

[John Jorsett]

Isn't the number of articles you get published a big part of career advancement in science? Wouldn't what amounts to the emergence of a vanity press undermine that measure of one's worth?

Re:Vanity press and career advancement

[ill dillettante]

I would say that this is the only functions of journals (i.e. as means to score scientisits).

Re:Vanity press and career advancement

[Idarubicin]

Wouldn't what amounts to the emergence of a vanity press undermine that measure of one's worth?

Nope. This isn't a vanity press; your work still needs to be peer-reviewed to be published. If a journal gained a reputation for being soft on authors, its prestige would fall. Scientists publishing in it would receive little professional respect or acknowledgement.

Scientists already rank existing journals both formally and informally based upon the quality of work that they publish. If I apply for a faculty position at a university, the hiring committee is going to be more impressed by a couple of articles in Nature than by scores of papers in the International Journal of Salami Slicing .

So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The prestige would be based on links to it. Like google does. You'd have prestige blogs pointing to cheaply posted material.

Re:So what?

[John Jorsett]

The prestige would be based on links to it. Like google does. You'd have prestige blogs pointing to cheaply posted material.

Leading to the equivalent of Google-spoofing, I presume.

Web of Science for teh win!

[Anonymous Coward]

ISI databases get me all moist.

Having open scientific journals is a great idea.

[ajutla]

I think having rreely available scientific journals should make more knowledge available to a wider cross-section of people. People would be able to look up accurate technical information online, and students would probably benefit too: it would be easier for them to do research. Making this kind of information more freely available will lead us to a more enlightened, informed, knowledgeable society.

Re:PLoS

[dokebi]

I don't know if the poster is intentionally spewing FUD or maybe just not knowledgeable. I'll give the benefit of the doubt.

The idea of Open Access is not about publishing whatever you want for a fee. It is about having access to the journals that are already published. Both PLoS (Public Library of Science) and Nature are peer reviewed by respected scientists of their field. Both charge fees to author to submit/layout their papers. But the difference is that access to PLoS is free and unrestricted, whereas access to Nature or Science is fee based and restrictive. The whole Open Access (and PLoS) movement started when Nature and Science *refused* access to their past journals without a subscription. Even when the authors themselves wanted their papers to be more accessible.

Things are better now that PLoS has gathered steam--most journal articles are available after 6 months. Publishers are afraid of the outrage they could cause by not allowing more access. But even now, there are restrictions in place that doesn't allow these journal articles to be fully useful. Why? Because they don't allow article body searches, only abstracts. Imagine how much more effective journal searches could be if we could search through full text bodies instead of just abstracts. Uh-huh.

I for one welcome our new PLoS overlords.

Scientific publishing and copyright

[kels]

Scientific publishing is a standout example of how skewed the incentives can be in copyright law. Typically, the scientist(s) publishing a paper signs over the copyright to a journal (which may be for- or non-profit), which often charges a fee to the author for the priviledge (and especially for extras like color figures). Thereafter, the interests of the author to have the paper as widely distributed as possible is in direct conflict with the journal's interests in earning fees for access to the content. Regardless of how many people read the paper, the author receives no royalties on it. Many journals now give the author permission to redistribute electronic & paper copies of the article (gee, thanks!), but since these are not linkable by standard databases or the journal's own web page, they have limited value. You can search for them on Google, maybe you'll get lucky. Scientists sign over their rights (and often pay a fee) to have paper published under a prestiguous journal name, and to have the paper peer reviewed (NB: the peer reviewers are not paid either).

It is so obviously in the interests of scientists to have truly open journal access, it is amazing it is taking so long. Especially since many of the top journal publishers are professional scientific societies, ostensibly representing the interests of the scientists.

Re:Scientific publishing and copyright

[bobej1977]

Don't forget the other motivation for charging, which is to help ensure that spurious papers never get submitted. Quite honestly, $1000 or so isn't that difficult to come up with if your paper is important.

An open peer review system must include some checks against spurious submissions. It would be a disaster if good research work was lost in a tide of "freebie" work which might harbor bias, bad-science or even outright fraud.

I'd be in favor of a pay-to-play system which might have a seperate system for free research posting. It could be set up such that people could "sponsor" a work to be placed in the main system. I think you'll find that such a system would promote high-quality research while not leaving poorly funded research completely by the wayside.

Re:Scientific publishing and copyright

[Dr. GeneMachine]

It is so obviously in the interests of scientists to have truly open journal access, it is amazing it is taking so long. Especially since many of the top journal publishers are professional scientific societies, ostensibly representing the interests of the scientists

Right on the spot. I'd like to add some points. First, personal experience... My university just lost access to PNAS, no less, due to their ridiculous institutional prices. What good is a scientific society if it comes to this?

Second, I heard a lot of people talking about open access and I've seen very little movement. This is going on for years. So, what can, what must be done? What can the scientic community learn from other open source projects? What kind of licensing scheme could be applied to scientific work? How can we actually get this started? Suggestions are welcome - perhaps this should be submitted as an "Ask Slashdot"-article.

Re:Scientific publishing and copyright

[kels]

I'd be in favor of a pay-to-play system which might have a seperate system for free research posting. It could be set up such that people could "sponsor" a work to be placed in the main system. I think you'll find that such a system would promote high-quality research while not leaving poorly funded research completely by the wayside.

I agree. I think the journals with the best systems now are non-profit professional society based, that have page charges for the authors. They are still having trouble figuring out what to charge for institutional electronic access, as fewer people want or care about the paper copy. Trying to keep individual subscription prices low while finding a fair price for library access is a problem that many are having (e.g., AGU). But access is still more restricted than the scientists would like.

Short Circuiting Journals

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 80's and 90's I used to work in High Temperature Superconductivity research. It was very interesting; the field of superconductivity had been a rather quiet backwater kind of place until Bednorz and Mueller blew the whole thing up in 1986 with their dicovery of the (ceramic) high temperature superconductors. There was a physics meeting soon thereafter which more or less turned into a high temperature (or High Tc as it is called) meeting, later known as the Woodstock of Physics.

B and M got a Nobel Prize the following year and the field turned into a fevered frenzy in making new discoveries. Once you cracked the concept it was easy to get started which meant that an entire world started at more or less the same starting point.

At this insane tempo nobody had the time to wait for Nature, Science, PhysRevB or the like to run the entire peer review process and (this is the first point I am building up to): much of the publication process was basically short circuited.

People realised that the Berkeley-Stanford environment had an advantage in circulating preprints but it was soon realised it amounted to an unfair advantage. And here is my second point: it was the Physics community that deciced it was unfair and also did something with it.

The result was a zine called High Tc Update that listed title and authors of upcoming publications as well as highlights of some submissions. And it was amazingly effective, cutting lead time with months, allowing for an even higher tempo.

So it has been done and can be done and I applaud Nature for staying ahead of the curverather than waiting to be outdated like the music industry.

Uh....

[Anonymous Coward]

New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user.

I thought April Fools day was over?

Why they charge so much

[reptilicus]

It depends on the journal, really. Most scientific journals have a very low readership level, at least compared with a magazine. It costs the same amount of money to print a magazine, no matter the size of the readership. So you get an economy of scale. If you have only 2000 readers, you're going to have to charge a lot from each reader to cover the costs.

Re:Why they charge so much

[snarkh]

If you have only 2000 readers, you're going to have to charge a lot from each reader to cover the costs.

Actually that is not quite right. They did a study in math journals and found out that top quality journals with similar readership (e.g. Inventiones and the Annals) charge wildly different subscriptions.

Profit before truth..

[robbo]

New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user.
(insert tongue firmly in cheek)
It comes as a great relief to me that scientific truth will soon rest firmly in the hands of the people with the deepest pockets. I can't imagine that special interest groups would *ever* try to take advantage of that kind of system.

Re:Profit before truth..

[Chucklz]

Unforunately, science has been in the hands of those with the most money for a long time now. Studies cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most comes from Government and Private grants. These grant bodies chose to whom and for what ends they give their money. There is a peer review process here as well, but there still is a certain amount of direction and control exerted by a relative few.

farming subsidies = free food

[reptilicus]

If the farm is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL food produced must be made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

Re:farming subsidies = free food

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad fact is that most farming subsidies consist of paying "farmers" *not* to grow food. This is done to keep the price of the food from bottoming out which would put most/all of those farmers into bankruptcy.

Re:farming subsidies = free food

[dillon_rinker]

Good point. Material objects are identical to information, after all.

publish or perish

[rkowen]

There's an interesting opinion piece in the Mar'2004 Physics Today by Mohamed Gad-el-Hak http://physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-3/p61.html concerning the glut of papers and journals that litter the scientific research landscape.

The problem he addresses is that generally the research and university bureacracy has promoted a ``publish or perish'' mentality, where it's not the quality of work (or how often a work is cited) but how many papers are published that earns a researcher respect (or more earnings, grants, etc.). He illustrates a engineering dean that published on average a paper per week for a one year period. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the papers were actually written by graduate students or post-docs, but it does highlight that how much of that prolific output was new or novel, much less interesting!

Perhaps, going to a author-pays system may have some beneficial side-effects of reducing the amount of cruft that passes for a research paper nowadays. An author would have to balance his need to publish with his resources. Is the content worth it?

I no longer do physics (I'm a software developer now) because I could see the trend that it didn't matter what you wrote, but that you wrote a lot of it. I still toy with the idea of going back and doing some novel research. However, if I do, I intend to publish it on my own website, since I have no need to pad my resume' with a long list of publications, I would just want to get the results out there and indexed by google or other search engines, so anyone who cares and is looking could get instant access to it.

For those who are concerned about this concept of author-pays limiting the exposure of unknown or young researchers, they would have this option available to them also of posting their own work and letting their pool of peers discover them. If their work is truly unique and well done, then their standing will increase.

Re:publish or perish

[wass]

I no longer do physics (I'm a software developer now) because I could see the trend that it didn't matter what you wrote, but that you wrote a lot of it. I still toy with the idea of going back and doing some novel research. However, if I do, I intend to publish it on my own website, since I have no need to pad my resume' with a long list of publications, I would just want to get the results out there and indexed by google or other search engines, so anyone who cares and is looking could get instant access to it.

Hi, I'm a 4th-year grad physics student that came back to school after 3 years of doing engineering-type research (hardware + software) after my undergrad. So I see where you're coming from.

What you want already exists and is the arxiv . You can put any papers here, and people can download them, etc. I don't know what limitations there are, like how long they'll keep your papers or things like that. But this is exactly what you want. It even allows searches based on various keywords.

Some people publish here because it's quick, and then get a peer-reviewed journal (like PRL) to publish it just for more 'authenticity'. But that's not necessary, and some people publish there and don't worry about future peer review.

I regularly look at the daily new writeups in condensed matter physics, and it's amazing how many there are, and many are by very respected researchers.

Anyway, on the other side of the coin, there is something to be said for peer-review. It does help 'weed' out some of the bogus stuff that will inevitably appear.

As for the publish or perish, yeah, that's what happens when a society uses some factor for judging 'worth'. Ie, in the business world it's money and people thus try to maximize their money. For physics, some people will try to optimize their publications. Look at Schon, the guy that faked his data 2 years ago, and finally got caught. He was putting out several Nature and Science articles a year, which is nearly deity status in the physics world. He couldn't keep up with this rate, and at some point had to fabricate his data.

Re:publish or perish

[The Cydonian]

Bloddy good link, gracias. This weekend should be fun! :-)

The body of human knowledge

[AxelTorvalds]

I'm a math guy, I like to keep up on what's going on. I've got a degree but I'm not of the cablibre of a professional mathematician. One thing I've struggled with over the years since university is that I simply cannot get access to good information. I know that various things have been proven but unless I'm part of the AMS or I recieve various obscure math journals I simply cannot get access to those proofs. Even good libraries don't carry them.

There is a balance to achieve. Every one part of me would love to have a set of DVDs for purchase (cheap, hopefully) from a web tome of math. It would contain every proof known. At the same time, as a former student I know the value of proving things on your own and the value that comes from that creativity.

What's more scarry though is that a lot of this information simply isn't distributed to enough places. Try to find a copy of the Erdos Selzberg elementry proof of the prime number theorem. It seems like it wouldn't take that much for that knowledge to be lost. More importantly, I think it creates a bad scientific culture. I've never read the elementry proof of the prime number theorem, I know it exists, I believe it has been proven but I can't verify it for myself. You know and this is just math. I think we're getting to the point where all scientific knowledge should be public. Public journals and stuff like that make the most sense and a large internet based repository would be ideal, with some kind of controls, I'd pay a fee for access to it if it was nominal. We're not talking about Hollywood movies and crap like that, we're talking about real knowledge.

As we start to issue policy from science, like the Kyoto treaty, we need to have a real open review process to measure the data, to examine that science actually took place. Not everybody is capable of reading through that kind of data and drawing logical conclusions but an effort has to be made, we've already seen high stakes scientific fraud over the last few years; things that got very public before they were caught and there were only a handful of people that could do the review.

Re:The body of human knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/

Expropriation

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet provides the means by which research can be peer-reviewed, published, cross-referenced and searched without middlemen. In the UK, state-funded academics carry out the research and write and review the papers. Academic publishing is an expropriation of resources that belong in the public domain.

Times are changing

[reptilicus]

Many major publishers (including Nature) now grant copyright to the authors of the paper. This wasn't the case in the past, but many publishers are making compromises that authors want. Another compromise is making articles freely available after a set time. Most journals do either 6 months, or a year. Anything older than that is freely available on the web. It's not a perfect system, but it's a step in the right direction. I think there's some hesitance, because you have a system in place that essentially works, and it would be foolish to just throw that away and replace it with something unproven.

As for societies that run journals, remember that the journals are probably the major fund raisers for those societies. Take away their ability to make money from journals, and you take away the existence of the society. Which is not a good thing for scientists.

Re:Times are changing

[kels]

As for societies that run journals, remember that the journals are probably the major fund raisers for those societies. Take away their ability to make money from journals, and you take away the existence of the society. Which is not a good thing for scientists.

The other big money-maker is often meetings. These can be expensive, but they seem to get the incentives right. You pay a (fairly large) fee to attend the meeting, and that gives you free access to all the content of the meeting. You pay a (somewhat smaller) fee to present something at the meeting. Obviously meetings lack the peer review process of journals (not counting shouting matches during the question-and-answer period).

But maybe professional societies shouldn't be making their money in ways that are contrary to the interests of scientists (by restricting access to journals and charging large subscription fees). Maybe we, as members, should be insisting on open access.

Not all journals are equal

[reptilicus]

You are correct. Different journals charge different amounts. It really depends on the publisher and how much they want to milk out of the readership. There are some not for profit publishers, often scientific societies who are much more likely to be fair than big publishing conglomerates like Elsevier, who are more concerned with the bottom line.

Re:Not all journals are equal

[snarkh]

Yes, yes, milking the readership is what much of it is about... And usually they take the copyright too.

Free electronic posting + Moderation?

[darkwing_bmf]

It seems like a "post for free" electronic only system would be good for research distribution and collaboration. The authors could post (and edit with change logs) their works without having to pay anything. All of the posters/researchers should be verifiably registered of course to prevent random people from screwing with scientific research. The "weeding out" part could be done by researchers who are interested in the latest reports... and if they find the paper is bunk, they can report it, and if they find it is true, they can say that too. And obviously the reviewers should be able to easily contact the author for minor details that are wrong so they can be corrected. The more casual readers could perhaps filter out anything that hasn't been reviewed yet. The funding could come from users on a pennies per paper basis for reviewed papers or free if they haven't been independantly reviewed yet to encourage reviewing and account for the lesser value of unreviewed papers. Anyway, those are my 2 cents.

Re:Free electronic posting + Moderation?

[darkwing_bmf]

I really wish authors could either delete or mod down their own posts without losing karma. I completely forgot to format the above post... so I reposted with formatting further down. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Free Publishing, Moderation, Cheap or Free Viewing

[darkwing_bmf]

It seems like a "post for free" electronic only system would be good for research distribution and collaboration. The authors could post (and edit with change logs) their works without having to pay anything. All of the posters/researchers should be verifiably registered of course to prevent random people from screwing with scientific research.

The "weeding out" part could be done by researchers who are interested in the latest reports... and if they find the paper is bunk, they can report it, and if they find it is true, they can say that too. And obviously the reviewers should be able to easily contact the author for minor details that are wrong so they can be corrected.

The more casual readers could perhaps filter out anything that hasn't been reviewed yet. The funding could come from users on a pennies per paper basis for reviewed papers or free if they haven't been independantly reviewed yet to encourage reviewing and account for the lesser value of unreviewed papers.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents.

Not a good objection

[Jonathan]

I really, really don't understand the objection to author-pay at all. $1500 sounds like a lot, but it is really trivial compared to the cost of the research. I can't see anyone saying -- "Well, we just spent $300,000 doing this study, I guess we aren't going to spend the $1500 to publish it:".

What isn't trivial, as you bring up, is the cost of journals -- a decent university library will literally spend a million dollars or more a year to subscribe to all the journals they need. The simple fact is author-paying would save universities lots of money even if the libraries paid the fees for the authors if it meant they wouldn't have to subscribe to closed-journals

Why do journals cost so much? Because they can. For profit publishers want to maximize their profits, and even theoretically non-profit professional societies charge way more than cost for their journals -- there's a bloated bureaucracy assorted with every professional society, and they naturally want to maximize their salaries.

Re:Not a good objection

[YoJ]

The objection is that not all studies and papers come from adequately funded projects! Imagine one lone professor who doesn't get the grant he wants, who travels to far-flung corners of the Earth on his own money gathering data for his unconventional work. Making him pay lots of money to get published is just one more way non-mainstream ideas could be marginalized.

Although this type of scenario illustrates how the price of author-pays publication might discourage non-mainstream research more, this is not a reason to abandon the idea of author-pays journals. I love the idea of open science and author-pays; I think it really is the most sane model of academic communication. If a non-mainstream idea cannot be published in an author-pays journal, it can still be dissemated widely on the internet. Finding worthy ideas that deserve to be published but haven't yet been because of the fees would be the perfect job for philanthropic organizations.

Re:Not a good objection

[flossie]

I think the open access ideals are well worth pursuing, but there is a serious flaw with the "author pays" model.

I now work in a University and have easy access to all the information I could possibly want. I should have no problem publishing work under an author pays model either, although I haven't tried yet.

However, before I started working here, I worked in industry. Getting access to scientific journals was harder than catching moonbeams. The best data we could get came from google and citeseer. Even harder than getting data, was getting management to allow us to publish what we were doing. There was a lot of resistance to giving away "secrets" to the competition. The chance of getting management to allow publication, and to *pay* for it, is non-existent in industry.

To reduce the amount of industrial research that is published would be very detrimental to science. In general, I tend to find industrial papers to be more focussed than academic equivalents - fewer words but more bang for the buck.

Re:Not a good objection

[Jonathan]

I'm sort of in the same situation in that I once worked for a biotech firm and am now at a non-profit research institution,

However, I disagree that industry wouldn't go for author-pay -- my firm would pay lots of money to ship me around the world to talk about our research at research conferences, so I don't see what would be any different about paying fees for publication -- when a company sends someone to a conference or publishes a paper, its all about exposure.

The problem with scientific journals

[ill dillettante]

The basic problem with scientific journals is that they are acting as a very inefficient quality filter. The scientist wants (needs?) to publish in the most "prestigious" journal that s/he can get the work into (or else they won't have job next year). This is because the quality of the publication can't be easily assessed without reading the paper. Where a paper is published is used to determine the quality of the work and hence the scientist. From a publishers perspective once you have been able to create (or buy) a prestigious journal then you can basically charge what ever they want to publish in it. What is needed is means to easily determine the quality of individual papers, preferably in a single number (making it easy for your promotion committee to score). If this were to happen then journals would cease to exist as scientist would just post their papers on a central server and other scientist could use the quality score to filter good from bad. The problem is coming up with a non-corruptible means of easily scoring individual papers.

Helping development

[tiger_omega]

As a software engineer outside of academic channels the publication of computer science papers online has been invalueable to someone myself. Previously if I wanted to lookup work done on a particular subject I would have to try and get access to the university libraries to find the publication I was intrested in.

As more and more journals are appearing online and via searchable databases using a web interface this has allowed me to find the required papers I need for my work much easier.

The result is that I'm able to write better software that has been greatly enriched by the work done by the academics publishing these papers.

I feel I should just point out that any code that I write based on a particular piece of work is properly credited for. I have never liked taking credit for something that someone else has spent a good deal of time and effert on. I'm an engineer not someone in marketing. ;-)

Re:They are open and believe me, the scientist pay

[Oligonicella]

"Anyone can go to any public university library and make copies of articles from journals."

Really? Do *you* know any universities with a library near West Plains, Missouri?

Re:They are open and believe me, the scientist pay

[Neil Blender]

Why, yes, I do:

From West Plains, Missouri:

1: Start out going Southwest on COURT SQ toward E MAIN ST. 0.1 miles

2: Turn RIGHT onto MO-17/AID AVE/S MAIN ST. Continue to follow MO-17. 0.8 miles

3: Turn LEFT onto US-63 S. 148.5 miles

4: Merge onto I-55 S toward MEMPHIS. 19.0 miles

5: Take I-40 E toward MEMPHIS/NASHVILLE. 7.0 miles

6: Merge onto I-240 S toward JACKSON MISS. 1.1 miles

7: Take the LAMAR AVE exit- exit number 29- toward CRUMP BLVD. 0.3 miles

8: Turn LEFT onto LAMAR AVE/TN-4/US-78. 0.5 miles

9: Turn LEFT onto CENTRAL AVE. 4.3 miles

10: Turn RIGHT onto PATTERSON ST. 0.1 miles

11: Turn LEFT onto VETERANS AVE. 0.1 miles

12: Turn RIGHT onto HERZOG ST. <0.1 miles

You are now at the University of Memphis which has some big libraries.

Citeseer!

[Anonymous Coward]

Citeseer rocks my world, everyone should use it!

Re:PLoS

[69speed69]

PLos is great but it is pretty new so I don't think many people know about it. Let's hear it for UC Berkeley (www.plos.org)

Why is Nature only digitally available for Windows

[crush]

Nature is currently promo'ing a digital version available through "Newsstand". I was extremely disappointed to find out that I was supposed to download a Windows only "viewer" to try out this "digital" subscription

Technical Publishers = Old School

[JChris]

I worked a while for a company attempting to aggregate published science content and provide it over the web to subscribers, etc. From that experience I can tell you that technical publishers are exceptionally conservative and extremely protective with regards to their current business models. They are terrified of losing that golden-egg laying goose - narrow channels of content distribution.

British Medical Journal discussed this 10 year ago

[JacobKreutzfeld]

I was fortunate enough to work with some smart researchers about 10 years ago, showing them the then-very-new web. They were excited about using it as a research publishing mechanism but the journals didn't get it: they thought it couldn't be serious research without peer review, etc. Of course, peer review is quite possible on the net, in fact, facilitated by it. So they wrote a paper about it and surprisingly, BMJ published it:

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm

I love the opening:

The musky scent of aging paper in our medical libraries still evokes an atmosphere of scholarship. But the cloistered peace of the stacks is increasingly punctured by the faint sounds of the coming revolution: the clicks, beeps, and whirrs of computers linked to the internet.

Another proposal

[Dr. GeneMachine]

In addition to the vivid discussion on open publication that already ensued, I'd like to propose another concept: publication of failed experiments. Scientist all over the world conduct experiments on a daily basis that don't yield results. There is practically no chance at the moment to get such results or non-result published - though they would be of enormous value to other researchers, simply by pointing out paths of research not to take.

Re:Another proposal

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people agree with you, for instance:
Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis

The Microsoft of Science

[Chucklz]

Many of us have been debating the rationale of having authors pay for their work, but most PI's wouldn't mind the fees, simply due to the free access to papers. Right now, there are companies that charge rediculous prices for access, paper or digital to science. Sure journals are expensive to publish and archives expensive to maintain, but companies like Elsevier just fleece everyone because they can (sound familiar?-- except I've never had a paper BSOD on me). If I wanted to get a copy of my paper in Immunological Letters, I would be out 25 dollars for the privledge. A little open access will be wonderful for everyone.

Citeseer is like a yo-yo...

[Rocky]

..it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down...

Misconceptions about "Author Pays" Model

[Michael Eisen]

It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science, a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.

The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.

So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?

Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.

We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.

What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!

Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.

Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
University of California Berkeley

Co-Founder, Public Library of Science

Re:Misconceptions about "Author Pays" Model

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes good sense to me. Also, I think the PLOS is a greatly needed thing and I hope to publish there someday.

Anyone wondering about the quality of articles in PLOS can just look at the Editorial Board members.

Kind of off topic for a reply, but I'm thinking it's simply hilarious that Nature is covering a topic like this. They're some of the greediest publishers I've seen.

To clear up some misconceptions in the posts...

[rhowson]

I work for the Public Library of Science, an organization dedicated to Open Access publishing, and just wanted to clarify a few issues.

I've only briefly scanned the posts, but wanted to clear up a few things, at least about how we go about open access publishing:

1) ALL of our papers are peer-reviewed to very stringent standards. In fact, many of our editorial board members have worked with high profile for-profit journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). This is not simply a 'pay to publish' system.

2) Our publication costs are not necessarily prohibitive. We grant waivers to those unable to afford these costs. Incidentally, our publication charge does not currently cover even our own costs.

Currently, for-profit journals are taking advantage of a free labor pool (scientists who donate their time to perform peer review), and turning around and profiting from it. As several readers have mentioned, much of the research published in these journals is funded by taxpayers; the fact that these taxpayers, and even the scientists themselves, have to pay for access to this research is something which needs to be remedied.

Please refer to our website for more information.

Things change, not for the better

[cookie_cutter]

You obviously haven't worked at a university recently, 'cuz things have changed:

It is becoming more and more common for university libraries to avoid paying for the increasingly expensive and increasingly numerous journals by opting for electronic only access to the journals.

These electronic licenses usually come with strict requirements by the journal companies that only university members can access the journal content. ie, if you don't have a student/employee ID and a computer account, you can't read the journals!

Re:They are open and believe me, the scientist pay

[cookie_cutter]

1. Starting in MEMPHIS, TN on N 4TH ST - go 0.1 mi
2. Turn on EXCHANGE AVE - go 0.1 mi
3. Turn on N DANNY THOMAS BLVD - go 0.6 mi
4. Turn on N PARKWAY/N PKWY - go 3.2 mi
5. Continue on ramp - go 6. Bear on E PARKWAY N - go 0.1 mi
7. Turn on BROAD AVE - go 1.5 mi
8. Continue on SAM COOPER BLVD EAST - go 4.5 mi
9. Continue on I-40 EAST - go 196.1 mi
10. Take the Exit 208 exit - go 0.1 mi
11. Exit 208 becomes ramp - go 0.4 mi
12. Merge on I-65 NORTH - go 2.1 mi
13. Continue on I-24 WEST/I-65 N - go 1.9 mi
14. Continue on I-65 NORTH - go 162.9 mi
15. Take the Exit 131A exit - go 0.1 mi
16. Exit 131A becomes ramp - go 1.2 mi
17. Merge on I-264 EAST - go 9.9 mi
18. Take the I-71 NORTH exit - go 72.5 mi
19. Continue on I-71 NORTH/I-75 N - go 18.5 mi
20. Continue on I-75 NORTH - go 258.9 mi
21. Take the Exit 47B exit - go 22. Exit 47B becomes ramp - go 0.2 mi
23. Continue on W FISHER FWY - go 0.1 mi
24. Turn on ramp - go 0.2 mi
25. Bear on AMBASSADOR BRIDGE ST - go 0.1 mi
26. AMBASSADOR BRIDGE ST becomes AMBASSADOR BRG/AMBASSADOR BRIDGE ST - go 0.6 mi
27. AMBASSADOR BRG/AMBASSADOR BRIDGE ST becomes AMBASSADOR BRIDGE - go 0.7 mi
28. AMBASSADOR BRIDGE becomes ramp - go 0.3 mi
29. Continue on HURON CHURCH RD - go 3.8 mi
30. Continue on TALBOT RD - go 2.5 mi
31. Take ON-401 - go 138.3 mi
32. Continue on ON-403 - go 44.1 mi
33. Take the MAIN ST W exit - go 0.3 mi
34. Continue on MAIN ST W - go 1.2 mi
35. Continue on MAIN ST E - go 3.6 mi
36. Continue on QUEENSTON RD - go 0.1 mi
37. Continue on MAIN ST E - go

You are now in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada. Why don't you swing by my place and we'll have a discussion about the adjective "near".

You are right, there is no argument

[gacp]

You are right, there is no argument, just facetiousnes, both form the privateers ("publishers" my ass, a publisher is someone who makes things public), and from the cabals in academia, who find the censorship system (called "peer review" but actually neither) extremely useful to get job security by pushing each other up the ladder and 'protecting' their careers from the disruptive influence of those real scientists who do real research and are the real source of progress (progress is what you definitely DON'T want if you are a high-priest in academia).

Didn't you notice that it takes about a generation for novel ideas to get serious consideration in Science, Inc.? Did you ever wonder why this is so? Think about this, and you will understand why the web, created by (real) scientists for scientific communication, has been shunned by Science Inc. (and was adopted by the pornographers!). The very LAST thing the high priests of Science Inc. want is any kind of openness, transparency, publicity, or freedom in science. The best analogy for Science Inc. is Micro$oft. See the repeated pattern?

So, forget it people, we will never have an open, public, free system for scientific publication, not in Science, Inc. We will never---and havent' ever---get any progress, scientific of technical, from these people. (Check it, it always comes from outside!) What we *will* get is a free (in all senses) replacement for Science, Inc. Science Inc. business model just has no place in the 21st century.

But, of course, no one gives up entrenched position of power and privilege, and the high-priests of Science, Inc. won't, either...

so-called "peer review" misconceptions

[gacp]

1. Editors are NOT authors' peers. Ever. The same couple of people can be peers in other roles, but an authors and the editor who decides on his work cannot ever be peers. Besides, it's publish or perish. Get published or you have no career, GAME OVER. The level of power these editors over professionals in science in truly of life and death as of your life a scientist. Conflicts of interests? Oh my, you can't start to imagine the size of it... 2. A review can only be made *after* the fact. Even the word is very clear on this, re-view. Only after it's visible, i.e. published. And a review does not per se change the fate of the work in question, a critic may review a film, and his review could very well affect how many people go to the theateras to watcht the film, but a review won't put the film on the screen or kill it. That's *precisely* what these 'scientific' editors do, make or break the author's paper. So, clearly, this so-called "peer review" is neither. What editors is this "scientific" media do is censorship, or, if you want a more politically correct term, editorialship. "Scientific" journals are a *censored medium*. Now, about quality control. Sure, we NEED it. We aboulutely most definetely must have it. But is all this censorship any good at stopping bad science? Even if physics, where it kind of works, a bullshit *chemical element* passed right through it. In something 'softer' like biology... again, you can't begin to imagine the size of it. What this censorhip *does* is effectively repress disruptive, revolutionary research, by all making it hard to communicate, hampering its acceptance since it can only be published in 'poor' journal or (gasp!) the web, and simply and silently killing the careers of these researchers. Barbarians assaulting our beatutiful Ivory Tower! (Quite confortable, thank you) They have brought IDEAS!!! PLOS (Public Library of Science) is just MOTS (More Of The Same). They simply sidestep the core issue here, and that is that technological change has turned publishing upside down. Anyone can publish, anyone can copy, easily, instantly, and for (almost) free. This is the new landscape, and not facing it is just plain denial. POLS is in denial, trying to use computer networks to keep living in the world of the printing press. This can only have disastrous consequences for science, and science is already in serious trouble, under feroucious attack from many fronts (New Age, religious fanatics, corporatists, totalitarianists, &c.). Science, to survive, needs a REVOLUTION to its very foundations, and not a mere whitewash like the POLS, or worse, like the one in Nature. The only way for science to work in the 21st century is to re-invent itself. One of the new characteristics it MUST have is freedom, both in the sense of freedom of publication and in the sense of freedom of dissemination. PLOS fits only the second part, and media like Nature neither one. Quality control? A MUST. Even more than now, since what we have now clearly does not cut it. But in the new landscape created by the computer revolution, it has to be PUBLISH FIRST AND REVIEW LATER. And review *openly*, in freedom, and not in the shadows of the "peer review". Linux has shown that the more the reviewers, the better. And no more censorhip possible, ever. No more the breaking or making careers in the hands of the people who have the most to lose from progress. No more the fate of science and the best scientists, in the hands of those who have the most to lose from science itself!

Re:so-called "peer review" misconceptions

[Shipud]

gacp obviously has an axe to grind. A few comments:

1. You are caught up in the semantics of the word "review", which is in American. In English, the term is "refereeing". And yes, it is for quality control purposes, as you pointed out. Inundation is a problem, and even now it is tough to keep abreast of all literature in most fields.
2. You are right: anti-dogmatic theses do suffer, the prion theory being a good case in point. But Stanley Prusiner did get the Nobel in the long run, did he not?
3. Peer review is not performed by editors, as you pointed out, but by actual peers: scientists from the same field. Anonymizing reviews is the only way for the reviewers to speak their minds without fear of possible retribution from the authors. The converse is that reviewers with an axe to grind with the author (or her theory) can abuse this privilege. There are some checks and balances for that: authors get to pre-remove certain reviewers, normally papers are reviewed by no less than three peers. Authors may rebut decisions.
4. Papers are commented upon post-publication. There is even a website for that in the Life Sciences Faculty of 1000. This mechanism enables to publicize "hidded jewels"

To paraphrase Winston Chuchill: Peer review is the worst form of scientific publication, except for all those others that have been tried.

Re:so-called "peer review" misconceptions

[gacp]

I briefly respond your comments:

1. Inundation is a problem indeed. Censorship is not the answer.

2. Yes they do. A generation too late. You may live with that, I won't. In fact, it probably will get us killed in the not-so-distant future.

3. There is no peer review. Censorship is performed by editors---theri decision is final, and reasons for rejection need not be discloses. Censors *do* often delegate, and request opinion of referees. Censors have full decision power as to whether reject outright of use referees, who these referees will be, and what to do with referees opinions---they absolute power.

4. Papers are commented post-publication. Too late, often. Comments are not easy to find from the paper itself. The process of commenting is cumbersome, and censored too.

As for Winstor Churchill: it's not surprising that your best choice for support of your argument must come from someone who has died half a century ago.

We live in a new world. Face it, or join Creative Anachonists.

They're not professional writers

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't make a living writing. They're professional scientists, not professional science writers.

Professional science writers like the journalists at Discover magazine or the NYtimes science section make a living off their writing.

Professional scientists make a living from their job at a university or company or organization, doing research. The writing is a way to present their research to the world, but not what they make money off of.

And these reports and abstracts of their experiments are a far cry from a magazine article designed for mainstream consumption at Discover or the NYtimes science section.

Yeah, it's so good it went out of business. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

at the end of the year (2003).

Re:Yeah, it's so good it went out of business. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

All good things come to an end. As did the frenzy of High TC research. Yes, I wrote that article you refer to and I left the field. A number of difficulties turned out to be far, far greater than first estimated. Tempo waned and the need for High Tc did the same. Also you now have ArXiv.

In the end I could no longer afford the salary of a researcher (as in near zero) and the lack of job security meant I could not risk taking up a mortgage to buy a house. Also the health hazards was a problem, many of my friends were hospitalised. Seriously.

So I left R&D, went to work in software development and now even have a disposable income and no hazardous work.

You see people don't care about R&D, they just expect things to be there, ready to be purchased in the mall. And in this forum this topic hardly generates any interest either.

If you just knew of all the fancy things we worked on in the labs you would be amazed. As things are the amazement in the general public will have to wait another 10-20 years.

Tax payer dollars used - why is info restricted?

[Linuxathome]

Please mod this parent post up. I'd like to add that as others have correctly pointed out, that the science is usually funded by grants, either in industry or to a larger extent from the government, at least here in the US where NIH grants are the mainstay.

Those of you who are not in science might not think much of this fact, but consider this. Grants are taken from your tax dollars. You are funding the science directly with your tax dollars (and indirectly for industry grants when you buy the company's product). Would it not anger you that the published data stemming from this research has restricted access? After all, concerned tax payers would like to know how their dollars are spent.

Would it not anger you to know that the publishing companies not only reduces their cost by taking your tax dollars (authors/researchers pay the per page publishing fees), but CHARGES for access to make more money? The vast majority of the info that is published would not be available if not for your tax dollars.

Sadly, the people who are in the best position to make a change in this policy and who want to make the changes, are the very people whose "nuts are in a vice." What I mean is that many scientists don't want to "make waves" because of concern for their careers. After all, upward mobility in their status is HIGHLY dependent on publishing in the most prestigious journals. Many scientists equate engaging in activity that would make the future of publishing uncertain with an uncertain career -- so many of us just stay out of it.

I can only see a true change if individuals outside of science start making waves -- the person suffering from HIV who would like to read up on the current status of HIV research not news that is 6 months old, the mother who would like to read the current opinions of experts in the field of eczema from which her son is suffering, the US citizen and taxpayer who is just tired of all this information being exploited for profit, and the congressman who finally does something about it.

One thing slashdot readers understand well is that self-policing rarely works -- this is a similar situation. For scientists to actually make a change for the better in the field of scientific publishing requires more than a miracle. It requires non-scientists to understand the true dire situation of change that it really needs.

p2p and napster for journal articles available now

[Linuxathome]

I'm not the first person to wish there was such a thing like Napster for journal articles. But the legalities of having this service is put in question. However, I had an idea about sharing journal articles to avoid this restrictive access nonsense -- legally. If you're an author (even if you're the twenty-third one listed) of an article published in a restricted peer reviewed journal, then find out if you are allowed to put the paper up in a personal web page/web space and let it be known to google or elsewhere (e.g. nodalpoint, pmbrowser) that it's available for download/reading. Lots of journals allow you to put it in your personal web space -- including Nature. I know what you are thinking -- why, as an author, would I want to put the effort into doing this? It's a known fact that the more freely available your article is, the more it will be cited. The more your paper is cited, the higher your scientific impact, the more valuable as a scientist you become. Please consider it, and if you aren't published yet, think about it and spread the word.

Lastly, any programmer out there want to contact me about writing a Napster-like client to share URLs -- URLs mind you, not the papers themselves? This will definitely be an open-sourced project.

free online scientific publishing

[linoleo]

Fortunately there is a middle way between traditional academic publishers and author self-publication on the web: online academic journals run by the scientists themselves. A good example in my field is the Journal of Machine Learning Research which was formed when the entire editorial board resigned from the overpriced Machine Learning Journal. Online access is free, while a low-price is published to satisfy the legacy requirements of libraries, copyright law, tenure review committees, and the like. Speaking of copyright: in contrast to traditional publishers, authors do not have to sign away their copyright when they publish in JMLR.

The result? Three years after its inception, JMLR is the highest-impact journal in Artificial Intelligence. This is by no means an isolated case, but part of a sea change in academic publishing. More and more such journals are being setup, often in direct competition to overpriced conventional publications, and with support from academic libraries.

The "author pays" model is a last-ditch effort by traditional academic publishers to wring profits from scientific communication, an activity that in essence has always been free (as in -dom). Apparently they haven't noticed yet that all the scarcities that their business model depended on - from trees to typesetting to transport - have simply been removed by technology. Given the free volunteer labor that scientists routinely provide, and the existing host infrastructure at the institutions where they work, the cost of running an online scientific journal is, for all practical purposes, zero.