Slashdot Mirror
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"
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.
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.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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.
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.
-- RJ
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)
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
Unless the research is classified...
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).
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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.
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?
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.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
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.
make world, not war
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.
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.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
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.
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.
Automated DNA sequencing software
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.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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.
This comment does not exist.
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...
Azurite is fine covellite is mine.
..it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down...
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
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
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!