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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"
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...
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.
"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
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.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
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.)
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
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.
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.
This comment does not exist.
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.
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately attributed to ignorance. -Napoleon
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening:
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.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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.
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.
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"