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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.
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.
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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.
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)
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.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening: