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

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: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: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.

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: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.

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.