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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"
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
So instead of peer review, we have peer-to-peer review! :)
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.
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.
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.
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'...
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...
--Less Thinkin', More Drinkin'...
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.
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.
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 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.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
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.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
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.
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
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening:
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.
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
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.