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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! :)
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...
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'...
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."
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 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.
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.