Slashdot Mirror
Open Access To Scientific Literature: Can It Work?
evilquaker writes "Nature is running a free web focus on the issue of open access to scientific literature. The current model of scientific publishing dates back to the seventeenth century and -- like the music industry -- is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because of the rise of the internet. The main issue up for discussion is whether the author-pays/access-is-free model will supplant the author-pays-less/readers-pay-too model. "
The more people are given open (free) access to information, the better.
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Adult Toys
Support via ad revenue, with subscriptions available to suppress the ads. You know, kind of like a certain site we are all familiar with... You can also use the site to sell printed copies, and use the revenue from that to maintain the site. Nobody likes banner ads but I like it a lot more than paying to read and I don't think someone should be paying to publish scientific research. The whole point is that it should be available as readily as possible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
given the cost of a subscription to Nature ;)
Long live BMC!
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
This is something I always find bizarre. I support the rights of musicians to specify terms for the distribution of their work. Everybody gets paid, etc. But for science journals, the authors want the widest, freest distribution possible. The editors, reviewers, and authors are all unpaid--indeed the authors are often asked to pay. Why on earth do we still give journals the right to act as gatekeepers for our information, when they give us almost nothing (basically just a referral service) in return?
It's working thus far with software :)
Perhaps encouraging the spread of scientific knowledge will increase the general level of education of the population. I for one would be more willing to look at publications which I wouldn't have done if I had to pay...e.g., something which I have an interest in, but don't really have much knowledge/experience with.
I would then probably be willing to donate to authors of particularly good books...a system which would also help promote high-quality literature. (ala Slashdot moderation system)
In my field, cryptography, most recent papers are available online on the author's website. Those that aren't you can often get with a polite email to the author. I went from knowing nothing about the field to publishing cryptanalysis at conference almost entirely through what I've learned from downloaded papers - my "dead tree" cryptographic bookshelf is very minimal. Much of this learning was done without access to an academic library, and would have been impossible in an earlier era.
It's a crime that so many papers are still being published under licences that do not allow their free accessibility on the Web. Scientists of the future will wonder how science was even possible without such access.
Xenu loves you!
...to disseminate knowledge and share it with the rest of the world? this area, much more so than music, is predestined for open, free publishing solutions (creative commons licensing, etc). but as usual, historical inertia and vested commercial interests are holding us back from adopting the obvious.
I think it is great to have access to this stuff if I wish to be able to research something quickly, and I know that in the past when I have tried to get stuff from Journals, it has been harder without a subscription. Now that I may being publishing, however, I fear that the cost may be prohibitive to get into a respected journal. Of course, the research institute will probably pick up some of the cost, but will this cause people to be more weary of publishing in journals?
the author-pays/access-is-free
why not...
"a worldwide scientific organisation"-pays/access-is-free
Like a science version of the UN?
And it better not be the author.
Not everything you find on the internet is true and credible, even if it seems like it is. In general books have a higher level of credibility and are often checked by more than one person to avoid flaws.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
Same thing will probably happen to publications.
S
Compared to the music industry, scientific publications needs more structure in distribution. Tastes in music are pure subjectivity: You like AC/DC, I like Britney[0], live and let live.
Journals per se have become a cash cow, but the structure and processes of peer review are important. It's how we tell Andrew Wiles and Murray Gell-Mann from the various witless kooks with a bogus proof or a crackpot theory. Without it, every worker in the field has to do her own comparative study of the merits of everyones work.
Until we find a way to replicate that, journals are here to stay.
[0] I don't actually, but you probably don't like AC/DC either.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Carnegie-Mellon University is in a process of setting up a Universal Digital Library. Got an impressive list of partners, including the richest pilgrimage in the world(no, it's not the Vactican). The pilot project is to scan a million books first.
I'm an astrophysicist. I read tons of papers all the time. I would really love an easily searchable P2P app for distributing and organising my huge collection of papers and pre-prints. The current web services like ADS are really good but it doesn't a) tie in with papers I've already downloaded and b) allow people who can't afford to pay for papers to download them.
We will still need journals for peer review, sadly.
Free literature is great, but someone will always off the argument that making it free will discourage research.
In distribution scheme where information is disseminated freely, it is obvious that the researchers need some insentive other than making money from publication of their research. Of course, most college professor will tell you that they make next to nothing on their publications--it all goes to the publishing companies.
I personally wouldn't minde paying a little bit for really good research; on the other hand, my Computer Science class this quarter required two $90 texts. I'm not OK with that. Perhaps a balance between the two could be achieved--eliminate the middleman publishing company, and provide the information online for next-to-free.
Open access to sci. lit. was bound to happen. What began during the Renaissance and continued into the scientific revolution and beyond was the opening of communication and transactions between scientists. Open access is just a continuation of that. And I think that eventually, publishing sci. lit. will be done for the funds that could be procured after people see the work that you do. So, basically, we will have totally open lit. (as in free) that will be published to garner funding for further study, new projects, maybe even professional standing, and dare I say it, the public good, in the nearly free land of the Internet.
My beef is that by going on-line only, their costs were significantly reduced (this was a hefty journal, often with color graphs 'n charts), but the savings were not passed on to the membership. My other issue centered around the fact that, like the infamous MS Assurance Program, once your membership lapsed so went your on-line journal access. At least the dead tree version ensured you had a viable resource until the acid paper disintegrated.
Yeah, right.
The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.
It's long, but a good read.
That said, it's also good to have channels that don't have any filters on them. The web is the best such channel ever invented. Anybody can publish given minimal resources. Whether anybody ever sees what you publish is a different problem, but it won't happen because it's been editted.
In some sense, a Google pagerank rating is the ultimate in "reviewing" (if not exactly "peer review"), since it lets a large number of other web sites vote on how worthy your writing is. On the other hand, many high-ranked pages are from cranks, or are hate-speech (like Google's first hit for "Jew"). This is kind of thing would generally never happen in a peer-reviewed journal.
Have you read my blog lately?
If you have all this scientific information just kind of floating around, you have the very real danger of contaminating political agendas.
Best Windows Freeware
of why they're facing obsolescence, look at http://xxx.lanl.gov/
(not linked to prevent needless slashdoting)
It's a pretty impressive resource, and not just because it's free and electronic.
Sometimes papers are submitted to journals, and are hard to find elsewhere. Most of the time, an e-mail to the author will get a response, or it can be found using a search engine.
It's been a long time since I have looked in a paper journal, yet I still know of universities who shun electronic access...
As much as I think it would be great for scientific literature to be made freely available to everyone, I see a couple problems with the "author pays" model.
1) Journals are businesses, and will inevitably cater to their source of income. Under the reader pays system, they have an incentive to deliver what the reader wants: quality research papers. Under the author pays system, they have an incentive to simply publish as much as possible.
2) Publication of scientific research should be a meritocracy. Any system which puts large fees on publishing is going to impede smaller projects from publishing their results, no matter how worthy. Not all science is done with huge budgets.
The answer to making research more publicly available is already here: libraries. In my opinion, all university libraries should be open to the public. If they start to move their collections online, they should have computer access from the library also. If libraries are underfunded, that is a different problem entirely...
Nominate reviewers in the scientific community. Rate articles, and if they get a high enough score they are posted to the main page. The few with the highest scores each month are "Published" in a special monthly addition.
Motivation is the gain for scientific knowledge. Reviews will be better because 50 eyes are better than 3. Funding for the server shouldn't be to hard.
arxiv.org is already a good place for many scientists to publish their work. All that is needed is moderation.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Even big-name journals like Nature seem to be in decline. When Nature publishes articles that aren't about the biological sciences, they range from weak to totally bogus.
A friend who writes for mass-market magazines was once talking to me about journal publication. When I described "page fees", which the author, or the author's institution, pays, she said "That's a vanity press". She's right.
An academic journal is really just a blog with tough editors. Deal with it.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I hope someone in the know could give us a better understanding on where the money goes in the production of a big time science journal such as "Nature" or "Science." Certainly we have many articles stating the costs to the readership (through library subscriptions) but how would less money going to the journals impact the quality of the journal?
Of course I am assuming here that open accessibility will reduce the flow of money to the journals, and I realize that this doesn't have to be the case. Are journals a low profit or high profit enterprise? Would fewer or more inexperienced editors produce an inferior journal?
We all benefit from the advancement of science (unless you agree with Bill Joy). So let everyone bear the cost. Allocate funds from the government's tax revenue to administer these journals.
Access to articles is a great start, but for science to become "open" scientist must give up their zealous grip on the data itself. Anyone who's ever tried to develop a data exchange network knows that getting scientist to agree to share even the most non-proprietary data can require self-abasement, bribery and arm-bending in varying degrees. Long live XML!
More often by who wrote them and who cites them.
Xenu loves you!
How did you know which papers were the seminal ones to read though?
In my experience, googling with the related key-words more often than not leads to 'said papers.
-B
I have a question for people -- how many rich scientists do you know? Although I've never published in Nature, publishing in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) costs ~$250 PER PAGE for the author... I'm sure Nature is at least as expensive.
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
With a fair number of journals, the author already pays. I am fairly certain that the author or institution has to pay for articles in the IEEE Transactions, and the ACM SIGs may be the same way. In most instances, articles are written by college researches, so the school picks up the tab.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
IMHO it is important that there be multiple venues for publication. Technical journals and magazines that specialize in an area seem to complement each other.
Some of my stuff has published in IEEE journals, other items in Electronic Design and EDN magazines. The writing style is totally different, and how you present things is totally different.
Also, what a journal rejects, frequently the magazine loves to have.
In both cases, the concept of "peer review" is important. (Although not perfect...) Out of control internet publishing means that the readers have to seperate the good and the bad themselves, and some of the readers are not qualified to do so. Peer review prior to publication at least gives some validation of content.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Yeah. But how do you know who the good authors are? And how did the citers find the papers in the first place?
Because they've been published in journals (hell, its pretty rare to see a citation that doesn't refer to a peer reviewed publication)
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Authors who maintain web sites usually mention which articles were recently published in which journal; I don't know about you, but I wouldn't read an article on cryptography written by "Bubble Gum Jones," no matter how good his blog was.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless. Imagine if you had to read through some of the bigger Slashdot discussions (1000+ comments) without the moderation system in place so that you at least have somewhere to start.
Today, paper reviews that decide whether your paper gets admitted or not are typically seen by only ~3 reviewers. This leads to pretty big variance on the quality of reviews -- some reviewers just couldn't care less and rush through the reviews with non-committal comments, while more rarely there are others who'd prefer to suppress competing research. Poor papers may get in if they hit a few indifferent reviewers, and good papers may be bounced for similar reasons.
I'd be curious about how well a public moderation system like Slashdot's would work in that context -- with more mods, review scores would be less vulnerable to manipulation by a small group of poor reviewers. That way, no one's work could be suppressed by negative reviewers, but the scoring system would help draw a reader's attention to the most popular articles.
Reputation is important but it can built.
For example x years ago people would download many Linux distributions but now enterprises use very few - those few that have built good reputation.
So if we started with x open source journals, within 2-3 years several good ones would take lead. It's just that money would be out of the game.
Actually somewhere I read about this search engine that specializes in searching thru electronic scientific papers and journals - many customers pay lot of money 'cause thats the real value - find everything you need in 10th of time you'd need to the same on Google.
There's no real reason that a free system can't be devised. The true value of a scientific journal is that it is a peer review process, something that isn't true of simply writing a paper and displaying it on your website.
Someone has to pay for the time and effort of the reviewers and someone has to qualify the reviewers. On the other hand, humans have an inherrent need to compete and rise to the top of the heirarchy, so I expect that a non-economic system of pecking order based on status and recognition can supplant the economic model.
Bloodthirsty politics is rampant in university acedemic settings with very little economic basis. The drive for that could be harnessed in this system.
There are some experimental review systems in place for budding writers to review each others' work -- something similar (yet better working) could be designed for this purpose.
The popular and prestigious journals add no value and incur no significant cost. They harvest papers from academics and redistrubute them to other academics, who peer review them for free. Then, a university pays ungodly sums to subscribe.
So when a professor can publish by himself on the internet and not give up all sorts of rights to the paper, why doesn't he? When the journal asks a professor to dedicate tens of hours of highly-valued time to reviewing articles for free, why does he?
Prestige. Professors make a name for themselves by being published in prestigious journals. They become better known in academia when they are a prominent peer reviewer for a prestigious journal.
It's a pretty sweet deal for those top journals: output nothing but brand name prestige (which is entirely renewable and not really subject to typical economics) and rake in loads of cash.
The sweetness of the deal for the journals comes at the expense of subscribing institutions: money paid for journals (which wouldn't have to be paid were it a competitive market) is money taken out of tuition and endowment revenues that could otherwise lower the outrageous price of college or add real value to the institution.
The journals must die.
Nothing is likely to kill science faster. Do you want dinosaur fossil research overseen by a committee of Orin Hatch's "Intelligent Design" cavemen ? Water table geology supervised by people who will get jobs from polluters after their term of office ?
I mean, seriously. Think about what you said. What else has the government done well ? Nothing, except those tasks which ONLY the government can do, for which it's hard to grade them by compairison.
Well, there's much good to be said about dead trees. :) On one hand, paper journals are great for archival purposes - you can go to your local library, and dig up publications from a hundred years ago. At the same time, the internet is entirely too impermanent - what if Springer Verlag publishes a journal, and then they go bankrupt in 10 years? The chances of the publications disappearing or becoming unavailable are pretty high. But endangering the access to all the accumulated knowledge simply because of economic accidents is not an acceptable risk in the scientific community.
So a joint paper/electronic model seems like the right balance. Most journals do that already - libraries subscribe to dead tree versions, and individuals can access the papers online, usually through a school-related discount subscription. Seems to work quite well although, paradoxically, it increases the cost per unit (because now you're printing far fewer issues).
But there's simply no incentive for publishing houses to make the online content completely free. Professional organizations can do it themselves (e.g. the AI Access Foundation), where they publish online papers themselves, and contract with a publisher to print each entire volume as a book. Non-profits like these will probably be the harbingers of new method of distribution for scientific findings...
My other car is a cons.
Since in the old model, publishers tended to turn the thing into a profit center, and recently started trying to control reprints of articles as well... this needs to be clearly avoided in the new model!!
Perhaps publications should be in some variant of the GFDL, with the entire original article, including bibliography, being included in the invariant section. To me this seems more important than exactly which form of distribution is used. The forms of distribution will vary, and vary over time, but licenses can get dreadfully permanent, and copyrights appear to be forever.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"I went from knowing nothing about the field to publishing cryptanalysis at conference almost entirely through what I've learned from downloaded papers - my "dead tree" cryptographic bookshelf is very minimal."
You just described what every graduate student has to do in order to complete their work. If everything you need to do your thesis is in a book then it has already been done ad nauseum.
Another quick note. There are free journals on line that are free to publish in as well as to read. The up keep can carried simply by ad revenue or donated by people in the field or a technical organization.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
The problems with giving talks at conferences, and just randomly posting stuff on the internet is that it hasn't had a level of peer review. Someone may have some great information out there, that everyone should read, and someone else might have a complete load of crap.
The service that journals provide isn't so much the publishing, but the fact that skilled people in that profession have reviewed the papers, and have verified that it is accurate, and worthwhile [ie, not just some rewording of someone else's research].
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
One problem is that you still need to make the paper copy--people like having them above their desks, and thumbing through them. but it would also be nice to have it online and searchable (i.e. google has access to the abstract AND the text).
The problem is that the company that puts the articles on line won't make much money on it, so will have to do it to gain some other sort of capital. Enter Apple, increases their image among accademics (i.e. free advertising) and they charge just enought to keep the section even.
Of course, it is much more likely that a large society would do this (like SIAM which you know doesn't try to make money because math text books from them cost about $15).
There already exists a system such that scientific papers are published without any cost either for
the author or the reader. In fact almost all paper of theoretical physics are published this way and
many other papers in maths, experimental physics, etc. All these archives are at:
http://arxiv.org
This net is supported by academic institutions over the world. Let the publisher quickly die. They
serve no useful purpose.
See http://www.arxiv.org/ for a good example on how it should be. All preprints and final versions of papers are freely available.
#1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type.
The Web was originally designed as a place to publish scientific articles. The very purpose of hyperlinks was to cite other papers. Sure would be nice to actually put all these papers on the web, instead of sticking them behind subscription barriers.
And now that we have PageRank, a simple google for any topic would bring up the most-cited papers...
A cardinal ethos of research is that the knowledge developed in its pursuit should be accessible. This means access both to the "information" and also to the language, or the semiotic field that produces the information. To take this a step further, this means that not only should the information be open, but people should have access to learning the methods of research so that they can both use and produce it.
Consequently, we see a HUGE gap in access that simply posting information on the web will not address. To bridge this important gap, the site should not only be an information hub but also a research and communication tool. Slashdot is a good example of this sort of site, whereas Nature may not be. The best example I've seen is http://inquiry.uiuc.edu.
The question concerning these models, then, is how active can people be in producing and using knowledge, rather than "merely information." The next step is wisdom, the right production and application of knowlege. The "site" or the "journal" and their various models don't live. The people who form the knowledge live. Journals are no more or less than artifacts of a community. When seen this way, the idea of pricing access opens up to include many, many options that are as diverse as the research community itself.
But since I don't have the bandwidth, I'll point you to the original article. Here. And this is pressingly relevant because these traditional journals are claiming that they're upholding the scientific tradition, while, in fact, the evidence is that they are pressing their editorial slant to try and bend the agenda of independent researchers to their whims.
I find this somewhat funny that the link would be to Nature, which is part of the academic publishing "evil empire". For a good opinion on what is wrong with academic publishing in its current form see this
Also, if you're a scientist and would like to publish in an open format or you're interested in scientific papers, go to the Public Library of Science
Best slashdot comment
I just finished reading Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig's latest book. That was an interesting read, and I found it remarkably similar on some points to thoughts I've had on the subject lately.
The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.
He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons. I remember reading the philosophy section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.
For those who aren't familiar with citeseer, it's a publicly-accessible database of scientific literature. There's a downloadable pdf available for most papers.
The entry for every paper has links to papers it cites, links to similar papers (i.e. papers that cited this paper were also likely to cite these papers), and a citation count (which can be a good way to estimate the relative importance of a given paper - if something has been cited 300 times, its probably worth a read).
-jim
My point is that the proper funding for this is from the taxes we pay. I said nothing about placing politicians in charge of reviewing articles.
If the current model of government does a poor job of distributing the funds, then it's up to the citizens to exercise their power to change things.
I reject your suggestion that the populace is at the mercy of the government.
I'm being published this month in a specialized IT technical journal. Its about a 10 page article and I'm being paid 2,000 USD for it. Who, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, are the people that are actually PAYING to get published? With a check for 2g due any day now, this truely boggles my mind. I tried to skim an article describing the scenario on the referenced web site, but could find no rational reasoning.
All your base are belong to us!
A patent starts out with a phrase such as "I, ______, invented a device and process to . . . .". The blank is filled in with an individuals name, and is signed under penalty of purjury. While many corporate originating patents may have the wrong names on them, those are the "vanity" patents. Patents which must really protect something, and have to stand up in court, can't have some random moron listed on there -- the opposition will call that CEO to the stand and ask him "Was the drug first reduced in an Erlenmeyer flask or a glass cone-shaped bottle ?" and everyone will have a good laugh and the trial is over. (I have never heard of a case of someone facing felony perjury charges for falsifying a patent, although I suppose it must happen.)
That said, I am aware of cases in which the chance to be listed on some bullshit patent was handed out to various people as a career enhancing perk in exchange for support in office politics. However, needless to say, such a patent has no real force. If they try to use it against you, just immediately ask to depose all the signatories; let them stew on that and don't even hire a lawyer unless they are stupid enough to proceed further.
As a young scientist, I've had my turn at reviewing papers (and having been reviewed, also). Trust me, without a good peer review, there would be an incredible amount of crap put out there. The more stringent the review process tends to be, the better the journal.
I have no problem shifting the economics, though. It is expensive to print a journal article for the authors as is. I believe that the last article I published cost almost $1000... and this was for a small 7 pager. ("Journal of Atmospheric Science", in case you're wondering.)
However, I actually don't see this as a bad thing overall. If a scientist is smart, they'll put the publishing fees into their budgets initially. Yes, it does handcuff them in a way, in that it will limit how much they can publish, but that's NOT A BAD THING. Like I said, there's a good amount of crap out there. The costs provide a nice sort of "check and balance"... if you're a talented and fiscally responsible scientist, you will usually have little trouble getting your results published. It forces the scientists to be a little more concise and conclusive in their works... which is a scary thought since some of the articles even published right now are insanely long for small results. (In the old days, early 1900's, articles were 4-6 pages... now the average in many of the journals I read is well into the 20 page range. There's something good to be said for brevity.)
But, shifting the ecomonics would be good. I'm not a fan of putting a lot more fiscal responsibility on the authors, but a little more isn't bad if it lowers fees for the readers.
-Jellisky
You and I both know that the Internet is not going to replace peer-reviewed journals; however, if an author decides to both publish his article in a journal *and* post it on his web site, well, there's no problems, right?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Although there are many factors motivating scientists to publish papers, the principle one is that a track record of publication is normally a requirement to get further funding from universities.
Here in the UK, most university funding comes through government and EU research boards. Even in the US, most research universities are heavily dependent on government: whether from direct grants or more indirect routes like tax exemptions for R&D.
Err, no. But thats pretty much how it works now.
As for IP, however, it makes no difference who pays the page charges -- generally speaking, the author (or the author's employer) signs over copyrights to the publisher of the journal. Those reproduction fees you see at the bottom of the first page of every IEEE Transactions paper go to the IEEE, not to anyone else. The authors don't get a cent.
Music by Britney Spears, Jay-Z, etc. are "popular" .. but are they as important as say Beethoven or Mozart?
.. the Indiana legislation tried to standard pi, Galileo was thought of as a heretic. Etc.
.. publish elsewhere.
I think I can safely say that today more people like to listen to P. Diddy than Mozart.
Scientific truths aren't determined democratically. Examples of attempts to do this
So the peer review process is important and has a place. I personally would hate losing the views and selections of a small qualified/experienced group. If you dont care what the Nature reviewers think or believe their choices are wrong
An interesting development in the world of scientific literature is the "cyberbook" - a peer-reviewed, edited book available for free online.
This book, as the editor describes, contains many things which print journals cannot: high quality color figures, interactive demonstrations, videos of the task, and a wide range of contribution.
It's also searchable.
The book is about avian visual cognition, and available free as free from here:
http://pigeon.psy.tufts.edu
One of the interesting aspects of journal publication is the restriction on the lengths of the articles. This forces authors (by-and-large!) to adopt a terse manner of writing ("telegraphic style" as Landau puts it). I think with online publications, the style of scientific writing will change, for better or for worse (I fear for worse!).
Articles could be less cryptic, but verbosity is also not nice. [As in Yes Minister - using fifty words where five would suffice!]
For whatever reason, no one has mentioned the very important link between grant money and publications. Its not as if people are submitting publications for shits and giggles. If you use grant money to publish, especially in more major journals in your field, the likelihood of having grant renewed/accepted increases substantially. It is this grant money that gets used for subscriptions, academic fees which pay for subscriptions, etc.
I think that no one would argue that refereed publications are a necessity. Even if it doesn't work, its better than an open system such as slashdot, where the only qualification is the time spent on-line, but the purpose, is of course, different. The real crime is that the middle-men involved, kluwer, elvesier, etc., make a significant amount of money off of these publications, but are far worse, on-line than publications such as citeseer, which would be perfect (free and easy) if it allowed a distinction for refereed publications.
I, personally, see print journals becoming a thing of the past, as they are non-searchable and slow to access (i.e., going to the library or requesting an item). Additionally, the charge for these articles, individually, is outrageous, $15-35? (thank you IEEE) How about $5?
Yeah, but if the journal is the copyright owner, than all this is illegal in most cases--it depends on the journal.
IMO, the cost of my subscriptions (which currently cost me a few hundred bucks a year) is pretty negligible compared to the benefit of keeping me up to date on the newest research in the field. What's more important is that the publications themselves contain high-quality, useful material.
The moderation model of a journal doesn't have to change (though it may be convenient for the journal to take advangage of the technology to make changes the believe to be desirable at the same time, or shortly thereafter).
Switching from dead-tree to magnetized-ground-rock publication can significantly cut the costs (and publication delays) of the operation of the journal. (Once you're in typeset form, you're done.) This might make the author-pays model for an electronic journal even less expensive for the authors than a both-pay model for a paper version.
And even if it ISN'T enough, the cost reductions and wider potential audience could make the readers-or-advertisers pay portion much smaller than with a dead-tree journal.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I understand we are talking about new work here. However, one thing I really would like to see is a high quality and free (in all meanings) web edition of classical and important works from all time science and math. For instance: Euclides Elements, Darwin books, original works of Newton and Albert Einstein with the very first formulations of their ideas, important works from mathematicians (like Poincaré, Gauss, Reimann) etc. That would be great for students and for those who like science history.
And yet it moves (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Galileo Galilei...
Theory of general relitivity (Score:3, Insightful)
by Albert Einstein...
Eureka! (Score:0, Offtopic)
Archimedes...
The problems with [...] just randomly posting stuff on the internet is that it hasn't had a level of peer review. Someone may have some great information out there, that everyone should read, and someone else might have a complete load of crap.
So here's an opportunity: Create a journal consisting of peer-reviewed links.
Submission consists of net-publishing the article, then giving the journal permission to review it, then archive (in case your copy goes away), publish links to it, and grant further reprint rights if they find it acceptable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hasn't anyone ever noticed that
Go back through the threads and read at +5, nested, and tell me you won't learn something.
The IEEE copyright forms explicitly allow the author to retain the right to redistribute. Taken from the link:
That's why many of the homepages for people in EE/CS will have a long list of publications, along with handy links to PDF copies of the papers in question.First, it is unfair because it costs the good scientist more money to publish. A paper with great results deserves the highest-quality editing and the widest circulation possible, correct? (Think a typical Science or Nature paper here.) That costs more money than a lower-quality editing job and limited distribution. (Think of your favorite third-tier journal for this one.) That means that the researcher with the best results will pay more, while the researcher with mediocre results will pay less. But, both get to read each other's papers for free.
Second, it is unfair because those who can afford to pay the most money for a journal get it for free. Scientific research is not published with a license that says "Don't try to commercialize this." Under the ``Author-pays" model, a pharmaceutical company with a 20% profit margin can read a journal for free. Effectively, they are using another researcher's grant money to subsidize their own R&D.
I don't think the real problem is not with having a subscription model for journals. Like so many other things, the problem is with publishing houses which abuse this model (yes, you, Elsevier!). Instead of abandoning a century of good science in good journals, patronize journals that are fair. By patronize, I mean submit your papers to the fair journals. How do you know which are fair? Cost, page count per annum, and impact factor (or number of citations) are three factors which could provide a good guideline.
I think opening up scientific literature to public is the greatest thought. How many times have you wanted to read some papers on a subject only to find that you to shell out a few dollars before you can get access to them.
Knowledge should be free. I think by limiting access to scientific literature we are restricting free thinking. By giving free access the efficiency of the scietific community will double. More scientists will be able to collaborate rather than compete. Two heads are better than one.
LIKE artists, I have to publish to get paid. I'm in a research university, so if I don't publish, I don't get tenure and then I have to go get a real job.
But, UNLIKE most artists, I don't get paid by selling my content. The only people who make money off of that are the journals, and most of them aren't making tons of money.
In the end, access to scientific information should be as free and easy as possible -- making the world a better-informed place about this stuff helps everyone (you know, a rising tide lifts all boats, and all that).
I'm all for freer access to scientific content. But to make it more freely available, we need to figure out who should be getting rich from it. Since we can't divorce our scientific community from our business community (that was tried, it was called communism), we need to figure out a model that rewards the scientist for his/her endeavors while also maximizing availability. The current system certainly doesn't do that.
in 2002: $1400 CAD
in 2003: $1700 CAD (+21%)
This is for an academic subscription in a Univeristy Library in Canada.
Here's the irony. In scholarly publications, the contributions are mostly made from contributions from researchers who give the publisher the rights to publish their work. The publishers then turn around and sell this back to the universities for 100% profit. I remember back a few years ago, a subscription to Elsevier (the Microsoft of scholarly publishing) charged over $30K CAD for a subscription to Brain Research. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there were 4 issues per year. That works out to $7500 per issue. The publishing model is that if a reasearcher wants to be recognized, they NEED to publish, and the better recognized the journal, the better chances they'll have of being cited. The more often their article is cited, the better their chances of receiving more research/grants/money/etc...
Yeah. But how do you know who the good authors are? And how did the citers find the papers in the first place?
The process builds on itself. Given one good author - say, Ron Rivest - you can discover the rest by spidering outwards and using your intelligence. That's mostly what everyone else is doing.
I'm not saying that peer reviewed publications are unnecessary, but I don't want you to overestimate the role they play in being able to find the good stuff.
hell, its pretty rare to see a citation that doesn't refer to a peer reviewed publication
It's unusual, but not vanishingly rare. For example, Andrew Roos's weak keys are cited in many papers about RC4 cryptanalysis, but have been published only online. (Actually I'd love to know what happened to Andrew Roos, he seems to have fallen off the Web)
Xenu loves you!
Am I the only one who sees the irony in an article wondering about on-line peer reviewed papers being feasible being discussed on what is probably the ultimate instance of on-line peer reviewing of publications?
All someone has to do is use slashcode, post the articles for review as articles and allow the reviewing, commenting and moderating, though I think the moderation names would need to be changed.
If peer review is a good thing, I think an open and transparent peer review would be even better.
The entity that runs the site could run on donations or subscription fees.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
The journals are in the business of supplying content for pay.
/. version of publication/peer review.
Their definition of 'Peer Review' is NOT what the scientific
community needs.
I agree with the earlier poster who suggested a larger
I find it very difficult to find 'UPDATED' information on subjects I'm interested in
without spending hundreds of dollars.
Given the limited nature of my work, this is cost
prohibitive and greatly hampers my ability
to stay abreast of relevant technologies for my projects.
OPEN UP THE INFORMATION!
This IS 2004 after all. *sigh*
You just described what every graduate student has to do in order to complete their work.
The key word is "downloaded". This is a discussion of free online access to papers, not one of the distinction between papers and books. Graduate students generally have access to academic libraries; I didn't. Please read more carefully before composing future replies.
Xenu loves you!
When you write a paper, you have a list of references at the end. Do you want references to papers in journals, or to papers posted in peoples' personnal web site?
Musicians make money selling their music. Scientsts DON'T make money selling their papers, but rather use their published papers to establish their reputation as researchers. Generally speaking, the better publication list you have, the more institutions are willing to pay for your services. Thus it makes sense that scientists pay to have their papers published.
Some journals may be a waste of money, but many aren't.
The whole point of journals is not dissemination---any monkey can put up a web page or archive---but quality improvement.
Where is the added value?
The journal editors do have to make decisions and more importantly they have to know the right people (harder than it sounds) to review, and they have to cajole people into writing the reviews.
On the technical end of things, the published finished papers in journals DO look better, their figures are clearer, the references more complete and checked, and the language is better than preprints. This takes the labor of professional copywriters, who don't work for free.
My papers have been improved by going through the publication process, both in presentation and in content.
Journals don't stay or get prestigious unless they can reliably publish good papers and reliably reject---or fix---crappy papers.
The system is hardly perfect---good papers get rejected and lousy papers do get published----but one has to consider if any alternative would have been any better.
It is extremely naive to imagine that good scientific quality control could be managed by some kind of utopian 'free' on-line review and meta-review system like Slashdot. People's scientific output is a whole lot more important than slashdot posts like this.
Professors do make a name for themselves publishing in prestigious journals. They don't become better known however for being a peer reviewer, as that service is usually anonymous. They do it because they feel they have a moral obligation to do so.
Many societies publish journals as a service and are not-for-profit, e.g. the American Physical Society. And their journals are usually cheaper, and often better, than the pay journals put out by for-profit companies.
I doubt the APS rakes in "loads of cash" without spending it back on fairly essential things.
The release forms I signed explicitly give permission for the author to publish on their home page. Copyright was assigned to the IACR.
Xenu loves you!
You might be refering to citeseer, which lists (and caches) papers from websites and allows you to see which papers cite it and which papers it cites and how similar it is to other papers in the collection :-)
Ian
I think there is a way that a bittorrent-style distribution system could be used to facilitate the free distribution of articles. The problem with just hosting an article on your own site is that with out the peer review system (as flawed as it may be) there's now way of knowing if the article that someone finds is any good unless you are an expert yourself. But I can invision a deal where an online peer reviewed journal could use a system in which they say, ok your article is good enough for us to publish but instead of paying us, or us charging readers, you have to host the paper and all the other papers in this issue in a bittorrent, distributed system and if you could make it seemless enough (which would be the big problem) you could also make the readers "host" the files they read in that way instead of charging them, after all these are mostly read by academics and other professionals who have office computers that could be put to work in a SETI@home style fashion serving the article out to people and thus distributing the bandwith among everyone who reads it. Of course to do this, it would have to be pretty transparent for the enduser because if it is a pain in the butt to do, then people wouldn't do it, which means it is a ways off, but if someone could code up a program like that, it would be an elegant solution to the bandwith problem.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
the Astrophysical Journal, published by the University of Chicago Press for the American Astronomical Society. Both of them have
respected peer review systems.
Solar Physics is free to authors but quite expensive to subscribe to. ApJ is expensive to publish in, but is quite cheap to subscribe to (at least for AAS members).
Perhaps in part because of the funding structure, Europeans seem to prefer publishing in Solar Physics while many Americans seem to prefer ApJ. It may have something to do with how science is funded: in the U.S. most of us are on soft money and budget page charges into our grants and/or overhead rates, while in Europe most folks are on fixed departmental budgets. But it's hard to say, because Solar Physics is published in Europe while ApJ is published in North America -- so it may just be the home team advantage in each case.
I tend to alternate between the two.
Ian
The one worry that I have (and this is not necessarily an argument against open access) is archiving. A key service that academic libraries provide is archiving of old journals. The web by contrast is not as ideal for such things as websites are always changing and individual servers are always going down. Academic libraries on the other hand are experts at the cataloguing, storage and retreival of old information.
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
It is a ubiquitous practice among even the most prestigious journals to have page charges - especially for things like colour figures. The reason people pay this is that for academics, getting published in journals that people read and cite is how they are evaluated. Thus, if it costs a bit more to get into a better journal, it's just the cost of doing business and it comes out of the grant. Since the readership is limited (I mean really limited - *noone* buys subscriptions except maybe to Nature and Science) there is not much ad revenue going to these journals and they need the help to defray costs.
Yes it is a silly way to communicate results - especially since most of the added value from a journal comes from the reviewers who are not paid.
I think that PLoS might very well be the model for how things are done in the future, now that the internet has essentially reduced the distribution costs to zero.
Peer review is as good as any traditional journal. In theory at least; my field is physics so I haven't actually read any articles in the PLoS journals.
With the author pays model, the articles can be distributed around the world, without restrictions. This is a big thing, for poor countries as well as people who have graduated but still wan't to keep up with their field. And we don't see the perversity were researchers need to assign the copyright to the journal and then pay to read their own words!
As PLoS is a non-profit, the per-page costs are not that big as there is no need to fatten the wallets of any shareholders. Hell, per-page costs for PLoS are lower than for many traditional for-profit journals! Additionally, researchers from poor countries are allowed to publish for free. This combined with the fact that they can get the articles for free, is about the best we can do to help the third world to increase their knowledge base.
I wish all the success to PLoS and hope that the same concept will be increasingly popular in other scientific fields as well.
Fact is, a lot of research is funded by the gov't, which is funded by taxes, which are seized by your friendly internal revenue dep't. So, the dividing line between author/reader direct cost seems irrelevant. Pay up-front or pay as you go (or in parts thereof).
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The idea of free journals sounds nice on the surface. However, there are a number of expenses that need to be paid. Web servers are not free. Professional editors cost money. People need to be hired for organization, administration, IT. Etc. Someone needs to pay these expenses. In the IEEE, for example, all journal and conference articles are online. The are not free to the public since it costs a lot of money to operate reputable journals and conferences. Hopefully the web will eliminate the printing costs, but as in the music industry, media costs are only a small fraction of overall expenses.
Vote for Pedro
How did you know which papers were the seminal ones to read though? In my experience, you learn that by considering which journals they first appeared in.
He stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
The reasons for this are the same as those cited by the parent--publishers act as a filter. Not everything that is distributed by well-known publishing houses is good, but chances of finding something good among published books is far better than hunting around the web looking for gems amid the piles of self-published junk. The publishing houses look for talented authors, pay successful ones well to keep writing, give them editorial support and encouragement, and produce their work in an easy to read form called "books".
There are some signs that this model is not working as well as it did in the past. (Check the price of paperback books recently?) But I think that the needed changes don't include getting rid of publishers so much as thinking up new ways for them to distribute their product. The crucial innovation might be a technology that makes downloading books and instant-printing practical, or (more likely) the advent of a really good electronic book.
The question as to whether these comments apply also to the music industry is left as an exercise for the reader.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Ok, so I'm a physicist, blah blah blah. Since we seem to agree that peer review is a valuable function, but that reviewers are not paid (at least I've never gotted paid!)... why not just take the peer-review process out of the journal context? You could have a website with a few editors/master-moderators who would settle disputes between authors and reviewers, the scripts (like those at arXiv.org) would check for most formatting issues.... I suppose the real question would be, if the editors are giving up their time, how can they best "afford" to do that? What about selling ads?
I don't think Scientists need to publish to Journals anymore. They could publish their articles to Wikipedia. This would grow the public encyclopedia and expose their work to peer review. The site has excellent search abilities and a growing reputation of reliability of content. It seems a logical place to put such work.
Just my two cents.
I think journals are a good idea. I don't think just putting papers on your website is the best way to get dependable research. But I think you _should_ be able to put your paper on your site; ie that articles should be freely available. Sort of like code that is free, but the copyright notice has to be displayed. I read Donald Knuth's letter about this, and he mentioned some journals like the New York math journal that do this, and I think that's probably the best way to go. I don't think it's fair some publishers can charge libraries so much, but I think that keeping the ``journal format'' is a good idea.
BTW, I'm only an undergrad math student and have never published, but I've used _a lot_ of journals for my research and study, and I like the format much more than going through websites or similar directories for information. Sometimes you can find good info, eg phd thesis, on the web, but it's just nicer to have a journal you can turn to and flip through.
There is a significant issue missing from this discussion.
There are two sorts of science journals: 1) for-profit journals from major publishing houses 2) non-profit journals from scientific societies (American Metorological Society, American Physical Society, The Royal Society). The second are most often the most highly regarded within a discipline -- even if others are more "prestigious" in some intangible way. The society officers and journal editors are selected by their colleagues and represent some of the most respected scientists in a field. Thus, scientists collectively charge and collect fees and own the copyrights.
The non-profit journals presage the best model for open source software: Free Software Foundation. Much open source has a lazy attitude toward copyright, with no real control or assurance of protection. This is the model advocated by many here for scientific publication. This is truly bad. Since this is slashdot, I assume you all know why XEmacs code was not incorporated into FSF Emacs (both are GNU, by the way) -- Richard Stallman needs all code copyright signed over to the FSF because only that organization can protect the freedom of code.
Likewise, when scientists sign copyright over to a scientific society, they are doing so in order that the society protect the openness of their work. Individual scientists cannot take on the task of preserving copyright. The societies are providing a service to open science. US Federal scientists do not sign over copyright as the government takes on this role. As to costs, authors pay publication charges so that granting agencies subsidize the scientific societies. The more money you have for research, the more you support the societies. It is an acknowledged cost of doing research and an assumed budget item in proposals.
The system is pretty darned good and works probably better than any institution in existance. I don't expect it to change any time soon.
Eric Salathe
The PLOS journals are indeed an interesting experiment. A couple of things to think about:
1) Regardless of the business model, it is extremely hard to start a new journal in Biology these days. The market is flooded, and there really haven't been any new top-level journals (well, ones without the words Nature or Cell in the title) for a very long time. If you're a postdoc looking for a job, are you going to publish your paper in Nature, which goes a long way with a job search committee, or are you going to be idealistic and publish in the PLOS journal, which doesn't have the same currency?
2) Not all journals are owned by rapacious corporations. Yes, Reed-Elsevier has gobbled up many of them in recent years. But many publications are put out by scientific societies (example: Protein Science) and research institutions (example: CSHL Press). They use the profits from the journals to fund Society activities that benefit scientist members, or to directly pay for scientific research. By taking away the possibility of profit for these types of journals, you take away the benefits and the research funding they provide to the scientific community.
Just want to mention PubMed while being primarily medical and biology related its definately better at searching for those articles there rather than citeseer (now CiteSeer I find is great for CS articles and such though).
The idea of groups of scientists running their own types of publications and peer-reviewing all of the papers available is laudable. The problem is really one of time. Are any of you scientists? Do you know how incredibly busy the life of a well-respected scientist is? Do you really think any of them are going to be willing to cut their research time, time spent securing funding, and teaching / faculty duties time to essentially run their own journal? Sure, maybe a few, but nowhere near enough to cover the massive load of publications out there.
That's why scientists pay for publishers to do this work for them. There's an enormous body of work out there, and if Nature can winnow that down to just the absolute best, that's a very important time-saving service for most scientists, one that most are willing to pay for.
Example: Last year, someone published a paper on the "Big Rip" scenario, speculating that if the cosmological dark energy has such and such a form, then the acceleration will continue and eventually rip apart every bound system, even atoms. Sounds crackpot, right? However, if it appears in a peer-reviewed journal, you can be sure that at least someone with the proper credentials agrees with him.
Microsoft delenda est!
Here's how it works at the moment:
(1) Get paper accepted by journal.
(2) Sign over your copyright to the journal.
(3) Pay extortionate page charges.
(4) Pay extortionate extra page charges for colour figures.
(5) Pay extortionate journal subscription so you can read your article in print.
(6) Pay extortionate extra web subscription so you can read your article online.
(7) Pay extortionate reprint fees so you can distribute your article to colleagues.
(8) Act as regular unpaid reviewer for the journal now they know where you live.
(9) Profit!
(10) Err, wait a minute...
I've been involved in these discussions for years, and happen to work for one of the major scientific publishers. Unfortunately this meme that scientific publishing model is somehow unique with dastardly publishers standing in the middle extracting payments from all has become far too entrenched, but it's really not a unique sort of situation at all.
Simple counterexample where exactly the same model applies: the Olympics. Just as billions of dollars are spent every year by publishers on the process of selecting the best scientific articles to publish, billions of dollars are spent by the host Olympic organization every four years establishing a venue for the world's best athletes to compete. A lot of that money goes into things that might seem unimportant to an outsider, like buildings and computers and IT and security staff etc. None of the money spent on the olympics goes to the athletes who bring their talents - other than the small amount that goes into paying for the medals themselves. Athletes in fact have to pay their own transportation expenses (or usually their home country takes care of it) - and then all those spectators pay again for the privilege of watching them compete. And you who watch on TV are paying via the advertising you have to endure, who have paid the TV network that has paid the Olympic organizers for the rights to broadcast.
Obviously, it would be much simpler and more efficient for athletes to just record their best performances in whatever stadium is available, and post it up on a website - then every four years somebody just picks the best performances and awards medals. Simple, right?
So why do we still spend all that money on the spectacle? Hmmm.
Energy: time to change the picture.
Apparently nobody's heard of arXiv. It works, quite well.
or go online to strandbooks.com for unappreciated science books. The best book store for real aceademic books was Book Scientifique but it went belly up a few years ago.
The books you mentioned used to be in the "Advanced Concepts" section, but because of limited real estate the section was replaced by "You too can become a computer wiz in less than 24 hours", and by the "IT/CIS... less science, more money" section. A few crypto books are still peppered in the "Network Security" section and also in the "Math" section.
Have an M.S. in CS, and I'm currently reading "Cooking for Kings" by Ian Kelly, and "Adventures in Group Theory, Rubik's Cube, Merlin's Machine & Other Mathematical Toys", by David Joyner.
The solution is obvious:
The costs of the archive are minimal compared to the costs of the editorial and peer-review process, so we can fold those in to submission and membership fees.
There is no need to have cutting-edge scientific papers immediately available for free. Only a small number of people are really interested (and able to understand) in the cutting edge stuff, and most of them can either afford a membership in the relevant journals, or their employer/institution should have a membership.
Once a paper is more than a few years old, it is either outdated or has become part of the canon (or both). These papers should be a matter of public record and open to anyone at no (or low) cost.
This isn't really like the RIAA situation. The sceintific journals aren't making any significant money off of their archives and the total public demand for scientific papers, outside of the existing journal membership, is negligible. The RIAA probably makes a fair fraction of their total profits off of archived material (I'd bet it's at least 20%) and there is little difference between an MP3 file and a CD (both need some intervening technology to allow access).
The sceintific journals, however, make most of their money off of membership (again, I'd bet it's at least 80%) and there is relatively little demand for archived materials. Further, the difference between a PDF and a printed booklet is fairly large: the booklet is accessible as-is, while the PDF needs some intervening technology. There is no reason that the journals should not continue to charge for physical reprints, so they don't lose any money from that direction, and the membership still pays for early access to papers, so the main funding stream is intact.
My guess is that Nature feels an economic pressure at the moment, and they have launched this page as part of a strategy to keep the subscribers.
Some of the big journals of physics and chemistry are backed up financially by american science foundations. Meanwhile independent publishers such as Nature, Elsevier and IOP have to survive on subscriptions and commercials. In other words they have to deliver the same product for less money.
Did you try opening the paper version of Nature recently? It is so filled with commercials that it takes time to fine the table of contents.
Come on, who are you kidding: ... is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because of the rise of the internet"
:-) Now try that search in a publishers scientific search engine - they're not free to setup, but are free to access - where do you think their funding comes from?
t ml
"current model of scientific publishing
The Internet has enabled the major publishing companies, who were trapped in a cycle of dropping circulation and increasing subscription prices, to offer new services to researchers, and provide new features they now find massively useful. The publishers are investing hundred of millions of dollars each year in electronic products and services - these electronic services are driving the scientific publishing world right now (Having worked in IT for a rather large global publishing company for several years I've seen this first hand - though I am not a slave to the machine just yet!).
When I was at college Inter-library loans were a pain in the neck, on-line searches of scientific papers almost non-existent, and hunting for information very time-consuming. The Internet itself doesn't solve these issues - try searching for research on Viagra if you are a clinician, you'll soon give up on finding anything useful for your work - you might find a good deal though
Open Access (or more accurately Publisher pays) is a big topical thing in the UK currently, with a UK Government Parlimentary Committee reviewing the subject. There's some relevant information here: http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb040322-3.sh
Here's just one question: once you've paid to publish your article, what guarantee is there that it will be archived for future reference? Where is the ongoing income for this. Will the Open Access journals come back and ask you for more money so they can upgrade their systems, produce new search tools, cross reference your article regularly, archive the data securely for generations to come?
The editor of 'Science' calculated they they would have to charge $10,000 for each article published. That's the COST to publish the article, not including any profits! You would move from a world where researchers can aim to publish as many articles as are deemed publishable by a journal to a world where you can only publish if your department has enough funds! Bad luck if you work in a badly funded field, or your department isn't well off. 'Open Access' doesnt solve the cost issue - the cost to publish is a real cost, where would Open Access cut these costs? Less reviewing? Less secure archiving? Cheaper what? Something would have to suffer, and there's then the temptation to accept sub-standard articles just to pay the bills.
I have here a copy of Embree's "Wide band Velocity Filtering" paper (Geophysics, circa 1963) that is perfectly readable, even through it is dogeared to hell.
Somewhere in this room, there is an 8" disk that is about 15 years younger than Embree but I'd wager there isn't a working drive (let alone a computer) that can read what's on the disk, assuming the contents haven't deteriorated thanks to dust, sunspots, and Whump the Cat's claws.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, right.
Placing the financial burden of publication onto the scienist is a serious impediment to publication. This is especially relevant to graduate students who are first authors on publications. They are notoriously without cash, and can usually barely afford the hardware they are using.
Having been involved in an active research lab for many years, I am of the opinion that the less that academicians have to worry about money the better. This is after years of chasing grant-money and making compromises in research tracks for the same purpose. Subscription-based models should remain as they are.
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
I agree, the current journals charge way to much and are purely are massive $money making enterprises for big publishers..(university libraries typically have to pay $25 million/year, a lot of universities have stopped subscribing to journals. (welcome to the new dark ages, a sign that your country is starting the eventual slide down to 3rd world status (happens to all countries, best to delay it long as possible)). Just try to find any biotech/nanotech article, it will cost you, not to mention, it costs the researchers to publish, the journals own copyright, it parallels the way the music industry works, not to mention an lot of reaserch is funded by the univerities and goverments, so we pay twice to access stuff we have paid for, not logical!!!(it just limits access to science and technology, who wants to pay some private companies toll booth to get access..it's like accessing patents, (ever try it on-line, it's crap, the US patent office search engine sucks, it's blurry, slow, not responsive, the European Unions site is better, but you can't print it and you can only look at one page at a time, IBM's patent search engine's site keeps track of you (read that one on the net, don't know it it's true)..(intentional aukward interfaces force you to buy the printed versions!!..the reason is that most countries have designated private publishing companies who are the only way to getting access to printed patents (blame the conservative Regan administration for introducing that dogma, in canada, of course, the lap-dogs of the old conservative Mulroney goverment copied the Regan administration, they introduced the idea of designated private publishers for patents...patents, which, by law, affect everybody and used to be cheaply published by the government of each country.. you now have to pay substantial $$$ to get each copy (her in canada,it costs about $17 US for each copy of a give patent, now just order 10 differnt patent copies, that's $170 US!! think about it, if you have to access 1000 patents each year, you have to pay Thousands of dollars, oops, sorry, tangeting too much!))..the open access journals are growing like crazy and for good reason, they are cheaper for the scientists, cheaper for yopu and me who want access to this information, and are really scaring these old established greedy companies (sound familiar??), like software, now is the time to change everything for the better.
Just thought I'd plug creative commons attempt to make a science commons. I'm really interested to see how this turns out. I'd apply for a job as director, but the requirements are steep to say the least.
Let the Catholic Church publish all research.
My wife is a scientist and so I know enough to take issue with this statement from the post:
Actually it is a "author-pays/reader-pays" model and from what I understand it isn't going to change anytime soon. Yes Virginia, they charge big bucks for a subscription the journal (and hire the cheapest possible company to manage subscriptions, by the way) and they charge a scientist for the content and then they keep access to the content to themselves (in any real sense).
Free would be nice butBob's Free Science Journal of Doom doesn't have the cachet of Nature Biotechnology and paying big bucks to get published in a peer-reviewed (IMHO the only real service provided) well-read journal is worth it to these scientists. There is a whole infrastructure and to break down the pay-to-publish, pay-to-read, we'll-charge-you-out-the-ASS-because-you-have-no-
Nature is the worst of them all, from what I've seen. Their recent proliferation of titles (Nature *, many titles added in the 2000's) reminds me of a noxious weed.
Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
What makes you so sure that printing paper copies is the dominant cost?
1) Anyone may submit papers.
a ll is preserved (cold fusion anyone?)
2) All papers are archived and availible.
3) Anyone may access papers, which are provided together with the results of 4, 5... (below).
4) Anyone may PAY to post a review.
5) Anyone may PAY to "rate" a reviewer.
6) 5 (above) is recursive (It is also self- limiting, possibly by means of price escalation per generation of recursion)
Practicioners develop appropriate reputations
The advantages of peer review are maintained (and -possibly- enhanced).
The work of the occasional crackpot-who-turns-out-not-to-be-a-cracpot-after-
Knowledge and metaknowledge are widely diffused.
"Outsiders" have access to the process but cannot afford to subvert it.
Flame-wars Support the system!
7) NO Profit! (to obsolete middlemen)
The Music Industry can make all the money from Live performance. Now the _Recording_ Industry is becoming irrelevant.
Some publications do that, most don't.
The current system will eventually break under its own weight. Universities can ill afford to continue to see large increases in their subscription rates. As the prices increase, so does the number of titles being dropped. Scientific inquiry suffers as a result.
When I was a graduate student in astronomy at Princeton University a bit over 10 years ago, one of the journals, "Astrophysics and Space Science", increased their subscription rate from I think about $1600 per year to $2000. (I'd rate ApSS as about the 6th most important astronomical journal.*) The department spent some time considering whether they would renew. (They did.)
So if the astronomy department of Princeton University is seriously considering dropping the journal, who can they have left on their subscription list?
(I see they are still publishing, at just over $3000 now. http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0004-640X. Warning: they won't let you see anything unless you let them set session cookies.)
* ApJ, A&A, AJ, MNRAS, PASP, ApSS. Not sure about the order of AJ and MNRAS.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
... if you are an expert in the field.
That's really, really, crucial here. The people who gain from peer review are _not_ really the experts. Ok, there's a gain by a first winnowing, but that's not really that much, if you look at what does get published.
For example, there is not a paper in my field (thin layer magnetism) where it matters one whit if it's been peer reviewed or not. Why? Because if it's a load of cobblers, I'll spot it. I don't need other peoples opinions.
Now, outside my field, I'll accept that peer review has some merit to me. The most notable one for me is the mathematical proofs, to be checked by other mathematicians [0]. On the other hand, in the abscence of a formal peer review stage pre publication, any errors would result in a Comment publication in response. I accept that that's a time lag - but I don't think that that time lag would be any greater than the formal peer review stage as is.
No, the people who gain from peer review are not the experts. They are the general public, and those learning, or branching out. A lack of a peer review step would make it more difficult for those people.
You'll find that the drive to opening of papers is primarily driven by the experts. I think that replacing the peer review step with a structed system of comments, and keeping those comments accesable with the paper, would benefit.
The counter point to this, is that by having greater access to papers, with comments, would give benefit to all, general public and experts alike. The end point would be a net gain for experts, and probably a gain for the general public - as more reading would be needed, but all that reading would be easily accessable.
Let me close this by re-iterating that the experts don't need peer review - which is why arXive.org and pre-prints are the stock in trade of many an expert.
[0] There are, of course, similar sections of related research for all fields.
Because the administrators look at the volume of papers, and the citation index of the journals they are published in.
Academic carrear prospects hold a remarkable close association with sum_allpapers(citationindex of journal).
It's nothing to do with getting the word out to other scientists. There are other ways of doing that (arXive.org, conferences, personal communication etc)
Hey Seth...I just visited the page you linked to in your .sig. Wow.
If science journals go online, let's hope they avoid such messups as those described in your link.
How about some sort of system - kind of like Google's PageRank - where scientists can vote for other scientists, or give them some kind of credibility rating. Just like PageRank, more voting 'weight' will be given to the scientists who are already very credible.
The system could also be applied to the actual papers too, with scientists rating each others' quality of research.
Surely that's the best way of going about it...?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
This is a topic dear to my heart, so I thought I would air a couple of comments.
First of all, the actual economics of the journal publication business are a bit different from what is suggested in the original post: very rare is the author that pays page fees out of pocket. The unwritten rule is that if an author can pay the page fees from a grant (of if the author's university has a policy of defraying these costs), they are payed; otherwise they are simply not paid. (It should be clear that it would be a self destructive strategy for journals to actually require assistant professors to ante up $5000 for a 20 page journal article!)
The current system is, however, clearly outdated and patently unfair: the academic community has allowed the journal publishing business to apply (copyright, pricing) practices, born in the era of paper and print publication, to the current age, marked in this context by the fact that distribution can be effected free-of-charge. The existing model is one in which, roughly, authors and reviewers, who are doing all the hard technical work that make the journal valuable, are payed nothing and editors (also academics), who maintain the journal's quality standards, are payed a nominal annual stipend. You would be right, then, to wonder where all the money goes that is garnered from a, say, $1700 annual library subscription fee. This goes to the publisher (whose costs are not zero, incidentally). Knuth's letter, written at the time that the Journal of Algorithms board resigned in response to irresponsible pricing on the part of Elsevier, is a good read on this topic (it is linked to from the TOC website below).
One natural response to this is for academic and professional societies to take up the task which, in the case of CS, has happened with great success (e.g., ACM/SIAM/IEEE). They have adopted the pricing strategy above, either maintaining lower subscription costs or passing the profits along to a good cause (the society).
A more dramatic response is that taken by a new CS journal (Theory of Computing): (i.) maintain zero cash flow, (ii.) adopt the internet as the primary means of dissemination and (even more radically) (iii.) leave copyright with the authors. See also the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
It is interesting to note that in order for this to be possible, not only does dissemination have to be free, but authors must typeset their own articles. If you are a member of the math/cs/physics community, you have been doing this yourself for perhaps 20 years.
Let us hope that a rapid cultural evolution divorces the publishing houses of these funds that the academic community can better spend on research and education!
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
SPARC Open Access Newsletterh ive.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arc
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
What you can do to promote open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do
Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
FAQ from the Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
Disclaimer: I'm associated with all of the sites above.
Peter Suber
I agree with your comments wholeheartedly in spirit. I do want to add also that although you say scientists pay for their publishing fees, I believe that in actuality, all taxpayers are paying the publishing fee, not just scientists. If you want to know how your tax dollars are used, read on and follow the link above.
In essence grants are what pays scientists, and US grants are taken from your taxes. For a lot of the science that gets published, these publishers are in a way "double-dipping" the researcher. Why do I say this? Well, not only are they dipping into the grant money (how else do you think scientists can afford the publishing fees?), for the researchers to access the same journal they published in, they have to pay a subscription fee!
This restrictive behavior is stifling research in more ways than one. If you want a good read on some ideas that could advance with opening the research, you should read alf's blog. He once proposed a crawler to parse the cited references of a paper, whereby automatic links can be made between and among papers -- the same sort of data that you have to pay big $$$ from companies like Thomson ISI. The benefit of this is staggering for people like me -- grad student looking to see commonalities and past literature on a topic of interest (after all, I do need to know everything and anything there is on the topic I'm studying). Alas, the only way I can get to this information is to pay for it from Thomson ISI on my meager salary (something around $20K a year) or to convince my library to get a site license. Sadly, site licenses happen to be astronomically more expensive than individual fees, so apparently, it's not going to happen. Hearing about this, how do you think these types of restrictive practices are affecting the next generation of scientists? Food for thought. Talk amongst yourselves. I'm feeling a little verklempt!
Linux at home
The researchers in my field get paid via grants. Without the grants, they also lose the support from my university. In order for their grants to be renewed, their work has to be published in the traditional publishing venues. So behind all this questioning of why on earth are we sticking with the old model when the technology is there to change it all, the answer lies behind money (as it usually does for lots of issues). The people who are in the position to change this nonsense to a positive result, happen to be people who are not scientists. But, I suspect that the change is not happening fast enough for scientists is because people outside don't really understand what's going on, or don't really care -- unless of course we bring up the fact that their money is also being wasted (i.e. tax dollars).
Linux at home
I can just see it now, the image that you paint. Less scrupulous scientists will do what people are doing now with google -- trying to bias the search engine to go to their page when a certain query is placed. As as example, try typing "weapons of mass destruction" in google and see what you get in the first few pages.
But what I want to bring up is: to get the peer review and editor value that you mention, do we still need to keep our publishing structure? Or more importantly, our pay and fee structure? Scientists are innovators, there's no reason to believe that a change can't be made. Is there a flaw in my assumption?
Linux at home
Mod parent post up please, because this is an important question. Many of us assume that technology reduces costs, myself included. But time and time again, I've read from supporters of the current publishing model that going digital actually increases the cost! Where are these costs? Mostly in archiving and ensuring the papers last so that people 200 years from now will still be able to access it (I assume). I'm sure there were studies made to compare costs, but I don't know who or what to believe -- I get the sneaky suspicion that the research saying that digitization is costlier was produced by those in similar circumstances where the tobacco companies were paying researchers who said smoke wasn't cancerous. Also, the cost of technology decreases over time, so that the estimation of cost for archiving digital material will have to account for this. Am I wrong to believe this? Someone prove me otherwise.
Linux at home
The top editors on a journal *may* get paid, and that's not for doing reviews.
It's for doing the organizational busywork to keep the journal going. So if they get paid (and it's an if), then it's less a conflict of interest.
The only costs for science journals are for printing, and for paperwork.
Now that we have the internet, high printing costs are no longer justifiable.
Sure, there's nothing wrong with printing a small run, and it'll cost, but
whoever wants a print copy should be prepared to pay for it.
The rest of us
can make do with electronic copies, and print out
the one or two articles we really want to read in the issue. Nobody reads a full issue cover to cover.
So when you sum it up, nowadays you only need to pay for secretarial paperwork,
and maybe a couple of editors. Nothing else costs anything appreciable beyond that. It's just lining the pockets of middle men (I can live with that) and preventing poor libraries from accessing the published knowledge (I'm not at all happy with that).
Heh. When he started, there were no journals on crypto. I recommend Steven Levy's "Crypto" for a readable introduction to the genesis of the field. Of course Rivest will be following all the journals, but it won't be the only source of his reading list by any means.
Xenu loves you!
I think all the articles in journals go under the author's real names, but you sometimes see people cite stuff by authors with made-up names. For example, the initial release of the RC4 design was done by a post under the name "David Sterndark", which referred to a frequent defender of export controls on sci.crypt, "David Sternlight".
Xenu loves you!
FSE, SAC, and all the conferences I know about in the crypto world put out a call for submissions, review the papers to decide which ones to accept for presentation, send out corrections, and have a pre-proceedings binder for all the delegates which you can refer to during the conference to bring you up to date on what was presented. The best presentations make light work of a difficult paper - Adi Shamir's presentation of the A5/1 attack and Tadayoshi Kohno's presentation of the Boomerang Amplifier attack spring to mind.
Xenu loves you!
I'm not Seth - I just think that this story needs to be remembered.
Xenu loves you!
If you look at the origins of the Web at CERN with Tim Berners-Lee, you'll see that open access to scientific documents was the original goal of the Web. It was not until very recently that non-Academic communities have begun using the Web. As far as reviewing articles and such, that is what protocols such as Annotea which are being developed by the W3C are all about.
Brant Gurganus http://gurganus.name/brant
Here is an example of what Nature and other for-fee journals need to be concerned about. In my opinion, more power to the free and open distribution of knowledge. Let the battle begin based on the value of the journals.
If Nature, the Lancet, and other major journals can justify their prices to their subscribers, more power to them. I would like to see access to science made more open and widespread, so my cheering interest is against them, but I don't begrudge them their efforts. I think that Nature et al are fighting what will ultimately be a losing battle, but the competition cannot be bad for scientists and the public -- let each side fight harder to win attention and business, and hopefully it will drive everyone to greater heights.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
you not Derek are you?