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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. "
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.'"
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?
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.
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...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.
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.
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.
It's long, but a good read.
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Secondly, review is not *just* a moderation process, its a feedback process. The comments and corrections of reviewers are used to *improve* the original paper. Thats no small thing, and completely lost if you replace it with a "this is good / this is bad" button, or "(+5 Seminal)" rating scheme.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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))
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.
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 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...
Well it's not like the scientists publishing in it get a cut of the overpriced bloated subscription fees.
Anyways, whoever you are doing research for will foot the bill to get it published for the prestige of getting their guys name published. It's not like jo-bob amateur chemist is publishing scientific papers in his spare time after he gets home from the office.
The biggest part of publishing is doing research worthy of being published. If you got something that can make it into a major journal you'll get the money from somewhere.
Scientists don't live off royalties of papers they publish. They aren't novelists. They are researchers. Someone pays for their research and pays for their publishing.
The current state of scientific or even better academic journals in general (because history, anthropology and area studies all suffer from it too) needs a real overhaul. It's a really antiquated system that has basically just become a big racket for the publishers.
Publishing academics papers in peer-reviewed journals is totally different than publishing a collection of poems or a novel.
And oh ya, all the scientist I know are very well paid, even the bums that haven't published squat in ages.
Anyways, the whole point, which you apparently missed is this: You say "especially when the information is not open for all to use" well the idea is to make it open for all to use. Also the reason it costs money to publish these things is because someone with high level of expertise has to spend a lot of time reviewing the paper. So you are paying for it to be reviewed. Why paying someone to review it should mean that it's completely restricted use?
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!]
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.
/. system. That won't work. You need to make sure all these reviewers are qualified in the field.
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.
I think we need a www.journals.gov. All that publically funded research should be open to every citizen to review. Odds are very few would actually look, but that's a different issue. I've read posts about using the
1. "Everyone" should be able to look at "any" of the "research" posted.
2. Any one willing to go through the "process" should be able to review.
3. The "process" should encourage "reviewing" other "papers."
4. Those that are "modded up" need to be eligible for grants and what not.
5. Posting papers to this theorical site should be like second nature to any serious scientist.
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)
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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.
BZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! We still need peer review, but what does that have to do with the journals?
The editors are professors who are supported by their universities. Their editorship fulfills the ``service to the profession'' portion of their job requirements, and brings some prestige to their department. It's generally considered to be easier to get published in a journal if the editor's office is just down the hall from yours, and he's heard your presentation of your ideas at one of the faculty brown-bag lunches. In short, the Universities support the editors, not the journals.
The reviewers are past and potential contributors. They work free of charge, and again, that's part of their university job description.
Yes, I know that the journals do have some paid employees. They seem to be associated with the print side of the business: they deal with subscriptions and money and such. If you are a contributor, you deal with volunteers who have .edu email addresses.
If Blackwell Publishers dumped Econometrica, the Econometric Society, which is funded largely by personal membership, could simply put its journal online, by subscription or free. Everything would continue as before: Eddie Deckel could still edit, the reviewers could still review, and the papers could still be made available with the imprimatur of the Society. They might lose out on some revenue from the journal, but I doubt that would be an insurmountable problem. I imagine that most of us could afford to double our dues, if we had to.
You're an academic, and you know all this stuff, but I'm saying it for the slashdotters, most of whom figure that they'll get involved in some science, like java programming, when they finally get to college.
See what I've been reading.
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.
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Underfunding of libraries is an understatement. Fees that journals charge to libraries are becoming rediculous to where only the largest of libraries can afford to have a rather complete collection. When you tack on computer access it gets even worse. To combat this even large libraries have cut back on the availability of on-line materials. With publishers being businesses there isn't anything to control costs till Universities and libaries say no. While costs are getting better the libraries have restricted access while the publishers get their act together and only leads to block access to the papers.
"the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) costs ~$250 PER PAGE for the author"
/. (etc...)would cover well over 1 paper/year.
Sence when is $250/page expensive? When a research project takes 6-9 months of your life to perform and write up (or more), 2K for a 10 page paper is well in the background of what the science cost to do, from start to finish.
I'd wager that the ammount of money spent paying scientists salarays while they read
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"