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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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!
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.