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. "
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.
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.
"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?
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.