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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I've got a bit of experience of this having a publication list of my own.
Perversely after I've had papers accepted in journals I can't leave the PDFs of the papers on my web site as I don't own them anymore, the journals do.
Omnis amans amens
As an ex-physicist, I'd say that perhaps your argument is just what the journals are afraid of. Back in grad school, it was pretty obvious that the hottest research was being circulated via preprints and later via the web long before anything showed up in a printed journal. The only thing the journals really have left are their names. They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals.
In the future, I'd expect to see federations of scientists reviewing and disseminating research results independently of the established journals. For the current gatekeepers, this would be a death knell.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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.
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.
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.
The PLoS publications will be the litmus test of whether a different model of scientific publishing can exist.
If the PLoS model proves unsuccessful, it will not be due to the lack of peer-review as some comments here have suggested. All of the submissions are subjected to the same rigorous peer process as subscription-based publications.
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.
Also, niche publications are often dropped by publishers due to the small number of subscribers. The effect on the groups who need that publication outlet is tremendous. Imagine new discoveries going unpublished, regardless of whether they are part of a 'high tech' science market.
The fact remains, as outlets for research are pruned, so is the opportunity for scientific inquiry. I don't profess to have all the answers to this problem, but I do know that we need to push back on publishers to force a change in thinking.
They exist to serve the scientific community, not the other way around.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I'll challenge you on this one, in an odd way.
/. (and others) did though, and stated that filesharing got them to buy more CDs, because they had a chance to hear more, and do a better job of deciding what they liked.
/. mod points were given strength by the karma of the moderator. Obviously doesn't work well for i=-1..5, but I'm thinking of the concept.
I agree with you on peer review on scientific journals. But I'll disagree with you on music. For the silly point, some rap fans are not 'live and let live,' they pack guns.
For the more serious point, it's not AC/DC vs Britney[0], it's how the heck did we get to those two in the first place. How did the music industry focus on who gets to be stars, who gets promotion, who gets airplay, etc?
IMHO, publishing industries have four main functions:
1 - facilitate origination - In the case of music or movies, this is the studio. In the case of publication, it's standards/guidelines and perhaps personal assistance.
2 - editorial review - Make sure what gets published is worth publishing.
3 - promotion - The word needs to get out, about any given work. This isn't necessarily advertising.
4 - distribution - This is what we commonly think of as publishing. Get the dead trees, CDs, and DVDs on the shelves and in the bins.
The Internet chisels away at all of these roles.
First, easiest, and easiest to imagine is (4) distribution. Since Joe 6pak equates this to the publication industries, (ie - music) this is where the heat is at.
Right behind it is (3) promotion, though most didn't recognize it. The
As for (1) origination, it isn't so much the Internet as technology. It's now easier to make a professional-looking report than it is to put professional content in it. (Perhaps it always was, but now it's SO easy that more poor content gets dressed-up.) Same for music and animation, a computer and perhaps a little specialized hardware, and you can do in you home what used to need an expensive studio.
IMHO, the biggie is (2) editorial. Someone mentioned page-rank as a form of peer review. Perhaps it is, but I think I'd prefer better qualified reviewers for scientific papers. The music industry is the one that rankles me. IMHO, they're falling down on their basic editorial responsibilities and giving us mostly a choice of drek vs slop for music. My personal theory is that the music industry is now run by money-men instead of music-men, and they wouldn't know a good song/artist if it blasted their eardrums out. No wonder most of my recent purchases have been fleshing out my Beatles collection into CDs.
I suspect there is interesting innovation waiting in using the Internet for editorial purposes. Not a serious proposal, but imagine if
Parting thought:
"If I have done great things, it's because I stand on the shoulders of giants."
Imagine if those giants had heirs and assignees who either charged exhorbitant rent for their shoulder-space, or simply refused admittance, altogether.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
It should also be noted that while the university gets almost all of these journals online any way we still pay an awful lot for the privilege of using our own paper to print them out.
Ian
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 big pharmas and other Corps are already pushing their brand of peer reviewed literature. The biggest pusher of all is the USA's Federal Gov't. I work in a medical library and I've read enough junk science in the major journals that it makes me take most publishing in the medical field with a grain of salt. If journals serve as a filter, it's not just a quality pass filter, it's a Politically Correct Pass and a $$$ pass filter, too. Caveat Emptor. Open Access won't change that, but it will truncate Corporate Publisher's Greed.
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.
Because any idiot can put a PDF on a website. The value of the journals is the extensive peer review prior to publication. This makes a publication in a highly respected journal a very valuable thing to get, because it proves to your scientific colleagues that your work has past the inspection of a diverse array of professionals in the same field.
This concept is so ingrained into scientists' heads (including mine) that I don't really consider a "paper" to be a paper unless it's been published in a reviewed journal. No matter how good the research looks, if it hasn't been reviewed for publication, it's always suspect.
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
Interesting.
Your last paragraph doesn't entirely jibe with your earlier statements.
Specifically, if "reviewers & authors are unpaid" why this latter statement "The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money." Note I'm not disagreeing with you as to the value of journals, I'm just working on a thought.
If reviewers are unpaid what are the actual costs in peer review? Not in publishing or other aspects of getting a paper in a journal, but rather the actual peer review, what are the costs there?
Sure information wants to be free, but how much are you willing to pay for the packaging?
If reviewers are unpaid what are the actual costs in peer review?
The editor who reviews the reviews, finds reviewers, etc.
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.
the journals get money for whatever they publish (it's not like you can get your money back by showing that the paper you wanted it crap)
the reviewers have no financial incentive, nor an incentive based on reputation (due to the anonymous nature of the review process) And last but not least, unless the papers are of intense interest at the time it is unlikely (and generally considered "bad form") that another author will write a refutation of the paper. After all, you say the paper you were reading is full of mistakes, why not write a letter to the author or editor of Phys. Rev. B?...
(a rhetoric question)
The more crap you publish the more "successful" you are!
It would certainly appear that way.
Be nice to people on the way up. You will meet them again on your way down!
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.
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.
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)
why not write a letter to the author or editor of Phys. Rev. B?
You see I am just a graduate student. If the scientific community doesn't care about such things, why should a graduate student begin to make enemies so early?
Nobody likes that and it appears that the prevailing tendency is to publish as much as possible, regardless of the quality of work done. If the journals don't set their standards and religiously follow them, there isn't much to be done, I think!
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
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!
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