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
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.
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.
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.