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.
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...
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'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.