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.
---
Adult Toys
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?
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)
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.
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?
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.
Carnegie-Mellon University is in a process of setting up a Universal Digital Library. Got an impressive list of partners, including the richest pilgrimage in the world(no, it's not the Vactican). The pilot project is to scan a million books first.
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.
Open access to sci. lit. was bound to happen. What began during the Renaissance and continued into the scientific revolution and beyond was the opening of communication and transactions between scientists. Open access is just a continuation of that. And I think that eventually, publishing sci. lit. will be done for the funds that could be procured after people see the work that you do. So, basically, we will have totally open lit. (as in free) that will be published to garner funding for further study, new projects, maybe even professional standing, and dare I say it, the public good, in the nearly free land of the Internet.
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.
The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.
It's long, but a good read.
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?
If you have all this scientific information just kind of floating around, you have the very real danger of contaminating political agendas.
Best Windows Freeware
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.
Sometimes papers are submitted to journals, and are hard to find elsewhere. Most of the time, an e-mail to the author will get a response, or it can be found using a search engine.
It's been a long time since I have looked in a paper journal, yet I still know of universities who shun electronic access...
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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?
Access to articles is a great start, but for science to become "open" scientist must give up their zealous grip on the data itself. Anyone who's ever tried to develop a data exchange network knows that getting scientist to agree to share even the most non-proprietary data can require self-abasement, bribery and arm-bending in varying degrees. Long live XML!
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
I have a question for people -- how many rich scientists do you know? Although I've never published in Nature, publishing in the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ) costs ~$250 PER PAGE for the author... I'm sure Nature is at least as expensive.
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
With a fair number of journals, the author already pays. I am fairly certain that the author or institution has to pay for articles in the IEEE Transactions, and the ACM SIGs may be the same way. In most instances, articles are written by college researches, so the school picks up the tab.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
IMHO it is important that there be multiple venues for publication. Technical journals and magazines that specialize in an area seem to complement each other.
Some of my stuff has published in IEEE journals, other items in Electronic Design and EDN magazines. The writing style is totally different, and how you present things is totally different.
Also, what a journal rejects, frequently the magazine loves to have.
In both cases, the concept of "peer review" is important. (Although not perfect...) Out of control internet publishing means that the readers have to seperate the good and the bad themselves, and some of the readers are not qualified to do so. Peer review prior to publication at least gives some validation of content.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
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.
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.
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.
Well, there's much good to be said about dead trees. :) On one hand, paper journals are great for archival purposes - you can go to your local library, and dig up publications from a hundred years ago. At the same time, the internet is entirely too impermanent - what if Springer Verlag publishes a journal, and then they go bankrupt in 10 years? The chances of the publications disappearing or becoming unavailable are pretty high. But endangering the access to all the accumulated knowledge simply because of economic accidents is not an acceptable risk in the scientific community.
So a joint paper/electronic model seems like the right balance. Most journals do that already - libraries subscribe to dead tree versions, and individuals can access the papers online, usually through a school-related discount subscription. Seems to work quite well although, paradoxically, it increases the cost per unit (because now you're printing far fewer issues).
But there's simply no incentive for publishing houses to make the online content completely free. Professional organizations can do it themselves (e.g. the AI Access Foundation), where they publish online papers themselves, and contract with a publisher to print each entire volume as a book. Non-profits like these will probably be the harbingers of new method of distribution for scientific findings...
My other car is a cons.
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
The problems with giving talks at conferences, and just randomly posting stuff on the internet is that it hasn't had a level of peer review. Someone may have some great information out there, that everyone should read, and someone else might have a complete load of crap.
The service that journals provide isn't so much the publishing, but the fact that skilled people in that profession have reviewed the papers, and have verified that it is accurate, and worthwhile [ie, not just some rewording of someone else's research].
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
The Web was originally designed as a place to publish scientific articles. The very purpose of hyperlinks was to cite other papers. Sure would be nice to actually put all these papers on the web, instead of sticking them behind subscription barriers.
And now that we have PageRank, a simple google for any topic would bring up the most-cited papers...
I find this somewhat funny that the link would be to Nature, which is part of the academic publishing "evil empire". For a good opinion on what is wrong with academic publishing in its current form see this
Also, if you're a scientist and would like to publish in an open format or you're interested in scientific papers, go to the Public Library of Science
Best slashdot comment
I frequently review papers in my field for a variety of IEEE and other journals. I do so because, as an author in those same journals, I appreciate how others who review my papers help to make them better. Peer review, believe it or not, is done by volunteers for mostly altruistic reasons. Journal editors are often also volunteers.
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.
One of the interesting aspects of journal publication is the restriction on the lengths of the articles. This forces authors (by-and-large!) to adopt a terse manner of writing ("telegraphic style" as Landau puts it). I think with online publications, the style of scientific writing will change, for better or for worse (I fear for worse!).
Articles could be less cryptic, but verbosity is also not nice. [As in Yes Minister - using fifty words where five would suffice!]
And yet it moves (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Galileo Galilei...
Theory of general relitivity (Score:3, Insightful)
by Albert Einstein...
Eureka! (Score:0, Offtopic)
Archimedes...
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.
in 2002: $1400 CAD
in 2003: $1700 CAD (+21%)
This is for an academic subscription in a Univeristy Library in Canada.
Here's the irony. In scholarly publications, the contributions are mostly made from contributions from researchers who give the publisher the rights to publish their work. The publishers then turn around and sell this back to the universities for 100% profit. I remember back a few years ago, a subscription to Elsevier (the Microsoft of scholarly publishing) charged over $30K CAD for a subscription to Brain Research. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there were 4 issues per year. That works out to $7500 per issue. The publishing model is that if a reasearcher wants to be recognized, they NEED to publish, and the better recognized the journal, the better chances they'll have of being cited. The more often their article is cited, the better their chances of receiving more research/grants/money/etc...
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!
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
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.
The release forms I signed explicitly give permission for the author to publish on their home page. Copyright was assigned to the IACR.
Xenu loves you!
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.
The one worry that I have (and this is not necessarily an argument against open access) is archiving. A key service that academic libraries provide is archiving of old journals. The web by contrast is not as ideal for such things as websites are always changing and individual servers are always going down. Academic libraries on the other hand are experts at the cataloguing, storage and retreival of old information.
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
I think that PLoS might very well be the model for how things are done in the future, now that the internet has essentially reduced the distribution costs to zero.
Peer review is as good as any traditional journal. In theory at least; my field is physics so I haven't actually read any articles in the PLoS journals.
With the author pays model, the articles can be distributed around the world, without restrictions. This is a big thing, for poor countries as well as people who have graduated but still wan't to keep up with their field. And we don't see the perversity were researchers need to assign the copyright to the journal and then pay to read their own words!
As PLoS is a non-profit, the per-page costs are not that big as there is no need to fatten the wallets of any shareholders. Hell, per-page costs for PLoS are lower than for many traditional for-profit journals! Additionally, researchers from poor countries are allowed to publish for free. This combined with the fact that they can get the articles for free, is about the best we can do to help the third world to increase their knowledge base.
I wish all the success to PLoS and hope that the same concept will be increasingly popular in other scientific fields as well.
The idea of free journals sounds nice on the surface. However, there are a number of expenses that need to be paid. Web servers are not free. Professional editors cost money. People need to be hired for organization, administration, IT. Etc. Someone needs to pay these expenses. In the IEEE, for example, all journal and conference articles are online. The are not free to the public since it costs a lot of money to operate reputable journals and conferences. Hopefully the web will eliminate the printing costs, but as in the music industry, media costs are only a small fraction of overall expenses.
Vote for Pedro
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
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.
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.
... if you are an expert in the field.
That's really, really, crucial here. The people who gain from peer review are _not_ really the experts. Ok, there's a gain by a first winnowing, but that's not really that much, if you look at what does get published.
For example, there is not a paper in my field (thin layer magnetism) where it matters one whit if it's been peer reviewed or not. Why? Because if it's a load of cobblers, I'll spot it. I don't need other peoples opinions.
Now, outside my field, I'll accept that peer review has some merit to me. The most notable one for me is the mathematical proofs, to be checked by other mathematicians [0]. On the other hand, in the abscence of a formal peer review stage pre publication, any errors would result in a Comment publication in response. I accept that that's a time lag - but I don't think that that time lag would be any greater than the formal peer review stage as is.
No, the people who gain from peer review are not the experts. They are the general public, and those learning, or branching out. A lack of a peer review step would make it more difficult for those people.
You'll find that the drive to opening of papers is primarily driven by the experts. I think that replacing the peer review step with a structed system of comments, and keeping those comments accesable with the paper, would benefit.
The counter point to this, is that by having greater access to papers, with comments, would give benefit to all, general public and experts alike. The end point would be a net gain for experts, and probably a gain for the general public - as more reading would be needed, but all that reading would be easily accessable.
Let me close this by re-iterating that the experts don't need peer review - which is why arXive.org and pre-prints are the stock in trade of many an expert.
[0] There are, of course, similar sections of related research for all fields.
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
SPARC Open Access Newsletterh ive.htm
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arc
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
What you can do to promote open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do
Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
FAQ from the Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm
Disclaimer: I'm associated with all of the sites above.
Peter Suber
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!
Linux at home