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Open Access To Scientific Literature: Can It Work?

Posted by Hemos on from the it-darn-well-better dept.

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. "

55 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. I think it's great by adulttoys · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The more people are given open (free) access to information, the better.

    --

    ---
    Adult Toys
  2. There's a third option by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.'"
  3. as a scientist... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:as a scientist... by blueZhift · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    2. Re:as a scientist... by beeplet · · Score: 3, Informative

      In the case of music, there is no absolute judge of what is good music or bad music - it's a personal choice. But there is an objective difference between good science and bad science. Unfortunately, most people either don't have the qualification or the time to carefully judge the merit of every scientific paper - instead we rely on the peer review system of respected journals to make that distinction for us. And people are willing to pay for that service.

      If you want to read all the crazy ideas people want to print, there's already a medium for that - it's called the internet. Lots of things get submitted to the LANL arXiv (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) that are "fringe" science.

    3. Re:as a scientist... by GPLDAN · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      Well, to try and answer honestly --- submissions editors add value. If one goes to the library and picks up the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that the articles in there fought to get in. Lots of sub-par research and writing was tossed or picked up by lesser journals. It serves as a kind of filter. If scientists just start setting up websites ad-hoc and there is no structure to papers being released, we end up with an Internet full of PDFs. What happens then, honestly, is corporate control of science. As somebody interested in say, stem-cell research, you maybe try Google to find papers, but somebody like Phizer may have it all neatly organized for you. Except it's just research by scientists paid by them, promoting their agenda.

      Science is at a interesting point in history. It's primacy as technological and economic weapon is unchallenged. But there is a growing anti-secularism on the rise, in the both the West with Christianity and the middle east with Islam. People are attempting to "flood the airwaves" with pseudo-science or straight up bullshit science. Social structures to create peer review and weed out crap must exist somehow.

    4. Re:as a scientist... by gowen · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Just why are you still giving the journals that power? Publish your information whatever way you see fit.
      Because its the best system yet defined to get your work out to a wide audience along with the message "In the opinion of knowledgeable people in this field, this work is probably not wrong." Sticking a PDF on the web does the former; we're nowhere near finding a better way to perform the latter.
      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    5. Re:as a scientist... by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The editors, reviewers, and authors are all unpaid

      I believe that editors get paid quite well, and they earn every penny, but yes, reviewers and authors are unpaid, it comes with the job of being a scientist.

      ... the authors want the widest, freest distribution possible ... 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

      Nothing is stopping scientists from simply throwing their articles on a website somewhere. I can't think of a wider more free distribution method.

      The reason that we give journals the right to act as gatekeepers is because we want them to do it. A scientist knows that there are journals that have higher respect in a field, and it looks good on scientists' vitas to have publications in peer reviewed journals, especially the more respected ones. The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money. Any bozo can throw something on a website. Journals have very strict standards for the format of the paper, and the methods used in the science. As far as who pays? Someone is paying the scientist and funding the research. I would guess that any costs associated with publishing the research is much less than 1% of research itself.

    6. Re:as a scientist... by Smidge204 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I am not a scientist, but I can imagine that one reason they may want to publish in a known journal is reputation and audience.

      For example, Nature has a reputation for being a respectable scientific journal. You pretty much know that the people reading and reviewing your work published there will be other scientists and academics. So what other avenues does a scientist have to publish his work?

      Website? Book? If so, who is your audience (as in, who is actually reading it and not who you wrote it for) and how can they generate feedback for the peer review process to work? Also, what does that say about your credibility? Lots of kooks have websites and books about all sorts of bunk science. How is someone going to tell yours apart?

      Unless you already have a reputation, how do you publish something by yourself and still have people take you seriously? I think it's a fair question...
      =Smidge=

    7. Re:as a scientist... by presarioD · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Current physics grad here! I'd like to add a few points here and there.

      I am currently studying a Phys. Rev. B article (which of course I will not disclose) that is full of typos, the kind of typos that are OBVIOUS to the eye, the kind of typos that any self-respecting editor should catch with no problem, let alone the referees that read the article (supposedly). This article got published!
      Additionally to the typos, there are formulas that are completely wrong (this is easily checked because the paper is based on an older paper with the same kind of calculation done right).
      In short here we have a paper full of typos and inconsistencies that passed through the "referee" and "editor" bus-stops and got published in a prestigious magazine. The same kind of magazine that you need to subscribe in order to view.

      This is only one of the many similar examples that show a pattern formulating. If the corporate scientific magazines can not even keep up with what they are supposed to do, safeguard the integrity and accuracy of the published information, what's their use anymore?

      Answer:
      The "prestigious" publications are the current measure of scientific "success". The more crap you publish the more "successful" you are!

      --
      Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
  4. Can it work? It does work! by Paul+Crowley · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
  5. isn't the whole point of academic publishing... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...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.

  6. The Music Industry by gowen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:The Music Industry by dpilot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'll challenge you on this one, in an odd way.

      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 /. (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.

      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 /. 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.

      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.
  7. Ulib by KrisCowboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. P2P by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:P2P by RealAlaskan · · Score: 3, Insightful
      We will still need journals for peer review, sadly.

      BZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! We still need peer review, but what does that have to do with the journals?

      The editors are professors who are supported by their universities. Their editorship fulfills the ``service to the profession'' portion of their job requirements, and brings some prestige to their department. It's generally considered to be easier to get published in a journal if the editor's office is just down the hall from yours, and he's heard your presentation of your ideas at one of the faculty brown-bag lunches. In short, the Universities support the editors, not the journals.

      The reviewers are past and potential contributors. They work free of charge, and again, that's part of their university job description.

      Yes, I know that the journals do have some paid employees. They seem to be associated with the print side of the business: they deal with subscriptions and money and such. If you are a contributor, you deal with volunteers who have .edu email addresses.

      If Blackwell Publishers dumped Econometrica, the Econometric Society, which is funded largely by personal membership, could simply put its journal online, by subscription or free. Everything would continue as before: Eddie Deckel could still edit, the reviewers could still review, and the papers could still be made available with the imprimatur of the Society. They might lose out on some revenue from the journal, but I doubt that would be an insurmountable problem. I imagine that most of us could afford to double our dues, if we had to.

      You're an academic, and you know all this stuff, but I'm saying it for the slashdotters, most of whom figure that they'll get involved in some science, like java programming, when they finally get to college.

      --
      See what I've been reading.
  9. Well... by abscondment · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. I hope so by Safety+Cap · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I recently let my membership lapse in a scientific organization because they went from dead tree journals to on-line access (dead trees can still be had for additional fee) without a cost reduction--for either readers or authors.

    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.
  11. Open Online Journals by JamesD_UK · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Public Library of Science publishes the rather open, and rather lovely PLoS Biology Journal completely openly online.

    1. Re:Open Online Journals by geomon · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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!"
  12. Knuth by gumbi+west · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Here is what Knuth wrote on the topic for his journal.

    It's long, but a good read.

  13. I don't know... sounds risky by L.+VeGas · · Score: 3, Funny

    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
  14. For an example... by cot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --

  15. Fund libraries with public access... by beeplet · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  16. Slashdot Model by GrEp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Slashdot Model by gowen · · Score: 3, Insightful
      All that is needed is moderation.
      Ahh. But getting expert moderation is not an easy task. An important skill of journal editors is knowing who the experts are in certain fields to review papers.

      Secondly, review is not *just* a moderation process, its a feedback process. The comments and corrections of reviewers are used to *improve* the original paper. Thats no small thing, and completely lost if you replace it with a "this is good / this is bad" button, or "(+5 Seminal)" rating scheme.
      --
      Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    2. Re:Slashdot Model by bsd4me · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Secondly, review is not *just* a moderation process, its a feedback process.

      I just want to second this. I had an article published in an IEEE journal last year, and the comments from my editor were invaluable. I also helped review a textbook this winter, and I know some of the comments resulted in big rewrites of sections.

      --

      (S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))

  17. The only problem is prestige by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The main reason remaining for paper publication in high-priced journals is prestige, in the academic "publish or perish" sense. Many academic journals expect authors and readers to pay them. They don't pay reviewers. Often, they don't even pay editors. Then they have subscription prices upwards of $1000 per year, so only libraries subscribe.

    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.

  18. Understanding costs factors on both sides by Mochatsubo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  19. Re:Kind of ironic by danormsby · · Score: 5, Interesting
    To make it worse you don't get paid to get papers published there. The money goes to the journal not the paper submitters. You actually have to surrender your copyright to the journal on submission of the paper. Most journals actually expect academics to submit their papers for free, expect fellow academics to referee the papers for free and then charge the academics to view both other peoples papers and their own papers.

    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
  20. Who's it for? by Pi_0's+don't+shower · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Who's it for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well it's not like the scientists publishing in it get a cut of the overpriced bloated subscription fees.

      Anyways, whoever you are doing research for will foot the bill to get it published for the prestige of getting their guys name published. It's not like jo-bob amateur chemist is publishing scientific papers in his spare time after he gets home from the office.

      The biggest part of publishing is doing research worthy of being published. If you got something that can make it into a major journal you'll get the money from somewhere.

      Scientists don't live off royalties of papers they publish. They aren't novelists. They are researchers. Someone pays for their research and pays for their publishing.

      The current state of scientific or even better academic journals in general (because history, anthropology and area studies all suffer from it too) needs a real overhaul. It's a really antiquated system that has basically just become a big racket for the publishers.

      Publishing academics papers in peer-reviewed journals is totally different than publishing a collection of poems or a novel.

      And oh ya, all the scientist I know are very well paid, even the bums that haven't published squat in ages.

      Anyways, the whole point, which you apparently missed is this: You say "especially when the information is not open for all to use" well the idea is to make it open for all to use. Also the reason it costs money to publish these things is because someone with high level of expertise has to spend a lot of time reviewing the paper. So you are paying for it to be reviewed. Why paying someone to review it should mean that it's completely restricted use?

    2. Re:Who's it for? by RayBender · · Score: 3, Informative
      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.

      Actually, publishing in Nature is free, unless you have big color prints.

      --
      Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
  21. Reviews and moderation by nodwick · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Funny that you should mention Slashdot, because there's a second issue that is being overlooked in this discussion that I think is even more important than cost, and that's moderation. IMO, the cost of my subscriptions (which currently cost me a few hundred bucks a year) is pretty negligible compared to the benefit of keeping me up to date on the newest research in the field. What's more important is that the publications themselves contain high-quality, useful material.

    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.

    1. Re:Reviews and moderation by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Only people who have submitted papers should be able to moderate. Further, moderation should be weighted, such that those who tend to be moderated positively will have more moderation power. This is simply a codification of the current peer review process, but with the shortcut of being implemented on a website instead of in the court of opinion over several years.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Reviews and moderation by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      Agreed. I recently checked out Barnes & Noble and Borders for technical books. Once upon a time, I could find the books on OS Design, Algorithms, Cryptology, Data Compression, Sound Theory, Game Programming, etc. You know what I found instead? EJB for dummies, UNIX for Dummies 3rd edition, Beginners Guide to Linux, J2EE for Business, etc. Talk about dumbed down material. Half of this stuff is useless crap intended for people who won't read specs (or at least tutorials). They simply add "purdy picturz" to a minor amount of information and call it a book.

      Maybe it's just me, but you know what I got for an anniversary present from my wife? A book on calculating sounds (i.e. synthesis of sounds produced by real objects) in real time. My wife pulled it from my wish list on Amazon. THAT is something I want on my shelf. Right next to the processor specs from Intel and AMD, Practical File System Design with BeOS, OS Design by Tanenbaum, Introduction to Advanced Data Structures, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, etc, etc, etc.

      I don't even have a Masters degree. What the hell are the people who DO have one reading?

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    3. Re:Reviews and moderation by Jon-1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The problem with a /. like moderation system is having scientists in a non-field be able to comment on the article. I don't think the molecular biologists want the particle physicsists to down mod their articles because they just don't get it and vice versa. Papers that are submitted to scientific jornals, such as Nature, are pass along to those within the same field for peer review. Also, it's occasionally of interest to have papers passed along to those in your field, but NOT doing the same work. There's a lot of competition between labs these days and you don't want to make it too easy for your competition to be down modded.

      This doesn't have any relavance on the real problem, which as you say, is information glut. There are too many crappy journals popping up and there are too many crappy papers being accepted by them (and even by the larger publishers). The end result needs to be that reviews are actually being CRITICAL analysis of the papers they read and responding accordingly. I don't think increasing the number of reviewers would help this as just increasing the number of viewers probably won't correlate to a better analysis of the work.

  22. Re:Can it work? It does work! by Donny+Smith · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  23. The added value is review. by Positive+Charge · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  24. Just selling a brand... by Pendersempai · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  25. Profit Center by HiThere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  26. Re:Can it work? It does work! by Drakula · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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
  27. Yet with no peer review -- by oneiros27 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  28. Hehe by afay · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  29. Proactively Protect Lost Freedoms by Milo+Fungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  30. The Slashdot Model by EnsilZah · · Score: 4, Funny


    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...

  31. Scientific publishing isn't the same by gearmonger · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I'm an academic and a scientist (albeit a social scientist...hey, not everyone can be John Nash). Publishing in the scientific community is somewhat like the music and books biz, but unlike in other ways.

    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.

  32. Our subscription to Nature costs $1700 CAD by gringo_john · · Score: 4, Informative
    They can preach all they want about open access but here's what our yearly subscription to Nature costs:

    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...

  33. Re:Can it work? It does work! by Paul+Crowley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!
  34. Not true. Professional society journals do work. by mbkennel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  35. Different models on different continents. by Dr.+Zowie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    As a solar physicist, I have two "workhorse" journals of choice: Solar Physics, published by Kluwer, and
    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.

  36. Archiving by Irvu · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  37. PLoS is on to something by joib · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  38. Which is of little value... by DarkMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    ... 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.