Slashdot Mirror
Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All
houghi writes "The register reports how the Dutch open up their research to the rest of the world.
It goes on to tell that commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science are not happy with it.
Will other countries and universities follow, or will they stick to the idea that knowledge is a commodity?"
like i said, giving up all of these smarts is the best thing for the world. screw those journals.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
... I always thought that medical and scientific research is free to the world. Perhaps I was thinking of the good ol' days.
I'm all up for the Dutch research talked of, and I hope that this trend does continue. There is only one thing worse than capitalism - capitalism of knowledge.
Anonymous Coward
500 of clog development research and technology is no use to anyone but Dr Scholl
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I personally belief that freeing knowledge will be a first step to a much better world. "Beware for he who wishes to keep knowledge from you, because in his heart, he wants to control you." - Brother Lal, Peacekeepers (from the game Alpha Centauri, not the most credible quotes but there you are)
When knowledge is a commodity, you'll see a vast upsurge in new knowledge. Well, at least when Google starts to index all the available knowledge, of course.
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!" - Return to Zork
They have been the first to adopt new and good ideas so many times, it's just amazing.
Let's just hope that this idea will also find followers in other countries, that normally take longer to adopt new ideas.
Way to go Netherlands!
Seems like they should've thought twice taking the dare with /. (already down)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
just part of the digital revolution that is now happening. paradigms are shifting away from what we have known and "early adopters", like this group of universites, will in the end be our (read: net junkies like me and you...) best friends.... this is a great step....we already have the music thing down....were trying to tackle video, but this here is a great stride for the demand of digital libraries
The corporations have no rights to have the sole access to research that was funded by the taxpayers.
Of course, this raises the question whether anyone from countries other than Netherlands should be able to get it for free (gratis) -- but, the free (as in unhindered) exchange of ideas is pretty much what the ideals of science are about.
If a corporation wants a monopoly for knowledge, no one forbids it from paying for the research.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This was bound to happen one day.
In the 'old days', the only way to spread your work to all your peers was through the estabjournals.
The publishers of those journals could ask a premium price for this service.
With the advent of the Internet, this barrier has fallen.
Publishers should find new ways of keeping their subscribers.
This sounds great! It may be as revolutionary as the arXiv.org e-Print archive. I wonder how long before the rest of the EU follows suit. Any guesses?
(I bet the rest of European scientists aren't hugely fond of seeing publishers gouge libraries for access to articles that they, the scientists, wrote and want to share with colleagues.)
We still need journals, if only for peer-review.
They don't need to be for-profit, mind you.
Knowledge is a commodity. It is used in return for money. Money buys other commodities. Also, you can use money to buy knowledge. If it can be bought and sold for / by money, it is a commodity. And those who wish to profit from their knowledge must be free to do so.
-Shaunak
As long as the research released has gone through the same peer review as typical academic papers/journals, I can only see great benefits coming from this.
If not, and the open source nature of research spreads, it could be that the info can only ever be treated like the current internet's information, and, as such, be treated be extreme caution. With the potential effect of almost diluting the information to be unusable.
I thought if something is a commodity then it is widely and easily available to all. Like electricity is a "commodity".
Enough of the fucking Doctor Evil posts...
The Dutch should be singled out as a great example of the scientific and engineering devolopment entity that made the Renaissance possible. Without the open participation and sharing of knowledge social and cultural progress would be at a standstill.
If you don't believe me, think where we would be without the Guttenburg printing press or how much information was flowing on the internet when it first came out and was an open community of academians and researchers.
When commercial jet airlines first developed, the BOAC had a plane called the Comet. It was the first plane to experience problems with metal fatigue and stress cracks. The industry at that time was very involved in finding solutions to problems and making better planes. As the direct result of this, the companies involved would share any and all information available in terms of problems and solutions in order to develop the entire industry rather than attempt to promote their own agendas.
This is a significant, albeit old, example of the synergy that can exist when information is shared freely rather than traded as a commodity. Unfortunately US industry, judicial, and legislation seem to have forgotten some of these lessons.
These Dutch aren't so "Freaky Deaky" but truely a credit and an example. Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause. The contrast makes me ill.
The currency of science is citations: the more you are cited, the more you are worth. Academics therefore have a natural incentive to have their work be more accessible.
That is partly balanced by the fact that papers published in well-marketed journals with recognizable brand names will be cited more frequently. But they still have to be well-known, which is why even expensive journals tolerate "illegal" copies of scientific papers (this is similar to software companies tolerating some piracy and low-cost versions in order to keep low-cost competitors from entering the market).
On balance, I think academic publishers are going to lose this one for the most part. In the end, they don't offer any value, since all the hard work is already volunteer work. All the academic publishers do is marketing, printing, type setting, and mailing to libraries, and none of those are essential for academic journals anymore. Some journals will probably continue to be proprietary and expensive, but most will probably not be.
This is not all research papers, but only research papers already available for free to everyone. I quote:
DAREnet harvests all digital available material from the local repositories, making it searchable. But it limits the harvest to those objects that are full content available to everyone. Tollgated objects (e.g. publications at publishers who only allow access through expensive licenses) can only be found in the local repository.
Let's not forget that most scientific papers are not available for free.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
If 3\4 of the posters had RTFA they would have seen that it is about the cost of PUBLISHING research not disclosing Intellectual Property free of charge. Most Universities around the world and a lot of corporations do this for "free" anyway. The article said nothing about patents or copyright or anything remotely on that topic. This article should be used as an idiot filter for future postings on IP.
Academic research is part of the public domain, much of it is funded through Tax.
The journals have shot themselves in the foot, there have been grumblings about this for years and the journals have done nothing to improve access.
Do they give copies to public libraries? Do they provide online access after a set period of time, no you have to pay exhorbitant fees to get access to research tax money paid for.
At least not in the sense that bread and bricks are.
:-D
Knowledge is a public good. If I consume (that is aquire) knowledge, I don't take anything away from anyone else wanting to use the same knowledge. Now try that with bread.
Also, especially know in the digital age, spreading knowledge and therefor acquireing knowledge has zero or near zero marginal costs. If knowledge is out in the open it is free to be consumed by anyone without any additional costs.
Again, try that with bread.
So knowledge is not something that is comparable to other products like bread or bricks, it's fundamentaly different. Now what follows off that difference is of course up for debate, but at least try to understand the issue at hand.
1. Calling others communists is so 50s..
2. So it's not about disclosing Intellectual Property (whatever that may be) and not about patents and copyright? Hm, might this be the reason why the headline of the article reads:
"Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All"
Man, you really must be desparate for a flamewar.
3. "Most Universities around the world and a lot of corporations do this for "free" anyway."
Wow, what exactly did you consume and can I get some of it? Seriously, did you ever take a look at the prices of scientific journals? Why do you think that so many articles you might need are not available at your University? Because it doesn't cost a thing?
Anyone who wants to get free access to publically funded information is a communist? Well, count me in as a commie I guess.
I'm reading the posts here.. I do not see how they have mischaractierized the article. It seems that you have some sort of axe to grind at people who want to take corporate journals out of the loop. Do you have an agenda here that made you stoop to petty name calling?
Research wants to be free, but Mp3 players want to be levied.
"I'm reading the posts here.. I do not see how they have mischaractierized the article." Do a "find in page" search for intelectual property, free or IP. If you want to see how stupid that statement is. No I not just petty name calling. Instead think of it as a worldview summary of the content of these kinds of post.
"The initiative is clearly not welcomed by commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science."
My personal amazement never diminishes when companies or institutions complain over a competitor offering a good/service at lesser or no cost to the consumer. The price of academic materials climbs higher and higher each year without justification. If finding out that one plus one equals two and that Earth's gravitational field is measured at nine point eight meters per second squared costs X number of dollars this year, there is no reason it should cost X plus Y dollars next year. Sooner or later, you lose your target market -- especially when someone comes along fed up with the situation enough to do something meaningful about it.
The journal publishing companies are quickly reaching obsolescence. Given the state of just-in-time publishing and the Internet, there's really no reason that academic institutions have to continue to be held hostage by the journal publishers anymore. Peer review can be completely separated from the publishing process and be managed by already-respected researchers in each field who volunteer their time to assist with the process, perhaps a month at a time (much like the review process is for many smaller conferences).
Each research/academic institution would maintain a repository of the papers produced by its researchers. The peer review organizations, after judging a particular paper as being top-rated, would add it to a digest of recent top-rated papers. When somebody decides they want a copy of the digest issue (or just the particular paper of interest), they can refer to the peer review organization to get a link to the paper(s), download them from the authoring institutions, and print them out if needed (such as to put a hardcopy in the library).
The entire process, from submission to peer review to publishing to distribution is accounted for without the involvement of a publishing company.
I totally welcome this occurrence, and hope to see more like it in the future.
The model of Open Source, where knowledge is considered free to all, is beautiful and is the only way to have scientific research treated. We are moving away from closed proprietary systems from a time when the costs of spreading knowledge meant intermediate parties were necessary, to a free for all system that can only benefit humanity.
It's not a directly analogous situation, but there are a lot of similarities between the Scientific publication game and the Open source movement, hopefully licenses such as the GPL can be altered to suit the future of Scientific publications.
Free for all is nice and all, but I'd go for a game type with objectives. How about Capture the Research Flag? (ducks)
is that dutch for Alfabetisch?
knowledge is a commodity, However one of the key issues that this raises is that researchers will potentially not have to research the same thing twice as the information may already be available to them through other "reliable" sources. This could potentially open up and increase the speed of research and in turn make discoveries that could potentially be as ground breaking as cures for cancer or something similar.
We've got a PM thats basically... eh hilarious.
The sad thing really is that there were enough people to vote for him and his party.
The government here tends to swallow everything America does.. BUT
Every once in a while... I'm proud to be Dutch.
From now on, all my papers will have a dutch collaborator.
I'm not kidding you with what's to come. Honestly!
I bet you don't believe me when I tell you that in the Netherlands the TV schedules of public channels may not be published more than a couple of days ahead by bodies other than the broadcasting associations.
In the Netherlands, public broadcasting associations -representing various groups in society- are allowed to broadcast over the public TV networks. These associations -which are largely payed by tax money- collectively own the rights to the broadcasting schedules. They go to war with anyone trying to publicize these silly schedules. And they win each time.
On the one side sharing the considerable wealth of scientific research and on the other hand being tightfisted about profanities like TV schedules is what the dutch themselves call a "grocery's mentality."
I'm not dutch but I know the country pretty well.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I checked it out yesterday, and Tanenbaum's work is there too. This is a pretty sweet collection :-). I would give you a link if the site was up.
Any other IT Gods in there?
People who are intollerant of other peoples' cultures, and the Dutch.
A.Powers
I don't know what you read, but from TFA:
"The initiative is clearly not welcomed by commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science. Increasingly, universities complain about the high cost of scientific journals and many argue that the research results should be distributed freely or at significantly less cost to library subscribers."
houghi writes "The register reports how the Dutch open up their research to the rest of the world. It goes on to tell that commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science are not happy with it. Will other countries and universities follow, or will they stick to the idea that knowledge is a commodity?"
It's not about limiting knowledge per se. The copyright you sign over to journals has to do with that particular presentation of text (think: plagiarism) or arrangement of data (think: lifting images), not the information contained therein.
IIRC there is an analogy to music: you can't copyright Mozart's symphonies, but a composer can copyright her particular arrangement of notes.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Disclaimer, I'm a researcher.
In the old days if you wanted to read a particular paper in a journal your library didn't carry you had to contact one of the authors and ask for a reprint of the article, which you would receive by snail-mail a few weeks later.
Now you just look it up on Google, most of the time it's there, or the author will send you a PDF a few hours later.
The main contribution of journals to research is no longer diffusion, now people usually don't go to the library to read a journal. They receive a summary of the month's issue by email and then go and consult it online. Clearly this could be replaced by informal web publication just as easily.
However the editorial board work is still essential. They make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly and that each paper looks nice in the end. This is not so easily replaced, even though the editors do a volunteer job.
What is definitely not clear is why journal should be allowed to charge scientist huge premiums for the privilege of having those same scientist work for them for free.
Over the next few years we should see the reactive journal boards realize this, and propose a very cheap online-only service. The IEEE is already thinking about this very hard. When others realize this works fine, the era of expensive printed journal will simply come to an end.
Next will be the issue of books. Scientists are already realizing that it is now extremely cheap to self-publish. Even a top-quality, 500 pages book costs less than $40 to print in small quantities. Yet publishing houses typically sell them $200 a piece or more. Then they go out of print but since the publisher has the copyright everybody is screwed.
For conferences, self-publishing is now more cost effective, and authors get to keep their copyright. Soon the era of expensive conference proceedings will also come to an end.
The last remaining bastion will be reference books or textbooks. These will remain in print for the next few years, because people appreciate having a nice book in hand rather than reading hundreds of pages online, but as the cost, speed and quality of desktop printers improve, we should see a new era of freely available, high-quality online textbooks. There are lots of them online already, ready for printing.
All of this will be good for science. No one will be able to claim in a paper they didn't know about so and so's work and don't have access to it. It will be increasingly easy to do dilettante science without the backing of a huge academic institution.
People will be able to follow a field of science extremely easily. Cross-fertilization will become the obvious way to make progress.
I can't wait, and I want to make that happen.
That is the most disturbing and hilarious site I have ever seen. Awe the links now go to registration.
Butcharoni... who specifically grows her facial hair...lives with parents....Catholic...that can't b e real. I deny it. It's a setup.
Blar.
In Germany we have a term for it: "Herrschaftswissen", i don't even know how to translate it, but it describes knowledge that is guarded as secret because it gives you an advantage over others and allows you to push your weight around. There are some philosophy (Bonn IIRC) and social science (Bielefeld IIRC) departments researching it.
In most philosophical oriented sciences Herrschaftswissen has been recognized as a problem and i guess the dutch move will turn some heads there.
As you can see, the hard part of the labor (writing, reviewing, refereeing) is not done by anyone at the publisher-- various universities pay the salaries of those folks and they pay again for the journal in dead-tree form.
So you can see that there may be some objection to the arrangement. In the old days, the journal staff actually typset things and dead-trees were the only game in town, but most of the typesetting is done by the author.
The choice is hard for some people that really need to publish in the expensive journals to get tenure, recognition, grants, etc. But for people who already have tenure, some are resistant to the journal extortion. Some may have a policy like mine- I do not submit to expensive journals or agree to referee for expensive journals, now that I have the advantage of tenure.
There have been some successes of editorial boards that resigned wholesale, then started a free/inexpensive journal. Hopefully this becomes more common.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
It is a self evident truth that sharing knowledge improves human development. In a few hundred years historians will judge those who once believed in intellectual property as we look upon alchemists and witch burners today. I personally find it hard to believe, at the start of the 21st century, that there are so many foolish people around who still
accept intellectual property as a concept.
His user page (click on his name on the header of his post) shows his comments. They're not numbered there, but it shows the total post count, so when he saw it had 665 post, he knew the next post would be his' 666th.
But he has 668 posts now, and the last post is the one that claims to be the 666th! A pity..
HD Trailers
It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.
The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.
I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"
What I expect is that the journals and publishers will start lobbying for laws to block this kind of 'free press' activity.
I wouldnt be suprised if they play the 'terrorism' card. Because you know, only legitimate researchers pay big bucks for access to scientific literature and only terrorists would want free access. Right?
Oh yes, and self-publishing is destructive to the economy, its anti-american, etc. etc. bla bla bla.
I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.
But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
-- Brandon
Don't worry , In the EU , We are all Allies, An act of war by the USA would result in taking on every country in the EU. So I doubt very much that thats going to happen :) Even If Shoot now ask questions later dubya Bush would want it to.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Technoli
Now, myself, for $40 a month, I have my own server at home on which I can publish what I want. It's much cheaper than printing and distributing my own magazine.
Those guys are just taking advantage of technological advances that enable one to publish without the expense of a printing press and delivery trucks (not to mention sucking-up to newsstands - or distributors).
By now, OCW has over 900 MIT classes available, and is an amazing success. I hope that the Dutch will succeed in a similar fashion.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
On many diciplines, the articles are requested as M$ Word *.doc files instead of LaTex ones nowadays.
MIT is offering all of its courses for free online (has been doing so for a yr. or more) - evenutally all 10,000 courses will be online. Included are notes, videos, assignments, projects, projects results, software, books etc. - all free! Most universities guard their stuff - even more so that some corporations - what do those universities have to hide? http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
Did the companies like Elsevier actually have an argument, or were they just whining because people are finally getting sick of them?
Technoli
Thanks for this information. It shows that there should be some more political pressure behind the move to freely available publications. Maybe through legislation that assures public access to the work results of tax money-paid researchers.
Side note:
Must check out the existing legislation for employees at German corporations. I was under the impression that my work results belong to the company and I could not sign the copyright over to a journal, even if I wanted to.
Am I wrong, and if not, does not the same apply to university professors?
C - the footgun of programming languages
Interesting concept. Would you mind rephrasing that for us? Not that it isn't crystal clear as is.. It's just that this seems similar (nay, a verbatim copy) of ALL your posts (excepting in cases where you replied to self)
Ah well, where's that -1,Incoherent or even -1,Idiot mod when you need it?!
The barrier to a better system is that many of the established "high prestige" journals are the culprits who are skimming money from universities in this way, and getting in the way of open communication among researchers. What's needed is for the top reviewers and submitters to emigrate en masse to more responsible academic publishers. Yeah, unlikely - unless something major like this goes down and kick-starts the process.
This doesn't seem to be a movement to release more or less research. It's just a way to publish research without having to get published in academic journals.
Journals are very expensive and act as a filter for what is published in them.
It sounds like they are just cutting out the journals which act as a middleman.
I'll grant you this one, possibly.
Peer review also reviews readability as weell as accuracy. A poorly-written paper can get knocked back (particularly if the content isn't that exciting) just as easily as a paper with poor content. My boss would have my balls on toast if I submitted a paper that was not clearly written.
Again, in my experience it's the peer reviewers that do this. If something is that badly written, it gets rejected anyway.
Again, it's the peer reviewers, not paid editors, who do that, as much as they can. Most of the time, only researchers active in the same area are capable of doing the checking. Maybe it's different in the world of medical journals, which you seem to be talking about.
Not in my field.
If that content is really useful, it can stand on its own and people will continue to pay for it.
You obviously haven't submitted a paper to the IEEE, then. They insist on copyright assignment.
Maybe medical journals (which seems to be what you're familiar with) are somewhat different to other types of scientific journals. For one thing, I gather many of those who submit to them are practising doctors rather than full-time researchers. Anybody who needed the kind of help you're describing as a full-time researcher wouldn't last very long at it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A. Heinlein, " Life Line "
[Have nothing to add to this]
And New York was named "New Amsterdam" in the early years.
more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam
Hivemind harvest in progress..
The journal, Public Library of Science, aims to create a platform with high impact that competes with Nature and Science. The idea is that funding (which is reasonable) comes from the authors themselves and should be in turn offset by a component of their grants specfically for publication purposes. This is the ideal situation.
This is a good trend...Too bad others haven't accepted this idea.
Being a researcher myself I have to point out some serious limitations on Freedom of information granted by libraries:
...
.pdf file with a scanned image of the article. You may read it, print it, but there it stops. Therefore you cannot (without cracking the copyright protection, which is illegal) do a full-text search on most articles. Some publishers provide a search engine, which works *only* for their own material, and which provides at best a pale shadow of the functionality of e.g. Google.
... and a tragedy from a knowledge-dissemination point of view.
... is commercial publication the best way to ensure availability of scientific information? And is it a reasonable way?
... i.e. the articles
... This was probably true before the advent of the Internet (printing and publishing was difficult, costly, labour intensive etc.), but if they add anything of significance *now*, it escapes me.
1) All periodicals are copyrighted and priced. Libraries pay for a subscription and the right to make the infomation accessible. Right now they (even the best scientific libraries such as the British Library) face soaring subscription costs and fixed budgets. Now imagine the situation for second-tier libraries
The point is that availability and dissemination is much lower than it would have been had all the content been available on the Web, and searcheable through e.g. Google.
2) In order to protect copyright, most articles are copy-protected. I.E. what you get from a library is either a printed copy or a
This sort of copy protection is perfectly reasonable from a commercial point of view
Having said this
Personally I do not think so, for the following reasons:
1) The articles published are by and large generated by publicly funded research institutions and universities.
2) The articles are all labouriously peer-reviewed, practically at zero cost to the publishers, by researchers working for publicly funded research institutions and universities.
3) The publisher obtains the copyrights from the author (again at zero cost)
4) The publisher produces paper prints and electronic copies of the articles
5) The publisher charges the public, publicly funded research institutions and universities premium prices for their valuable intellectual property
This would have been reasonable if the publishers provided a large added-value to the articles
So in summary, I believe that:
- that putting the results of publicly funded research in the public domain is a reasonable thing to do
- the Dutch initiative is a good way to start
In the US da gubermunt and da taxpayers drop a few pennies into research via an organisation called da Pentagon.
"...what is considered an invaluable department..." - Da gubermunt language is not english.
Invaluable => $0 but lots of nice speaches.
Essential => $NameIt but keep your mouth shut.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
knowledge is a commodity?
Not when it's being Slashdotted, no.
Proud owner of BOT2K3 [ bot2k3.net ]
I'm at work behind a porn-blocking proxy, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, what is it? I can't get there.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
"However the editorial board work is still essential"
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style. Say a researcher at uni UofX creates a paper on say quantum transportation: then just send it round the Internet2 to all the other faculties of quantum transportation around the world and have at least 25% of all those people peer-review it.
That way, you have instant distribution to all places that need it (maybe force 'em to have a webserver open to the public with all the publications) and peer review by the people who can do it. Hell, you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, and make that kind of cross-peer-review mandatory nfor a stamp of credibility (and make participation in that peer-review process a job requirement for being attached to a university.)
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
"The market will decide."
Nope. Capitalism is old hat. Not popular anymore. Not even PC. Find another way.
xxx.lanl.gov
(No, it's not pr0n). My colleagues and I glance over the abstracts posted in our field every day. It's a great resource for to know what's going on in your field. We use it primarily as fodder for intellectual discussions, but eh. Check it out.
----------------- Oink. Moo. rarr! -----------------
They had to export their dangerous overload of vowels *somehow*. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
didn't someone say 616 is the new evil number?
Manojar - pronounced like Manager
IANAL, but what are the exemptions to copyright for educational purposes? If an academic publication is purely for educational purposes, as many of these scientific articles are, can't they be widely redistributed for education? Perhaps, the context is important, but it seems as though it could be suited for free educational redistribution.
Secondly, what is the need for peer-review only? Why can't papers be published with peer comments like slashdot?
Peer-review in a "name" journal doesnt guarantee the bad and repetitive stuff doesnt get published, but certainly filters a lot of it. There are just too many secondary journals, conference abstracts, and websites to read more than a fraction of it.
The University of Connecticut has a rather impressively large research library (three million books, plus two and a half million more on microfilm, plus seventy-five thousand journal titles (plus seven thousand current subscriptions)), but if you can walk to the library, you can read to your heart's content. Photocopying costs more than it should, but it's still something like a dime a page.
When I was a student there, you could request a PDF coupy of a journal article and a scanned version would show up in a week or so, free for downloading and keeping. I suppose you'd need an account for that, but it's still really frickin' cool.
Now that I'm no longer a student, the privilege to borrow books from the library is twenty-five bucks a year, which is still really, really cheap for access to all of that. (Their missing-book fees, however, are positively draconian.)
There's a public library downtown, but it's tiny. I suppose I've been spoiled by being able to find everything I'm looking for actually on the shelves, and not waiting for ILL.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Of course people who are going to loose money are going to complain...sounds like Microsoft. However, the world will be better off because of this. It would be amazing if the US, China and Russia would do the same thing. Just think of how many problems could be solved if more agencies did this. Mankind would benefit tremendously.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
The 2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable.
So is it DARE to KNAW or is it DARE to NWO?
I never ceased to be astonished by the arrogance of free and open software advocates, all of whom manage in one way or another to be well-paid for their work, but who expect other knowledge workers like writers and and performers and editors and designers to work for free (or better, drop dead).
Publishers perform a host of tasks that are invaluable in creating a truly useful product. Without these services, the quality of publications would sink to the marginall level quality of most of the stuff on the Internet (including the fascinating but supremely unreliable Wikipedia).
Scientists as a rule get paid for publishing, but someone has to manage the process of selection, peer review, editing, proofreading and other publication steps. Where books are concerned, many if not all of the steps traditionally performed by publishing houses still have to be performed. If this is not done, the work will be of inferior quality.
Are the Dutch planning to replace the services provided by Elsevier et al by some paid Internet equivalent?
Most people in european gouvernments do not want cannabis to be illegal. The health risks compared to alcohol are minimal and it is costing a lot of money enforcing. What keeps the dutch gouvernment from decriminalizing it alltogether are the conservative forces that point to countries with a very harsh stance to cannabis, saying that legalising it will isolate us from these countries.
In reality, this is costing us a lot of money: money we have to spend in enforcement, and money that could be make in taxing the stuff.
Right now 1 kilo of maihuana costs ~1000 Euro (in bulk), plus a similar amount it costs in enforcement paid by the taxpayer. That money is made illegally, because it is still illegal (and prosecuted) to grow weed commercially), so no taxes are paid over its production. The price can be expected to drop sharply once production is legal. This low price makes room for taxing the stuff, just like it's done with alcohol.
As for exporting to other countries: That is not a nonexistent problem right now either: a lot of shops selling the stuff are right next to the border, many counties are making it a policy to put them there to decrease the trouble their customers would cause if the shops were located in the city center. Legalising the production side of it, will not increase those kind of problems.
Meanwhile some politicians put up a stance 'against cannabis,' probably for electoral gains from an electorate that has no experience with it (apart from seeing some scary people smoking the stuff). If only they knew how much their ignorance was costing them...
(And for myself: I think it stinks, literally, and the hangover from it lasts way too long for me)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
From http://www.m-w.com/
Main Entry: commodity
Pronunciation: k&-'mä-d&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle English commoditee, from Middle French commodité, from Latin commoditat-, commoditas, from commodus
1 : an economic good: as a : a product of agriculture or mining b : an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment c : a mass-produced unspecialized product
2 a : something useful or valued b : CONVENIENCE, ADVANTAGE
3 obsolete : QUANTITY, LOT
4 : one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market
If you don't have it, you want it. If you need it, you'll go through a lot to get it. It *is* valuable and the people who have it may want to be compensated for their efforts in getting it. That is their right. They have no obligation (but your morals aside) to give out anything that they've discovered except under their own terms. In extreme cases, what you hope is that someone else will develop the same knowledge and be a little more nicer about making it available.
All this "knowledge wants to be free!" stuff is just emotional, moralistic slants on the holders' own beliefs and what they wish it would be. They want it to be free so they can take advantage of it and use it (for free), that is all.
If I discover the "Universal Cure for all things that ail Humans, including age", you can bet damn well that I'm going to want to be compensated for it and I'll laugh at anyone who tells me that it "wants to be free!". Live in the real world with me instead of your idealistic, emotionally and morally defined world.
In the US, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that NIH-funded researchers will now be required to submit final copies of their published manuscripts to PubMed Central providing free access. For folks in the health sciences, this will have a substantial impact (and journals will adjust their copyright rules to permit it if they want to get submissions from folks successful enough to get NIH funding.)
...if you ever get a chance to visit the Netherlands, do it, you won't be sorry. Imagine the USA in the mid-70's, yeah it's that cool. None of the right-wing bullshit that has taken over America...
This is very good news if this pattern catches on... Many times I've wanted to read papers which were referenced on other papers, and I couldn't because they were in paid-subscription sites such as ScienceDirect, IEEE, or ACM...
I don't want to have to subscribe to that many associations if I just want to read a paper or another ocasionally, science research should be free for all!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Elsevier isn't happy 'cause they've made lotsa money sucking at the academic tit.
:)
I hope that this will nudge more medical journals in the direction of freely available. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (http://www.cmaj.ca/) is currently the only major open access journal (CMAJ March 1, 2005; 172 (5).) (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/172/5/621). The British Medical Journal experimented with the idea for a while but decided to close up again... perhaps they'll now reconsider.
If you read the CMAJ article above... you'll know that Nature Publishing Group is okay with authors making the final version of their articles available six months post-publication. Things are moving in the right direction.
Isn't much of the web creating new forms of authority? Do you now trust newspapers and journalists tot the same extent that you did in the past? Isn't a more open discussion of the review process a benefit? If I obtain an article from the web, which corresponds to an article in print, what exactly is the difference? Isn't it the "pulling" (Research) part that makes it authoritative?
This already sort of happens with pre-prints.
Servers like arXiv.org and at cern.ch
already contains huge
amounts of online material that can be search
and download.
Every major experiment has its own editorial board
as well so a lot of those papers have had some kind
of peer review process applied to them.
It is hard to find scientists willing to review
papers. Top scientists have their work cut out.
Getting grants, doing research and teaching.
Revewing papers unless it is a special paper is
something that is avoided at all costs.
Conferences proceedings are almost obsolete
as well since you can always find the talk
given on the conference's website, the paper
submitted to the publisher etc.
It is those pre-print servers and online information available to the
public which are putting the squeeze in publishing
companies. Libraries are doubting whether it is
useful to keep paper copies of papers and if the
expense is cost effective. It is the same old
story.. library's budgets are cut and the journal
prices are increased.
Publishing books is hard work and time consuming.
Most probably not cost effective to be done
yourself if you take into account how much your
time is worth.
It is easy enough to create something on pdf with
latex which gives you professional presentation
and stick it on your website
but the distribution of such thing would be
very limited.
I like books they are portatble and I can
annotate things on the margin.. laptops
are still too big to be as portable as book.
Cheers,
A.
In case none of you are actually involved in science -- and since this "IS" slashdot that odds of that are pretty high (yes that was an insult), here's another open access research publication site.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/
It's a clearinghouse for peer reviewed science and they have journals covering various topics from reproduction to evolutionary biology to genomics. Plus, you can subscribe to an RSS feed for everything.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
More recently, those pesky Dutch have also staked a claim to substantial parts of the universe with the discovery and naming of such features as Kuiper belts and Oort clouds.
That trick doesn't work quite as well when the audience in question is a bunch of PhDs, and worldwide at that, as opposed to the general public.
The problem with arXiv.org is that the utter crap is right next to the brilliant, and there is far too much of the former. It makes it a complete waste of time to browse the archive. It is only useful as a more permanent repository.
Top scientists are usually editors of journals or series. They do their bit with regards to the peer review process. Young scientists can do most of the actual peer reviewing, this is not a problem as there are more of them, and it's not clear who is more afraid of novelty, whether it's old or young scientists.
Since the equilibrium has been disturbed we are in a time of change, and so lots of things are in a state of flux. I think journals will continue, they have the peer-review in place and that is the only thing that distinguishes science from crap. They will just become cheaper and more easily available, not the other way around.
...Horsewhip and Buggy manufacturers are irate that their purpose for being disappeared. Quick, someone sue to get automobiles banned!
-Styopa
I think research could be done in a collaborative/open-source model of posting articles with commentary following. The hard parts are making sure the posts are real and not made up and ensuring adequate review prior to publication, but the sites could be set up to have wiki's editable by peer review faculty and comments open to the general scientific community.
Are you suggesting that all war criminals should only be charged in their country of origin?
There's this stupid idea many people have that things they disapprove of should be illegal. It doesn't matter that making the thing illegal may actually increase its frequecy, or incur horribal societal costs in enforcement because, well, these are not rational people. It's sad, really.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style.
You genius, you! That's exactly how the current greedy, money-grubbing, for-profit journals do it! We write the articles, we (that is, everyone who submits articles) get tapped to review them, then our institutions get tapped to pay big bucks (thousands of dollars) for our work.
The only thing that would be different under this new proposal is that there wouldn't be any bloated, plutocratic publishers leaching off of us.
>... you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, ...
That would be different. A statistical review would result in some radical changes in some fields. It isn't going to happen, because too many careers and too many fields of study have been founded on unsound methods. I'll let you guess which I'm thinking of.
See what I've been reading.
One of the big things in Universities at the moment are Institutional Repositories. Bascially a web accessible database containg records and FULL TEXT of all articles published by academics at the organisation.
Have a look at a list of a few here (from the eprints website). Many of them are in there early days, but in a few years will have grown to be quite a collection. The next step will be to cross search them, perhaps using Z39.50.
There are two software applications to run these sites. eprints from Southampton University (UK) and dspace from MIT/HP.
Some other links can be found here.
Chris
--
You will forget this sig before you next see it
This is cool but... what percentage of the documents have translations into other languages, like, say, English.
This is obviously a good thing for Dutch speakers, but if the rest of the world is to make use of it, they'll need native translations. And those translations will need to be free to everyone, as well, or copyright law will forbid them from being distributed...
--
AC
If, in the future, every scientific report will be on the web, then the rating system for those articles can be highly distributed and computerized.
I can easily imagine the whole thing controlled by just three variables:
- I am x% familiar with the subject matter of this report.
- I rate this report at y%
. - I give z% credibility to this author.
The first two would be edges between an article node and an author node, and the third would be edges between author nodes.If you are a well-respected, oft-published geologist, you still might have a somewhat valuable perspective on a pharmaceutical trial report (and you probably wouldn't even bother to read the article if it had no meaning to you in the first place). But in regard to an article on x-ray crystallography, your opinion will carry much more weight. And if the article is very good, you might decide to up your own assessment of the writers' credibility scores.
If you assume that you give yourself 100% credibility, you can trace along the giant graph to not only find the best articles, but also the ones most relevant to your interests. Even Joe Schmoe could decide that he trusts the rock stars of science to pick out the good from the bad, and get highly-rated articles that way. But it would not do him much good to rate those articles until some of the authors decided they wanted to trust his opinion, and to get that trust, he would have to either publish his own articles or impress a few authors in person.
Obviously, the weak point in the system is the judge's self-assessment of topical familiarity, so the check on that would have to be the rated author's credibility rating for the judge. If you rate an article at 20%, claim 90% familiarity with the topic, and cannot back up your low marks with some coherent criticism, then the author will lower your credibility.
"This quote is a product of the Frobozz Magic Quote Company."
Boring credential bit: I'm a reviewer for two journals and a colleague is an editor of a fairly well known publication. Its not a paid job, its a professional responisibility. Even the guy who is an editor just gets expenses.
someone else to tell you what is good and what is bad.
and
The internet is so complex that you can't see how to organise an open peer review site.
Come on; your not that stupid are you.
the audience isnt PhDs, its legislators. all you need to do is play the terrorism or commerce cards, and blammo -- legislation to prop up your dying business model.
Have you been reading any of this? The whole point is that peer reviewers work for free, for the prestige of appearing on the journals' list of editors. Let's review.
Researchers write the articles for free. Reviewers review the articles for free. Publishers take the results of this work and make mega, mega fucking dollars from it, for doing pretty much nothing at all.
It's a racket. Do you understand?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
as having completed college 45 minutes ago, i can say, with no amount of pride, that research is a bitch when 90% of the sites want me to pay $30 for one stinking article that might not have what i need.
this is not freedom of information, this is consolidation of our resources into the hands of a few for personal gain.
that sucks!!!
why am i reminded of the whole american ideology with this?
On behalf of all the Dutch*,
:)
thanks dude!
(And no, you can not have some weed with that, as the Dutch youth actually smoke less of the stuff than youth many other countries do - true fact)
*Eventhough I'm a mix, but what the heck
That is a bit harsh with arXiv.org I would be
surprise if you found papers on perpetual
motion machines (the sort of thing I would classify as crap). Then again I work in particle physics so most papers found in the repository
have some editorial input already.
I always seem to find stuff such as proceedings from summer schools which are useful
when learning about a new subject
which would require a lot of sluething
if only the paper copy was available.
The review process is not completely solid either.
If you do not like the comments from a reviewer
you can always ask for another one. My first
paper that I reviewed (a few months ago) I managed
to tally around 25 comments and corrections. The second reviewer for the same paper wrote 2. They were both related to a grammatical error in the first
page. It goes to show you should always question what you are reading.
But I agree completely. Having competent journals with good editors is necessary and has a place
and hopefully enough momentum has been created
to forced prices to ones that libraries can afford.
Cheers,
A.
"However the editorial board work is still essential. They make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly and that each paper looks nice in the end. This is not so easily replaced, even though the editors do a volunteer job."
:).
Um, Wiki.
Why not simply have the editorial board peer-review articles using Wiki? They could have 50 authors do it all online, and when they do they get credit towards someone else reviewing their own submitted articles.
It would kinda be like Wikipedia restricted to academics but for journal (instead of encyclopedia) articles.
Hopefully in the end the restricted status to academics only will be dropped (since anyone knowledgeable enough to find errors should be able to at least give a heads up in the discussion if not change it), but one step at a time
You obviously have either never priced the "small" contribution required to get to some of these scientific journal or get free access as one of the perks of your job at Elsevier or PR agencies you're astroturfing for on the company payroll.
The research covered in these pay-for-play journals is by and large, publically funded. Why should we have to pay a second time for access to the results?
Tech Public Policy stuff
I believe your right. The internet is bringing people together for the common good. In this instance, to provide the world with a wealth of information.
Who knows, maybe future global projects on space travel will be based upon "Open Source Research"?
What i've been thinking of recently is a forum, much like slashdot where people can talk present research and even colaborate together on some of the toughest problems known to human kinda. The hope is that this information will be freely available so that government or commercial organisation can pick up the research and further it or provide applications that make use of the research. Possibly even contributing back to the community.
Know we get into the argument of MIT/BSD vs GPL. So i wont go there. But this is absolutly wonderful news. Bring on utopia!
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
You've obviously got an axe to grind, and it obviously isn't in favor of public access to publically funded research.
Tell us who you're working for and your part in the process of producing scientific journals, and your explaining what your company's value-add to the process is might actually be worthy of discussion.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The parent obviously needs to get out of academia. The system is screwed up, but there are alternatives.
The government absolutely pays for a lot of reseearch, and a lot of it esoteric. Many of these DARPA projects you hear about are done by academic researchers. There's also the entire budget of the NSF and a significant amount of money from the DOE, NIH and DOD and I'm sure others. My lab has government grants for things which go way, way beyond "No Child Left Behind". The government doesn't spend enough on research, but it spends a lot.
I'm a physicist and I knew going in to physics that you don't do it for the money. It seems the same with most academic research. We all get paid too little, and yes, that sucks. If it really bothers you, try your hand at fixing it in University administration or politics. The problem is most of us would work for next to nothing just to the chance to stay in the lab.
There are a whole lot of people who come in to academia thinking they're smart shit and going to get paid well for it. In a lot of the really cool areas, everyone is smart shit, and any extra money in the budget will buy some equipment to give you an edge.
It seems to me, that to make it in academic research, you have to be the kind of person who will work at it in your spare time, at night and on the weekends, and you'll like it. Anything less and you won't compete in the big areas, because there are too many smart people out there working all the time. In short, you do research because it's what you were going to do anyway, not because you get paid well for it. If that's not the case you'll end up like the parent, raving on some webpage or blog about how society doesn't have its head on strait.
Getting slightly back on topic... the parent is right that researchers rarely spend money irresponsably, but one of the few extra big costs is getting things published and then buying a subscription. Everyone has to deal with this funding problem (despite the parent's complaints it's better in the US than in most places). At some point, we're all going to realize that it's silly to pay a commercial publishing house for a service we already provide to ourselves just about at cost. Many top journals are published by trade associations like APS or ACS, and the money they make off of them goes right back into the reseach community.
Americans are prosecuted everyday for crimes overseas.
BTW there's nothing stopping foreign countries themselves prosecuting American soldiers for warcrimes in their countries. Contrary to popular belief, most countries in the world have not signed armed services treaties with the US signing away their right to prosecute US servicemen in their country if they commit a crime there.
Here in Oz I can name a couple of incidents when US servicemen were arrested & prosecuted for indictable crimes & the relivent state govt rejected US appeals to let the US military prosecute & punish the servicemen themselves. Mind you often what happens is that the US military pulls stunts to make sure the servicemen in question arn't accesable to local low enforcement bodies, so the juristiction concerned has little choice but to accept US military offers to prosecute & punish the soldiers internally, whether the offer is genuine or not.
Well arXiv is just a repository of paper in near-draft status. That there are good papers in them is great, but almost incidental. These papers also get published somewhere else afterwards. Unless you are looking for stuff in your field and you go by word of mouth then there is no way of knowing if the paper you are reading holds any value. Trying to understand a paper not in your own field is usually a non-trivial undertaking, you'd like to know if it's been reviewed before you make the effort.
For example of non-trivial crap look up the numerous proofs of both P=NP and P!=NP in the math/computer science sections.
Yes the peer review process is only as good as the reviewers. I find that this is precisely what makes the difference between a good journal and a poorer one. With better journals, reviewers often make a more significant effort at providing insightful comments, or the editor will make a better effort at finding reviewers that do provide insightful comments. Sometimes a single comment can change the orientation of a paper around completely !
Well, I guess you could say morals are _defined_ as a given society's set of behavioral norms. Then, at least within this society, they are not relative. However, once you define them thus, why should my ideas of "right" and "wrong" (ethical choices) have anything to do with morals?
Would you also say that "illegal" necessarily implies "wrong"? If yes, why? If not, why should "immoral" imply "wrong"? Kissing in public used to be immoral not so many decades ago, this just goes to show...
Plus, yes, I make my own decisions on when it is moral for me to murder, just as "society" makes its own decisions when it is moral for it to execute me for it. Not so?