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Royal Society Wants to Keep Science off Web
truckaxle writes "Britain's national academy of science, The Royal Society, which publishes one of the world's oldest journals, Philosophical Transactions, has joined the debate of the publishing of scientific publications on the internet. In a article by the Guardian a spokesman for the Royal Society was quoted as saying: 'We think it conceivable that the journals in some disciplines might suffer. Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?' They believe that internet publishing would harm the exchange of knowledge between researchers."
I am a physicist, and I have published in a few journals, including Physical Review, and also refereed papers. I agree with some of the observations of the parent poster, but not with his conclusions. It is also not nearly as bad as he suggests.
Firstly, one can exclude certain referees when submitting a paper. If I for instance have a foe or competitor in the field, I can exclude him or her. The same goes for people I collaborate with: ethics demand they do not referee the paper. Furthermore, you can suggest referees, and if you choose people who are not friends, but just know your work is OK, you can speed up the process quite a bit.
Secondly, it is more of a problem of not being able to do a proper job than of malice. Scientific work is by definition new, and the referee is less of an expert on the work than the person who wrote the article. His or her main job is catching gross scientific errors, sloppy mistakes, poor writing, and checking whether a paper is relevant and significant, although that last burden is shared with the editor.
Thirdly, most journals use multiple referees, and if one rejects the paper on a BS reason, the second one probably will not, and a third referee will cast a deciding vote, making the first referee look bad.
Fourthly, referees are not nearly as anonymous as you might think. The pool is typically small, and especially if you know the person, the style of writing and quality of his or her English might give him or her away.
The main reason the peer review system exists is because there is no better system that I can think of. The editors of journals already wield way too much power, and by letting them do the reviewing, this problem will become even larger. Furthermore, they are even less competent than specialists in the field to referee a paper.
Yes.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
I'm not sure what journals you're submitting to, but the turnover rate for most journals in science are only a few months, and some just a few weeks. As an academic with a wife who works as an editorial co-ordinator for three journals, I think I have a bit of insight into the process, and you've greatly misrepresented the process.
Indeed, the process is flawed, but it's what we have at the moment. Blind reviews are lame, and blind authorship is even worse (where the reviewers have no idea who wrote the paper - but can quickly guess given their reference list). It's the editor's job, however, to ensure that the quality of the reviews are adequate. The peer review process certainly isn't without flaws, but I have yet to see a better process. If you have a better suggestion, please speak up.
On the topic of the availability of scientific publications on the web, this really isn't new. Many researchers already post their papers as pdf on the web, and Scholar Google provides instant access to them. I suspect he trouble seems to be with greedy publishers. Academics are expected to hand over their rights to the publishers to distribute their own work. Many don't look favourably on posting papers for download and are trying to stop it. This is a bit odd. They have the rights to the version of the paper *as it looks in the journal*. So if you take out a comma and repost it, you're fine. Or if you're a LaTeX user, you can create nicer looking documents than the publishers do! There's also the issue of reprints. Once upon a time, if someone requested a copy of the paper, you could send it to them. The publishers even provide a number of hard copies to do so. So many researchers have added a prompt to the user before downloading the document indicating that by clicking the download link to the article, they are requesting a reprint.
You're quite right... Many scientific societies use the journal money to fund other (often worthwhile) activities. But we should be clear. No one is saying that the scientific societies should be given less money. We are saying that journals should make all published articles available at no charge.
They just have to adapt their payment model. Consider this example. Reviews of Scientific Instruments is a journal that offers authors the option to pay a surcharge ($2000) so that their article is freely available online, instead of being available online to subscribers only (more details here). An author might do this if he has a particular ideology (believes that publicly funded research should be freely available), but he might also do this simply because it gets his papers MORE EXPOSURE. More scientists will read it, cite it, and therefore the work will become more useful, important and influential. In the future, it's quite possible that all journals will always operate in this way: the authors pay a fee to the journal, and then the articles are freely available. In fact, some journals have switched to this mode and it seems to work.
I appreciate what the Royal Society is saying, but ultimately they have to adapt to a new world. There are other systems by which they will receive the same amount of money, be able to maintain the same quality of activities, and yet make the information freely available.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Peer review is a little like evolution: it's sloppy, it's brutal, it makes its share of mistakes, but in the end it works. There are loads of horror stories out there, but most of the time things shake out. And in most fields, even if your paper gets rejected one place, unless the whole field is against you, it can generally get published somewhere else, assuming there's some merit to it. Unfair reviews are balanced by other reviewers, and if you feel like you've been truly screwed, the final decision always rests with the editor. Some one in my lab is fighting that fight right now.
It is important to remember the reviewers are only anonymous to the authors (though, as you say, they aren't that anonymous...looking at the review of my last three papers I can guess with about 90% certain who all but one of them are). The editors know who they are, and giving a sloppy, unfair, or inappropriate review still hurts a reviewer's reputation with editor, who many times is a fairly well-respected member of the field. I'm often tempted to give marginal papers in review a pass, just because I know how much it sucks to have a paper rejected, I know the amount of work that went into it, and I'm a fairly nice guy (I think). But I also know that the editor is judging me on how I respond to the paper, and I don't want him/her to take my willingness to let subpar work slide as a reflection of my understanding of what qualifies as quality science, and so I do my best to give my honest opinion on the quality of the work.
"... internet publishing would harm the exchange of knowledge between researchers."
Internet publishing is exchanging knowledge. Thus, exchanging knowledge would harm the exchange of knowledge, which is a paradox
You didn't read him correctly. He said, "The implicit claim, that free journals deliver a lower quality of review, does not stand up to even cursory examination"(emphasis added). You conviently left the part that agreed with you out (and additionally got modded up by someone who similarly can't read)!
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Darwin did submit a paper on the origin of the species for peer review alongside Alfred Russel-Wallace. this was published in 'transactions. 'Origin of the species' was intended for the populus. Darwin was working on a far more scientific publication, full of footnotes, throughly arguing his point, but did not publish at the time (1844) because another "evolutionary" publication ('vesiges' - annamous, but later it was found that William Chambers (of W&R Chambers of Edinburgh)) was not well recieved.
Journals having an editor which allow behavior as you describe, and don't correct it soon, have their journals fall out of favor with scientists in the field. The may cancel subscriptions to it, and they submit their own articles elsewhere. It's a good form of moderation which is already built into the system. Replacing it with something like /. would be silly.
I don't know about your field, but in mine, biology, there are very low-tier journals that are non-peer reviewed. Many of the articles in them are held in fairly low regard due to lack of peer-review, but it's a good venue for publishing bits of information that might be informative for other researchers, but isn't a 'whole story' or doesn't necessarily show positive results. You might consider publishing in such a journal if you think you have done some work which would genuinely be interesting to some others in your field, but which wouldn't make it to the rank of publishing in a higher-tier journal.
There is no reason to take up journal space in a more major publication with negative or minor results. Publishing in the very low-tier non-reviewed publications allows you to get that information out there so that it can be searched for by others working on the same material.
The main point of this article that tends to be overlooked/ignored, even by the OP, is this:
Also, its worth linking the entire Royal Society position on open access, so those who read it would realize the OP is presenting a very selective view of the Royal Society's position.
The Royal Society's point is that free stuff might make non-profit/commercial organizations lose big money, possibly forcing them to stop producing their peer-reviewed journal. This is obviously bad for a scientific community trying to reach a larger audience, and thusly the above quote on exchanging knowledge and what-not. As scientists/free-as-in-beer advocates, this is the sort of concern/fear that we need to squash, and pronto.
What I believe the Research Council UK and the Royal Society should consider is a position put forth by Paul Ginsparg, who helps run arxiv.org (an open access system primarily for math/physics based papers). His idea, contrary to the Research Council UK plan of concurrently publishing research on the web at the same time as in such journals as Philosophical Transactions, is to publish research of refereeable quality immediately in a "standard tier" system primarily interested in dissemenation, rather than review of, the information - similar to that provided by arxiv.org. That way, experts in the field have immediate access to the work, can review/comment on the work so that the authors can improve upon it, respond to comments, post updates, etc. Upon meeting some guidelines put forth by an "upper tier", the work could then be submitted for peer review knowing it had met the standards for that tier. Only upon acceptance through peer review would the article reach the larger audience via publication, thereby fulfilling both the needs of open-access advocates and commercial/non-profit societies.
As an aside, Paul Ginsparg makes the interesting note that this system would also put the power of publication back in the non-profit sector: commercial entities only got involved due to the enormous costs associated with mass-production quality control of submissions. However, the dissemination of information and communication across the 'net essentially eliminates this requirement.
CAPS LOCK IS THE CRUISE CONTROL OF AWESOMNESS
I'm surpised that there hasn't been more discussion about arXiv in these comments. At our institute (astrophysics) most people send their pre-prints to astro-ph before the journal version is published, and NASA ADS http://adswww.harvard.edu/ is the first place to go when looking for something. There are also frequent group meetings to discuss recent submissions to astro-ph, making it more talked about than any particular journal.
Personally I feel that research which is not made publicly available only helps re-inforce the white tower image of scientists as self-serving. The fact that funding is directly related to citations has firmly entrenched journals in the run of things. Of course they are going to make vague claims about how science will suffer without their editorial control, but maybe if money was not an issue things wouldn't be this way.
http://arxiv.org/blurb/pg02pr.html is a pretty insightful consideration of how peer review systems can be made more efficient.
UBU