Slashdot Mirror
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'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.