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 believe that the scientific Journal has outlived its usefulness, and will be replaced by ... Slashdot!
But seriously, reviewers are biased and sloppy, as are the editors. The fact that reviews are blind means that they are also unaccountable, which fosters even more bias.
Journals take months or years to respond to a submision, and often as not they respond with a rejection so the submitter has to give up or start the whole process over with another journal. There are so many scandals that one could quote. The whole process seems more designed to support the status quo than to promote knowledge.
I have discussed this with many people in academia and they react not with logic, but with horror that I would dare to question a system that they view almost mystical reverence.
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I would be very interested to know how these guys depend on the publishers of exotic journals. Perhaps they get paid in monies and esteem by reviewing articles for them?
Slashdot itself can be seen as a peer-reviewed site, and it is doing quite well i'd say. I would have loved a site like this (but based on 'real' science) when I was doing science.
But maybe the conservqatives fear that their fragile ecosystem of importance, references and reviews would all fall down when the web equalises it. Suddenly bright young studends will have as much esteem as a good-for-nothing professor, and they all fear they are that good-for-nothing.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Now, while I am not a history major (IANAHM), I seem to recall something about some scientists at a large scientific facility (CERN) that invented this web thingy to exchange scientific data in a timely manner. And, since necessity is the mother of invention, the journals were'nt filling the need of the consumers (scientists).
Anybody know if Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a member of the Royal Scority?
Alan.
Don't forget xxx! As a high-energy theory Ph.D. student, I have to say I've found the arXiv much more useful than many journals.
The Royal Society, Britain's national academy of science, yesterday joined the debate about so-called open access to scientific research, warning that making research freely available on the internet as it is published in scientific journals could harm scientific debate.
My immediate reaction to this little tidbit was "How obvious can you make a contradiction?" How does open access harm scientific debate? The research papers are there for other researchers to read and discuss--isn't that the idea?
Then when you read more, there is a case made:
The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. "Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society," The Royal Society said.
The RS does bring up a good point in one respect--the printed journals could conceivably lose funding due to the lack subscribers, thus actually making the work less accessible. While access to the Internet is becoming more and more common, it isn't universal and thus works published ONLY in electronic form would be accessible only to those with electronic access. Presumably researchers are in positions and facilities that have such access, but in field sites or less developed countries this may not always be the case.
However, to answer the final question asked: "Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?"
Answer: because a printed copy is easier to read as a reference document. Ever try to cut and paste a reference on your computer screen into a actual research notebook?
Yes, electronic copies such as PDFs can be printed, I am well aware of this. It still has a cost associated with it in terms of printing supplies, long-term storage media (CDs, DVDs, paper, etc.) and most important to some scientists--time. Could I go get the electronic copy of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation magazine? Sure, since my university subscribes to the IEEE Xplore electronic depository. Is it easier for me to grab a copy off the bookshelf withing arm's reach? Without a doubt.
Electronic copy makes searching for a particular resource much easier, but if I have the paper copy on the shelf, I don't have to worry about CDs or CD drives going bad, hard drive failures, etc. (Yes, I am aware of the importance of backups, offsite storage, etc.) However, a printed copy isn't concerned with file formats, media formats, etc. Printed words are printed words.
My prediction: electronic records will never completely replace paper. They will be an additional resource, not a replacing resource.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
If those activities are worthy, people will pay for them. There is not need to hijack scientific publishing, which should be free as in "we already paid for the research with our taxes", to subsidize those activities.
If they were to offer a real publishing service, then I would pay for it. I'd like to give them content and they take care of fighting with Latex, Word or whatever formatting tool. They should take care of creating top-quality charts and plots. They should take care of storing my data and my programs, so anybody can double-check my results. That would be useful. The current state of affair is ridiculous. Authors do all the work, and they cannot even share the results on the Internet. Journals have no right to steal the copyright from authors. In the past, when publishing in journals was the only choice, they had us researchers enslaved. Not anymore and never again.
I use PubMed regularily to search millions of journal articles relating to biology, and only about 10% of the abstracts contain a link to a "free" version of the full article. Often the abstract contains enough information such that this isn't necessary, but sometimes the pertinent information in the conclusion is missing entirely from the abstract. To access the article without being a subscriber it typically costs $50-$100 to get a copy of the PDF! I am not making a profit off of this so I'm not sure why they expect me to pay that much. I would certainly love free access, as-is, I have to bug someone with access such as a doctor or university student friend to get the PDF for me (as their organizations have subscriptions). I wouldn't even mind paying a reasonable fee, but the current rates are anything but reasonable.
Now, is the delivery format really the problem here, or is it simply a case of dollars and sense? Is the concept of charging for access to content -- whatever the delivery vehicle -- completely foreign to the content publishers?
Sometimes I read this kind of thing and wonder if I'm in the wrong career.
The reason right now is that nobody would pay any attention to such a publication.
I'm confident that this will change. Scientists, as a group, are generally doing science for the love of it, to better society, etc. (they usually are not doing it for the money, that's for sure!). Thus, as a group they are remarkably interested in "doing the right thing." Hence the ongoing debate in the scientific community, with more and more scientists putting support behind the notion of open access. As more open access journals are created, and gain reputation, I think the status quo will change.
As I describe in another post, the highly recognized American Institute of Physics is experimenting with allowing authors to cover the administrative costs, thereby making the publication open-access. Also, the journals from the Public Library of Science are making significant strides towards becoming high-quality yet totally open access. This directory lists nearly 2000 open access journals online. Granted the quality is highly variable. Some are great, some are not. We'll see how they work out.
A noble sentiment, however there is no mechanism available that provides for making this material available for free yet also allows for the funding of the needs of scientific article publication. There are some pilot programs in place, but at least so far they are not proven to work. Until this evolves to a trustworthy process the traditional methods will have to continue.
There are many mechanisms that are being debated. Obviously there will be growing pains, and obviously the most important thing is for these new open-access journals to gain a decent reputation... and/or for established journals to start experimenting. Luckily both of these things are happening. Thus, the future is bright for open access in academia (in my opinion, at least).
Hi there
Point #1: I didn't say reviews aren't useful. The point in my comment was that subject to some criteria, all submitted papers should be available for people to decide for themselves whether the information in them suits oneself or not. This is the base functionality of Arxiv.org. Reviews, however opiniated they may be, are useful and people trust certain persons more than others to provide them with opinions they agree with. So a layer of reader reviews / moderation / sorting by popularity / or even an Amazon style "People who read this also read that..." system can replace executive review committees. Publications complain that reviewers need to be paid and hence they can't do a free-for-all distribution of journals. Hence the suggestion for something different.
Point #2: Access to knowledge should be free. Especially in this day and age, where it doesn't cost much to publish through media on the internet.
Banu
Sorry - this is plain wrong. I am also a physicist, at Cambridge University. Even though we have access to the physical journals (and to electronic ones too), I have found the system immensely frustrating. The Web of Science is a dreadful tool to use - even if you have the privilege of access to it. It's nothing like as good as Google, and furthermore, hunting down the papers once you have found the reference is often time consuming[*]. And even Cambridge cannot subscribe to everything. Furthermore, if one is a teacher, an amateur scientist, a researcher in the 3rd world, these journals are beyond ones's reach.
What is really immoral, however, is that the journals in which one must publish (in order to be peer reviewed, in order to be read, and in order to keep the grants panels happy) usually insist that by publishing, you are assigning your copyright to them, and you may not publish your own work on the web. The journals are using their monopoly to take publicly funded research out of the public domain, and are very damaging to the progress of science.
[*] for non-academics, I should explain that the WoS is a search tool for abstracts of papers. Once you find a result, if you want to read the whole article, all you get is a reference eg "Journal X, issue Y, pages ppp-qqq". Then, you have to hunt down that journal on-line, and hope that your institution has a subscription. At best, a literature search that should take a few hours will take a day. At worst, many materials are inaccessible.
My research was significantly impeded by this system. But, for what it is worth, my thesis is on the web.
In Astronomy (at least in the US), major journals are supported by subscriptions AND by page charges. If an author wants to publish in a journal (eg. ApJ, AJ, etc.), they have to pay by the page. Subscription rates (for paper copies) are quite low, and generally reflect the cost of printing, binding, and postage. On-line subscriptions are also available to individuals (if you're institution doesn't already have an on-line subscription to the journal you're interested in), and are quite reasonable.
The exact charges are (for members of the AAS):
ApJ/ApJS/AJ Electronic Only $50
ApJ Printed $290 (add electronic for additional $25)
AJ Printed $110 (add electronic for additional $40)
Keep in mind that these are not some newstand magazine, but thick journals with many tens to hundreds of articles/month (some have multiple issues per month).
Page charges are $110/page for manuscripts submitted electronically.
Journals that don't use page charges have higher subscription rates (ie. Icarus - $3377)
From personal experience, articles in Icarus tend to be much longer than articles in ApJ or AJ - I wonder what would happen if the authors were paying by the page...
Though this may seem a rather simplistic approach, I would have thought that the journal most able to draw attention to real scientific revelations or discoveries would be the one in which the initial review, i.e. the one that gets the paper into the publication in the first place, is the least selective. Because of the inevitably larger audience of an online publication, it is far more likely that members of the readership would be able to determine the validity of a given paper than a few reviewers deciding what gets into the publication, as is the case with the traditional scientific journals.
What I mean to say by this is that the better journal is far more likely to be the one with which the actual experts, rather than some selection committe of the publication, are the ones assessing the majority of the papers submitted to it. In this way, it is much less likely that valid papers would get rejected before they reach the wider community, and those papers which really don't hold up will have a greater number of people scrutinising them.
Though this is slightly off-topic, in a way the same applies to online publications like Slashdot. There are undoubtedly many stories that get published which really aren't newsworthy, and many that don't get published which really should. If it weren't for the fact that so many of the good commenters, if you will, already use Slashdot, a site like Digg, where the users themselves get to decide what is newsworthy or not, would be far better at ensuring that valuable stories get the coverage they deserve.
Though this has undoubtedly been said before, I think it holds up fairly well as an analogy to the traditional scientific journals, i.e., why should CmdrTaco (the reviewers who decide what makes it into the journal) have greater power to decide what stories (papers) are worthy of coverage, when there are members of the audience who are surely much better equipped to decide in the vast majority of cases, if not all. A better model would be one in which the users decide what gets coverage, e.g. by way of voting, where those users who have made the most valuable contributions to discussion in a given area have the most voting power - which would carry across into the model of a better scientific journal. Those scientists most distinguished in a given area should have the most power in deciding which papers get the coverage they need to be subject to a wider community review.
In sum: if the royal society doesn't want to adapt to a modern era where real publication costs approach zero, let them be sidelined.
This is exactly what we are seeing in the publishing industries (music, video/movie, literature, etc.): the traditional intstitutions are very unwilling to accept that distribution now costs nothing, the RIAA and MPAA being prime examples of this. Such associations' sole purpose is to maintain the stranglehold on the distribution market, by placing artificial constraints on distribution and by making sure that it is as difficult as possible for independents to form any real opposition to their power. In cases where the incumbent institution cannot so easily maintain their grip on the market or medium, as in the case of the Royal Society, they will have to move to accept the new distribution methods or fade into irrelevance.
It's interesting to see the same happening in many different areas, newspapers being another example, where the old institutions, the old bearers of power, are finding it very difficult to adopt the new paradigm that the Internet has brought about. What seems to happen is that they either find a way to fit into the new model, and thereby retain their relevance, or are pushed aside by other organisations which more readily adopt the new model. Of course there are also those, like the RIAA/MPAA, who try to hang on to the old model, but in the end I don't see that they will be able to survive. The collective might of their very audience will eventually overturn them, as it is the one power no amount of their money can fight.
Wasn't the web invented in the first place by scientists so they could more easily share information?
Indeed, and it can go a lot further too.
In addition to information sharing, the net could easily support moderated peer review by the very same experts who review papers submitted to the top journals. All that's needed is for a group of experts on a topic to get together and decide to do it. After all, the costs are miniscule, except for their time. And publication of a paper accepted by such a review body as an online PDF is a lot more useful than dead tree publication anyway.
Experts in a scientific field don't need the backing of a Society or of a respected scientific journal in order to perform peer review. They're acknowledged experts in their own right, and everyone working in a field inherently knows who they are.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra