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."

Comments

My previous post on this subject

[Catamaran]

From my previous post

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.

Re:My previous post on this subject

[flyingsquid]

If a reviewer used rhetoric, sarcasm, illogical arguements, innacurate facts, or rejected your manuscript on the basis of typos, you should have complained to the editor. Any editor worth a damn would see the problem, send your paper for another reviewer for review, and stop sending any more submissions to the offending reviewer. That's how the system is ment to work.

I put up with this kind of stuff for a few rounds of review, real turn-the-cheek kind of a thing. Finally, I took a couple of weeks, sat down, revised my manuscript, and carefully dissected every single point the reviewer made, citing evidence, theory, and papers. I conceded a few things, and made a couple changes, but mostly implied that the reviewer was bullshitting and didn't know what the hell he was talking about- because that's what was going on. It was a risky move: I'm an unknown from an unknown university, he's a tenured Ivy League prof with a Harvard PhD, so all else being equal, who's the editor gonna side with? But I was tired of spending all this time battling bullshit, so I did the intellectual equivalent of dragging this guy out behind the pub and working him over with a two-by-four.

The paper was accepted for publication, without further review.

So yes, it did work... eventually. But I went through five journals and a total of seven submissions before getting accepted. The whole process gave me a new appreciation for Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. And I really took heart by looking at examples of persistence rewarded, like Lynn Margulis. Her Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (the idea that chloroplasts and bacteria were once free-living organisms) was rejected a dozen times(!), before finally ending up in Journal of Theoretical Biology. Now it's in every biology textbook and nobody would even think of questioning it. So after being rejected by the fourth journal, I could tell myself, "well, I'm still only a third of the way towards Margulis' score!"

But that's also the classic refuge of the crank: point out the examples of unappreciated genius. "They reject my idea... but they also rejected continental drift! Everyone says I'm crazy and there's no evidence for the Chupucabra, but people thought the first stuffed platypus specimen was a fake and wouldn't believe the evidence!" Sure, it's possible that you're right and everyone else is wrong, like with Margulis. It's also possible you're a freakin' loon. Without too much knowledge of the specific subject of your paper, how is the editor supposed to tell the difference between science which provokes hostility because it's dead wrong/plain bad, and science which is right, but provokes hostility because people are narrow minded and dogmatic? For that matter, if you're confident in your work, and the reviewers hate it, somebody's perception of reality is tweaked: how do you make sure you're not the one with the warped perception? Back when I was still trying to get this paper accepted, I liked to joke "They laughed! They all laughed!" in a classic Evil Scientist voice... it helped me keep sane, but it also made me a bit uncomfortable because I was giving voice to the doubts: "am I really crazy for thinking this?"

Seriously though... what's the easiest way to tell when you're an undeservedly unappreciated Archimedes, and when you're a deservedly unappreciated Archimedes Plutonium?

I'd love free access

[Frangible]

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.

What about accessibility?

[isolationism]

Let me sort this out. Say that one of the brightest minds of our time is blind -- but they can't access the content of scientific publications because braille is going to take months to produce (if it ever materialises at all, and chances are it won't). I'm sure most people wouldn't have too hard a time thinking about some luminaires (past and present) with severe disabilities; most people in the know are aware that properly designed HTML is just about the most accessible content there is because of its incredibly rich structural markup capability.

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.