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.
Test 1 2 3 4
Exchange of ideas or exchange of currency? I'm not really sure which one they don't want hurt.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Yup, knowledge is only true and valuable when you pay lots of money for it and distribute it to a limited group. Everyone knows that. After all, that's how it's always been. Can't change that now, can we? Heaven forbid the chaos that would ensue if there were a peer reviewed, moderated system like Slashdot to replace our sacred institutions.
(Oh, and yes, some publishers making a good living might lose their monopoly gravy train in the process.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You're obsolete. :-)
... (glances at Microsoft)].
It's really quite simple. Adapt or die [well the other alternative is to use your undue influence to make your approach last longer than it naturally would otherwise
How any academic could think that the wide spread distribution of information could HURT academia is beyond me. Me thinks they have other issues on the mind [namely $$$ and power]. Given I've never read anything from their journal [nor consider myself an academic] I can't say I'd miss them if they disappeared. I get enough free shit [decent quality] from citeseer and eprint.iacr.org
The dude has one point though. Random acceptance [or blind] of papers can lead to some low quality material. Once in a while on eprint there are some really lack lustre crypto papers but quite a few are well written and interesting. And they are the sort of things that close minded expensive conference tours (...looking at the IACR conferences...) routinely rejected.
That said though, I've seen some REALLY POOR peer reviewed talks at conferences. Like the Indian students who presented on highly hardware optimized multivariate boolean equations at a SOFTWARE conference. Their talk was so horibly presented as to make me wish I had literally died at the time. Then there were the talks on one time pads at Crypto'03, etc, etc, etc.
Point is, quality material is subjective. The more open your publication is to peer review the more likely you will see quality material. The more close minded and aloof your publication is the less likely you will have insightful or interesting material to publish.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Whilst this may have some relevance I still feel that both the internet and journals can have a place in society. People are much more likely to trust a paper published in an old, established journal than on some site they find on the internet, no matter how "reputable", especially if they are not used to the internet and its many delights. While the internet can be used for publishing discoveries quickly, and perhaps publishing discoveries which the journals may not publish, the journals will still publish the most important ones, and as such will still be bought, and will still survive.
These guys sound like they think there's a way to stop it. Short of their fellow scientists organizing a formal shunning of research data that's web-published, what could actually prevent a researcher from putting his/her results on the web? Particularly if they get turned down by the journals? If I had devoted a lot of time and effort to some research and couldn't get a journal to publish it, you can bet that I'd publish it in web form rather than just let it rot.
so they ask:
Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?
As a publishing scientist, I would venture another question: "Why should I publish in a journal that is not freely available? Why would I pick a journal that limits its readership?"
Science is produced (by and large) by scientists using public funds. It makes no sense that the results of this research become locked away and unavailable to the public. Scientific results should be available to the public, free of charge. The fact that this also helps foster international collaborations, makes science overall more effective, and levels the playing field between rich and poor nations is also a good thing.
Alternate funding models for the journals and publishers are being pursued. For instance, when a scientist publishes a paper, he could pay a fee to cover administrative costs. Then the article appears online, free to all. Some journals have already implemented such systems. It seems to work fine. At the end of the day, it's always the same people paying (universities and scientists pay for it, using public funds).
So to answer the question "Why would you pay to subscribe to a journal if the papers appear free of charge?" Just like now, the public will pay for the journals to operate. However, the public should be allowed access to that which they are funding.
They're not saying they're against free information flow. They are saying that for them it will have a significant impact on the scope of their activities.
Pure FUD.
The only thing being threatened is the business model of the journal publishers. Their enterprise was a necessary expense in the age of dead trees, but those days are gone. If online publication makes the free exchange of knowledge between researchers possible, that's a good thing!
But there is a reason for reverence for peer review - as a procedure, it weeds out a lot of bullshit. There are many scandals - but far more successes (the entirety of biology, from the sometime in the early 20th century to the present.) I'm a biologist, so I cannot speak with confidence on the impact in other disciplines, or where the corresponding institutions of peer review may lie on the continuum between old boys network and tireless defenders of the scientific method, for other journals in other disciplines. In Biology, in spite of some failings, the record is overall very good.
The comments by the royal society are nakedly self serving. The fear at the royal society is that organizations like the Public Library of Science will sideline them. This will only happen if organizations like PLoS can maintain the same quality of peer review as the Royal Society (I will assert - so far they are doing better) without charging money. The implicit claim, that free journals deliver a lower quality of review, does not stand up to even cursory examination. I will say (and this is a subjective assertion on my part) that PLoS actually provides a better grade of peer review, and that a system where professional editors preside over large budgets and a permanent base of prestige breeds the sort of cronyism and corruption that the parent post is (legitimately) concerned about.
From a moral standpoint, of COURSE research done at public expense should be freely available to everyone, now that the technology exists to easily do so. 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.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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.
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.
Wasn't the web invented in the first place by scientists so they could more easily share information?
If you want to say "As dead tree format publishers, we think that Internet publishing hurts dead tree format publishing and therefore internet publishing should be stopped," that's fine. Don't try and feed us some bullshit about how the Internet (whose one and only purpose for existance is information exchange) will hurt information exchange. Just just come out and say it: "We hate the fact that the Internet makes us redundant. Someone prop up our business model for us!"
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