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Science Journal Publishers Wary of Free Information
Billosaur writes "Nature.com is reporting that the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes the companies that publish scientific journals, is becoming concerned with the free-information movement. A meeting was arranged with PR professional Eric Dezenhall to discuss the problem. Dezenhall's firm has worked with the likes of ExxonMobil 'to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace', among other campaigns. The publishers are worried that the free exchange of scientific information may be bad for the bottom line, as it might cause the money from subscriptions to their journals to dry up. Among the recommendations: 'The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.' The AAP is trying to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information, or the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central."
Non-profit doesn't mean it's FREE. It means that the publishing company can't get profit from selling journals.
Any idea why Firefox has suddenly decided that the single-quote key should take me to search instead of typing the character?
I often have the same bug, only much worse - it happens with all keys. To fix it you can go to advanced options and disable "search for text when I start typing".
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Peer review isn't perfect, but do you have a better suggestion? Publish everything and have every working scientist spend most of their time reviewing every one of the papers published in their field every month to see if there is anything relevant to their work? I don't think that's very pracical. Peer review is the best filter anyone has so far invented for scientific publishing, despite its flaws.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
The justification for the censorship allegation is contained at the end of TFA:
Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the AAP executive chair, [says]..."When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."
The problem with this argument, of course, is that PubMed is not actively suppressing any materials whatsoever. Other journals can publish whatever they want. The NIH is simply trying to make publicly funded research available to the public.
This is about keeping control of information in the hands of a powerful publishing group (the AAP) to maximize their profits. The AAP is clearly not interested in advancing the scientific knowledge, much like the RIAA is not interested in the artistic merit of the music they control.
(Funny thing about the best peer-reviewed journals: The reviewers are not compensated for their reviews. Reviewers are almost exclusively university professors who consider it their obligation to review, because it is necessary to help the advancement of their chosen field. All journal subscription costs go towards production, distribution, and profits for the publisher.)
Complete rubbish. Physics has had preprint servers like arxiv for 15 years now, and the American Physical Society (APS) found NO EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER that subscriptions were drying up because of arxiv. APS publishes a large number of journals at that. I can find things much easier through arxiv but if I'm going to cite something then its going to be peer reviewed. APS actually felt that preprint servers helped so setup one with Brookhaven, and link to a number of their own webpage. Their attrition rate has remained very constant over the same time period and probably has more to do with shrinking funds. The preprint servers help us. Our group put out a couple of papers recently and we got some constructive feedback from people reading the preprints of astro-ph - and some of the points mentioned the referee didn't catch. Its a stronger paper as a result. The preprint servers are also frequently much easier to search for current literature than the journals sites. They have their problems - theres a good number of completely crazy papers on them and its sort of annoying to sift through them - look for submitted to/accepted for publication in the comment field. In short they are great for easy information access and the journals are great for enforcing quality control. The public access to information is an added bonus. Yes, open access to scientific journals AND data should be mandatory. The journals won't die because they do still provide a valuable service in peer-review.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Peer review may be of little value for articles by people who are stars of their field, but that is just a tiny fraction of the articles submitted for publishing. For the rest, peer review filters out incredible amounts of junk (I *have* seen the rejections), and improve the rest significantly (that is called "accepted with major/minor revisions").
[ I have been in "academia" for two decades. ]
Authors?
In scientific journals?
Paid?
Man, I wish I lived in that magical world.
A blog about stuff.
There is no monetary payment whatsover. The costs associated with publishing are typically paid for by advertising, and some journals with lower circulations may charge page costs as well. The authors never get payed royalties or anything for journal articles. It's an amazing thing really -- putting all your work out there for review (essentially before AND after publication), for the simple satisfaction that you have made a contribution to the knowledgebase. If your conclusions are erroneous, the community will figure it out eventually, and if your contributions are right on, you will be remembered as someone who had a positive impact on the field (you may even get rewarded). Scientists in academia are generally not the richest people in the world.
"The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship."
Simple sound bites are used because people respond. Most people don't want to take the effort to absorb anything more complicated. God knows we wouldn't want to have to think for ourselves.
And have you ever noticed that the sound bites don't even have to be true? "Public access equals government censorship." "The war in Iraq is a war on terrorism." "The jury is out on global warming."
I've also noted that if you dig deep enough you find that it's all about money and power.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
In fact, most of the time you have to pay to be published. And god forbid you want color, then you really have to pay out the ass. Even NIH's online Biomed central charges $500 a pop to publish pdf's to the web (unless of course you are a member institution, which I am sure any research university worth a damn is).
The scientific publishing industry is almost like a cartel, and just like the entertainment industry they are flailing wildly to try and keep a dying business model alive with FUD. My PI has decided that unless we have something worthy of a really high impact journal (because when you can, it really helps to get published by a journal with a high impact rating) that we are only going to publish to open access journals. My first publication came out last May in a Biomed central publication, and has already been downloaded over a 1000 times (which is huge for me considering how incredibly specialized and long and boring the article really was).
Here is a directory of open access journals. One of the requirements for inclusion is "Quality control: for a journal to be included it should exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system."
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Seriously. How often do you encounter people in science who oppose the government being in science? It's exceedingly rare, for the simple reason that scientists realize that science is expensive and risky, and private industry often can't stomach it. There are even economic theories that show why government spending in research is necessary, based on the concept of "public goods", which benefit everyone but which are hard to get specific payment for.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Did Feynman really mean that?
I've heard that somebody did a study of whether chewing gum of different sorts produces a measurable effect on an EEG. The result was that no, it doesn't. That's what I think Feynman meant: they had a hypothesis, and very scientifically determined the experiment was a failure, but still should be published, if only to add to the information about what shows up on an EEG and what doesn't.
Now, in my understanding, peer review is to tell apart things that are well researched from things that aren't. The above should pass peer review and be published: Even though the result was negative it was still good research. On the other hand, I don't think Feynman was saying that any crap anybody makes up should be published as well. Research with a negative result has value, while plain nonsense adds nothing useful and is with all likehood damaging.
Of course, the peer review doesn't actually cost them more than a little administration. The reviewers are all unpaid volunteers, and if there is an editorial board of any kind then so are they (it's happening on office time, of course, so more correct would be saying that the grant agencies are paying for the journal work). The submitters format and set the paper themselves and communication between everyone involved is usually by email or an automated website system. I'd say $1000 is probably overstating the cost per article by a factor of ten, and that's before you add the profits made from selling paper copies to libraries.
In fact, I'd say a better model is the one being tried in some quarters, with paid-only database access for six months, after which the papers become free. Need-always-current research libraries can pay to get the early scoop, the rest of us can rest on our heels for a bit (or just email the author directly if it's important).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
As a graduate student who's been published, I can say this:
We don't get paid jack when we get published.
In fact, for many journals, we have to pay them a substantial per-page fee if we include graphics beyond a fixed (low) limit, or exceed the page count. Even for peer-reviewed books, we don't receive payment for the chapters we contribute. Also, we have to pay for reprints of the article. Oh, and we also have to sign copyright assignment forms that transfer the copyright on our work to the publisher.
Because of this, many people in my department (experimental psychology) have started turning our manuscripts into PDFs and posting them on the web once they're accepted for publication. In that way, we preserve the peer review system and the journal system while simultaneously giving access to those who can't readily acquire the journal. Yes, we know it's not legal, seeing as we signed over all the rights to the publisher, but we feel it's morally appropriate to let scientific knowledge be free.
The Freelance Wizard
You're kidding, right? The scientists who do the research and write the papers receive no financial compensation from the journals whatsoever. Often, those scientists pay part of the cost of publication in the form of page or colour charges. The scientists who peer review the work work for free as well. It's seen as something that they owe to the rest of the community.
The journal publishers are the ones who make the money. They charge libraries and scientists for subscriptions, and they charge the authors to publish. Granted, they provide services; typesetting and layout and editing and distribution aren't free. But don't mistake money-grubbing publishing companies for money-grubbing scientists. A money-grubbing scientist would want to distribute their work as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. Scientists make money (grants, tenure, collaboration opportunities) on the basis of their reputations--reputations which are built on their work being widely known.
~Idarubicin
The publishers' real problem is not free journals, but rather libraries trying to stop paying the publishers' vastly increased charges. "Free journals" is merely the latest library tactic.
Many librarians and researchers didn't start out caring about the principle of free journals. The publishers' greed forced it on them. Even major research libraries are cancelling subscriptions. The libraries are doing that because the journal prices have been increasing so fast. First the libraries tried switching from paper copies to online subscriptions. So the publishers raised the online prices. Further, the publishers bundled many journals together so that libraries could not cancel the least used titles. The libraries try to form consortia to share subscriptions, but the publishers' license terms stop that.
Even "free" journals cost someone money. PLOS is quite expensive to publish in. Their model is charging the author not the reader.
One factor driving rising journal prices is the increased concentration as big publishers like Elsevier buy their competitors. Some years ago, Elsevier stated their business model as, approximately, serving assistant profs trying to get tenure. In 2005, their profit was 655 million euros on income of 2097 million euros ( http://www.reed-elsevier.com/ ) That's not a bad profit margin.
Journals are priced like drugs, at what the market is perceived to bear. That can be up to $2/page (w/o even any color) ( http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html )
Journals are obsolete. They're slow to publish, rarely have color, don't have videos, etc. We academics publish in them because administrators use them to judge us. However, when we need something, we search the web, not the libraries. I put my own research first on the web, so that people can find it. Later I write papers.
Finally, to respond to the comment that publicly funded work should be free: That would be nice, but there's a US law giving universities ownership in discoveries resulting from NSF-funded research. What do other countries do?
I'm opposed to this simply because I view it as an arguement to essentially dismantle peer review by flooding it with disinformation.
As the article mentions, there are many organizations that don't like scientific information having consensus and respect.
This is very clear by:
1. The Forced ShutDown of EPA Libraries
2. Scrapping the funding of the NASA earth program
3. Censoring of the US Geological Survey
_
Whats more,
The article mentions this guy is from an Exxon PR firm.
A group which stands the most to gain from disinformation.
If you replace the word "scientists" with "publishers", your whole post itself becomes much more reasonable. We are not paid for publishing, and many of us (myself included) find it wrong that our freely-given research is held ransom by people who had nothing to do with its creation, yet we would still like it, and by extension ourselves, to become well-known. I personally upload copies of my research to my website to circumvent this, even if this is technically a violation of a contract with many journals. Restricting access to scientific information slows the entire field down, thus any scientist who has taken up the cause of advancing his field has a duty to fight this.
To me, publishers are little better than the music industry (which does the same thing to classical sheet music that should be public domain by now). Please don't blame the scientists; there is little we can do about this unless our research becomes so well-known that people actively seek it out. Well, perhaps we could start our own "opensource" journals, but journals themselves have prestige that must be built up, and this can take a lot of time.
Additionally, current dogma states that extensive peer-review is required to maintain high quality research and thus a journal's prestige. I believe that peer review stifles innovation and would like it abolished (if this means lots of crackpot research, so be it: I believe that the worth of an idea is a platonic ideal, which we must all judge according to our imperfect "sense" of its worth. No one person or entity has the right to withhold ideas from the entire population without that population's consent). However, doing so would probably cause many to shy away from the journal.