Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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.
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...
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?