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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."
Oh yes, the American way. Information that's vital for you: either pay for it, or die.
Now seriously, come on! those "scientific" papers, I didn't know they made MILLIONS a year out of subscriptions (that's what research costs, millions if not billions). Maybe I'm in the wrong business?
"Public access equals government censorship"
I've been parsing that for a few minutes and it doesn't make sense. How would open access equate to some sort of closed access?
Trolling is a art,
Once you've been in academia or the research world for a couple of decades, you'll truly understand how little peer review often means. In many respects, it's a popularity contest no different than that one would see between high school kids.
Those researchers and academics who are most outspoken and sure they are correct end up being considered as such. As long as you consistently deny that you're wrong and insist that you're correct, many fellow researchers and academics will believe you, even if you're completely full of shit. When such people are the peers reviewing your work, it's basically pointless to go through with the whole process. Shitty peer-reviewed literature is still shit.
Subscription-only journals aren't dying: they're dead. See http://www.arxiv.org/ or http://jhep.sissa.it/ for more details. The fact that Nature etc. have left it until 2007 (!) to seriously worry about this just shows how little chance they have.
So efforts to promote science to the general public by making the product of science available for the general public (improving scientific education, etc) are "government censorship" while locking things in overproced journals (Acta Chemica has a $1300/year price tag) is not? They look more and more like the RIAA every day.
Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.
This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.
This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.
Viva XXX and PLOS.
AFAIK, you don't have to pay to publish in nature. You have to pay to get yourself a number of nature (and every university library in the world does just that).
Scientific journal subscriptions tend to follow two paths. One, getting a subscription tends to cost a lot of money, but they're cheap to publish in. The other is the reverse: cheap to get a subscription, but it costs quite a bit to publish in. A subset of the second group (like Nature, and Science) also use ads to defray the costs. Which is why if you pick up a copy of Nature or Science, a large percentage of the pages are ads for equipment and chemicals.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
The whole of scientific publishing is a big racket. If you stay away from dead trees, publishing a journal is shockingly inexpensive. Peer review is customarily done for free. When journals are printed up, they are sold at prices that almost guarantee a fat profit for the printer and publisher. If ever you pony up $10 or whatever ludicrous price a publisher asks for some 10 page journal article, know that the authors get precisely 0% of that money. As if that isn't bad enough, organizers hold a conference somewhere like at a ski resort which gives them a cut rate but socks it to the attendees, among whom are pretty much all the authors whose work was accepted. The attendees can almost always pass those costs on their patrons, but for those who don't have such support....
Authors get very little. All the authors get directly is bragging rights. The indirect compensation, only given out to "the best", is of course the tenured university teaching and research position, which is also the gateway to grant money. Sucks for researchers who haven't managed to get into that system. Also sucks for those researchers whom their patron (usually the government) cuts, especially when it's not for good reasons like their research is of poor quality but for political reasons. Someone even suggested that authors should _pay_ to have their work published! Well, scientists who aren't backed by a patron do have to pay. The RIAA cries about starving artists, but starving scientists, especially if their work is not what grant givers want to hear or believe, get treatment as bad or worse as the worst ever dished out to artists.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
But first they would have to provide something of value.
What they offer is a panel of scientists to whom your article is sent before it appears in their journal. These people then get to review it prior to publishing. This is unnecessary today; you just publish your paper on the internet, and then people review it. People can easily find reviews of your paper with google, unlike in a dead-tree-only model, where without a review process as part of the journal submission process, you would have to search manually though paper publications to find reviews of the paper in question. Basically their business model has expired and they are looking for lies to tell to bolster it, because they can't think of any legislation they could afford to solve the problem for them.
It's not clear that there's a lot of adaptation to be done, although I think they could limp along for a while by providing free or nearly free websites that handle the review process, and then charged people for dead tree editions compiled from material on the website monthly. Some schmucks would buy it. Ultimately nothing short of getting into another business is going to save them because a site (or network of sites) similar to Wikipedia could replace all of those scientific journals.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm kind of surprised to see an article calling attention to an upcoming FUD campaign by the traditional publishers, in a traditionally published journal.
Pleasantly surprised, but still it seems to me that there is an interesting story hidden there.
It's true that if the publishers of scientific journals offered their information for free that a substantial amount of their revenue would dry up. However, not everyone would stop buying the hard copy. I'm sure that many libraries for prestigious universities would still buy the hard copy. For the average student or scientist, however, we could care less about the hard copy (it just takes up shelf space). We just want the information.
Furthermore, they could alter their business model by charging a flat fee per submission. After all that is the true value added that they provide: the peer-review system which filters out articles that lack scientific merit and forces researchers to really do their homework. Even a submissions fee of $1,000 is a small amount when compared to the overall budget of a multi-year scientific research project. Of course academic fields with smaller budgets may have to find other business models, but what else is new.
The world changes. Either you can be innovative and survive. Or you can use scare tactics to try to prolong the death of your dying business model.
The point here is that there are money-grubbing scientists. It's not just the Republicans any more.
I'm telling you, the quicker the entire Intellectual Property system goes topsy-turvy, the better. There was a watershed moment, sometime in the last few decades, when copyright, patents, the whole schmear, started working against it's initial purpose - to encourage innovation and creativity. Now, you write a good song and you hope it gets used in a movie and a commercial and you're set for life. How does that make you more creative?
I made my living from the IP system until some years ago, when I noticed the first time I lost revenue because of the copying and sharing of my work without my permission. After an initial few hours of outrage, the part of me that got into this whole business to be creative started to realize "Of COURSE people want to share it and copy it. It's entire value is in it's dissemination. It's what's SUPPOSED to happen."
Then, I went to work to reevaluate how I charged for my ideas and to come up with a way that's not based on commoditizing or objectifying my creativity, but just the opposite: Embracing the fact that these things are ephemeral. They are MEANT to be shared, copied, live a life and then go into an archive, maybe to be found again and maybe not. I don't need to collect a toll every time someone uses what I make, and I don't need to squeeze every last cent.
The final piece of the puzzle for me is figuring out a way to identify my work as my own, not to prevent copying, but to prevent someone else saying they made it. Unless that's part of the deal, that is. Digital Watermarking is still too expensive for a small-market individual like me and there are still some questions about signatures. I read an article about how The Aphex Twin hid his own face in a graphical display of his music. That fascinated me and I'm always bugging the math folk in my little world about these things. An answer will come. I just hope it's Open Source, or at least reasonable.
Reasonableness. I guess that's the solution, no?
You are welcome on my lawn.