Free Global Virtual Scientific Library

Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.

Comments

Library purpose

[saskboy]

The purpose of libraries in modern times may change to offer that sort of science service. My area's library has a list of online databases they pay for, and offer to everyone with a library card [which is free where I'm from] to access them. Perhaps ask your local library what databases and journals/periodicals they offer to you at no cost online.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[Damastus the WizLiz]

Now they are making it even easier to access. I think this is a great move. however it will be an expensive undertaking. I just hope that they make this access to the public, not just global universities and research centers.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[Mirk]

Is there really any reason why government-funded research shouldn't be made available to the masses? After all, wasn't it the masses who paid for the research?

Yes, there is a reason -- but not a good one. Very big publishing houses such as Elsevier have a huge financial interest in maintaining the status quo, whereby government-funded researchers donate their work for free to the publishers, who then make a large profit by printing and selling it. It is typical (though not universal) for the publishers also to take the copyright of the papers they publish. To add insult to injury, it's not ususual for the publishers to CHARGE THE AUTHORS for the privilege of donating their work -- usually a fixed amount per page above some predefined page limit.

The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are. Scott Aaronson has written a scathing analogy to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny).

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[TubeSteak]

FTFA:
Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.

The Nature article being referenced
The Slashdot Story about the article

"[Dezenhall the consultant] hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review"

"Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the [Association of American Publishers] executive chair, says that Dezenhall's suggestions have been refined and that the publishers have not to his knowledge sought to work with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On the censorship message, he adds: "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""

I don't really think that logic makes sense, but these guys are feeling a bit desperate, considering that their profit margin/business model could be legislated into oblivion.

zCyl (14362)
They're trying to insinuate that public access means a thing must be funded by the government, and thus subject to state control. This is a silly false dichotomy of course, but such is the nature of propaganda.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[mochan_s]

I don't believe so.

If you publish to a journal, the journal takes over the copyright. Your university's library has to pay the journal to get access to the article you wrote. And, of course, the price of journals have been skyrocketing lately ...

Already in place for physics

[jfabermit]

The arXiv system (www.arxiv.org) already hosts just about every preprint that comes out in high energy physics, astrophysics, and several related disciplines. Access is completely free, and they currently host 400,000 papers. Needless to say, people post there for a reason: it works really effectively to get research results out to the public quickly and efficiently, and as mentioned before, it's totally free for everyone involved. Open access isn't a theoretical question taking place in a vacuum, it's already underway, and it works just fine, and can even coexist with the refereed journal system, as the physics world has learned over the past decade.

Re:Already in place for physics

[kripkenstein]

arXiv is excellent. In fact I believe someone said that it was "the greatest contribution to humanity from string theory thus far" ;)

It is interesting that physics is a pioneer in this field. It may have something to do with their research culture, I have been told; not being a physicist, I can't say. Yet, closer to my field, there is also some positive movement. The closed-access "Journal of Machine Learning" gained competition by the name of the "Journal of Machine Learning Research", where the latter is open-access, leaves copyrights with the authors, etc. In a very short time this has become an important journal.

American Physical Society Free online access

[kwieland in stl]

I was wondering about this last year. Michele Irwin, International Programs Administrator at the APS Office of International Affairs provided this information:

In 2006, the American Physical Society established a program that provides free on-line access to its journals for non-profit institutions located in eligible countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. This program is made available through the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (PERI), http://www.inasp.info/peri/free.shtml. PERI provides researchers in developing and transitional countries with access to international, scholarly literature from a wide range of disciplines.

The APS began its participation in PERI by offering access to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now that this pilot program has operated successfully for one year, the APS is in the process of expanding access to other developing regions.

The APS also supports the electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS), which is administered by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), http://sdu.ictp.it/ep/ejds.html. This service is aimed at providing access to scientists at institutions in developing countries that do not have access to sufficient bandwidth, thus, making it impossible or too difficult to download material from the Internet. Through eJDS, scientists receive individual mathematics and physics journal articles via e-mail.

In addition to the programs above, the APS is also one of many publishers that are partners in the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL), https://www.ivsl.org/. IVSL provides free access to scientific journals to institutions in Iraq. The Society has also established multi-institutional agreements (consortia) in many countries to help broaden access to institutions that might otherwise be unable to afford or gain access.

Directory of Open Access Journals?

[192939495969798999]

www.doaj.org - directory of open access journals

If only they could use this new initiative to pump up the number of journals and full-text index the whole thing, plus the physics/math/computer science index over at www.arxiv.org, you'd have a good start towards a single, comprehensive index.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Is there really any reason why government-funded research shouldn't be made available to the masses? After all, wasn't it the masses who paid for the research?

Yes, but they don't pay to publish it, which isn't free. Also, many of the non-profit professional societies use subscription money to do rather a lot of good for K-12 and undergraduate education, so there's an effect there too.

I'd like to see an open system too, but it's not as simple as it sounds, which is why it hasn't happened.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[Coryoth]

And, of course, the price of journals have been skyrocketing lately ... There has been some effort to fight this, for instance the formerly pretigious journal Topology has the entire editorial board resign after negotiations over lower pricing with the journal publisher, Elsevier, failed. The members of the editorial board then founded the Journal of Topology with the London Mathematical society as publisher with a much lower price. In general, however, you are correct - the price of journals has been increasing steadily. Historically expensive journals made some sense; there was significant cost in typesetting and printing, particularly for any articles that had significant mathematical content, since typesetting mathematics was considerably more difficult and expensive than plain text. Nowadays, however, journals can publish electronically, and article submissions are often required to be in TeX which reduces the formerly expensive task of typesetting to the relatively simple task of merging several TeX files into a consistent document. The high cost of journals really is no longer justified. Indeed, some of the most significant papers in mathematics in the last few years (Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture) were not published in any journal but simply placed on arXiv.org as preprints.

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think he meant it that way. Any research from Federal institutions, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation, and the like are freely accessible*. I may be mistaken, but I believe stuff done directly by the government (for example the excellent Image-J software from NIH, are public domain, not just available for free, not even BSD-type licensing). Many publications in the PubMed database are open. ISTR that the NIH is moving to require research that they fund and is carried out by external researchers (universities and the like) be published in open access journals, at least within a certain time frame of publication in "closed-access" journals. I believe that they provide a line in grants for the extra (and often heavy) fees charged for publication in open access journals, too. (I just do the work, my boss handles the grant details.)

Also, if I again recall correctly, the NIH (and mayby NSF) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have been having words about NIH's plans for PubMed and the National Library of Medicine. ACS publishes many well-respected journals, most of which have steep subscription prices. (And most scientific journals also impose page charges on their contributors, as well as subscription prices.)

FWIW, I'm a member of the ACS, and work on bioinformatics projects funded by the NIH.

(*well, actually, the NIH requires a shrubbery)

This exaggerates the situation.

[turkeyfish]

"... while some random company that adds nothing of value is"

Publishing books can hardly be seen as not adding value. Could you imagine how combersome and unworkable a system there would be if everyone just printed out
or photocopied raw manuscripts? Plagarism would be rampant and citation would be next to impossible. Also publishing houses provide distribution, and often are the
only outlets for many obscure works and often manage storage of unpurched volumes yet to be sold.

Can web-based systems work? Yes, they probably could but there needs to be a lot of infrastructure in place before it will replace published works. Take for example, hosting? How would this be paid for. Should we require that webhosts agree to permanent, indefinte long term storage for all time? Who will upgrade the media? Paper, degrades far more slowly than electronic media. How about security issues, these are greater for electronic media as the potential to "deface" previously published text is greater and more available to crackers and other miscreants. What about citation? Which website should be cited? What about date of publication, etc.? These are not insignificant issues. I for one, would be lothe to have a government system so centrally organized that some future politicans can begin to restrict or destroy what can or has been published, simply because they find it expedient to do so.

Yes, I believe that in the long run we should be moving to freely available web-based publication for research articles, but to think that it scientific publication is just as simple as posting HTML to a webpage, is a gross oversimplification of the scientiric publication process. Likewise, it counter productive to destroy the business of scientific publication houses, without consideration of the attendant loss of expertise, talent, and resources, without providing a beneficial and well-reasoned pathway for all parties, often quite well-meaning even if money-making enterprises. The entire move will require careful deliberation and quite possibly lare expenditures to complete, even though they will hopefully save money in the long run and make scientific works more accessible.

Good idea, but could be hard to implement

[Stuntmonkey]

Nobody has yet mentioned the reason expensive journals persist in an era of cheap typesetting and distribution. It's because they provide two (inter-related) things to the science community:

1. Quality control. For the good journals, when you submit an article it is typically reviewed (anonymously) by at least three of your peers, who make comments that are forwarded to you for response. You either argue your case against the reviewers or change your paper to accommodate. Then the reviewers see your counterarguments and/or changes and make further comments, etc. Sitting in the middle of this are 1-2 (very knowledgeable) editors refereeing the process, and your paper doesn't get published until they approve it. (This large amount of back-and-forth also contributes to high cost.) Sometimes this review process can take 6 months or longer to complete, which is why preprint sites like arXiv have flourished. ArXiv has taken many months out of the cycle time of the scientific process. But since anybody can post to arXiv, a lot of the papers there are frankly pretty kooky and would never make it through peer review.
2. A reputational mechanism. Because of #1 it's a big deal to publish in a high-quality journal. Academics typically cannot directly evaluate their peers in different fields -- topics are very specialized in modern research -- but all physicists know that Physical Review Letters is a good journal, and if a colleague has published there several times it says something about his or her ability. By contrast, the number of preprints posted on arXiv carries no reputational value.

I agree the current system is bad and needs to be changed. My point is that it isn't so simple a problem to solve as many Slashdotters might believe. We're talking here about one of the primary mechanisms influencing people's research careers (which jobs they get, whether they get grant funding, which awards they win). If the money gets sucked out of publishing and the peer review process that this funds goes away, something will need to take its place as a QC mechanism for science.