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:Library purpose

[timeOday]

It is true that the current system of evaluating research quality is based on paper counts and citation counts, rather than any real measure of quality (of which there aren't any, at least none that a bean counter could grok).

I think citation counts are actually the best system available. Look at it this way, the WWW is under intense pressure from web spammers, and the best known way to select usable information is google's Page Rank, which is basically citations. Heh, maybe sometime soon researchers will be evaluated by their online publications' PageRank, just like web spammers are. "I'm the number one hit for post-arthroscopy subcutaneous emphysema! Tenure is mine!!!"

Re:Library purpose

[pfbram]

I've worked IT at a Big-10 research library the past 7 years and GPL'd SourceForge project: http://libdata.sourceforge.net/. There's an excellent web site, dedicated to evangelizing open source software in libraries: http://oss4lib.org/. One progressive company that jumps to my mind in particular has bridged the open source paradigm with the basic necessity of earning an income. My hat goes off to these guys hailing from Denmark: http://www.indexdata.dk/.

That said, libraries exist mainly as government-funded entities here in the US. And, when you think about it, government agencies by-and-large don't actually produce things themselves -- they primarily exist as subsidizing entities: they have a mission and a budget, and "contract out" to the private sector, whether it's building spaceships, tanks, spying on would-be terrorists (or you and me), or stocking libraries.

One of many problems that libraries are encountering, I think, is that open source technologies -- and information outlets -- sort of violate the long-standing tradition of government=subsidizer. There have been some attempts (R-Santorum, as I recall) who tried to limit NOAA from offering any weather service that competed with the private sector (Google the specifics). I wonder if there's some political pushing that wants to prevent libraries from treading on their vendors' bandwagons also. This is very problematic, since we're in a post-industrial era, and practically any service you offer potentially treads on someone else's interest in offering the same service -- but with a price tag.

I'm now middle-age, and worked in public libraries 11 years before my current gig at a large university. I've seen (and assisted) libraries go from card catalog to fully automated, to (slowly but surely) private database subsidizers. It's the Y and Z generations that will need to really hammer this one out. Your chief challenge will be to change the nonsense model that requires tax/tuition-funded faculty to publish in closed venues, relinquish many of their rights, and the citizens/students are forced to buy back the same rights. It's dead model. The etymology of "publish" means "to make public". Today's dynamic is quite the reverse, sort of the anti-publishing industry, setting up protected access barriers more so than conquering them. Ponder this carefully.

The other thing to keep in mind is that academic is "one of the last great medieval institutions" as an IT consultant I once worked with at the University termed it. I worry that they are antagonistic toward sources like the Wikipedia for all the wrong reasons. If you think about it carefully, professors grade papers based on (a) the accuracy of the information the student presents and (b) how well the student properly cited his/her sources. If the information was correct, why should it matter whether it was his astrophysicist neighbor (personal communications are citable sources), textbook A, research paper B, a ridiculously expensive database that the university had to subscribe to, or some free source of information?

I think I know the answer, but simply knowing it won't help matters at all. It'll entail a change of guard -- so it's up to the under-40 crowd to figure this one out, and when they become the next generation of library managers, university administrators, and IT directors suggesting that libraries might become Wikipedia mirrors (hint, hint) and contributors, things may then begin to iron out on their own. :-)

Shouldn't it already be this way?

[morgan_greywolf]

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?

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 ...

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?

[notwrong]

On the other side of the coin, I would think the journals provide some level of oversight as to what actually gets published. Meaning i wouldnt want any fool publishing his/her theories on the world. The government would have to compensate in this role and have specialists performing this function for every discipline.

on another note, should the government regulate what is worthy of publication and who is worthy.

Specialists already provide the oversight about what is actually published. That's precisely what "peer-review" means. Amazing as it may seem, the privately-controlled, for-profit publishers get experts in the field to review every article for free. The reason that most journals have a low crackpot ratio is more due to the peer-review than vigilant editorship IMO.

The editors/editorial boards do have a role, in that they make the initial decision about what is sent out for peer review (particularly for journals with low acceptance rates like Nature or Science). They also make the final call about whether something is printed given the reviews it receives, which can often be mixed. I see no reason that some experts couldn't volunteer to perform this function, or even public servants if the state was providing funding. People working in the field effectively already fulfil this role for peer-reviewed conferences.

Free Access to information?

[bdr529]

Yeah. We remember what happened to the LAST "freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe".

Re:And we'll call it...

[Mirk]

No, this is not at all like Wikipedia. It's about peer-reviewed research, created by professionals in the field, and it's about taking this publicly funded work out of the hands of private publishers and giving to back to the people who paid for it.

This is overdue

[Denial93]

Scientific literature is now mainly published in digital form and all the infrastructure that paper copies require is increasingly obsolete. Now we still live in the ruins of the time when printing mattered: we have rivalling databases who charge money from "publishers" (just a guy with Office and Outlook Express, in some cases) who in turn charges money from authors. In many cases, having published at a particular journal before or knowing who's probably going to review you has entirely too much influence on what gets accepted. People still insist on distributing their papers as read-only PDFs. The whole system ceases to make sense as a market, and it never made sense as an infrastructure. If all of this luggage was finally done away with and replaced with a state-funded, largely automated, high capacity system that was available from anywhere, lots of highly competent people would have more time to devote to research. The difference such a system would make for scholars is akin to the difference that Wikipedia makes for laymen.

I know what's suggested here wouldn't be quite that, but it'd be the second to last step before we arrive at a system where free application and publication, anonymous worldwide peer review and free access to all publications speed up research considerably.

However, the advantage of this would be greatest for backwater scientific communities in second- and third-world countries. I could see a couple of legislators not want the Russian anthropologists, Kenyan mathematicians or Peruvian veterinarians to catch up on the guys in "their" universities...

Re:And we'll call it...

[eln]

I had an appointment for next week so my doctor could prescribe me some medication he read about on Wikipedia, but he had to cancel it. Turns out he had to go on an emergency hunting expedition to Africa to try and help with the elephant overpopulation issues they've been dealing with lately.

Long time coming

[kidcharles]

I have been thinking about this for a long time. At my public university (in the US) I have heard librarians say that some journals have subscription fees of 10's of thousands of dollars a year. Multiply that by the enormous number of journals that the university library has to subscribe to each year and you are talking 10's of millions of dollars a year. Also, of course the access is restricted to students and faculty of the university; the general public cannot get web access to these journals. Given that the vast majority of the research published is funded by government agencies, this is outrageous. The fees have gotten so bad that the library has had to pick and choose. Just this year my online access to the journal Review of Scientific Instruments was limited to just the last 5 years or so, rather than the entire archive, due to fees. The kicker is that there are paper copies in the physical library that I can go photocopy, but I can't access the articles online because my university can't afford it. There must be reform regarding the publishing of scientific work funded by government agencies. My only concern is that the quality of peer-review must remain intact, but I see no reason for that to change since those who review papers don't get paid anyway.

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.

Re:That's great!

[ericleasemorgan]

I concur! This is idea is way overdue. Do y'all know how much these articles cost in the formally published form? Thousands of dollars a year. If libraries didn't feel compelled to purchase them (librarians are nice), then the journals would dry-up and blow away. With the 'Net there is not nearly as much need for journals. Let open access become the norm, not the exception. --A librarian

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.

Dumbassery

[spun]

When you give someone bread, you have less bread. When you give someone information, you still have it.

The article talks about government funded research. Why shouldn't the people who paid for it have access to it? Why should publishing companies, who often require transfer of copyright and cash payments from authors in order to publish, continue to get fat off public money?

People who think that the public is not entitled to what it pays for, while some random company that adds nothing of value is, are dumbasses. Just saying.

Obligatory nitpick with summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, but what if I want to see papers from real science, not virtual science?

("Free Global Science Virtual Library" might have been a better choice.)

Free Global Virtual Scientific

[jomama717]

I haven't seen that many adjectives in a row since my wife's last order at Starbucks...

Re: Not So.

[turkeyfish]

This is hardly likely, except in a miniscule fraction of research libraries. Although there are reams of papers whose finding are essentially worthless, often what is worthless to one investigator is often of value to another. This is the case because research papers seldom contain a single relevant "finding". Often papes contain important and valuable data, but the interpretations or methods used to analyze it are faulty or poorly chosen.

A much, much bigger problem is that the average Joe has no interest in reading ANY technical publications (on line or otherwise) and for many who try they really don't have a clue as to what it means. Just look at how the science of climate change is covered in the news and in print. The entire science is predicated largely on the solution of differential equations and numerical analysis. Just how many readers are really in a position to read and properly interpret such results? The percentage is extremely small.

I have published "obscure papers" myself. I would love it if they were more widely available, read, and appreciated, but regardless of whether people would find them "useless" or "valuable" it seems unlikely that these will be even read, except by a few experts.

What about peer review?

[symes]

I'm all for greater access to academic publications. However, there is a problem which might be aggrevated. Good publications rely on good reviewers, the better the reviewers the better the output. Currently, the continuuing increase in academic publications is putting more and more pressure on reviewers and it is increasingly common for prospective reviewers to either ignore or refuse requests. If this Virtual Scientific Library increases capacity further then this may well undermine the integrity of peer reviewed research.

Moreover, my concern is that a Virtual Scientific Library will will not emphasise where (i.e. which journal) a paper was published and therefore the rigour of the review process. Instead we'll end up with average research on an equal footing with research that deserves maximum respect.

So, yes to a Virtual Scientific Library but can we have it based on Slashcode please but with moderation linked to expertise?

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.

price has little to do with reliability

[Submarine]

"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: 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."

Peer review has little to do with the price of the publications. Referees are not paid by the publisher of the journal (I know this because I've refereed a bunch of papers and never got anything more than a "thank you" note.)

There are enormous price differences between peer-reviewed journals. Some first-class journals in computer science, such as the Journal of the ACM, cost about 200 a year, while some other journals cost as much as 5000. The difference is that the former are published by nonprofits (scientific or technical societies) while the latter are published by for-profit entities, who charge universities through their nose.

A solution, yet unimplemented, would be to have editorial boards read and validate articles that are published on sites such as arXiv.org

Repeat: what's important is the editorial board, not the publisher.

(Shameless plug: the French research agency CNRS has a nice site for open publication: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?langue=e n )