Slashdot Mirror
Open Access For Research Gaining Steam
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports
that open access to research is gaining steam as more than 20,000
people, including Nobel Prize winners, have signed a petition calling
for greater access to publicly-funded research. While publishers are
fighting open access, a growing number of funding agencies and
universities are making it a mandatory requirement."
The link I had to click was already clicked by me, and I think it was because I read it earlier on Slashdot.
God spoke to me.
"While publishers are fighting open access, a growing number of funding agencies and universities are making it a mandatory requirement.""
OK so let's cut to the chase. Ignoring money for a moment. Let's compare the open-access sites and the closed journals. How do they compare strictly on results? More accurate? Less accurate? More depth? Less depth?
---
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment."
TRM (Taco Rights Managment) strikes again
It's just like this story on Slashdot this morning. Even links to the same story on BBC.
Open Access For Research Gaining Steam
First steam, maybe they'll get electricity soon?
Have you read my journal today?
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important. The classic example is the law journal where a misplaced comma cost millions, but it's also important in scientific journals where someone should be asking "does this sentence make sense?"
On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding? And why should there be gatekeepers of knowledge, or perceived knowledge? My grandfather had a paper that was rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine because he'd done the research before one of the editors, who came out with his own substantially similar paper later. Information should not be subjected to politics--especially information that saves lives. Restricting information increases corruption.
... kill the conversation. Now the comments on a single FA are spread over the comments on two stories.
Allow me to cite an earlier source.
Open Research Gaining Steam, eh? Sounds great; maybe I'll be able to play Half-Life on the lab computers!
Green Monkey
Given the five or so posts pointing out this was a dupe from this morning, who voted for this on FireHose? The status for this article was red indicating many people want this story on the main page. If anything, this shows we should probably give the editors a break... they made only one mistake based on the mistakes of a large number of readers.
:(){
Bioinformatics, especially genomics, has been open from the beginning. It's about time the rest of science caught up.
In Wikipedia anybody and their dog can edit. In contrast, in peer-reviewed journals it's the editors who select the competent referees. Your comparison is not fair: there is definitely a bunch of loonies who would love to referee the papers, but they never get invited.
Nobody said that the publisher has to be handsomely paid to have an unpaid editors and unpaid reviewer that they have now.
On another note, many researchers have partial funding from agencies which are not taxpayer funded, like Howard Hughes, American Cancer Society, Alzheimer's Foundation, etc. This is also very common for postdoctoral fellow or graduate student fellowships. So just because a particular area of research got a dime of taxpayer money, does that automatically mean it should all be open access? It's not often easy to figure out the final contribution from multiple funding sources to a specific project.
Most journals actually provide free access to articles after a certain time frame (like six months, or a year). Additionally, most articles that have broad interest are typically well publicized by news outlets (the applicable conclusions from the research, at least). Frankly, I don't think most of Joe. Q. Public gives a damn about the details of 99% of the research articles published, or could even understand it. As a biologist, I'm not sure I could understand most physics papers, for example. This whole bruhaha seems more about some principle that important to some vocal minority than a genuine public concern. In the end, important taxpayer funded research finds the light of day at the appropriate juncture.
Personally, as someone who is proud of his work and wants it to be widely known, open access is great. Practically, I don't think it's THAT big a deal. And I think most journals are doing enough to publicize the broad picture.
Really. I mean, sure, many of the journals make a profit; however, a number of them probably do so via the enormous subscription costs that PhDs (and even graduate students, sometimes) must pay to get access to the paper copies and electronic PDFs from said journal.
Even today in the advent of electronic publishing, it is still a gigantic cost to print each issue; yes, we pay (sometimes hundreds of dollars) per page for things like color micrographs and the like, but considering that many times these journals have readerships that are less than ten thousand (sometimes considerably less) in the entire WORLD, to make these things self-sustaining is difficult at best.
Let us not forget also that the journal editors orchestrate peer review. Certainly you might say that would be simple to resolve, but there are often good reasons why editors will avoid candidates for peer review that might look good to someone who hasn't been doing the job for years. Doctor X might work with Doctor Y, for example. Editors often have an eye to catch situations that might represent conflict of interest and avoid them. This also works in reverse as well. Without some sort of oversight, the less scrupulous researcher could simply send all his or her publications to be peer-reviewed by a friend, who would give them great ratings and send them on to be published online. The problem is that most researchers live in a bit of a vacuum. They work in a rather narrow margin within a field and sometimes get to know others just by the work they've published if it falls along close lines. That would make it very, very hard to objectively self-review (among themselves, that is) publications.
Does it still happen in the current system? I'm sure it does. I also know that bad papers still get published, and good papers are rejected because one of the peer reviewers is working along similar lines and wants to be first to get it out (I've seen this happen).
The system is imperfect, but it provides a structure under which we can have some sort of independent review. Simply tossing everything out in the open sounds good, but would be quite a different issue in practice.
Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, but what is the general public going to do with all of this? The Federal government has required for a long time that the titles of all NSF (maybe NIH too) grants are made available to the public. What happened? People objected because studies were being done with cannibis, or other 'bad' drugs for purely medical reasons. Now we are specifically taught how to word grants so that they don't inflame the 'layperson' and get funding rejected because someone didn't like the title. What do you think will happen when we start touting all the 'free and open access' to papers? People who have no idea what is going on will raise holy hell because mice are being used for experiments or god forbid we're using heroin to test it's effect on X or Y.
I'm all for freedom of information, but I don't see what good this will accomplish.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
from yesterday: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/0 1/1643204
once and for all. Its SO 18th century to distribute information in the way they are trying to mandate on us. We have the internet now - we can publish anything anywhere with it, not needing them.
Read radical news here
Societies like the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK and also the American Chemical Society are slightly different from the big publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, etc. The society publishers make a profit, yes, but much of the profits get put back into the field of chemistry for running conferences, research grants, public outreach, etc. It doesn't seem wrong for them to make money on the system as it gets reinvested into something useful and beneficial to science.
Also, these publishers have consistently high standards which is most welcome these days where quality can be quite variable.
...People spend time and resources in developing those results and then another amount of time and resrouces to write them, then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings and then some money to publish them.Yes. It is stupid. Let's look at why it is so stupid, point by point:
In short, the publisher deals with distribution and branding.
So. What the current paper-based publishers offer is brand recognition, through the reputation of the journal's past publications. That's something which can be easily duplicated with Open Access. The difficulty is in bootstrapping the process, and that difficulty is fortunately being overcome in several fields.
Thise "closed" journals are not closed, they are abailable, for a fee.They are in effect closed for most people and even many institutions: Take a look at those fees. The realize that for many institutions, these journals are often only available as part of "packages" which are set up worse than cable TV packages. The only way to get all the journals you want for a given field would be to buy all of the packages from all of the publishers, even if you don't want or don't use 80% - 90% of the others in the package.
However, most places don't have that kind of money to throw around and must choose, some times just one. So one package gets chosen and the journals in those packages, good or not, get promoted and the journals in the other package are invisible. With a little bit of planning, the MBAs choosing the titles to go into the packages and prices for the packages could, if they had incentive, marginalize specific research topics.
Why, yes. I have worked closely for many years with libraries, librarians, researchers and reviewers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
All the reasons made for the continuation of the status quo are just excuses that benefit only the owners of the journals. One justification for the high cost of the journals is printing. But who really needs to go to the library to read the Journal of Biological Chemistry or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in their dead tree format anyway? If a library really needs a paper copy, perhaps they can just send out the PDFs to a third-party printer to print and bind it. I don't think we need Elsevier to do the printing and distribution. The internet already performs the distribution process very efficiently. So the traditional for-profit scientific journal publishers need to go the way of blacksmiths and scabbard makers. As for the world's premier science journal, Nature, perhaps Google or the Gates Foundation or Warren Buffet can just ask them what is their projected profit from the sales of subscriptions and archived articles for the next 10 years, pay them twice that amount, secure the copyright to past articles and future publication the journal and hire the entire editorial board. I don't think it would cost a lot. Now that would be a service to mankind.
In traditional journals it is the reader who pays (and sometimes an author). But this effectively makes publications not available for general public, unless they are ready to shell out $30 for 10-page PDF with DRM restrictions (valid for two days only) or you know the author in person.
In open access journal it is author who pays for expenses. The fee is typicall $2000 (http://www.plosone.org/) or $3000 (http://www.springer.com/openchoice). If it is a public grant for research, I think it is the right thing to pay $2000 and give back the results to the public. BTW, you may see, that traditional publishers like Springer are also adopting Open Access. It is good for everyone.
BayaWeaver++
All the editors of the math journal Topology, which is an overpriced Elsevier journal, resigned effectively the end of last year: http://www.lehigh.edu/~dmd1/toplet.pdf (pdf warning). Instead the same editors are starting a new, open access journal. I think we will see more of this as more and more scientists are fed up with overpriced, limited access journals, and libraries start dropping subscriptions. We are fully capable of running the journals ourselves, we already do most the work anyway.
Research patents are turning our school into corporations and the top 5 school are now completely dominant in terms of receiving grants (MIT, Harvard, and a few others).
This even in cases where the research as government funded and done say, in 1935 -- author long dead, unknown copyright status and so on, but the society or publisher feels entitled to get this fee. I'd go bankrupt in no time buying lots of articles that I can't tell contain the information I need from the abstract. This is ridiculous, does not advance science (as many of these societies and publishers state in their mottos) and is surely a major profit center for someone. I cannot afford to subscribe to all these journals and so on, I need some money left over for equipment! I suppose larger outfits do subscribe for the benefit of their employees, but this is yet another case of big vs small with small getting the shaft. Have fun at http://www.coultersmithing.com/
Information wants to be as free as possible. Advertisers want information to be as expensive as possible. The Internet kinda turns the model of traditional publishing "inside out" in that it does not discriminate between the two: information can be advertising, and advertising can be information. Most advertising is useless, hyped, glam. There are some companies that have built their entire brand off of advertising alone.
I think one of the things that has to happen in order for information (even, say, life-saving information which has been discovered by scientists and people like that) to be as free as possible is for the concept of "agents as gatekeepers" to cease. Any time agents (agents are advertisers, by default) are involved, everything gets artificially inflated. Rarely do the people who should benefit actually obtain any benefit when agencies are involved; my employment/career search has proven this to me.