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Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results
Tim O'Reilly has a post about how the prominent scholarly journal Nature has recently launched an open-access service for pre-publication research and presentations. In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.
I hope they have something about gravity, because I would love to see what happens if the majority voted against it.
(No, I do not RTFA)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Here's an important list of science databases. Don't forget CiteSeer, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Science Direct, American Chemical Society, Institute of Physics, IEEE, EBSCO Host, etc. Also, an older discussion might be useful, and this one and online science information portals.
A way to get first post at Nature. And possibly be modded -1 troll.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
This site is very informative on the topic of Open Access.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
In germany there is an UNESCO backed project trying to open scientific information as a whole
I personally would be glad if scientific publishing would open up. Of course, someone has to do the editorial work, but currently many journals actually dare to ask money for publishing with them, ask thousands of dollars for including color pictures, and to subscribe to them is not cheap as well. This unfortunately gives the smaller universities a huge disadvantage, even when the people working there might be very good. Also, I suggest that peer review gets some working through, by either always opening up the names of the reviewers, or anonymizing the article. As it is now, many articles get good or bad reviews based mainly on personal views, or on the fact that the reviewer wants to publish the same subject and has an interest in delaying it. With these things fixed, science would get a step in the right direction becoming the honest thing it should be.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Although I use it in combination with Google Scholar. Sometimes one has something the other doesn't, and vice-versa.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Anything like this is great, really great.
I'm writing up my phd, and for months (years if you actually include research time), I had to beg/borrow access to pay per bloody paper portals, or hunt around for non locked up copies of papers. Even then I have often had to rely on abstracts and what other people cite papers for as a guide to what I myself can cite, it's not easy.
I guess it would be if I were more monied, but I'm not. Yes my uni has subs to some portals, but not them all, and usually not the ones I find in the middle of the night after searching for hours.
Anything that makes new research more readily available is great news in my book.
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
It's important to note that the primary way of relating new work in computer science is through peer-reviewed conference proceedings, which tend to be a bit faster. Is there a reason to use a service like this if you're a computer scientist?
Also, will people be concerned about releasing docs to something informal like this? There are already issues with people "stealing" ideas or perhaps arriving at the same idea independently. A service like this may make the distinction even harder to characterize. I've known people to scoop others by posting a tech report on their web page, which are incredibly difficult to search. This would at least make that better.
science isn't really science unless published.
While it's certainly very nice that the big journals like Nature take steps towards offering Open Access to (some of) their material, it has already been a growing trend in certain research areas for the past, say, five years or so. I do research in the field of Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology and except for high-profile stuff that could go into Science or Nature, I simply will not publish anything in a journal that is not Open Access.
The journal being Open Access is of tremendous importance to the researcher as it makes it _much_ more likely, that your paper will actually be found and read by other scientists. I know this from my own literature searches: hits found the PubMed database links to the journal webpage, and if no Open Access version is available, it really have to look like a promising paper, before I spend my time ordering through the University Library.
Also, it should be noted that an ever increasing number of Open Access journal exists in the areas of Life Science in general - for example all the BMC journals, the PLoS journals and even journals from "old school" publishers such as Oxford University Press (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research) have gone Open Access. Also an increasing number of traditional journal now offer an Open Access option, where your pay to make your specific paper availably under Open Access.
This unfortunately gives the smaller universities a huge disadvantage, even when the people working there might be very good
Most universities base political progress within the organization, at least in science, largely on the number and prestigiousness of journal articles published by an author/researcher/scientist.
If publishing in Nature and Science is going to get you a nice raise, a full professorship, tenure, chairmanship, etc. then that's what people are going to do. Is that different in small universities? If not, they need to do some introspection.
This scheme is also under pressure from women in science who have to balance their biological clock with their career ambitions, therefore the system is already seen as broken from a sexism perspective. Unfortunately, the replacement system is still in the requirements phase.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I somewhat disagree with your vision of things.
...).
I have just finished a MSc in bioinformatics (I looked at your page, and I am going in the "opposite" direction, from CS to Biology) and it seems to me that biologists are very closed with regards to, say, marker data. At least the ones that I know take it as a competitive advantage to lock data as much as possible.
From my MSc I have published only on closed journals (Bioinformatics and Molecular Ecology Notes) and people around mostly (like 90%+) publish on closed access pubs (Molecular Ecology, Genetics,
Note that I am fully for open data and open access (If i had the money I would have targeted BMC Bioinformatics before Bioinformatics even with the lower IF), and that I am very frustrated with how things are closed.
I would like it to be more as you say... But I see a different reality.
Most research is published by academics. Academics tend to work at universities. Universities usually tie promotions and career advancement to the number of publications. 300 citatations = Full Professor or some such thing. I don't know how willing they'd be to publish there if they don't get a citation out of it.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
The way I see it most journals (even the closed access ones) actually require that you make your data available. This is especially true for DNA microarray studies, where you will be required to deposit the data in a public database - for example ArrayExpress or the Gene Expression Omnibus at NCBI. Personally I see the publication of the data as a very important way to drive citation of your papers. When I link to data on the department webserver, I group the data into specific directories depending on the area of research - that way a person look for data from one particular paper will also find data and reference to our other papers within that area (for example see: Probe Design datasets and Cell Cycle datasets).
Regarding the fee for Open Access publication: In my personal experience this has not really been a problem - performing the experimental work behind the datasets has always been the expensive part and the Open Access fee has been paid using the same grant as the one paying of the experiment. For non-experimental papers ("pure" Bioinformatics) the department or the University pays the fee (of cause it may not be as easy everywhere - I work at the Technical University of Denmark).
It should also be notes that for some new grants your are actually required to publish your finding in an Open Access journal (I think this may the true for the EU grants, but I am not completely sure).
Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it.
With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One can't go through all of them, and a few 'bad' articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.
But if search criteria can include objective measures of articles' qualities, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.
Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:
- clarity
- originality
- novelty
- presence and quality of experimental data
- logical procession
- depth
- proper referencing
In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.
The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.
The problem with only publishing in open access journals is that they may not be considered the "best" in some fields. In my field, the most respected journals still cost money. I'd like to think that the quality of my work matters more than the journal in which it appears, but I know plenty of colleagues who would look at where I published and never read the article itself. Maybe this won't be such a big deal for me after tenure...
That said, I would love to see all journals become open access. The publishers make a killing off of research they didn't perform.
Precedings is aesthetically almost identical to Dave Bacon's Scirate. They're both good designs, but I can't help but wonder if Nature took some inspiration from Scirate in their design process.
In a nutshell.
For many years researchers (academics) carry out some research, write up the findings and try and get the results published in the the most prestigious journal as possible (there are tens of thousands of journals now available), on submitting to a journal, a paper is peer reviewed. Peer-review is carried out by other academics (normally for free), they will either reject, make corrections or just (rarely) simply accept an article for publication in a journal.
For years this was fine. Then the web happened. (well the web was originally designed for communicated research). Journals became online journals, requiring authentication to prove you are part of a paying institution. Academics could access them from anywhere, print their own copy, access them the same time as others etc. The advantages were huge. But something else happened, journal prices increased way out of proportion with inflation, sometimes 10% a year. End result, libraries had to cancel them.
So two points:
One: Your article, the result of years of research, can only be read be a very small number of people who work at Universities (and other research organisations) which can afford to subscribed to the journal (and not even Harvard can subscribe to them all). Your work is hidden to the vast population of the world. Even when it was tax payers money paying for it
Two: The key to academic publishing is the peer review, it's the step that ensures quality. That is done by other academics for free (and overseen by an editor(s) also normally for free).
Hang on, your University, and Research Funding body (such as the nsf) have paid for months/years of research, which you have written up, peer reviewed by others for free, and now a journal - which charges huge amounts for access - takes the copyright, pays you nothing, pays the peer reviewers nothing, formats and proof-reads it, and then sells it to Universities (basically the very people who supplied the content) for huge amount of cash. Universities rely on journals and have to pay what ever the price. Meanwhile academics are not allowed to send their own research to their peers, colleagues and students because the publisher now owns the copyright. It is (cliché alert) a licence to print money.
Open access (making research free to all) comes in two forms:
- open access journals, which are freely available on the web (either working at no cost, costs covered by a sponsor or by charging institutions to submit articles).
- Author deposits their article on to their institution's website, namely in to an Institutional Repository (or a subject specific website such as ArcXiv), as well as submitting it to a journal. This means the article is always freely available online.
The advantages of making research (normally publicly funded) free to all, are numerous and hard to exaggerate. Hobby scientists, school children, the press, the third world, and smaller universities have access to research that they just could not afford to access in the past (and of course, unlike freely available research, subscription only research can not easily be googles).
The main two software systems for Institutional Repositories are Dspace (MIT/HP) and Eprints (Southampton, UK).
Nature, they are a pain, they are one of the biggest journals, and they of course know it. If we (my university) were to subscribe to Nature online, we would have to cancel hundreds of other important journals, probably more. We can just not afford it.
You will forget this sig before you next see it
Journals charging for scientific content is piracy, in the real sense of the word. Consider:
--almost all scientific work that appears in journals like Nature or Science has been done on government grants. You already paid once.
--page charges are included in most grant funding. The author pays the journal so much per page of his/her article to cover the journal's costs. The journal not only doesn't pay the author(s), it RECEIVES payment from the author. You, once again, have paid for that.
--The journal then charges you for the content. That's the third time you're paying for it.
The amount they charge is non-trivial. $30 / per electronic copy in Nature's case, for instance. The cost to them is whatever that space on their server costs. A tenth of a cent, perhaps? (The other aspects of their costs they've already been paid for a couple of times.)
It's about bloody time they published ALL their articles under CC. The commenter who said scientific work is about open and free access has it absolutely right. Anything less than that is indeed not science.
Robert Chiacchia is piece of crap... a no good loser, and is employed by animal testing labs (even lab rats won't do some things). Robert Chiacchia is a short little dude, which isn't a bad thing, it's his trying to compensate that is so anoying. Algae is more productive than this excuse of a human being. I am stumped to try a come up with one good quality about him... I'd rather share an apartment with Jeffery Dalmer than him. Do you get the idea? This Robert Chiacchia is one sad little fart.
science - we need faster and faster access to knowledge
politics&business - we need longer copyrights/patents/trademarks/etc
theology - we need no knowledge whatsoever
someone pls help me, it's soooo hard to choose the best one
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe