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.

Comments

Vote on it?

[houghi]

... and can be commented and voted on ...

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)

Science databases

[the_kanzure]

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.

Cool subject

[Seiruu]

This site is very informative on the topic of Open Access.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

just the prepublications?

[pimpimpim]

Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already?

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.

Re:just the prepublications?

[aibob]

Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already? But this service is specifically intended for fields which are not covered by Arxiv.org. Quoting http://precedings.nature.com/about

We do not accept submissions from fields in the physical sciences that are are already well served by preprint servers such as arXiv.org.

wonderful

[iHasaFlavour]

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.

Re:wonderful

[digitalderbs]

This won't eliminate that process (at least yet). These are not a suitable replacement for citations of peer-reviewed journals, and as a member of the scientific community, I would expect worthwhile submission through this system to be processed through the formal peer-reviewed system.

this system is good for at least two reasons, in my mind :

1. eliminates abstract citations, which are nearly worthless because they're not archived : i.e. citing conversation, manuscripts in progress, "results not shown."
2. can save time for the authors if the rest of the community thinks the study is a waste of time by modding down articles. Mind you, this will probably not deter scientists trying to pad their publication lists.

However, I'm in favor of having publicly available peer-reviewed journals. This is a necessary first step to that -- the only requirement now is the participation of "peers" and credibility of the journals. (chicken and the egg problem)

Re:wonderful

[Metasquares]

You're correct, but most of us don't care. Until the journals write my papers for me, the public's right to access that information and my own right to dictate what to do with my content, as the author, trumps the journals' right to restrict access in the name of profit. When we receive neither compensation for nor rights to our own work, the intellectual property system is broken.

As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.

Open Access is already widespread in certain areas

[RasmusW]

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.

Universities are Partly to Blame

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Data availability

[RasmusW]

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).

Re:How Useful Is It?

[Seiruu]

Being published in Open Access Journals apparently gives a higher chance of being cited. Not that strange, considering it's easier to access.

Across many fields, journal articles made openly available on the Internet are more heavily cited than those that remain behind subscription barriers, evidence that open-access articles have a greater impact on research. This chart shows results from a 10-year tracking of citations. Shown is the ratio of citations of open-access articles to citations of closed-access articles published in the same issue of a given journal, averaged by discipline. (Data from Hajjem, Harnad and Gingras 2005.)

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDet ail/assetid/55131#55165

lightening introduction to open access

[Chris_Keene]

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.

About bloody time!

[quixote9]

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.