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MIT To Make All Faculty Publications Open Access
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."
now that's the kind of university that one would want his/her children to go to.
Read radical news here
This should put to rest any concerns that closed access journals protect the interests of the authors.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is a major blow to an industry with an outdated business model. Scientific publication is starting to move beyond the need for the middleman, and I am extremely glad to see it happen.
That said, the major publishers will scramble to try and patch this hole in the business model, and they will probably make the overall situation worse before it really starts to improve.
Oh well. Got to start that process at some point. Go MIT.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
They're setting America on a path to certain destruction. Why how's a good, god-fearing businessman gonna make a buck if he can't do it by reselling publicly funded publications???
I think the businessmen have tried to close public access to NOAA data too.
As much as I congratulate MIT on this, I'd be interested to see the official vote tally. MIT's faculty is rather largeish, and the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure. There's no way in hell that vote was unanimous. Sounds more like the motion passed by a simple majority, someone introduced one of those silly, "Motion to declare the outcome of this vote unanimous," motions, which was then passed by the same people. That's just speculation, but seriously...not one single dissenter on the entire faculty? No way.
Many of the professors I know of host copies of their publications on their lab websites for all to view. Perhaps this decision by MIT is the first of its type officially, but it's hardly new.
My notion of Computer Science is, that you will always find published papers on the homepages of the relevant authors. Regardless, of what the publishers say. If the publishers make you require sign away your copyright you will almost always find the relevant paper either in some "draft version" or some "technical report", slightly reformulated but essentially the same.
I always thought that this is the standard also in other disciplines. What is the publication standard in other disciplines?
It's about time that publicly funded research make it back into the public domain. I'm sick and tired of my tax money going to enriching institutions of higher learning, and big Pharma (and other corporations) and seeing nothing in return but more generally useless, largely unnecessary, and unjustifiably expensive drugs, not to mention huge salaries.
I have a really hard time coming up with good arguments against open access publishing. Do they exist? Or are all arguments against flat out support of the publishers' business model?
The original article I read said they would encourage MIT faculty and students to put their articles on a MIT-supplied website and back authors to obtain copyright permission. However, they weren't going to abrogate copyright contracts of existing articles and put the stuff out there without permission of the copyright holder. As more and more major institutions get on board this will back the expensive, commercial journals into a corner.
A possible compromise with the journals might be a 6 to 12 month delay before it goes on the MIT site.
I am currently not affiliated with an university and have noticed increased difficulty in reading research journals at nearby libraries. The main culprit is online storage. Almost all the research libraries allow physical public patron access. But I can only read the online journals if I purchase a university computer account. I estimate over the past five years from the shrinkage of the magazine racks, half of the library journal subscriptions are only online now.
Computer and engineering journals are fairly receptive to open publication. However, the medical journal industry is viciously protective. Pre-publication of articles threatens rejection and potential loss of priority rights. A lot of this is due to biotech which seeks to keep new technology hidden as long as possible. A number of people with fatal illness have complained to congressmen about the difficulty of accessing research on their diseases.
This is the same in many other disciplines. In economics, for example, this kind of story is non-news.
For the past 10+ years, even most "old fashioned" journals allow you to post your paper, as long as you post some blurb acknowledging that you passed copyright to the publisher. That arrangement worked out just fine. As an academic, who cares who has the copyright; just give me the paper!
Even for journals that did not offer this, authors would blatantly post their paper anyway. Yet I never once heard of a publisher going to an economist and asking them to alter their personal web page. (Yeah, yeah, insert "nobody reads the paper anyway" joke here.)
More recently, the field of economics has seen open-access e-journals popping up everywhere. The writing is on the wall, as to the future of access.
Finally, our school is in negotiations to make all publications open-access. This isn't just some faculty declaration; we're working on actually doing it. I imagine other schools are doing the same. So like I said, this is non-news to an insider.
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I see this as good and bad.
It is generally a good thing that the research gets out and is seen by as many people as possible. Show me a person off the street who is going to care about some paper on quantum mechanics, however. The scientists and researchers are generally going to have access to these papers in some fashion anyway, via university library electronic journal access or professional groups that they may be a part of (such as the ACM).
The bad thing is that journals may selectively not publish papers they would have previously accepted from a researcher if they require open access. You may not think this is that important. They can find a different place to publish. Things aren't that simple when it comes down to it though. Faculty and research hires and promotions are often based on WHICH journals you publish in as much as how much you publish. As a young researcher I would hate to lose out to someone for a tenured position because they published a few less papers in higher profile journals but I had to publish in lower ranked journals because of open access.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
They may not spend as much time with makeup and outfits as the uberbimbos. But IMHO their bodies are often quite as functional. Even more so: Brains have a lot to do with that.
Tracing the individual variations on peripheral neural pathways and working out their operation is even more fun (for both) when the tracee knows and appreciates what is going on and can give additional feedback beyond the basic flushes, indrawn breath, postures, erections, secretions, etc. And there's such synergy when the partner can reciprocate.
Being able to have an intelligent conversation can be far better afterplay than smoking cigarettes. (Though sometimes it DOES distract.)
Then there's the love for gadgets, tool-making, and tool use. (For instance: It's not a coincidence that some of the largest and most active consensual BDSM communities formed in Silicon Valley and other tech centers and organized over the net and email, or that some of the big names in tech are major participants. Did you really think all that pron on the intertubes was just frustrated geeks who COULDN'T get any? B-) But even if such tastes are more common with geek girls it's far from a universal attraction. So use care bringing it up.)
But one of the hottest things about geek girls is that they can appreciate a geek's mind and tend to be attracted - indeed, turned on - by a good one. If said male geek can reciprocate, treating her as a valued team member rather than someone to play smarter-than-you-nyah mind games on, it's the foundation of a solid long-term relationship.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
I'm a big fan of the move toward open access. But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
Think about it: a university is establishing rules and giving itself oversight over where faculty can publish. From the article: "Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost." Imagine 2 faculty members who want to publish papers in journals that do not cooperate with MIT's policy. One does popular research that the provost likes, the other does controversial research that the provost doesn't like. Why should the fate of these 2 faculty's research be left in the provost's hands?
Like I said, I agree with the goal, but I worry that this is a lousy way to reach it.
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively advance their careers and retard those of their journal-publishing peers. (Just as journal publishing replaced things like anagram-publication to claim priority without actually making the work public.)
This will work even better if the peer-review function can be disconnected from the print-journal publication and ported to an electronic publication model. That would avoid burying the respectable work in the chaff and aid in search filtering as well as re-enabling the manual method at electronic network, rather than print library, speeds.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have you submitted an article to a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Have you been a referee for such an article? I have been in both roles, and more than once. Your view of an editor's work is not consistent with my experiences.
As a referee, I was never harassed by an editor. At first, they simply ask if you're willing to referee a paper, and ask you to suggest a different referee if you are unwilling to be referee yourself. If you accept, you're expected to give a reasoned assessment of the article within a few weeks. They typically use several referees, so if there's a laggard, it does not matter. Most referees are conscientious and timely (I and my colleagues are).
As an author, you are expected to follow the guidelines which the journal publishes. Most of them provide LaTeX or Word templates, and strict typesetting guidelines on figures, headings, citations, captions, etc. If you don't follow their guidelines, your article will be rejected by a secretary who will politely provide the formatting guidelines. It won't even reach the editor and certainly won't go out for peer review.
Oh, I also know editors of a few journals personally (including two journals I have published in, but I met the editors long afterwards at conferences). None of them ever mentioned any need for harassment of authors or referees. They did need to harass their own employees (fill the advertising space, dammit!) and subcontractors (this is printed on SC paper, I said to use coated stock!). That's where the time is spent.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If I were a publisher, I'd want the smartest minds in the world to publish in my journal.
I'm sure people would want to read what the geniuses at MIT are doing, and the publishers will have to choose between losing subscribers or making the requirements more lax.
MIT's one of the few schools in the world that can pull off something like this. Most people choose schools because of rankings, and rankings are mostly based on the number of publications, so schools are not very likely to risk lowering their ranking for an ideology. But MIT doesn't care. No one would pay any college ranking that doesn't end with MIT or Caltech.
Does this include the MIT Press Journals e.g. Presence http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pres?
Whether or not editors get paid varies based on the discipline as well as the journal. In my area (mathematics) a few journals may pay editors, but most do not. Editors, just like referees, work voluntarily; except that editors get the prestige of having their name associated with a well-known journal.
Also, I think you vastly overestimate the cost of running a journal. In math there have been a few cases of mass resignations of editorial boards (essentially killing the journal), and a brand-new journal springing up to take its place. Remarkably, these new journals that are basically equivalent to the old ones manage to charge 5 or 10 (!) times less to get the same job done.
Journal prices have been rising out of proportion with actual publishing costs for a long time now.