Slashdot Mirror
Jimmy Wales Backs UK Government Bid To Free Academic Data
judgecorp writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is helping a UK government bid to make the results of Government funded research available freely online. The move taps into a popular protest at the restrictions which academic publishers place on the availability of research. From the article: 'Almost 11,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of journals owned by the huge academic publisher Elsevier. Subscriptions to the thousands of research journals can cost a big university library millions of pounds each year – costs that have started to bite as budgets are squeezed. Harvard University, frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions, recently encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.'"
Jimmy Wales? The guy where people paid millions every year so they'd get rid of him for the next eleven or so months again?
No, that's just Wales.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
to free our data. http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Discgate
But research funding in UK universities - given to them by the government - is to a large part determined by the researchers and academics recent publishing record in high impact journals, i.e. those run by people like Elsevier. The government analysis of how well your university research departments are performing (and therefore how much money they will give you in the next round of funding) is dependent on you showing you've published lots of journal articles in hiigh impact journals.
You can publish all you want in open educational archives but until these are considered high impact and valued by the government, then academics will continue to have to deal with the paid for journals. The government needs to make sure that as well as promoting open access of government research - which will be great - that they also acknowledge the value of research being presented in open access archives.
I'd really prefer to publish all my work in open access archives but I know that if I want to look good in my university and make my cv look good for when I have to look for the next fixed term contract, then I need to be publishing in the paid for journals. This is slowly starting to change, but it would be great if the government made a much stronger formal recognition of the value of open resources with respect to funding criteria.
frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions
Yeah, sounds like a "solution". Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
I am a researcher, and I also hate the unfair fees publishers require for journal subscriptions, but I will never submit an article to an "open access" journal.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Not.
You can go to a German or Dutch site and see it almost as soon as it is prepared but on the British site you have to wait 7 hours.
AND you are not allowed to show it to anyone too neither, unless you have paid AGAIN for a copyright.
This.
The only true way out of this situation is for there to be established open access journals that are also high impact. Some journals allow the authors to elect to use an open access option for additional cost. Whether the charges are at the right level I really don't know, but it's definitely an option. However, if you're publishing in a traditional high-impact journal that has the open access option, please use it!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If the government really wanted tax-funded information to be free, they would just declare that it was public domain. Society would find a way to disseminate that information at zero cost to the taxpayer.
Instead, this looks like a bureaucratic project designed to take years and absorb lots of taxpayer's money, while giving the illusion of making information nominally "free" but retaining control, and giving Jimmy a high-profile ego-stroke in the hope that he may moderate his objection to internet censorship.
Paid Q&A/Research
The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository.
It looks like they want the info published in the high impact journals, but also in the national archive. This sidesteps the whole "looking bad on a CV or research grant application" problem. Unless there's some licensing issue with the big journals, but you'd imagine the government could deal with that. Maybe.
It had to happen, I used to work at one of these Academic Journal publishers, they used to practically double their pricing every year because they knew the Universities had to purchase their journals.
The authors got nothing for their work but it was big money for each journal, at some point the internet had to win out, no reason why someone cannot come up with a modified version of Wikipedia that has full blown peer review functionality that provides the functionality the authors expect.
Serves the publishers right tbh, they made me work all hours godsend for a shitty wage whilst they soaked up the profits like fat cats eating the cream...
So the government wants you to publish your stuff in open journals, but they wont fund your research unless you publish in closed journals.
Did I mention how much I love the government?
Does freely online mean we don't have to pay MS?
Journals need quality research or they stop being quality journals. If the government mandates a price ceiling for access to government-funded research (as opposed to mandating free access), I think you'd find more and more publishers agreeing to come in under the price ceiling in the face of seeing multi-million dollar research projects publishing their results in competitor x's journal. You can't expect journals to publish for free, and the quality of open-access journals isn't up to par with the paid journals, but you might be able to get some of both worlds if you can stop journals from taking egregious markups.
Jesus wept, in two years we'll all be commuting to moon meetings in fusion powered flying cars.
Trust a government to over-complicate things. But some racks, install a Wiki, job done.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The main reason to publish your article in a pay-for journal is to get peer review. Which is why the key phrase is "published in a peer-reviewed journal". You're paying for the trust.
You could establish a system of trusted peer reviews that didn't depend on paid journals quite readily. You could even make it difficult to fake by employing cryptographic signatures. What's more, an online system wouldn't have to stop at the board of reviewers employed by the journal - any interested party could add their own review, taking into account that a more widely trusted reviewer in the field would carry more weight. You could even add cryptographically signed "debunkings".
Trust is the main commodity that journals trade in, but it's mostly a facade produced by glossy printing - who actually checks our the credentials of peer reviewers?
In one hand, knowledge should be free.
But in the other hand, to get that knowledge and fund it, it was paid for in part by said publishing.
Cheaper publishing so most people can see?
Most models have shown that roughly halving the cost of something barely loses that much, and in some cases even more than doubles the profit you'd normally get since so much more people have access to it.
Take something like food. What'd you rather pay for, a huge burger in some place that costs $10 or something cheap and small-ish for $1?
Most people have $1 floating around all the time. But $10? People tend to view it as something not as disposable, but would happily fork over 15 $1 without even thinking about it because they view a single $1 as more disposable and returning than a single $10. (since you typically get more "things" as opposed to one single thing)
This has been shown to work all over the world of services, from fast food to even paywalls on sites, game sales on things like Steam to Humble Indie Bundle.
The exposure at such a cheap price reels people in. More so than if it were at a higher price since more people are willing to have a shot in the wild and see if it is something they like since "it is just a dollar". These sales numbers alone typically dwarf more expensive things.
Cheaper would work much better than free. As would better exposure of said journals.
Please take the trouble to click those 2 links in the summary. Notice that I'm not suggesting that you'd actually have to Read The Fucking Articles.
Just ping the news sites.
If only there were open access peer reviewed journals.
There are peered open journals, and peers for pay journals are not paid. Pay journals are relying on legacy rent.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
You're hitting on the problem with current open access that no one wants to discuss: pay-to-publish.
It's a broken solution, one that's even worse than the current model.
It breeds corruption in multiple ways. You essentially make publishing ideas contingent on financial resources--rather than publishing because of the quality of the idea, there's an incentive to publish because it brings in money. It's a conflict of interest on the part of the journals, and creates obstacles to those with quality research that is underfunded.
All of the counterarguments are nonsense, also. For example, the exceptions at many journals (which often only apply to individuals without any institutional affiliation or absolutely no resources) leaves the same problems in place for the majority of researchers. Also, the fact you might have lower tier non-pay-to-publish journals just reinforces the nature of the problem, replacing "any access" with "useful access." The fact the journal is nonprofit is also a non-argument, because the same conflict-of-interest applies, but on a different scale.
I am completely in support of open access journals in principle. There's widespread corruption and the current model needs to change in some way. But the standard of pay-to-publish is absurd.
For example, why the hell don't these libraries *just stop subscribing to these journals* if they're too expensive? I understand the shock and aftereffects, but it's not like researchers couldn't communicate their results in the temporary amount of time before the publishers lowered their prices as a result. Universities would be forced to take it into consideration for tenure, because it would be so obvious. It's basic economics.
Another option is to just publish on your personal or department websites. A variant of this is advocated for in certain models, where publishers get the pretty formatted version and researchers can post the submitted manuscript.
Finally, you could have non-profit journals that are open access, but supported through third parties, such as federal research institutions, professional organizations, or charities. That would be the best option in some ways, but also the most difficult to arrange.
Open access is important, but the responses so far have been creating problems out of nothing, or creating more problems than they solve.
"Trust is the main commodity that journals trade in, but it's mostly a facade produced by glossy printing - who actually checks our the credentials of peer reviewers?"
No, that's not true. It is a "web of trust" created by the smallness of highly-specialized disciplines. Scientific research topics are (usually) so narrow that only a few people in the world are looking at the same questions, and they all tend to know each other, at least by reputation. The editors of journals have a good knowledge of who has written a lot about various topics. I've reviewed lots of articles, and they are nearly always closely related to topics I have published on previously. "Glossy printing" has nothing to do with it - it has to do with one's name appearing repeatedly in a literature search as the author of peer-reviewed articles on topics closely related to the paper being reviewed.
how about the people giving the funding follow what the fuck the research has been up to? that's easiest to do if they're forced to publish the results openly.
the logic behind with the force to publish on prestigious journal is that the journal would do the quality checking for the funder, that the funder wouldn't need to bother with checking what they're funding then because the journal magically does that with magic peer review. this system doesn't quite work though and all important research would stand on it's own anyways - 3rd parties need to do duplicate the research results anyhow for real peer review and the peer review done for journals seems to be pretty much never on that level - and indeed recently there has been a lot of talk about how a lot of such stuff published in high quality journals can't even be reproduced, making a lot of certain types of medical research questionable.
so, if major sources of funding would just stop requiring publication in a journal but instead required full publication of results - good, bad, failed, and so forth, even the badly done of questionable scientific quality - things would get a lot better. the unsounds, badly done research being published would matter too for the simple reason as to work as a guide who to give funding to next year! basically just post the shit on slashdot or equivalent, that's how a lot of cs is done anyways in practice - peer review is the release.
as it is now the journals could just double up their pricing if they felt like it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
> Jimmy Wales sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled fundraising ability. When the deal had been done, Jimmy looked the devil lovingly in the eye and got his soul donated back.
This made me lol, thank you.
The problem Open Access journals need to solve is the vetting problem. Anyone can post their brain-damaged research if there are no gate keepers. Currently, the journals do that through the servitude of the rest of the researchers. And gatekeeping is against the spirit of open. Also, who is going to fund all these open access journals. Staff to support the journals, admins to run the servers, web site people, power for the servers, retirement accounts for people working on the journals, etc.
So if government wants open access, they must put their money where their mouths tend to wander. Let's see the government program all costed out so we know what we will get when the system is up and running. Some bureaucrat will no doubt tell us that it should be let out to the private sector to run. Guess who will be first in line to bid those contracts.
Taking the example of physics, the arXiv is a very successful platform for preprint publication. If you look closely, most of the papers there are also being published in high impact journals like Phys. Rev., etc.
People seem to cope with the dual publishing and the publishers don't seem to mind either. In terms of impact, Physical Review is up there with Science and Nature in terms of impact within general physics.
I think this is naive. It assumes that all "open access" is equivalent. Elsevier typically charges $3k for it's "open access" option. But it's open access option is not very good, the license is not really that open, and it doesn't seem to have resulted in them dropping subscription charges. Basically, they get paid by both sides and laugh all the way to the bank. They are not unique in this.
Bottom line is, it depends what field you are in. When I publish as a bioinformatician, I have lots of options. As you will know, in computing, there are many fewer.
This argument is 10 years out of date. There are, and have been for a long time, open access journals. The gate keepers can still exist, as can the servers, website people and so on.
The issue of whether we want and need peer review in the way that it currently exists is an interesting one. But it's not related to open access.