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Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco
Marian the Librarian writes "UCSF is among the first public institutions to adopt an open access policy, and is the largest scientific institution to have such a policy. The policy, voted unanimously by the faculty, will allow UCSF authors to put electronic versions of their published scientific articles on an open access repository making their research findings freely available to the public. Dr. Richard A. Schneider, who led the initiative, said, 'Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals. The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research.'"
UA faculty voted unanimously today to restrict all university research to millionaires and large corporations only.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Now, let's get other big institutions on board with this, and then let's turn to the problem of journals. We really do not need journals anymore; their primary function is to distribute papers to other researchers, which can be done online, and peer review and editing can be done by professors at universities (and this is frequently the case anyway -- often unpaid). The Internet connects researchers to each other, so why are we not using it to accomplish these goals?
In any case, this is a good first step.
Palm trees and 8
Chemist here. Science will not, nor will anything else, solve all our problems.
Don't be an idiot.
So really, the only thing that journals have left at this point is their names -- a paper in a "top journal" looks good on a CV, regardless of whether or not the paper is really groundbreaking. Is that really something that justifies the continued existence of journals? I think not...
Palm trees and 8
1) academia operates on reputation, so a paper in a more rigorous journal does and should carry more weight. This is a good thing because it helps separate good work from the junk. 2) You say things like "papers can be..." but I'm saying that online access is worthless unless there is a certified transparent peer review process. I await your suggestions...
A paper cited in a journal will be there indefinitely. One can always get a hold of the original paper even for papers written decades ago. Can you guarantee that the URL for a paper that is available only online will still work in 10 years? How about 50?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The current peer review process is not perfect, but as you mention, it provides several benefits: researchers can be organized, and because of independent journal publishing, the people who select the peer reviewer are different from the people with a personal financial stake in the grant-funding process. Same with editing - the editor must referee between the authors and the reviewers, and if they're scientific colleagues, that easily leads to conflicts of interest. pauljlucas just covered the distribution issue.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
That is what DOI is for, and there is no reason that big research institutions could not store archives of published work -- which they already do by maintaining bookshelf upon bookshelf of bound journals.
Palm trees and 8
So their "policy" is that taxpayers have the right to see published forms of research they funded, as long as it's OK with the journal publisher. From TFA: "Researchers are able to “opt out” if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy. “The hope,” said Schneider, “is that faculty will think twice about where they publish, and choose to publish in journals that support the goals of the policy.”
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
academia operates on reputation, so a paper in a more rigorous journal does and should carry more weight. This is a good thing because it helps separate good work from the junk
Except that I have seen good work published in less "rigorous" journals (well, in CS it is more conferences than journals, but the effect is the same: I have seen good work presented at lower-tier conferences, and I have even seen people cite groundbreaking papers and get published in top-tier conferences for incremental improvements, when the groundbreaking paper itself was rejected from the top tier conferences). The name of the journal that a paper is published in is only loosely related to the quality of the paper. Articles should be judged on the quality of the work, and reputations should be built by publishing quality results, not by publishing in particular journals.
You say things like "papers can be..." but I'm saying that online access is worthless unless there is a certified transparent peer review process. I await your suggestions...
Well, we are having this conversation in two different threads, so I'll just reiterate this point: we can use group signatures to facilitate peer review. Researchers / institutions can coordinate to bring together a couple dozen reviewers, and then some random subset can review a particular paper; if the paper passes review, that subset applies a group signature for the group of reviewers and concatenates it to the paper, which is then published, or else sends anonymous feedback to the authors of the paper (which is what happens in the current system). When someone reads a paper, they can see that some subset of the group of reviewers agreed that the paper should pass the review process, but learns nothing about that subset. The only thing that needs to be done is for the researchers to be organized, but that is something that can be done cooperatively and which does not require a publishing company to facilitate.
Palm trees and 8
In my experience the big research institutions are getting rid of the old bound journals, and won't take any more, even from well-maintained private faculty collections. I find it unlikely that any big institution will want to maintain a working archive of thousands and thousands of electronic journals either. The NIH is a proponent of open access, and the pub med central open access subset is an ideal example of stored archives. But even then, journals still serve a valuable function, and copyright still matters because it's how they make money. I'm all for phasing out the current publication model, but the UCSF policy won't change anything without a viable alternative to the current semi-independent peer review process, that allows scientists to publish without paying hefty fees. This reality is why the policy doesn't have any teeth.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Social Science isn't science. And I say that with a BA in History and a Master's in Political Science.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The only thing that needs to be done is for the researchers to be organized, but that is something that can be done cooperatively and which does not require a publishing company to facilitate.
I can see a role here for a peer review facilitiator to come in, manage the process, and give it a certification that the industry accepts as valid. Perhaps this would cost the publishing institution ~$1000, but then the paper would be free to all. Once this piece of the puzzle comes into place, then I agree that journals can go by the wayside. You wanna go into business?
last time I looked through the Elsevier policy, you have rights to the manuscript, you have rights to the modified manuscript after peer review, and they have rights to the version of the peer reviewed article that they typeset for publication. they may also ask you to agree to certain limitations to your distribution of the pre-prints, but many of those are fairly tame.
I think we should just go back to calling them all Philosophy. Then I could stop explaining to people why they're called PhD's.
Most researchers will think about this for about 2 seconds and then publish in the journal with the most prestige and highest impact factor that they can. Publishing in high impact journals is a major factor in promotion and tenure for professors, so until universities adapt their policies on promotion and tenure, professors will continue to published in prestigious and expensive closed access journals. When reviewing someone for promotion or tenure, high-level administrators don't have time to read all the journal articles a professor has published, so they really heavily on g-indices and/or h-indices that are based upon journal impact factor scores.
Not quite, but there is a movement among universities to reserve copyright on their faculties' publications. Elsevier can publish it, but the professore wouldn't be able to give them an exclusive copyright to the submitted paper.
I've got a PhD in physics, my partner a PhD in Sociology. Her dissertation consisted of obtaining qualitative data regarding a social phenomenon, building a model, collecting quantitative survey data and statistically analyzing that data to test hypotheses drawn from the qualitative data.
So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis. That, my friend, is science. The only difference between her work and that of my colleagues who are experimentalists is that her instrument was a survey instead of an atomic clock.
I, on the other hand, did a bunch of maths, and was an exception in my field by being able to test my work against observations. A master's in Polisci might not have got you close to science, but don't presume that science isn't being done in the social sciences - it is, and done right it can be of vital importance to the society we live in.
Researchers / institutions can coordinate to bring together a couple dozen reviewers, and then some random subset can review a particular paper; if the paper passes review, that subset applies a group signature for the group of reviewers and concatenates it to the paper, which is then published, or else sends anonymous feedback to the authors of the paper (which is what happens in the current system).
Bear in mind that in many journals you'd have to go through that whole process for each individual paper , and a random subset could quite well include people who have no qualms with actively screwing over an author they hate/compete with.
Bear in mind that in many journals you'd have to go through that whole process for each individual paper
OK, but if it is already happening under the current system then we have not really taken any steps backward. If that is not happening under the current system, why would it happen under the system I described?
a random subset could quite well include people who have no qualms with actively screwing over an author they hate/compete with.
I know for a fact that happens under the current system; it happened to one of the people in my own research group. It is unfortunate, by as was noted elsewhere there are limits to how anonymous authors and reviewers can actually be, especially in very specialized fields where everyone knows what everyone else is working on.
Palm trees and 8
You wanna go into business?
Thanks for the offer, but what I am trying to do is take the entire business aspect out of this ;-)
Palm trees and 8
So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis.
We did the exact same. However, the difference, and why I believe social science isn't real science, is in what is being measured. In biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, even things like geology or archeology, the researcher is dealing with concrete, consistent laws and processes. The laws of physics do not change, basic biological processes do not change, if 2 chemicals react today they will always react. This means that, along with a descriptive capability, it allows for a very predictive capability in science. You could describe a phenomena today, and the same conditions will create the same phenomena millenia from now. It gives a measure of certainty to findings, because you know that the laws the findings are based on are not going to change. And as we learn and experiment, our knowledge of these concrete laws grows even better, which makes predictions even more accurate.
Social science is very well equipped for descriptive analysis. It can tell you why the battle at Gettysburg played out the way it did. It can tell you why poverty or unemployment levels are the way they are, and the effects it has had on people. It can tell you how the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan have played out, and what contributed to the current situation we see today. What it cannot do, with any certainty, is tell you how the war in Afghanistan is going to end. It cannot tell you when the next war will occur, or what will cause it. It has no predictive capability whatsoever, because social science at its core relies on and studies something that is totally random, so irrational, as to preclude any attempt at predictability; people. People do not follow immutable laws, they don't behave rationally; just when you think you know what someone will do, they go and do something completely different. It is for this reason why I say social sciences aren't real science. In real science, you can say "based on our understanding of the laws, this should happen, and we should see results accurate within whatever measurement." In social science, they best anyone can say is "we think that, given these set of circumstances, this might happen, at roughly this rate/level/intensity, but there's no guarantee." This inability to accurately predict is why I argue that social science is not actual science.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
journals still serve a valuable function
I disagree on this point; I think that it is possible with today's technology to do away with publishing companies entirely and to basically put all published research in the public domain (where it really should be). In the absence of a need to publish bound copies of journals, publishing companies really act as a trusted party that anonymizes submissions and reviewers, as well as randomly (and hopefully in an unbiased way) selecting reviewers for papers. I think the following building blocks could be used to completely replace that trusted party:
I may be missing a step here, but the process would look like this: each month, some group of research institutions chooses reviewers from a given field to participate in peer review; this should be done before papers are submitted, to reduce the chance of a conflict of interest. When authors submit papers, they send the paper through a mix network, along with an encryption key; when it is received, a random subset of reviewers is selected to review the paper. Each paper's reviews are then encrypted with the corresponding key, and are all posted on a commonly accessible website. Authors can then (possibly through an anonymity system) download all the encrypted reviews, but will only be able to decrypt the review corresponding to their own paper. When a paper passes the peer review process, the reviewers certify that by producing a group signature for the paper; upon receiving this signature, the authors open their commitments, and the paper can be published (at this point, it makes no difference where, since the digital signature certifies that the paper passed peer review; one difficulty is that an unscrupulous author could refuse to open their name, but will still have the signature, although this may not be a big deal -- the paper could be published by the institutions supporting the process without any name).
Clearly this is a cryptography-heavy solution, but I think the technology is there -- none of the primitives I mentioned are too impractical to be used, although they are still pretty cutting edge.
Palm trees and 8
* peer-review coordination and facilitation
* copy editing and type setting
* distribution and storage repository. Other posters have commented on the dangers of papers no longer being available.
* outreach to encourage research in the field of interest, encourage submissions. Being a booster to the field, so to speak.
* tie-ins with conferences. Finding ways to actively grow the field, rather than be passive.
* facilitate connections among researchers. Be like a social network for people in the same field.
Holy cow, this could be epic!
Go to a university library and you'll notice how the annuals from the mid nineties onward are all in pristine condition. Nobody uses them anymore and all they do is take up valuable library space, so many institutions have cancelled paper subscriptions
Preserving paper archives is much more difficult and costly than digital archives, but there's a catch: Current copyright laws make it illegal for institutions to maintain their own archives, so they need to perpetually pay the journal subscription to access archives.
Open access alleviates the problem because there's no single rights holder who can tell anyone what to do with published papers.
One valuable function of journals is the non-random selection of reviewers. I'd argue that an essential function of the peer review process is the selection of appropriate reviewers. Editors must account for the scientific expertise, and conflicts of interest, of any potential reviewer. Afterward, they must make editorial judgements based on personal interactions between authors and reviewers. These judgements are not just up or down. Publish or don't publish. There is an extended dialog in the review process that is mediated by the editor. Moreover, reviewers must know the authors' identity: in many scientific fields, the reputation of the authors, prior publication of their methods, etc., is integrated into the publication, and essential to the review process. Cryptography can't take that away. Further, there is no such thing as a 'trusted party'. There are many journals and various publishing houses. None in isolation can be trusted, but we can trust that they each want to publish more of the best science. How will that dynamic be replicated in a new one-size-fits-all system? I applaud and promote efforts to open up the publication of scientific data, but these efforts must take care to preserve the things that the current system gets right.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Cheers for reading the Elsevier policy, and communicating something that's not always appreciated by the non-scientific public: a lot of scientists do keep an archive of their work on their personal or lab website, and sometimes it' s nearly complete, with no secrets behind paywall. It's easy to release raw data, because journals copyrights usually just cover the particular words and figures that constitute an individual publication. Unfortunately there are risks, and this practice is not routinely rewarded on grant applications.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Much of social science research is hypocritical. On Thursday, the researcher teaches the university students to use independently and identically distributed samples. On Saturday, the researcher and students go to sporting events to loudly tout the proposition that the team from their university is superior to the team from the other university. On Monday the researcher selects a sample of these students for a research study, collects data, and does statistics. On Tuesday, the researcher publishes a paper stating that these students are an independently and identically distributed sample of the general population, despite the researcher's belief that they are, in fact, better than average people like you.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena. People as individuals may not obey immutable laws, but en mass they can be modeled quite effectively, just like gasses of particles can be modeled without knowing the motion of any individual particle. It is impossible to model the individual particles accurately due to their number, but given extensive properties (Temperature, Density, Volume etc) I can tell you how the gas as a whole will behave. Based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I can never tell you exactly how any one particle will behave, only give you probabilities of certain behaviors, just like people. They aren't "rational".
You absolutely can say within social science that certain things will happen at certain rates within tolerances - this is exactly what my partner did in her PhD. She performed statistical tests to show (at a 99% level of confidence) differing care-giving levels (measured by hours worked for family members) based on variables such as fertility of the individuals concerned.
She can certainly tell you, with 99% accuracy, based on the number of children a woman in Togo has and her desired levels of fertility, what the probability of her getting AIDS in the next year is. She can compare this with Benin, which has a different social support structure, and show that, for instance, the more localized family networks reduce this fertility desire and in turn reduce instances of people developing AIDS. And she can absolutely tell you, ahead of time, what the impact of building a new road to a remote village will be in terms of fertility desires, migration and infection prevalence. With measurable, repeatable numbers, statistical significance, etc. If you changed "fertility preference" for "quark mass" and connectivity of a village for "phi^4 coupling" what she and I do end up looking almost identical, so I can't claim to be doing science if she isn't.
I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena.
I never said that's what sociology can do. I said social sciences. That includes, sociology, history, political science, and others. That why I gave several different examples of thing that social sciences can tell you. Amazing, you have a PhD, and yet you can't even read....
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You know, I was trying to be polite - there's no need to be rude in response. You generalized to all social sciences, I showed that you were wrong with this generalization - that indeed some of the social sciences (namely sociology, with which I have quite some familiarity now) are sciences. Then you respond by saying things related to the outcome of wars. I then tell you that your statement isn't relevant as it doesn't address the point that indeed sociology is a science. Therefore the statement you initially made "Social Science isn't science" is false, by my counterexample. You simply tried to move the goalposts to mean "this set of things (most of which wouldn't qualify as social science) aren't science".
Of course, I agree that history isn't a science. But I don't think many people would put it in a "social sciences" category, for myself it falls squarely in humanities.