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Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco

Posted by Soulskill on from the setting-an-example dept.

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.'"

24 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. University of Alabama retaliates by crazyjj · · Score: 3, Funny

    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?
  2. Good, now... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Good, now... by noh8rz3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?

    2. Re:Good, now... by MickyTheIdiot · · Score: 2

      Good luck. Most Universities are FILLED with corporate kissasses.

      I've worked at a few. The people at the top wearing suits are no different than the people at the top of the corporations wearing the suits, nincompoops that have mastered the Peter Principle.

    3. Re:Good, now... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Which I addressed in my post, but for clarity:
      1. Peer review is often unpaid under the current system
      2. You do not need a journal to organize peer review when researchers can communicate with each other rapidly on the Internet
      --
      Palm trees and 8
    4. Re:Good, now... by noh8rz3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      no, the internet has made this question more relevant than ever. In a time of free and rapid dissemination of information, how can we judge the validity of that information. This is especially important if you're going to suggest supplanting a peer reviewed journal with open access. I await your answer!

    5. Re:Good, now... by nedlohs · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Did you just not see the "peer review and editing can be done by professors at universities " part what you are replying to?

      The basic model of journals (not all use it of course) is:

      * Papers are submitted with no payment to the authors.
      * Papers are sent for review to experts - usually university professors (who often then oass it to their doctorate students) - with no payment to the reviewers.
      * The journal then prints the accepted papers and sells them to the very places that both supplies the work and the reviewers for free.

      Now there is a bunch of administration work the journal does, but we have computers these days, and universities already have a bunch of admin staff.

      The return the reviewers/submitters get is the prestige of being published in a respected journal and of being a reviewer/editor for a respected journal. The same thing would apply if the journals stopped being money siphoning devices.

      The main issue is certain journals are prestigious now and that takes time to change. If you have what you believe is a great piece of research now, where are you going to submit it? The prestigious journal that looks great on your list of publications and likely pulls in more grant money but that charges a fortune to libraries to buy it? Or that new relatively unknown journal that sells to libraries at cost (electronic copy free)?

      Hopefully the newer fields can get the ball rolling since they don't have as much of the existing prestige problem.

    6. Re:Good, now... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, I think the solution lies in cryptography (disclaimer: I am a grad student doing research in cryptography). You need a system where researchers in a field could apply digital signatures to papers, but with a twist: the reviewers should remain anonymous after applying those signatures. This is not an impossible task; it is called a "group signature." The idea is that universities/researchers would cooperate to bring peer reviewers together, and those reviewers would be given group signature keys that they would apply to the papers they review. A person reading a paper could verify the signatures, which would tell them which consortium of universities/researchers organized the review process for that paper.

      Like journals, the groups of reviewers could be organized on a per-month basis, and the names the whole group would be published -- with only a fraction actually reviewing any particular paper. It is not a complete break from journals as a system, it is just a way to use computers and the Internet to publish instead of relying on the old publishing companies; the way researchers communicate with each other has changed, and publishing articles should change too.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
    7. Re:Good, now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The problem is not reviewing, the problem is gaining sufficient reputation.

      You see, the internet replaces the distribution mechanism. It does not replace the reviewing process. So that we keep that as (as topic starter said) the way we already did it -- by academics, unpaid. Whether this is distributed electronically or on dead trees does not matter. The label that is on the distribution matters -- that is the seal of quality.
      To generate a new seal of quality, we'll have to start from square one: building reputation.
      After a steady flow of not publishing crap, reputation will be garnered. Even better, if some respected researchers use open access works as venues for their hot new stuff, then citation count will increase drastically, attention will be gained, and the whole process will be sped up.

      But yeah, this won't happen overnight. That's no need to start though -- even a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step and all.

    8. Re:Good, now... by GreatBunzinni · · Score: 2

      Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?

      We are talking about science.

      You know, testable explanations and predictions about everything.

      You judge the validity of a paper by testing their explanations and predictions. That's essentially what the scientific community does for a living. Some person finds something odd, some other person comes up with an explanation, others test that explanation to see if its valid, and in the process might find other odd stuff. Rince and repeat.

      If you are worried that, without journals, you might not get a conforting authority dictating what you should and should not believe then rest assure, because organizations such as universities and research institutions are more than willing to put their logo on the cover of their member's papers, and also distribute them to the public.

      So, it's safe to say that the sky isn't falling.

      --
      Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
    9. Re:Good, now... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Internet already made this point moot, friend.

      Yes, because we all know you can believe everything on the internet.

      Seriously, look at Wikipedia and loads of other things which get petty little squabbles about what is "true" and people spinning it to make their own point.

      Good, solid, reliable peer-reviewed stuff (and I mean qualified peers, not random people on the internet) is much harder to achieve than wikipedia.

      Think of how many "think tanks" put out position papers on behalf of whoever is paying for them -- much of that would utterly fail in a peer-reviewed context, but they get put out there to say "see, our opinion on science is just as valid as these guys". Joe Average has no idea this is just a tactic to muddy the waters -- it sounds awfully science-y to him.

      I think the internet has done the opposite of making peer-reviewed journals moot. Hell, we keep hearing how much of science is absolutely unbelievable as the authors fail to use any meaningful scientific rigor.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    10. Re:Good, now... by bzipitidoo · · Score: 2

      This is not a hard problem. The mere fact an article appears in a reputable journal is evidence it was properly peer reviewed. This can be replaced with digital signatures. An online journal could sign each approved article. Or if that's too hard, a journal can list on their own website (which itself is verified with a Domain Keys kind of scheme) all accepted papers and their digests, rather like most download site's md5sums.txt and sha1sums.txt files. Wouldn't even have to have the papers themselves, just the digests.

      Not that that matters a great deal. Shouldn't limit ourselves to traditional peer review to filter papers. With the improvements we have in communications, we'll see improvements in vetting processes. Meantime, in many ways better than peer review is number of citations. The more a paper is cited, the more significant it is thought to be. Already, that is pretty easy to check, as scholarly websites slowly accumulate papers and link them all together. Of course, have to be careful that measure of excellence is not gamed. You'd also want to consider who cited a paper. Wouldn't be hard to produce a bunch of trash just to pump up the number of citations on another piece of trash.

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
    11. Re:Good, now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Want to guess who does the actual "peer reviewing"? You know... who judges the validity of published information and analysis...

      Hint: it's not publishers.

      It's the scientists themselves. And they do it without any type of monetary compensation (i.e. for free/gratis).

      Scientists do the work.
      (Other) scientists review the work.
      Publishers only do typesetting, rip-off scientists of their intellectual property right and little more than that.

      On the other hand... taxpayers ALREADY have to pay scientists to do research, already have to pay for scientists to spend their time doing peer-review, already have to give money to libraries so they can pay the publishers for their subscriptions (i.e. access to the research that was already funded by taxpayers to begin with). And... yeah... if they want to access that research that was bought and paid for them, guess what? THEY HAVE TO PAY YET AGAIN.

      Here's a crazy idea... take all the money that universities and libraries pay to publishers worldwide and use it to enable "open access initiatives" to have the required tools and expertise (mostly at the level of typesetting, since everything else is already covered by scientists anyway) for preparation and free dissemination of high-quality publications.

      Meanwhile... in the real world... current (i.e. already existing) open access journals are ALREADY some of the most reputed venues for scientific publication (e.g. "BMC Genomics"). So... yeah, no need to refute you when Reality already does it for me.

      Please... do tell... in what way does the "open access" model (as opposed to the "pay-wall" model of scientific publishing) prevent scientists from doing what they already are doing for free (i.e. peer-review)? I await your answer!

    12. Re:Good, now... by noh8rz3 · · Score: 3, Informative
      ahh, I see. gone AC to avoid the bad karma...

      Here's your answer - open access is just one piece of the puzzle, and without a peer review certification process it is meaningless. If you're a senior academic and leader in your field, then your reputation precedes you and people will turn to your stuff regardless of peer review. But if you're a junior academic / post doc, perhaps your stuff is legit or perhaps it is crap and you're pushing it out the door to up your publication count. We need a certified peer review process for this.

      FYI, these open access internet journals, you typically have to pay money for the paper to get peer reviewed. I'm fine twith that. as long as there's a process!

    13. Re:Good, now... by uncqual · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Aren't there some important missing steps in that process for respected journals? Those steps being performed by technical editors who:

      • * Review the flood of papers they receive.
      • * Reject the vast majority of papers received.
      • * Select appropriate reviewers for the remaining papers.
      • * Coordinate updates among reviewers/authors.
      • * Make a final publish/no publish decision.

      Although these steps don't (I think) justify the outrageous prices for many journal subscriptions, it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.

      These steps seem to be important to maintain the reputation of the journal by not passing too much unworthy BS to reviewers (thereby resulting in them withdrawing from the review pool) and by not rejecting too much really important work (that later gets published in a lesser journal raising its relative ranking and increasing fragmentation in the field and resulting in a lot of "fairly good" journals but no "great" journals in a field)

      --
      Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading /.
    14. Re:Good, now... by Obfuscant · · Score: 2

      Peer review happens constantly - you're reading papers from your field, you're publishing papers others are reading.

      That's not "peer review". Peer review means changes are made to correct errors prior to publication, or entire papers are withdrawn because they are bogus. It's not a "peer review" when someone arbitrary reads your paper. Google won't help you figure out if a paper is crap or not, it will only tell you that it contains a high percentage of the right keywords.

      And peer review doesn't mean the paper is sent to your friends to review, it is sent to people who sometimes are your harshest critics. If a paper can withstand that kind of review, then it probably has some merit. Reviews, in most cases, improve the paper by suggesting better methods of presenting data or more easily understood language. Peer Review is a Good Thing.

      Publishers don't just formalize the process a bit. They are the reason the process exists.

      Open access without peer review is a bad thing. Relying on "reputation" is a bad thing, since even the most highly regarded scientists can publish nonsense. (Just last week, one such highly regarded scientist was approached by a grad student who referred to an old paper of his, to which he said "that was crap, ignore it." Names witheld to protect the honest.)

      Open access will be to science what Pons and Flieschman's press conference was -- a way for more people to publish less correct work. Unless there is some mechanism added to enforce peer review, and that doesn't look likely. The scientific literature will become like wikipedia -- often wrong but ubiquitously referred to.

      By the way, Oregon State did this in 2009.

  3. Re:Copyrights? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Not necessarily a step backwards; it could be a step towards ending the anachronism that is journal publishing. Really, what are journals doing for us these days, that cannot be done online?
    1. Researchers can be organized over the Internet to participate in peer review; this is already done voluntarily in many cases under the current system.
    2. Editing can be coordinated online as well, and is likewise often done by unpaid volunteers.
    3. Papers can be distributed to researchers over the Internet instead of being bound and printed.

    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
  4. Re:Copyrights? by noh8rz3 · · Score: 2

    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...

  5. Re:Copyrights? by pauljlucas · · Score: 2

    [W]hat are journals doing for us these days, [sic] that cannot be done online?

    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.
  6. More of a suggestion than a policy by codeAlDente · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  7. Re:Copyrights? by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 2

    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
  8. Re:Let the Seed Grow by Nidi62 · · Score: 2

    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
  9. Re:Copyrights? by noh8rz3 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

  10. Effect on Promotion and Tenure by cortex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.