Slashdot Mirror
Start-Up Wants To Open Up Science Journals and Eliminate Paywalls
First time accepted submitter ryanferrell writes "Not even Harvard can afford to subscribe to every academic journal. For scientists at small institutions, lack of access to journals specific to one's narrow field can be painful. Individual articles can cost $30 to $50 each, which is paid out of personal or grant funds. The Boston Globe profiles a start-up that is piloting an 'iTunes' model with Nature Publishing Group and the University of Utah. In the pilot program, researchers pay nothing to download articles and their library foots a smaller bill for a la carte access from the publisher."
I can build a web site like this, too! It doesnâ(TM)t mean that the journals I follow will come running to me to abandon their multi-thousand a year subscription fees. The solution is not in the delivery system, itâ(TM)s in the entire mentality of the so-called âoeprofessional journalâ and the need for scientists to pimp themselves within.
And that will not happen any time soon.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If the articles remain that expensive the academia end up where newspapers are now... Minimalized.
nosig today
The journal publishers are in a world of hurt. So are Universities and faculty. They all want to get behind *something,* they just don't know what. Perhaps these guys have a good enough model and a critical mass of backers (one big publisher -- hundreds of journals, and a big University) to build some momentum.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
Since their endowment recently slipped to $30.7 billion.
Or is it possible that they are simply not interested in subscribing to everything?
The superficial problem is that universities can't afford to subscribe to all the journals that are out there. The ultimate source of this problem is that there are too many fourth-rate universities trying to pretend that they're research universities, and too many people trying to make it in academia in proportion to the number of available permanent jobs doing research. These people have a heavy incentive to publish lots of papers. If some of those papers happen to be important and influential in their field, that's good too, but the primary commandment is just to publish a ton of articles. This is what they have to do in order to get tenure. In many cases, they're in a department at a lower-tier state school that isn't really research oriented at all. Tenured faculty in their department aren't even doing research, just teaching. But the school wants to be just like the research-oriented universities (UC, Ivy Leage, etc.), so they make research a criterion for teaching. The school can afford to do this, because they have 300 applicants for every tenure-track job. All of this creates an overwhelming incentive for huge numbers of people to do research that is probably correct but utterly unimportant, and will never be cited in another paper. These useless papers have to be published somewhere. That's why all the low-impact-factor journals exist.
The only solution I can imagine is that we could create not just a full set of high-quality free journals in all academic disciplines but also a full spectrum of medium- and low-impact free journals as well. Kind of depressing, but it seems to be what junior faculty need.
Labtiva's approach doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a way of tackling the problem. The problem they describe is that research libraries can't afford to subscribe to all the low-impact journals. Low-impact journals are crap. They're low-impact. Their papers hardly ever get cited. For that reason, the market for $0.99 downloads of their papers will be too small to matter; nobody wants to read these papers.
I teach at a community college, so I don't have access to journals. It would be great if I could get specific articles from high-quality journals for $0.99 a copy. But the publishers of those journals have no incentive to sell the articles for $0.99 rather than $30. If they did that, it would just encourage libraries to cut their subscriptions. As it is, some researchers will pay $30 for a specific article out of their grant money, and the journal will pull in a pile of money for doing almost nothing.
Find free books.
I'd like to cure cancer, bring peace to the middle east, end child poverty and provide free, clean power to all and sundry. All I need now is a start-up. (Or a political party).
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Three Squirrels
I would gladly pay a yearly stipend for an "all I can handle" subscription to academic, peer reviewed articles.
The question is...how many people are like me? I don't know...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
A benefit of free academic journals is that the "real" science articles will be available to the masses, and not just those with biased content. With the advent of cheap electronic publishing, there has been a proliferation of free "peer-reviewed" journals whose purpose is to promote one ideology or another, often confusing science with faith or politics. These journals are rarely read but often cited by those who agree with their ideology.
This is different from an university library... how?
Sorry, but the only real solution is Open Access journals. And thanks goodness, they're gaining ground. Nature is doing this token gesture because they at least have some intuition on how the gradual but unstoppable move towards Open Access publishing will sweep them away, alongside the other too-greedy-for-their-own-good journal publishers.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
It is sad that renting articles and not being able to share them with colleagues/students almost seems like a deal compared to the current system. It is sicking to me that the publishing system gets in the way of scientific progress and selectively holds back faculty and students from smaller universities that can't afford access to high-impact journals.
I thought the 'i-tunes' business model was all about building your own os and your own hardware platform, so you could have a large captive audience and shut out competitors.
In any case, I doubt that "paying less" is the argument they used to bring in their current publisher on-board. They probably sold it to them saying: "You guys could make a lot more money short-term wise, if you stopped offering your unlimited access subscriptions and switched to a metered approach. Since the researchers reading your articles are not even the ones who see the bill, that means they'll probably just keep on reading as if they still have an unlimited subscription -- thus inflating the bills for libraries to ten times the amount that they usually pay."
Obviously, it's only a matter of hours before the Academic Paper Publishers Association of America's hired FBI agents kick in this startup's doors, siezes their web servers, and then has a call center in Florida staffed with $7.50-an-hour temps contacting anyone who visited the startup's web site in the past six months with an offer to settle out of court now for $8,000.
iTunes is a paywall. If you don't pay,you don't listen to the music. And while the researcher might not be paying out of his or her own pocket, the institutional library is paying and that money comes out of his or her pocket indirectly. The library must be funded by the campus and so that means less money for pay raises. Once again, someone is paying. There is a wall involved.
There is nothing in the middle, because technology has already rendered the journal publishing industry obsolete. It is like asking about the middle ground between cars and horses -- which is ridiculous and pointless red flag laws.
The real answer is to get rid of the journal publishing industry entirely. We do not need them. Copyright does nothing to promote scientific research these days, and journal publishers just hide human knowledge behind a wall of copyrights. Journal publishers rarely compensate the scientists who review articles, and sometimes they do not even compensate the editors.
Of course, journals also have names, which scientists can use to impress people. "I published in Nature" sounds impressive, and people simply assume that your work must have been "a cut above" work that was published elsewhere. After all, who has time to read so much as the abstract of an article, when you can stop at the name of the journal (and it's not as though anyone publishes the same article in 10 different journals, making only superficial tweaks to their work, right?)?
Let's not keep our minds so open that our brains fall out. The journal publishing industry is an obsolete industry, riding on nothing but its good name and an anachronistic method of promoting the spread of human knowledge for the benefit of society.
Palm trees and 8
In other words, we do not need journals anymore. We have the Internet, and the only reason we haven't yet stopped publishing in journals is that we need to keep padding our resumes (publish or perish and all that nonsense).
Palm trees and 8
We should just bring back the Library of Alexandria: Full access to the library, must donate one original work of your own. Takes care of all this stupid licensing crap -- just have a central library with a non-exclusive license that says all library patrons have free and full access to read any of the materials at the library, and the right to make a personal copy of the same, free of charge. To become a library patron, simply donate a copy of an original work of your own, subject to the provisions mentioned earlier.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Why not use copyright a different way to achieve a goal of openness, and still bring in some cash? Have all the articles free to read. Charge money to cite the articles in other academic papers. You'd have to invest in lawyers to go after people that try to screw you (plagiarizing without citation), but everyone gets to read and learn, it creates a barrier to entry for crap papers that mean nothing, and you can keep it cheap enough to not have it be a huge burden on actual researchers.I'm not a copyright lawyer...I don't know that this would work, but it's a decent idea, I think.
The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques and The Journal of AI Research are both respectable CS journals that are free for authors and readers. Why can't all science publishing be free? Most of the work is already funded by government grants, so why should anyone have to pay to access it?
I don't see how their system makes anything more affordable, and it's outrageously inefficient. When I'm writing a grant or a research article, I might easily look at 20 or 30 articles in a single day. So, that's $120-$180 if I just look at them temporarily or up to $330 if I want to keep them permanently. So I could spend thousands per month just on access to references. Plus, I'll be spending an inordinate amount of time and mental energy on constant decisions of whether to rent, buy or pass up every article I encounter. Usually, I don't know whether an article will be relevant to the specific question I'm trying to answer until I actually look at its data. This system really will be a major impediment to scientific progress, if investigators are regularly ignoring articles that might contain a critical piece of information, just because they wouldn't risk the $6 - not a huge risk of course, but multiply it by hundreds of articles and it adds up quickly. The people particularly hard-hit would be those who for example have just lost their funding, and so have to write grants more or less nonstop but at the same time have no grant support to pay for article access. The best solution in principle is the author-pays model (with allowances for those who truly can't afford to pay). At least with that system you eliminate the infrastructure needed to charge users and maintain the security of paywalls, which is a big part of the expense of electronic publishing. The problem with author-pays is that currently it's just too expensive, a few to several thousand dollars per article, and that has to be brought down. Perhaps with better software and better-informed authors, you wouldn't need all the layout techs and copy editors that put articles into a standard journal format - the authors could do that themselves - at least for low-impact journals that seem to present the biggest problem.
Why not open them to scientists also? After all this is supposed to be a sciencey, techie site. So c'mon, go for it!
Scientists love tearing apart each other's work (for free). The only ones getting paid work for the publisher.
Let's not forget that the journals (a majority of them) charge the authors (the researchers, using their NIH government money usually) a huge fee just to publish their own work that was funded probably by government money. After paying this huge fee, which can range between 2000-5000 dollars in the end to get the research paper published, the journal charges other researchers more money to view the article!! Around 30 dollars as has been stated. I think most state schools have access to a majority of the most cited journals like Nature, Cell, JBC, etc. Sometimes I have come across journals I couldn't access without an embargo or without asking for document request, but I never had to pay once. In the end, if you really want the article you email the author an explain the situation and they will usually be kind and send you the PDF. The author may ask you to keep it to yourself and not make further copies etc.
I realize this does not address the burden of cost on the universities, but until legislation is passed to regulate this process, the schools just have to man up and pay for our access.
The article makes no mention of thriving competitors with similar business models which have already been in business for several years.
A post about such a topic omitting any reference to, for example, DeepDyve (www.deepdyve.com) can only be classified as advertisement.
We (scientists) used to access publications by literally picking up a print copy of a journal and thumbing through it. We learned about researchers and where they were publishing from conferences. In the 1960's you could follow less than a dozen journals and know the entirety of the research in a field as broad as Chemistry. In the past 20 years or so the number of publications exploded; Nature has ~80 publications. Some of that is justifiable, as there are many more researchers in the world and the body of scientific knowledge is simply too large to boil down to broad journals like "The Journal of the American Chemical Society."
With the computerization of publishing, we now have instant access to metrics like our "h-index" or the number of times we've been cited. Journals now publish their "impact factors," which are self-fulfilling prophecies of how likely someone is to cite your work if it is published in that journal. Impact factors track strongly with the breadth of a journal, which means that to publish in a "top-tier" journal you must publish something that is of interest to "the broad readership of this journal." Funding is strongly linked to the aforementioned metrics, so everyone competes to publish in certain journals out of necessity and these journals can charge whatever they want, pay their editors nothing, and send take-down notices when you link to a PDF of your own work.
So, the problem has nothing to do with not being able to access enough journals; this company seems to to think that, if only we could access all of the available literature, life would be great. There are already too damn many journals to keep track of and no good way to search them (sans a few specialized fields of research that allow for things like structure-based searching). Since you still learn about papers and people from conferences, you have to speak at a conference to get anyone to read your paper unless it is in a top-tier journal--and guess how you get invited to a conference? Publishing in top-tier journals. So good research languishes in no-name journals with zero citations, dragging down the h-index of a researcher and making it harder for them to find funding. Which turns these journals into dumping grounds for research that isn't accepted in the top-tier journals; and that is, to a limited degree, just fine. When you do publish in a top-tier journal, you cite your previous work in the no-name journal which, due to the structure of "general interest" journals, often contain more scientific rigor anyway. But there is a limit; beyond a certain threshold for terribleness, journals no longer serve any purpose but to make it more difficult to sift through the mind-boggling amount of published science.
What science publishing needs now is an intelligent way to search the existing content. There is no reason good work should go unnoticed just because it isn't in a top-tier journal (and publishing in those journals is an exercise in politics as much as it is in doing good science), but it does because currently we have no way to learn about it other than by the authors promoting themselves at conferences, which is difficult if you aren't already "known." And creating more journals--free or not--contributes to this most fundamental problem of modern scientific publishing.
This "iTunes" model of access to papers sounds like something that was cooked up by grad students, who have no idea how scientific publishing actually works. And, from TFA, you still can't print or share the material, which instantly makes it useless to most professors who, due to age, routine, and the sheer volume of information they are responsible for, rely heavily on hard copies.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Here's Craig Venter's take on it: http://seedmagazine.com/stateofscience/sos_feature_venter_p1.html