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."

Comments

Pipe Dream...

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Pipe Dream...

[wealthychef]

Is it possible that if a few brave scientists start publishing to the open source environment, scientists with the street cred to do so without scorn, then others might see the value in it and start pimping themselves to the new venue?

Re:Pipe Dream...

[jmerlin]

I don't think it's the journals we have to worry about. All we need to do is to get the actual scholars to contribute their work in a more direct and public manner. From what I've gathered reading about how companies like Elsevier and others have treated authors following the dissolution of The Journal of Algorithms (good job, Knuth et al!), my understanding is that a handful of people get these journals free of charge, but most universities (including those who funded the research found in those journals) have to pay substantially over-priced yearly fees, and not purchase individual magazines but instead are required to purchase large collections of journals, most of which are widely regarded as complete jokes.

Further, these journals, from my understanding, pay authors/universities an utterly insulting royalty. The only reason authors submit their works to these journals is because everyone already buys them so it guarantees publicity and looks good on paper, and being a year-long endeavor, this makes actual research incredibly inefficient (leading to researchers just creating mailing lists and keeping each other informed about their research). I think we, the collective internet, have demonstrated that we can provide a better platform for this in every regard. With an open peer review, and instant publication to millions of people, with potential prices per-article (reasonable, like $.50, not $30) going primarily towards the authors and reviewers, we can do better.

I don't like the solution in TFA. I think it's a tiny step, maybe even just a shuffle, in the right direction, if at all. It reads very much like these two are just trying to take over the entire industry by placing themselves at the very top of this massive money machine as the middle men, much like Apple did with iTunes and the App Store, rather than actually solving the underlying problems. They argue "with better accessibility, the same model will work, and we can even drive down prices by being a little less greedy than Elsevier." Nonsense. We neither need nor want a middle man. Much research funded by tax dollars should be made publicly available at no cost, and the rest should be available at a reasonable cost to EVERYONE, not just other researchers. And if you completely cut away the operating costs of middle men and walled gardens, the prices could be astonishingly low but still maintain very good supplemental returns for Universities and all contributors. This proposed "solution" should be rejected for the very same reasons the existing publishers are being rejected.

Re:Pipe Dream...

[Phillip2]

Many scientists do. As well as the expensive options like PLoS, there are many who just publish on their own blogs, or use tools like arxiv. At the moment, though, the credit structures don't acknowledge the cheap options, so we have to pay for the more expensive process, whether before or after.

Scientific publishing is on a knife edge at the moment. There is a lot of flux in the system. I hadn't heard of ReadCube -- there is also Mendeley and Zotero which offer good reference management capabilities. Then, in terms of journals which are, or are about to appear, there is Elife, F1000 Research, PeerJ. Then there is Figshare which is also NPG now. It's quite an interesting time. Some very big names are going to crash (Elsevier is kind of high on that list of possible losses; fingers crossed Springer goes as well).

The risk is, and I think it is a very real risk, is exactly that what this article suggests. We end up with iTunes; a single, dominant publisher who can define the publishing model, control the sytem regardless of the other stakeholders. It has happened in many other areas: google, facebook, amazon are all obvious examples.

I dislike the status quo intently, but this does not mean that replacing will necessarily produce a better result.

Re:If the articles are that expensive

[Aardpig]

Newspapers are minimalised because of the plethora of free news sources online. The same can't be said of peer-reviewed scientific papers. So, I think your analogy is flawed.

of course Harvard can't afford it

[csumpi]

Since their endowment recently slipped to $30.7 billion.

Or is it possible that they are simply not interested in subscribing to everything?

perverse incentives from publish or perish

[bcrowell]

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.

Pipe dreams != eventual reality

[Kittenman]

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).

plos.org

[rueger]

One of the few sites/blogs, whose RSS feed I actually follow closely. Good solid science, and very accessible.

Our mission is to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading a transformation in research communication. Every article that we publish is open-access - freely available online for anyone to use. Sharing research encourages progress, from protecting the biodiversity of our planet to finding more effective treatments for diseases such as cancer.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) to works we publish (read the human-readable summary or the full license legal code). Under this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.

Re:If the articles are that expensive

[tragedy]

But the scientists producing the research and the institutions employing them are, as far as I can tell, seldom (never?) compensated by scientific journals for articles. Peer review is done by scientists, not the journals themselves. The journals just publish. It seems that scientists are more likely to have to pay to be published than the other way around.

Re:ReadCube Cost

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Then do something about it -- refuse to publish in journals that are not universally accessible at no cost. If there are no such resources in your field, create one. Talk to fellow researchers about setting up a system where volunteers review and edit articles, and where articles are hosted on servers at those researchers' institutions. These are not insurmountable problems given today's technology; the real issue is that nobody wants to take on the system as it exists today.

Of course, it would not be the first time that an elitist establishment was successfully taken on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopathic_medicine_in_the_United_States#History

Uh-- clearly someone doesn't understand paywalls

[cornicefire]

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.

What middle?

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:What middle?

[betterunixthanunix]

Kidding aside, I still don't see why a middle ground between free and ridiculously-high-paywall is dead from the start.

You can think of it this way: the fewer restrictions there are on reading journal articles, the more scientific research that can be done. So free (libre and gratis) articles maximize the benefit to researchers, who are the very people writing those articles.

Now, prior to the Internet, such a thing could not have happened, because one of the major restrictions on journal access was the ability of researchers to actually obtain copies of the journals -- without a global copying machine like the Internet, they had to rely on people who had industrial copying equipment, which was expensive to operate. Back then, copyrights made a lot of sense for scientific publishing, because they helped to monetize the publishing industry that was making articles available to researchers.

These days, most researchers have enough equipment in their pockets to make copies of articles available to the world. So the intrinsic restrictions on obtaining articles are now gone; copyright is no longer helping to reduce restrictions, but it has actually become the most significant restriction on reading articles. Since researchers are not paid via copyrights on their articles, and since the reviewers and editors of journals are often not paid for their work, there is little reason left for us to continue to pay anyone just to read scientific articles.

So, while copyrights will keep journals alive, and will likely keep "middle of the road" approaches alive, in terms of actually benefiting society by promoting the progress of scientific research, there is only one good way to proceed: free availability of articles, via the Internet.

Re:What middle?

[betterunixthanunix]

In the long run, copyrights on scientific research are going to either die or become irrelevant, that's why. That is all that the middle of the road approach has going for it.

Re:What middle?

[betterunixthanunix]

Does Dr. Joe Researcher make any money selling papers?

Not directly; a researcher might make money by advancing his career, which a well-padded resume might help with, which publishing in top name journals accomplishes. But that is a pretty big stretch, and there is no reason that a resume could not be padded in another system where the papers cannot be copyrighted (or simply are not). Note also that researchers in my own field, where papers are almost always available at no cost, still pad their resumes.

Do the institutions that employ Dr. Joe?

That is even more tenuous. Institutions with researchers that have well-padded resumes do tend to bring in more grant money, because those researchers are more likely to get grants. Again, in my field, people get lots of grant money, despite the fact that their published papers can be downloaded at no cost.

Does any of the money flow back to the source of funding?

Only in the sense that the money I spent on coffee this past week will eventually find its way there.

Re:Copyright - old problem, old solution

[betterunixthanunix]

The problem is that "an original work of your own" might not be possible for someone who has never accessed the knowledge in the library. The right answer is for the library to be funded as a public good, so that anyone has a right to make unlimited copies of any research stored in the library for whatever purpose they want, as long as they do not misrepresent modifications they made to the work (think of creative commons licensing). Research is already funded as a public good in most civilized nations (NSF grants, NIH grants, etc.), and the results of that research should also be considered a public good.

Re:ReadCube Cost

[Joe Torres]

Easier said than done. Keep in mind that research articles do not only have one author (at least I haven't seen any recent ones in my field). Assistant professors, graduate students, post-docs, and even tenured professors (with the funding situation these days) do not always have the luxury (guaranteed funding and job opportunities/security) to choose to publish in a lower impact open-access journal even if they preferred to.

Personally, I try to encourage others to favor open-access journals and sometimes make articles available to others that don't have access (other scientists and even non-scientists that are simply interested in primary research). That being said, I think going RMS is a little too extreme at the moment. Thankfully, the quality of open-access journals is improving and power is slipping from the non-free publishers and this is something that they can't stop.

Not much of a solution

[lfp98]

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.

Re:Side Benefit

[icebike]

Exactly.

You've hit on probably the last desperate justification for a paid peer reviewed journal: Weeding out the web of wackos.

If the Universities at least made sure that the research was in fact done at their university by real honest to god faculty or research staff, and THEN posted the papers on their .EDU domain, you might have a running chance of separating Dr. Joe Krakpot from some real scientist.

But since anyone can put up a web server, muddying the waters with a lot of crap science is going to be an increasing problem, taking hours just to weed the chaff of charlatans from serious science.

Re:Copyright - old problem, old solution

[girlintraining]

The problem is that "an original work of your own" might not be possible for someone who has never accessed the knowledge in the library.

The library was intended as a repository of scientific, academic, and cultural texts of significance. It was never meant to be a free-for-all; It wasn't meant for the teeming masses, but for people who actually had something to contribute. It doesn't take very long anymore these days for anyone, in any scientific or engineering discipline, to come across a novel idea, implimentation, or method. All you have to do is write about it in your own words.

That's not a high bar to clear; And it keeps people who probably have no vested interest in the accuracy or integrity of the information, or people who haven't been trained or educated in the field, from wasting time and resources. There's already a place for the teeming masses to share their own opinions -- it's called the internet, and it's a firehose of continuous crap.

Pardon me for saying, but I'd like to have a place to go where when I walk into the section on evolution, all the work collected there was by people who actually bothered to study it in some kind of detail before adding something. I do not need "Volumes 1--500: The uneducated people's 'proof' of evolution being wrong." If I want that, I'll watch Foxnews!

A Solution Looking for a Problem

[fearofcarpet]

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.