Slashdot Mirror
Mathematicians Aim To Take Publishers Out of Publishing
ananyo writes "Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers. 'It’s a global vision of how the research community should work: we want to offer an alternative to traditional mathematics journals,' says Jean-Pierre Demailly, a mathematician at the University of Grenoble, France, who is a leader in the effort. Backed by funding from the French government, the initiative may launch as early as April, he says."
I know it's verboten to point out any downside to this sort of thing, in this age of "Everything should be free and open!" But I just wanted to point out, before the flood of "This is great!" and "All academics should do this!" posts that are inevitably to follow, that those commercial publishers and traditional academic journals employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families. Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
But, but, how is the free market going to decide a winner if these professionals are free to publish their articles for free?
Seriously, did you really need that last night to prove your point?
you have to convince 1)young scientists they can still get employed and grants publishing there and 2)old faculty who do the highering and grant reviews that these are just as good as normal journals. As an academic myself, I'd prefer to publish in open source journals but the powers that be want high profile journals like science, nature, PNAS, etc. You can't even get an interview unless you have papers in a high profile journal anymore. Until this mindset changes, these 'publishing free' journals are dead in the water.
Donald Knuth gave TeX to the world so we don't need publishers. Just like how Jesus died for our sins!
I've reviewed several articles and I've never been paid. Nor has anyone I know. Reviewers work for nothing, it's considered part of the "service" portion of your employment contract - so I guess one could say that they're being paid by their employers, not the journals.
What they need to do is add deniability to the free ones and sell access to the official ones. [This document contains one factual error]
Call it anti-sarcasm for me.
Academic legal journals are published by the students. The students select articles, work with authors, edit, proof, contract printers and manage subscriptions.
Each school is different, but most have a writing competition each year and students are selected based upon a combination of their score in the competition and grades.
Why wouldn't this work for the Journal of Even Numbers?
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this:
1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
2) it's sent to a journal, where the editor (paid) looks and decides whether or not to pass it on to reviewers (only the journal staff are paid)
3) the paper is sent to reviewers who make comments and suggest whether to publish or not (no one gets paid)
4) if the paper is not-worthy it's sent back to the author/s who decided to revise and resubmit or whatever (no one gets paid)
5) if the paper is accepted, the author has to sign over copyright (no one gets paid)
6) the paper is published, and if the author wants more than the "complementary" copies, has to pay. If anyone else wants to see the article, they have to pay. The journal makes loads of money for very little work.
Another model cuts out the last two steps, and the journal makes their money from ads, donations, grants or other sponsorship (e.g. from a university). Another model has volunteers all the way through. It's not difficult.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Point (6) needs to be expanded to include the physical costs of printing and distributing the paper version of each issue. There are also costs associated with the servers needed to distribute the electronic version of the journal. These costs, particularly for the paper version, can be quite high. The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
He was making a valid point, and not (as per Godwin's Law) comparing anything to the Nazis. WW2 rather changed my father's career plans and caused him considerable inconvenience. After the War, there was little promotion opportunity for Navy officers with combined ops experience, but he found another job. Changing the mould of European history resulted in a lot of casualties, but the usual Franco-Germanic war every 20-40 years is now long overdue and unlikely to recur.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I worked as a research assistant for several years and I have never seen a paper on physical paper. I could have (universities tend to stockpile them) but who wants to? 5% of papers are even interesting to read beyond the abstract. So I better print the 5% (if i am so inclined) and have all of it digitally. Get over it: Journals and other publications on paper are slow, expensive and practically dead. Oh and I stopped like 3 years ago.
Things which typical on-line systems don't do which publishers do:
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others) .png on-line, but it's wasteful if instead it could be a nice re-drawn or re-created graph or chart done as a vector graphic)
- editors (for some reason, people take the content of text more seriously when it's to be printed)
- graphic artists to re-draw illustrations, colour correct and fix graphics (sure, you can just slap a
- designers to create pleasing layouts for a publication so that not everything written has a boring sameness and so that the layout is adapted to make for more efficient reading of a text.
I look at raw author manuscripts pretty much all day, and believe me, the vast majority of them are _not_ something one would choose to read in their original, un-edited source form.
Typography is the craft (or art) of setting type so as to honour the content.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Unfortunately the vast majority of posters have never had any work published and make the false assumption that its all gravy for the publishers. Editing anything - scientific papers, manuscripts, text books is a considerable effort, far more than spell check in word. Layout is also important to make best use of space and present the work clearly to the reader. So the text (including tables and figures) that the author sends to the publisher do not equate to editiorial review or layout work. All costs must also be spread over the expected readership of the journal, which in the case of most scientific journals is not a very large audience.
Demailly statement about authors doing all the typing already - did he really think publishers sent stenographers to take dictation? Hand written submissions? Sure, maybe in the 1920s.
In the case proposed here, there is also the added need for peer review with checks and balances, not just peer review by the guy who has plenty of free time because he has nothing else going on. Who is going to run this process? Who is going to prod slow reviewers? What about the final decisions to accept or reject? The opporunity for bias in decision making is going to be far higher. While academics are involved in the process now, the publisher (in theory) acts as last guarantor of good behavior.
In my experience, people that are good at math don't often buy Apple products.
"His name was James Damore."
I agree with you that labor should be rewarded. However, so should the researchers reviewing the work. The could've better spent their time with their families, work, or regular chores. What about the cost of each researcher's education? Who pays for that? Education has its costs as well.
However, I understand the need to be impartial when reviewing work. But today's journals act more like NCAA's scheme of not paying its athletes for the sake of "fair play," "impartiality" or whatever moral crap they come up with.
Thanks for voting me to -1, as if my arguments were 100% troll. You are fucktards and you obviously cannot accept differing opinions.
You were peer-reviewed and we as a community decided not to publish you.
Is legacy access. When a given journal shuts down, the articles they did publish are still available from the publisher for perpetuity digitally or physical copies archived in the library. Free open journals are great, but we need a way to ensure anything published will be accessible even if their servers went down. My University cancelled their subscription to one journal I frequently read articles from, but I can still get PDFs of the physical copies that came with that subscription from the library archives. A huge part of science is being able to refer back to what has already been done.
Your argument was fundamentally flawed to the point that you must willingly ignore the facts or are used to being spoon fed. Either way, you sound like a shill or a troll.
I like your subject. Disingenious is what your comment is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The commercial publishers add price.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Hey, if you've been watching the publishing industry lately, it looks like the publishers have been trying to remove simple math from their own industry!
Ebooks where the majority of publishing-related costs disappear, but where the publishers keep a larger percentage of the revenue from sales and pay authors a smaller percentage...
Trying to make it so that textbooks are no longer reusable, while attacking the used-book submarket...
Oh, and this gem...prosecuting someone for reselling the exact same book that was published for sale in another country.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Ironically you are wrong, and at the same time also just proved your whole point wrong. You see, he *is* published (I can read his comment). The reason is of course that there is no proper selection of peers, but rather some mob-moderation facilitated by some script. If you think that is the future of publishing than think again. I prefer my articles more carefully picked.
Brilliant. I love it.
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this:
1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
A minor correction to this-- the authors are typically paid (often poorly, especially in the case of mathemeticians) by their institutions to do some combination of research and teaching, and writing papers falls under the research part of things. They don't get paid specifically to write any paper, but it's part of the general job.
It's worth noting that at least in mathematics, the editors are generally paid only a nominal amount - maybe a few thousand pounds per year. The money really does all go to the publishers.
most people won't see the original AC post or your response or this response. I believe the default on slashdot is not to show posts with 0 or negative score. I have to go through extra steps to see posts which have been downvoted, which is the equivalent of purposefully reading bad journal submissions.
A journal will have a "better" mod point system than slashdot. The easiest way is something along the lines of only giving users who are proven/qualified reviewers more mod points or make their mod points weighted more. There will also be more criteria for being able to mod posts in the first place apart from having a /. account.
Then you can even have your own personal "weight" for each reviewer that is active on a journal you frequent.
So there you go. proper selection of comments and it can develop into something better than print journals...yay progress!
All is in the title -at least we may start forgeting Claude Allègre and homeopathics...
Indeed -real pride there, an unusual feeling.
Herve S.
that those commercial publishers and traditional academic journals employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families. Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.
I am about as liberal as a person can be, from the point of view of someone who is educated in the best ideas of conservativism, and from that point of view, I gotta say that you have /specifically/ suggested what Hayek correctly articulated as "The Road to Serfdom" -- the thesis of his most famous book. If we are going to prevent economic disappointment, then the will end up in totalitarianism, and also reduced prosperity for everyone. Read the book for the arguments... they are compelling.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
With tools that make it easy to publish ebooks like the iBooks tools from Apple, universities all over the US are working on publishing by themselves cutting the publishing companies.
really? apple is almost standard in many applied math departments; i think that counts as "good at math" by slashdot standards. pure math maybe not quite as much, but definitely not rare.
people who are good at math often want a unix, but they don't want to waste work time wrestling with their os, leaving apple as (unfortunately) the only option. those who are doing serious compute projects might have a linux box for heavy or GPU-based number crunching, but that's about it.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Human knowledge must be liberated from paywalls! Too much knowledge is behind paywalls. All we know about it is what pop-science journalists think it says from reading an abstract. We must bring knowledge out from behind paywalls, and leave the paywalls guarding an empty warehouse. Time for an end run.
My experience has been that people under the age of about 45 tend to use arXiv and digital copies of research papers. People older than that tend to use paper copies. The standard deviation in this, however, is very large. I usually only print a paper if I want to quickly add some data to a figure, or do a chi-by-eye fit, or something similar. It is still easier to do this with a piece of paper than it is on a computer screen
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
The point is important, the editor and journal staff can significantly improve the scientific process by suggesting certain changes, even rejecting a paper can make it better. The communication between the author(s), reviewers, the layout and actual publishing on a website or in paper form all take time and money.
Unfortunately the actual helpful editing by the journal seems to be missing completely for a lot of non-high impact publications. Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters, and other still edit the manuscript. The price universities and individual researchers pay for articles or whole journals is still way too high for the given benefit. Most pre-prints on arxiv.org are already in a pretty good form, the peer-review process is improving the articles, the additional editing is in most cases more icing on the cake than absolutely necessary.
The general direction for open-access journals might change things quite a bit. For a reasonable amount $500-$1000 as a one time payment you can publish and everybody can access the research for free.
The commercial publishers add value by facilitating the review process by competent people. Unless they can replicate that "for free", this thing will fizzle out.
I do not think they have answered the question how reviewers will do their work and will be paid or otherwise motivated to do the reviewing.
You have absolutely no clue how the peer review process works. You would do well to discover how it functions before making laughably misinformed statements.
The greatest asset Humanity has is its collection of individual intelligences. We have no idea which individual intelligences have the potential to change the world. All we can do is ensure everyone who desires it has access to the sum total of prior Human knowledge.
Paywalls and publishers see their purpose as the diametric opposite to this principle. Their thinking is simply 'knowledge is power', and 'power belongs to the elites'. A hour's research into Human history will show the price paid by previous civilisations that allowed such thinking to rule.
But publishers are like lobbyists. The have direct access to the ears (and pockets) of the politicians and academic administrators that matter. Where useful, they run the 'non-profit' con, which means the most massive salaries and 'expenses' going into the personal bank accounts of those that oversee the 'non-profits'. JSTOR, for instance, enriches those involved with it beyond the dreams of Solomon. You see the same thing with the 'non-profit' music royalty organisations in Canada and Europe, whose managers are paid individual salaries of high six-figures or greater, while most artists are lucky to see pennies.
Obviously the publishers of scientific papers, making hundreds of millions every year from tame markets, are going to use every power they have to prevent scientific papers going 'free'. They will shill sites like Slashdot, for instance, with garbage about 'peer review'. This is the worst excuse in the world. Cheating in 'peer reviewed' publishing is incredibly high, but worse, the pretence of 'quality' means people forget to be sceptical of articles in such publications, encouraging the cheating.
Maths is going to the 'free' model first, because 'peer review' in maths is a joke. Your maths is either right or it is wrong. The more people that read your maths paper, the greater the likelihood that someone will spot a flaw in the logic, if such a flaw exists. Mathematicians crave this. Scientists working on some big fat government grant are more than happy to have no-one notice how flawed and useless their 'research' is in reality. 'Big fat government grant' people want THEIR papers to be given the OK by people in the same financial position- you rub my back, and I'll rub yours.
The American Constitution doesn't get amended very often. Here is a golden opportunity. Scientific/maths papers by authors who want others to have free access to their work should be constitutionally forbidden from exclusively existing behind a paywall. At the same time, Copyright periods should be adjusted so that material is entering the public domain after a reasonable amount of time has passed for a commercial squeeze of such material. 50 years from date of publishing would seem a reasonable maximum.
Sadly, Western society is heading in the opposite direction. The masses must be conditioned and controlled. Free access to knowledge is as 'dangerous' as it was in those prior elite-run civilisations. It doesn't matter how wrong an idea is, so long as the consequences of the masses believing in it is useful to their masters.
Oh, and the nastiest way in which the parasite publishers can strike back is in finally offering to pay money to the authors of the papers. Prior experience proves that even if they offered the authors a pittance, most would accept the pittance over allowing free access to their papers.
The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Almost no individual scientists or laboratories in my field (biochemistry/molecular biology) actually gets the paper copies of any journal except for Science and Nature, unless it's specifically a journal they're an editor for. Everyone else either reads the papers online, or prints out a PDF (or reads them on their iPad or similar device - since I started doing this I haven't touched a paper copy). Institutional libraries still get paper copies, but I'm not sure how much use those actually get. If the printing costs really are a large part of the subscription fee, we're all getting screwed.
I have!
Seriously. I reviewed an article for the British Medical Journal some years back (some time between 2005 and 2008), and I got paid either £20 or £50 for it. I think it was an experiment they tried for a short time before dropping the idea.
It's the only time I've ever been paid for reviewing papers; and the only journal I've ever heard of doing it.
bang goes my karma... again...
Consider that *you* pay to publish in most academic journals; they don't pay *you*. Then you pay for access....
mark "and should lit fic, in the same pay-to-publish journals, be considered vanity fiction?"
It's not a free market. The government, through grants, fund researchers. Researchers in turn fund their universities, one of three ( or four for state run universities ) sources. The other two being endowments and students. The researchers again fund the publishers from grants--through page fees, access to published articles--through subscriptions and services like JSTOR--. FInally the university libraries also pay for subscriptions--money they got from researchers grants. Could such a system work? I think once the original startup costs are handled, one grant could maintain such a system. A lot cheaper for the government then propping up the publishers. As for lost jobs, well just giving the workers an equivalent position to sit in a room would be cheaper. For every dollar a worker gets, the owner probably gets 1000. Even more as publishing techniques improve and those workers get thrown out of work anyway.
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this: 1) a paper is written (no one gets paid) 2) it's sent to a journal, where the editor (paid) looks and decides whether or not to pass it on to reviewers (only the journal staff are paid)
Actually most of the editors I heard of rarely got paid, and if they did get paid it was very little. Most were premier scientist who did it for the prestige of being an editor.
3) the paper is sent to reviewers who make comments and suggest whether to publish or not (no one gets paid) 4) if the paper is not-worthy it's sent back to the author/s who decided to revise and resubmit or whatever (no one gets paid) 5) if the paper is accepted, the author has to sign over copyright (no one gets paid)
In my experience, a lot of time the publisher got paid for printing the article. They called them "page fees". Ain't "publish or perish" great?
6) the paper is published, and if the author wants more than the "complementary" copies, has to pay. If anyone else wants to see the article, they have to pay. The journal makes loads of money for very little work.
Another model cuts out the last two steps, and the journal makes their money from ads, donations, grants or other sponsorship (e.g. from a university). Another model has volunteers all the way through. It's not difficult.
To put a finer point on it, no one gets paid by the publisher that will make all the money from that work.
Socialized costs, privatized profits.
Job, jobs, jobs! Good jobs! Union jobs!
Mathematicians take it to the limit
Worst than that! Most of the time you have to pay an extra fee if the paper exceeds the limit set by the journal, and most publisher try to re-organize your paper (enlarge the figures for example) to get you beyond the limit.
And I'm not even talking about the extra fee if you have figures in color...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
I don't think you have the ages right - I'm 56 and I use online references whenever possible. Then, if they are interesting and it's necessary, I'll print them out, otherwise, they go onto my hard drive or onto my Kindle for later perusal. Of course, this may vary from field-to-field. I'm pretty used to computers, having used them from my college days. People in fields who have had little exposure to computers or the internet during their training (medicine, social sciences, etc.), may not be so comfortable with the electronic format and may still want paper journals. Still, it seems to be quite the waste of trees...
That is all.
I posted about this a couple of days ago, also wrote something at my blog. As a math grad student in a third-world country these are really great news.
Open access is the fair deal for mathematicians. I mean, why should I give away my work, and then have to pay a stratospheric amount of money to share it? Why my work has to be worth reading only if I give it away to one of this peer-review thefts?. Why keep this model of publishing that every scientist hates but no-one had, before this, the courage neither the will to do something about it?.
I'm not sure if this attempt will be successful, but definitely is worth trying.
This exactly. Apple has basically killed off Linux in academia. It's too bad these same academics didn't ask Apple for help killing off the journal industry instead of buying into the open sores kool aid.
Thanks for voting me to -1, as if my arguments were 100% troll. You are fucktards and you obviously cannot accept differing opinions.
You were voted down because what you stated is factually incorrect. Reviewers aren't paid by journal publishers.
"Backed by funding from the French government"
Oh, so it's not free. This well-meaning organization just managed to get itself some of that money. Lucky taxpayers.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
i disagree (assuming you're not trolling, which might be a stretch).
math journals are for mathematicians. they don't need apple's magic touch of marketing and "it just works," because it's for their own community. this is the first step; what you're suggesting is years done the line.
now, if academics were trying to replace nature or science or some other technical magazine, then yeah, apple would be someone to seriously consider, but for this project, it would be a total waste for both sides. academia wouldn't get enough bang for the buck, and apple's margins would be shit.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Fine, as far as it goes. But in a few years, strong AI will disintermediate mathematicians. Imagine the equivalent of thousands of journals being published every minute by millions of strong AI-based computers running around the world. What then?
"...have not been paid..."
"...service part of your employment contract..."
So, you are paid. You're just paid by your regular employer.
The government is beholden to private business.
Academia only exists because enough people make money from it.
Remember this.
Instead of free, why don't they charge $1 for a perpetual subscription to these sites and papers? I bet $1 per subscriber will cover 50-90% costs of publishing, web hosting, peer reviews etc, and don't have to mooch off too much taxpayers money, most of whom won't ever read such papers.
The commercial publishers add value by facilitating the review process by competent people. Unless they can replicate that "for free", this thing will fizzle out.
Reviewing, editing and formatting articles is important, but nowhere as significant as coming up with the concept of the paper and writing it. Could you explain why publishers have not shared a percentage of their profits (say 10%-25%) with the authors of the articles all these decades?
Authors of novels get paid, so why not scientific paper writers?
And your point is?
The post I was replying to said that the reason journals had to exist was to pay reviewers, so I pointed out that as a reviewer the journals don't pay me.
Your lifestyle only exists because academics studied and built the world in which you live. Where would you be without quantum mechanics (transistors, microchips, lasers) modern materials, modern medicine, hell even calculus?
Businesses exist on what WE make. Today's businesses are founded on yesterday's discoveries. Tomorrow demands that you pay for today's work. You need us much more than we need you.
Remember this.
PS: I'm not funded by any government, thanks, my position is funded externally. So shove your self-righteous attitude up your arse.
by charging more than they deserve. I just can't see how their prices can be justified today. Not to mention that they're holding back the dissemination of knowledge around the world.
At a recent conference I was charged about £70 for a copy of the proceedings. Perhaps reasonable given that it's a small production run? Well, on www.blurb.co.uk I can get a 440 page book printed for £63 and that's a production run of one!
I can see the value of a subeditor at a publisher reviewing works (spelling, grammar, typography etc.) however, in my limited experience of submitting to conferences (where all work is done with LaTeX), I haven't seen the publisher do such review on individual papers - it was all done by the peer review process and submission was in PDF format. This was possible because the publisher produces their own LaTeX style which avoids a hotch-potch of typographic styles. However, there are plenty of existing styles that an organizer/editor could choose from to maintain consistency across a set of papers. Yes - the publisher may oversee the book, e.g. table of contents, but when you download one paper (at a cost in the region of £10-£30), you don't benfit from any of the book overheads.
Anyway, well done to those involved in the Episciences project.
Then you must not know anybody who's *really* good at math, like a professional mathematician, because I am one (writing this comment on a MacBook Pro) and the overwhelming majority of my colleagues have MacBooks and/or iPads. And it's not just something they choose to do on an individual level: for example, the public computers in the Harvard math department (which has plenty of people who are "good at math") are all Macs.