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?
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 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!
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?
No other organization has the brains (sorry math nerds, but being able to do algebra doesn't count) and the brawn to put an entire industry out of business. If these math nerds were actually as smart as their entirely academic credentials make it seem they would be BEGGING Apple for help. Obviously they are going in an typical "open sores" direction and the effort will naturally thus fail, so they aren't as smart as they claim.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Job, jobs, jobs! Good jobs! Union jobs!
Mathematicians take it to the limit
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.