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."
Converting to mechanized agriculture had its casualties too.
Converting to steam power had its casualties too.
Converting to digital IC computers had casualties too.
Invading Nazi germany had its casualties too.
You know, slave traders also had to feed their families. And they all got out of job when slavery got forbidden.
Also, you should welcome all spying on you, because it gives jobs for spies.
On the other hand, it is not a given that this will kill publishers. It might just force them to make a better offer. Note that there are already commercial Open Content journals. The only effect on those might be that they get a bit cheaper.
I am sure the buggy whip manufacturers had families to feed to. Progress does come with casualties, but keeping a moribund institution alive does not come for free either, this choice has casualties too, even if they may be hard to spot.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That's dangerously close to being a "Think of the publishers!" argument. It's not convincing.
If you want to keep people employed then give them something of positive value to do, not the negative value of restricting access to academic research.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Not funny, sorry. But having a very serious post flagged +5 Funny is one of the worst that can happen here :-)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Seriously, did you really need that last night to prove your point?
This is great! All academics should do this!
Oh please...they can easily get new jobs making buggy whips...
Industries change, people find new careers. It's evolution, baby!
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
You're saying one should feel bad for putting a small privileged group out of their society-damaging jobs?
Not buying it, sorry.
You Godwin'd this article in within 6 minutes.
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.
Think of it as http://bandcamp.com/, hold the band.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The articles are written by scientists, generally using taxpayer money to do so.
The scientists pay the publisher to publish their work.
Other scientists, who are usually not paid, review the work before publication.
The publisher uploads the pdf to a website and then charges universities thousands of dollars to have unlimited access to their pdfs.
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.
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!
well Reed Elsiver is a Dutch/English company so the French don't give a fuck - if it was a french company that had REs position you can bet that they would be singing a different tune.
Well those people can now be employed by the universities that no longer have to pay the extortionate journal subscriptions, with the end result that more research can be done for the same amount of money.
One of those line is not like the others. One of those line does not belong...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
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.
You're missing some points -- adding them strengthens your argument though.
Other scientists, who are usually not paid, review the work before publication.
They are paid, usually by the taxpayer (as they tend to work at public institutions).
The publisher uploads the pdf to a website and then charges universities thousands of dollars to have unlimited access to their pdfs.
Universities are again funded (to a greater or lesser extent) by taxpayers, so the taxpayers pay again. The system continues to exist because the publishers own the "big name" journals like Nature, and because the insiders (e.g. established peer-reviewers) get fast-tracked when they want to publish in these journals. It's a racket which siphons huge wealth from the taxpayers to the publishers for little effort. May it end quickly.
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."
You're probably unaware that the backstory to this development is the academic boycott of publishers Elsevier over their price-gouging tactics. They're not casualties - they're legitimate targets.
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."
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.
The commercial publishers add price.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
The publishers don't actually do that. They outsource the selection of 'good' papers to unpaid volunteers.
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.
I want to state at the outset that I'm a firm believer in open access publishing, and believe that academic writing should move more toward things like academic blogging. (I'm a tenured research professor, BTW).
However, I don't think the solution is quite as simple as everyone makes it out to be. For example, even with everyone posting papers on their own blog (which I see as the ideal), there's a certain amount of peer review that disappears. You can institute it in a journal, but then who pays for the costs of maintaining the journal?
Pay-to-publish, which is a common response to this problem, sets up an incentive scheme with an inherent conflict of interest. This is a fundamental ethical problem that people do not want to acknowledge. The journal has an incentive to bring in money to support its own existence (even non-profit journals are presumably interested in maintaining their own existence), which then creates an incentive to publish more papers regardless of quality. It also creates a bar to researchers to publish in a peer-reviewed journal--even with exceptions for hardship, there's still a bar.
Whether you want to admit it or not, the traditional publishing model follows solid economic principles: someone produces a product, and the quality of the product affords a price that can be charged for it. If papers aren't good, people should stop subscribing to the journal and not pay for it. We can argue about who produces the product, but ultimately under the traditional model, you are paying for the correct product--the published papers, not the privilege to publish.
Just to be clear--I submit, review, and edit papers to and for journals. However, there's lots of tasks that I do not do. I do not do administrative tasks, for example. I do not do copyediting (editing for style, spelling, etc.), or deal with all of the page design issues that produce a high-quality publication. These issues are important, and are not handled by any of my fellow scientists.
Open access is critical, but I think the problem now is not the basic economic model, it's the fact that there is a bubble, where journals are overvalued. There are lots of reasons for this, but one is that there's a bubble in terms of professional advancement in academics (e.g., to get tenure, get a pay raise, etc.). The right solution to the problem is to encourage researchers to start publishing on their own websites, and to encourage departments to not value frivolous peer-reviewed papers that could be posted as a blog post or directly on a researcher's website when they're evaluating professors and researchers for promotion and salary. When this happens, libraries will be able to say "sorry, we really don't need to subscribe to your journal," and will drop them. Maybe open-access will be seen as a feature that encourages libraries to subscribe to one journal versus another, when all other considerations are the same?
I'm all for multiple journal models, and wish there were more non-profit open-access journals maintained by professional membership dues. But those are increasing at unreasonable rates also. Maybe this is what the mathematicians have in mind--we'll see. I'm just troubled, as someone who sees open access as fundamentally important, to see so many people so blindly willing to dispense with basic economic and ethical principles in trying to achieve it universally. Pay-to-publish will make things worse, not better (articles under that model used to be required by law to be denoted as advertisements--maybe they still are?).
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.
Peer review is part of the job of an academic- they're not paid by the journal to do it, but it's something you're expected to do as part of your job if you're an academic.
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.
and when he did, the author of the then-state-of-the-art proprietary typesetting system launched bitter polemics against TeX to anyone who would listen. his main point was that it wasn't fair that TeX was 1) orders of magnitude better than his software and 2) free, so that he would now lose all of his support contracts. sounds familiar.
the letter was published in the bulletin of the ams (i think), with a rebuttal from Knuth telling him, politely, to go fuck himself.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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
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
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.
and because the insiders (e.g. established peer-reviewers) get fast-tracked
Nonsense.
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.
the letter was published in the bulletin of the ams (i think), with a rebuttal from Knuth telling him, politely, to go fuck himself.
This sounds fascinating (especially since I occasionally encounter similar problems) - do you have a URL for this? Google wasn't very helpful.
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...
And that is exactly why we should have a strong social safety net that provides a good standard of living while the people who take one for the team make the necessary adjustments. It would still be cheaper than the costs of holding up progress.
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.
And the simple rebuttal is that they can always get a new job (assuming their job actually becomes obsolete in the first place). I don't see the reason to care that someone might have to find something new to do.
i've tried to find it a few times myself as well... sorry, but it was in a journal i just happened to pick up and read in my college's math lounge one day. :-/
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.
Not complete nonsense. Read the controversial story of the article "Manifold Destiny" published on the NYT.
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.
They employ relatively few people, add very little value, but make billions of dollars in profit each year. These industries constitute a massive misallocation of wealth and the meagre employment they provide does not justify the potential jobs being lost to this profiteering.
Rent seekers are never worth it. Never.
May the Maths Be with you!
... publishers .. employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families.
So we should go back to riding horses to work to save those working in the manure collection industry? It's a law of nature. That which doesn't evolve to adapt to its environment perishes. It applies to virii, companies and people alike.
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.
And someone has to pay for the research, and the researchers themselves have to actually get published or they have no career. So let's also think of the consumers' families and the researchers' families as well/
"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 used to be a french taxpayer (I no longer live in france, so i no longer pay tax there). and i'd be very happy to pay that tax. That effort might end up saving millions of dollars in jounral subscription that will go toward something else (research or not). Maybe they will even lower the tax (Hey! I can dream).
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?
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?
I would like to see a system where commercial publishers could have rights to publish for a very limited time, but in return for getting the opportunity to do this, would have to make articles based upon taxpayer funded research available for free download after that time.
Maintaining the servers holding the free downloads, and paying for the internet access, might be a reasonable task to give to a government funded library, such as the Library of Congress, or perhaps to third parties on a contract basis.
This approach would still support the business of publishing, while allowing the taxpayers access to the material. Easy taxpayer access is important to further the progress of science and the useful arts, to provide long term public oversight over government, and because the taxpayers did, after all, pay for this research.
Note that the current copyright system does NOT provide this kind of model: it has been corrupted through apparently perpetual extension and other problems. For science and mathematics research, the period in which publishers would have control should not exceed five years.