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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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?).
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!
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
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.
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...