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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
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.
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.
Well, that last night was quite a night. Steaming, and blurry. While not necessary to prove his point, it for sure provided him the stamina today to put it all out there in his insightful contribution to this Godwinly-diverted thread.
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.
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.
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.
Very little of this happens in maths journals, and when it happens, it is usually the editor that does it, and he does it for free. Or rather, payed by his employing institution, not by the publisher.
When the plots look ugly, it's usually the author who gets to fix them.
I don't think any of that has happened in ages in maths. Perhaps the publishers pay for the cover illustrations, and a secreatary for handling correspondence, but everything else is done by people who are not paid by the publisher.
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?).
Perhaps you are talking about fiction and general publishing? Because in research publication, it's not the publishers who do all those things, it's the authors and fellow authors. And it's all gratis. Publishers really are not adding any value whatsoever.
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others)
Fellow experts in the field do this, because they're the only ones with the expertise to judge a submission, and spot mistakes. Even the editorial/management process of finding and choosing reviewers is done by fellow experts. This practice is so ingrained there's even a name for it: peer review.
editors
Authors are asked to do basic proofing themselves, so as not to waste peer reviewers' time on trivial errors such as typos.
graphic artists to re-draw illustrations
What illustrations? Perhaps biology uses illustrations, but an abstract science such as mathematics does not.
designers to create pleasing layouts
The typical journal spells out those details. They specify what font sizes authors must use, and often fonts as well. The onus is on the authors to follow the specifications to prepare camera ready documents. A typical research journal will have some variation between papers. Unless the journal has specified otherwise, most papers might be in a serif font, with a few in a sans serif font mixed in. There will be slight differences in the spacing of lines and other fine details. Not everyone uses LaTeX. Probably almost no one still uses a typewriter, but there is other software. Usually, there is no color. These are research papers, not glossy magazine articles. But with e-readers able to substitute on the fly whatever font at whatever size the user likes, these issues are quickly fading into irrelevance.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Actually, mathematics often does use illustrations - I'm in graph theory and my next paper is going to have quite a few. They're entirely supplied by the authors, though, and the publisher doesn't change them at all.
I have had many articles published in several journals, including the maligned Elsevier. If publishers add any value they have not educating me on what it is. I write the paper. I typeset it (in LaTeX); text, figures, and all. They require me to sign away the copyright. They put it on a web server. They charge me (and University libraries) to gain access to my own work. And the kicker is THAT THEY DON'T EVEN EDIT ANYMORE. I haven't submitted revisions or check galley proofs since the late 1990s. In other words, the only thing that I can see that they do is host a web site (that incidentally is more complicated than it needs to be because of the pay wall). Bah, good riddance I say! And three cheers for the mathematicians.
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.
Last time I had something published in a peer-reviewed (Elsevier) journal, I sent them a LaTeX file using their stylesheets, all formatted and ready to go (and boy are tables a b*tch in LaTeX!). They don't give you the actual styles they use to format papers, but presumably the ones they do make available are compatible, so there was very little work on their end. Then, I went and did it all a second time myself (the published styles are not very readable, and I wasn't sure about copyright issues), so that I could publish a readable version as a preprint for free access through my institution's repository (which is allowed). Granted, most people in my field will just send in Word files and some images, and someone has to arrange them neatly. That's not that big a job though, and they're certainly not going to make your pictures prettier (unless you pay them a hefty fee for that service) or do much more than running a spelling checker. If it's badly written, the peer reviewers will politely suggest you (note: not the publisher) get a native speaker to fix it up for you. I know several colleagues (none are native speakers) who have some or all of their papers checked for proper English by professional editors before submitting them, at their own expense.
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.
The editor, like they do now? As far as I know, editors at least in the West generally do the job for the reputation capital and as a kind of community service, not for the money. I could see people volunteer some of their time as a (co-)editor just for the credits. Anyway, even an open access journal could charge a small submission fee to cover this, or it could be subsidised by bodies like the NSF.
Oh how clever you are. Someone is going to mention something eventually, so it should be you first. fuckwit.
You're not supposed to sign your posts when you post as an AC.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.