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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
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!
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.
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?).