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The Real Reason Journal Articles Should Be Free
Around the time of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, who lobbied tirelessly for free access to academic articles (in his sometimes grey-hat manner, which ultimately got him in trouble), I admitted to some friends that I didn't understand how this became a problem. Why aren't all journal articles free, all the time?
I don't mean that I didn't know why the journal publishers charged exorbitant fees for their subscriptions. If academic researchers have to have access to journal articles in order to do their jobs, then you can expect the journals to gouge academic libraries on the prices. What I didn't understand was: Why do academics even publish in journals that demand exclusive publishing rights for their work, and then charge readers huge fees to read it?
Well actually, we know the answer to that too: academics want the prestige of publishing in big-name journals that have established reputations, and as a result, those well-known journals are in a position to dictate the terms of the contract. A professor might genuinely want to publish their paper in a journal where it can be read for free by all, but they can hardly be blamed for thinking of their own career path first.
Here's the question I really wanted answered: If "prestige" only exists in the minds of other academics within a field, then why don't the academics within a given field just agree to confer "prestige" on papers published in open-access journals, if they can see for themselves that the quality is equivalent to what would be published in the old-guard journals that charge an arm and a leg? And then make hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions accordingly?
I don't mean that the papers published in an open-access journal would bypass the peer-review process, and that everyone in the field would have to judge the papers for themselves without any prior certification of their quality. One of the points that Peter Suber makes repeatedly in his book Open Access is that open access is not about skipping peer review and dumping papers directly onto the web. Rather, the process would work similarly to peer review for a traditional journal:
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Author submits a paper to journal XYZ.
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Journal XYZ selects one or more peer reviewers from among their list of people they consider qualified to review the paper. The peer reviewers send back their usual suggestions and some consensus is reached as to whether or not to publish.
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If Journal XYZ publishes the paper, then they have certified that the paper passed the quality controls in step #2, and the author can now legitimately claim that they had a paper published in Journal XYZ.
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If people in the field know that Journal XYZ is not skimping on the quality controls in step #2 — that Journal XYZ is sending the papers to the same academics who would do peer review for one of the old-guard journals, and who are holding the papers to the same standard — then they should respect the paper just as much as if it were published in a traditional journal. If a person has never heard of Journal XYZ, then it should only take a minute to explain to them how it works (and crucially, that Journal XYZ is just as strict about quality as the old-guard journals that everybody has heard of).
Each step in this process should cost the journal virtually nothing. The "hard cost," the part that consumes the time of people with unique skills, is the peer review step, but peer reviewers are usually paid by universities and consider peer review for academic journals to be part of their job description. At a minimum, all the editors really have to do is maintain the list of people they consider qualified to do the peer review, and send the submitted papers off to them.
Moreover, the entire process should be fast. Again, the "hard cost" in time is the peer review, but there's no reason that the delays between submission and publication should be in the range of months or years.
(I'm assuming that the article authors would want their writings to be widely read, or at least would not be opposed to it. That may not be the case if, for example, the authors were commissioned by a pharmaceutical company for a study that cast their drug in a favorable light, but the authors realize that their research methods contained errors and want to minimize the number of eyes on their paper, to reduce the chances of their chicanery being caught. Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma documents these types of problems very thoroughly, but I'm sidestepping that issue for now.)
So, with that in mind as the ideal, I asked my friends, including many current and former academics, why this essentially wasn't the model that was used. Several mentioned the Public Library of Science, which publishes all articles in its journals under a Creative Commons Attribution License (free for anyone to read and reproduce in full, as long as the original author is cited), and finances its operations through publication fees. These fees are in the $2,000-$3,000 range, heavily discounted for low-income countries and authors, and in any case most academic authors pay the fees out of their research grants and not out of their own pockets. That sounded much better than the traditional model, I thought, but I still didn't understand why the costs weren't even closer to zero. Another friend pointed out that PLOS costs cover the expenses for many of their other activities — which are all noble goals, to be sure, but at the same time, why isn't anybody operating a more bare-bones model which minimizes all expenses, and charges almost nothing for publication or subscription?
This, it turns out, appears to be the approach of the PeerJ project, which aims to let authors pay a one-time fee of $99 at article submission time for the right to publish one article per year — or, if you prefer to pay only if your article is accepted for publication, you can pay $129 "on acceptance" (explained here). And the author of the Techdirt piece mentions that he submitted a paper which was published in the inaugural edition of one of PeerJ's journals, 10 weeks after the submission date. This is cheap and fast enough that I'd call it a validation of the theoretical model which predicts the whole process should be able to be done for almost no cost in almost no time. In other words, I think PeerJ will succeed, but even if it does fail, it will only be because of some anomalous business snafu, not because the hard costs of the service they're providing are greater than the dirt-cheap price they're charging for it. If for any reason PeerJ doesn't happen to get it right the first time, they or some other company should keep trying until someone makes it work.
The basic algorithm at work here — taking a piece of content, submitting it to one or more suitably qualified reviewers, and then certifying the content based on the feedback of the reviewers — is something I've advocated in many contexts over the years, for many different types of problems. In one article I argued that we could make success in the music industry into much more of a meritocracy, with far less arbitrariness in determining who succeeds and fails, if a suitably popular site like Pandora simply took new submissions from artists, had the content "rated" by a random sample of listeners interested in that type of music, and if enough of them liked it, push the content out to all of the fans of that genre. In "Crowdsourcing the Censors" I suggested that Facebook's complaint review process should use the same principle: If a given page received enough complaints, have the page contents reviewed by a random subset of Facebook users who had signed up to be "abusive content" reviewers, and then only flag the page for removal if a high enough percentage of those users voted that the page had indeed violated Facebook's guidelines. This year I argued that "We The People", the White House's online petition-drive-organizing website, should rate ideas based on what a random subset of users think of each idea, rather than allowing users to organize mobs of their friends and followers to vote their own ideas to the top of the pile (which, in case you missed it, is how 4chan gave us this). Or, if you think the general public is not qualified to rate ideas according to how they should be prioritized by the White House (and I'd be inclined to agree), you could have the ideas rated by a random subset of, say, the nation's economics professors.
Of course, I haven't heard of any plans to implement this algorithm in any of those contexts. Not that I expected the key power players to be reading my articles, but it's a little surprising that none of them ever came up with this idea independently, either. (To this day, the only website I'm aware of that ever implemented random-sample voting correctly, was HotOrNot.com, where users could rate members' pictures by attractiveness — but each picture's rating was determined by showing it to a random subset of the site's visitors. That system is gone, since the site has made itself over into a date-finding service.)
But academia in general, and science specifically, is different from other arenas in a number of key ways which could help this algorithm succeed:
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Academia, uniquely, is comprised of many professionals whose love of knowledge and intellectual inquiry, is greater than their desire for money. That's not to say that I don't think the same algorithm could work just as well in a business like the music industry, where most of the stakeholders are in it for the money. But even if Pandora did successfully implement the algorithm, it would meet a lot of resistance from entrenched interests in the music industry, who make their money by finding and promoting and managing talent and would not be happy about a new system that threatened to make them irrelevant. In academia, by contrast, it's quite plausible that even the "entrenched interests" — the people who had become superstars under the old system — would see the new system's great potential for disseminating free knowledge, and would welcome it even if it gave scrappy new upstart academics a chance to dethrone them. Not everybody in academia loves knowledge more than they love their own prestige, but I know more people like that in academia than anywhere else.
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In academia, even among people who do care primarily about their own prestige, many of them have tenure and guaranteed job security, a situation that does not exist in most other industries. This gives them the freedom to experiment with new models, such as submitting papers to upstart PeerJ journals. But more importantly for our purposes, it means they can announce that in their department's hiring and promotion decisions, they will count PeerJ-published papers as legitimate professional accomplishments, for the benefit of non-tenured faculty members who do have to worry about their resume.
- Academics, particularly in maths and sciences, are more prone to the kind of thinking that would lead a person naturally in the direction of the kind of system that PeerJ embodies. First, think of a theoretical model (like the kind I described near the beginning of the article). This model predicts that, ideally, it should be possible to publish papers at very low cost with quick turnaround times, without sacrificing peer-review quality assurance. Now, try to approximate that model as closely as possible in the real world. (In most other industries that I've worked in, there's much more inertia around the existing way of doing things, and far less willingness to entertain any discussion about whether a theoretical model can show how we could accomplish the same thing with vastly less overhead.)
And that, in the end, is the real reason journal articles should be free. Not because the U.S. government is making it a condition for taxpayer-funded research, although that is a welcome development. But because there's no part of the process that should cost very much to begin with, if article authors and peer reviewers are already being paid by their employers. The last piece of the puzzle is that enough academics and faculty departments have to agree to confer "prestige" on articles published in open-access journals, equivalent to the level of prestige that they would accord for an article published in a traditional journal of the same quality. If they won't do that, then the old-guard journals will maintain their monopoly on conferring "prestige", and don't be surprised if journal prices keep growing to the point where even Harvard can't pay for them.
Most academics are publishing to advance their careers/reputations/chances-at-tenure, not as a community service. So publishing in "Bob's Open Source Mathematics Journal/Blog" is NOT the same as publishing in Annals of Mathematics to them. You may be able to talk them into *republishing* their articles in some open-source repository at some later date (and that seems to be the President's goal), but you can forget asking them to forgo the prestige of established print journals for idealism. It's hard enough to get tenure today even with a list of publications in prestigious journals, much less with a long list of publications in fly-by-night open-source journals that your review committee may not have even heard of.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
...that this is precisely the kind of stuff that WWW was invented for. Nah, twenty years later, and the web is dominated by YouTube and Facebook.
Ezekiel 23:20
We paid for it. We should be able to see it, and profit from it.
Of course, some exceptions for sensitive strategic military stuff, but such should be identified and ring-fenced from the start.
Now, if Prof. "X" wants to boost his reputation by publishing in a 'prestigious' journal. Well, let him/her pay for it.
I don't buy this 'editorial excellence and peer review' crap; it's been discredited too many times.
Put it on the net; it'll get reviewed...
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has required this for some time now. Interestingly enough once NIH made this mandatory, the for-profit journals found ways to comply on a per-article basis so that academics would still publish with them.
The important thing to consider about all this, though, is that the for-profit journals still get more readers than the open access ones. I am one of many who wish that this was not the case, but it simply is. Hence if you want your work to be read by the largest number of possible readers, and become incorporated into your field of work, you want to get it into the larger, more prestigious -and more expensive - journals.
That said, some of the open access journals - PLoS ONE being a great example - are catching up quickly and drawing lots of readers and with them lots of citations.
The only problem left is that the open access journals cost about as much for authors to publish as do the for-profit journals. I had a paper in PLoS ONE recently and we paid somewhere around $1,400 to publish. By comparison the journal a lot of our "higher impact" work goes to costs around $1,500 and even Nature is in the same ballpark (not that we publish in Nature). So if the open access journals with their lower impact scores can't attract authors with lower publishing costs they need to do it with promises of good exposure.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Peer review is one of the most important components of modern science. It must be done.
It ensures data isn't faked or fraudulent.
Granted, peer review isn't 100% effective, some research slips in that shouldn't. I don't see why the open journals wouldn't just become the more prestigious journals when all the big research goes there first.
Learn something new.
There are a few journals - Nature and Science being the premier ones - which serve as filters, a word that I don't see mentioned in the OP. (Each field tends to have a few of their own, such as Physical Review Letters in physics, but let's keep it general.) A paper appearing in Nature or Science has passed through a fairly rigorous weeding out process, and is judged to be interesting and / or important to a wide audience. It may not be right, but it is likely to be worth reading. That is not the same as "prestige."
I don't see these journals going away, even if putting everything in Arxiv becomes routine (as I think it should). There is a lot of stuff published, and the need for filters is going to grow, not diminish, with time.
another problem with the "prestigious" journals is that the editors can often be political with the articles received and show bias towards articles that either boost or negate their own research.
First off, on the time issue, I think a lot of time between submission and publication (or decision) is eaten up by reviewers. You can't expect to get immediate responses from your reviewers (after all, while they are doing this as part of their job, they also have their own research and teaching to do). And some reviewers will be really bad in getting back to the editors in a timely fashion.
Second, inertia plays a large role. Sure, everyone could agree that open access journal X is just as prestigious as closed access Journal Y, but there is a lot to be said for a journal name that everyone recognizes. People use journal names and reputations as a heuristic for quality precisely because they can't reasonably assess the quality of every paper.
Essentially, there is no inherent reason why you cannot have a prestigious open access journal. The problem is that prestige takes time to develop, as well as concerted effort on the part of people who are choosing to submit to the open access journal rather than somewhere else. That's not going to just happen by itself - you'll need an organized effort to get tenured faculty to publish in specific journals (and in some disciplines, they may be more interested in ongoing conversations taking place in other journals).
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
The degree of publication openness varies by scientific sub-field, with some doing better than others. From my own experience, the nuclear and particle physics field does a pretty good job with this.
Papers are usually first posted, before peer review, as freely-readable preprints on arXiv.org. This is actively encouraged by the journal publishers: the last time I submitted a paper to an APS journal, they had an option to give them an arXiv preprint number, and they would import the paper from there. The journals still coordinate selecting paper referees and maintaining high editorial standards, so papers have the benefit of going through rigorous peer-review (and being re-written/improved in the process) before being officially published in a journal. The changes are included as updates on the arXiv preprint, so anyone wanting to read the paper can get a free copy there. Journals are supported by institutional library subscriptions and membership fees (in the case of professional societies like APS), with library subscription fees that are *much* lower than for money-grubbing bastards like Elsevier. APS is also promoting a new series of their own open-access journals (with publication fees).
Now, if Prof. "X" wants to boost his reputation by publishing in a 'prestigious' journal. Well, let him/her pay for it.
Not only authors publish based on prestige. It's their institute, their school, working group, ...
I think forcing public institutions to publish freely 1 year after is a good compromise. Libraries won't be forced to subscribe to most journals. 1 year old research is enough in most cases, the rest can be bought by article.
Fundamental problem with academic publishing is incentives. With some notable exceptions, a scientist's salary is fixed based on seniority and degree. Masters will always get less than PhD, no matter competence or productivity.
Since monetary incentive is removed, secondary incentive system has to be implemented. This is where prestige comes in, and it is largely determined by type of publications that accept your articles. It is economy of artificial scarcity.
Nothing will change until fundamental problem - researchers getting "paid" by publishing - is addressed.
I don't buy this 'editorial excellence and peer review' crap; it's been discredited too many times.
Put it on the net; it'll get reviewed...
I have served as Editor-in-Chief and/or Associate Editor for various "prestigious" peer-reviewed journals (both Open Access and Paywall). You seriously underestimate how much CRAP is submitted to serious journals. Without a peer-review filtering process, the quality stuff would be buried below the noise floor and become unreachable.
As for discrediting the necessity of peer review, please back that up with some references.
So long as whatever new journals come along continue to act as gatekeepers for good science through a rigourous system of peer review, I'll be happy. I would not trust the author of this /. writeup to maintain that system though; the high level of sneer in his every word is worrying.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
This is the kind of journalist work I love : Reportage
The governments pay a researcher for his production. One way to measure how productive is a researcher is by how many publications does he has during the evaluation period. Other stuff is included, of course: lectures, graduated grad students, the citations of your work, conferences, invited talks, and how hard is to get a publication in the journals you are publishing... well, the variables depend on the country, but that's the idea.
The nice publishers joined forces to facilitate this evaluation, with the hope to make them easy to follow up or to evaluate a researcher. They created a web site, the web of science, where the authors can check the publications, references and citations of their work of from other researchers, in an automated way. When you are applying for funding, you just give the ISSN number of every publication you had in the evaluation period, and that's it, you print it, or send this information to the government, they get your publication record, citations, etc., etc., and renew a contract, get a promotion, or give you thanks.
The problem is... you need to publish in a journal from the circle of publishers who maintain this website, if you publish in a journal not from those publishers, then, your publication cannot be counted by... by the government, hence, you won't get a payment rise, or your contract will not be renewed. Since the government only checks this website, then everybody must publish on the publishers in that circle. And that's where the bad thing comes: offer/demand, you only publish with them, then, only those publishers have the good journals, if those are the journals where everybody publish, then, the good research is in there, hence, they can ask for more money to read their top journals. You need them to do research, and your research will be published there, so you can have a job.
That's it, it is just a circle that went wrong, but now everybody is mad at the publishers. The problem is that the governments are helping a bit on this.
Alternatives to this web of science, are very few: Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar, (Academia.edu, Research Gate?), but none of them as "professional" as the web of science in the eyes of the governments, so you just continue using the Web of Science.
Each step in this process should cost the journal virtually nothing. The "hard cost," the part that consumes the time of people with unique skills, is the peer review step, but peer reviewers are usually paid by universities and consider peer review for academic journals to be part of their job description.
The reviewing is the hard part in the sense that it takes the most specialized knowledge to do well. As far as effort though, the part he writes off as costing virtually nothing was by far more time and effort consuming for me than the reviewing part. Selecting reviewers is not a quick and simple thing, especially if you are trying to make sure the reviewers have knowledge of the particular subject. Unless you have some really generic papers, it is difficult to have a short list of reviewers to just pick at random, it takes a lot of time to make sure you have a good match, and to make sure there are no obvious conflicts of interest. On top of that, once you pick the reviewer, there is no guarantee that they will review it in a timely, professional manner. Some reviewers take a bit of nagging to get them to actually get around to things, others obviously review things without much effort and their review reflects they didn't read the paper thoroughly, and then there are more subtle issues and conflicts that can come up between the author and the reviewer. It is one thing if the reviewer obviously didn't read the paper based on their review, much more complicated if the author makes that charge and the review looks at least on topic.
So while you can have the peer review process managed by volunteers, in my experience at least having done plenty of reviews and having tried volunteering for the other side of the editing process, the management part takes a lot more time and effort. There is a lot more room here to screw things up, depending on how you handle the review selection process, and how you handle conflicts between reviewers and authors. It is even more difficult to keep this consistent if you have multiple volunteers handling this, or if those volunteers have their own schedule slacking, etc. The process does have a lot more potential to run smoothly if you have a single person managing this stuff full time, instead of a handful of people throwing in volunteer time into it. At some point it comes down to someone just spending time to babysit everything.
That said, I support open access, and I do find some of the prices publishers charge for open access publishing to be rather exceptionally high. I think there is a lot of room for improvement. Although, for a long time, I won't be surprised if it comes down to journals with a small team of paid staff charging reasonable publishing fees tending to edge out completely free and volunteer journals in quality. And it is such difference in quality that could affect the importance and consider such journals get, for both career positioning and readership, especially if there is potential for a feedback effect.
Academics are evaluated during the tenure process by committees composed of people from multiple disciplines. This means that there would need to be an agreement throughout a university to accept open access journals, in order to match the tenure demands of the institution. Furthermore many academics transfer to different institutions during their career, so for personal reasons many would choose to target widely accepted journals to maintain job flexibility. The only reasonable course is for these journals to evolve prestige based on quality of published research which will take time. It's not easy to replace this outmoded model with a superior model due to inertia for a variety of reasons.
One real possibility would be for the prestigious journals to move to being online-only. This would reduce their operating cost significantly which could result in lower fees for publications and subscriptions.
Ray Seyfarth, ray.seyfarth@gmail.com, http://rayseyfarth.blogspot.com
You seriously underestimate how much CRAP is submitted to serious journals.
He mentioned "editorial excellence", do you really need that to weed out outright crap? Perhaps the whole "buy a prestigious journal, get a bunch of good articles" model is wrong. Why not treat all papers individually? You don't need to get them shoved to you, researchers simply publish online and the rest of the community then reviews the things that have been published. Reviewers get meta-reviewed and receive new reviewing weights accordingly. No journals needed. Something like Slashdot comments, only more thorough. (I guess the real problem is the automated logic that would select appropriate reviewers for the respective articles in an unbiased, yet meaningful way. That sounds pretty tough to me.)
Ezekiel 23:20
It ensures data isn't faked or fraudulent.
NO. That is absolutely not the point of peer review.
Peer review is designed to ensure that there are no methodological or logical flaws in the project. Essentially, peer review assumes that the data is accurate, but makes sure that the conclusions derived from the data are reasonable. It will also check to make sure that the methodology used to collect the data is sound.
There are almost zero checks for faked or fraudulent data. Faked data will only be found immediately if the faker did something very stupid.
Where science will find faking is in followup studies. Eventually, people will try and reproduce the same result, or at least a similar result. If they fail to reproduce the claimed data, then there is an issue and the fake might be eventually found. But this takes quite a bit of time, effort, and money, and therefore isn't part of the peer review process.
Open-access and other cheap(er) publication venues are out there, more and more over time. But as well as lack of 'prestige' there are obstacles:
1) If you have a great result you publish it in the best place you can, not the most accessible to random people. Thus open-access journals get weak submissions, which makes them either look weak or not publish much. When someone is looking for a place to publish, he or she may be turned off by the quality or limited/sporadic content, while the journal may water-down its quality in order to have any content whatsoever. The result is a downward spiral.
2) It's all in the indexing. Looking through random web searches is a necessity, but looking through sites like ACM or IEEE removes a huge amount of dreck.
3) New venues are flaky. If archived in somewhere prestigious, that archive will likely persist, one way or another. A new journal that pops out of nowhere with unclear backing may or may not be there in a few years, and then all that lovely free access is moot.
4) They cost too much to the author. Yes, they give discounts to the poor, but it's still a hefty amount to publish when other good places do it for free or fairly close to free.
5) The people running them are largely unknowns. If some number of well-established and famous people would support and be involved that may turn some heads, but they don't, so it's mostly it's independents, startups and new researchers, none of which have much pull.
In my experience, just contacting one of the authors and kindly asking for a copy works. Moreover, once you start to contribute a little (in my case reporting possible new species of scorpions and assisting on a field trips / being a guide to a location of a possible new species) makes that new articles just come in regularly by email.
That said, I do agree that access should be free.
Perl Programmer for hire
Almost all papers from the fields of economics, administration and the like are posted (many even on draft status) on http://ssrn.com/ for free.Even if they are selected and put into a journal after, you will probably will have free acess to them if you just look for then into there.
Worse yet is the fact that, in academic publications, it's not the opinion of the authors that matters, nor is it, to a lessor extent, the opinion of the authors peers in that discipline that matters either. As others her have pointed out, publication is important for two reasons beyond the academic consideration of advancing the field. Being published in say Nature, matters for tenure and grant applications as well. It's the presitige of the publication of non-academics in the academic field that matters for those issues. You not only have to convince Professor Steamhead of the integrity of your Open publication, but convince the Dean of Steamology that a) Example Journal is as good prestige wise as Nature and b) This fact is already well established in that field, so all the other deans and grant board chairmen know this too.,/i>
THAT is the hard thing to establish, the near universal understanding and presumption that new and shiny Open Journal for Steamology is just as good as Proceedings of the Royal Society for Steamology which has been publishing for over 80 years.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
I get the impression that tenure is a major concern only of American academics, but obviously the world of publishing extends beyond that to many other countries. I am at a northern European university, and here there's no need to worry about tenure, because it's rarely a problem to keep renewing one research or teaching contract year-in, year-out. And in the rare case that you are suddenly unable to renew that contract, you'll receive completely adequate benefits from the state for the few months until you can do so again. Are academics in the US desparate for tenure because without that job security they would be left in poverty?
The academic circus is all about pleasing the right people and having the right network.
I gave up on a very advanced PhD thesis without regretting it for a second (maybe because the job that dragged me away was simply so much better than being a PhD student slave) because I suddenly didn't have to deal with this circus of vanity and status anymore; instead I'd suddenly be able to focus on real research and engineering.
The big ones like IEEE are and will for a long time dominate the "market", commercialize other people's work, and hinder free access to the world's knowledge. I doubt it's going to change in my lifetime.
I'm an academic researcher. I research new technology because I believe in the power of science to make the world a better place. I strongly believe in it, this job is my life's work, my childhood dream. I don't publish in prestigious journals because I want to show off. I publish in them because otherwise I am not going to be able to carry on doing this work. Researchers are valued by their publication record, and it is assessed on shallow terms. The majority of researchers are, like me, post-docs. We work temporary contracts for a couple of years, desperately hoping we'll get a good enough publication record so we can move on to being a lecturer/ assistant professor.
If I was forced to pay to publish in the established journals then I would pay. But it would be a matter of survival not vanity.
This is like saying "we don't need Slashdot or Ars Technica or the NYT, just go to Twitter and let the community upvote the most important news. People with more followers have more weight when favoriting/retweeting".
You will never again see actual news.
There is no way around peer review, and good peer review can only happen if experts choose the review panel. Now this is already being done by professors for journals (for free!) and there is a movement of high-profile profs that will only review for Open Access journals. This is definitely a way to go, and the government agencies requiring Open Access is likely the best solution to date.
this sig is useless
The detail you're missing is that academic journals have a hierarchy. The top ranked journals in a field get far far more submissions than mid or lower ranked journals. So even though the peer-review process might be identical (to the point where in small fields such as mine I regularly review for both top ranked and mid ranked journals, as do all my colleagues - ie its even the same pool of reviewers), the higher ranked journals will end up publishing the more groundbreaking research, because they cream off the best of their submissions (and once your article gets rejected at the top journal you resubmit it to a lesser journal). As a reader, you use the contents pages of the high ranking journals to work out what's currently considered cutting edge in your field, and the mid-ranking journals to see all the necessary 'filling in the gaps' research. As an author, you want to be published in the top ranking journal because a) it's more likely to be seen and read by colleagues in your field; b) your colleagues pay more attention to your work generally if you're consistently publishing in top ranking journals; and c) tenure/promotions committees give more 'weight' to articles published in higher ranking journals. I've literally seen publication requirements for tenure at some US universities that look like "A minimum of 3 articles published in the following list of top-raked journals or a minimum of 5 articles published in the following list of lesser-ranked journals".
So in short, even though I (like everyone I know) would prefer to publish in open access journals, simply on ethical grounds, most of us still submit a lot of our work (and particularly our best work) to journals which have been around for longer than the open access movement just because they remain at the top of the hierarchy. The good news is this isn't a static situation - journals can and do move up and down the hierarchy, and some of the open access journals (including some of the PLOS journals you mentioned) are rising quite rapidly in the impact rankings. The other major point is a lot of the key journals are actually the property of various societies or academic organizations which simply contract with for-profit publication companies to handle all the messy bits (eg 'Addiction', the leading journal in my field, is the journal of the Society for the Study of Addiction, not simply a journal owned by Wiley who publishes it). A lot of these contracts are long term (25 years or more) but as they expire, you might see a lot of key journals becoming open access simply because the sponsoring organization decides to switch to an open access model simply because they now can, and have a philosophic interest in seeing their journal be as accessible as possible.
(I guess the real problem is the automated logic that would select appropriate reviewers for the respective articles in an unbiased, yet meaningful way. That sounds pretty tough to me.)
That is kind of like saying: "Why don't we just build a space elevator now? (I guess the real problem is finding a material to use, and that might be tough.)"
Finding appropriate reviewers, screening for conflict of interest, managing the reviewers, and resolving conflicts is a bulk of the work an editor does. Getting that all to work well is what increases the relevance and usefulness of some journals (inertia being the other half...).
Additionally, a big aspect of some of those steps is not just making sure the research did a good job, but filtering for significance. Some of the most prestigious journals are picky about how important and wide reaching they think the paper will be, while others are more work horse, take anything or reasonable quality and usefulness.
This isn't to say this can't be divided up and done more collaboratively and with the help of technology. But there is a lot involved that it is not going to be solved by just a better website interface.
As someone who is on the editorial board for 3 journals, reviews about 3-4 papers a week, and is not a faculty member (I'm a contract researcher) with over 50 peer reviewed publications to his name, let me tell you about some costs you're missing in your assumptions.
1) You're correct that the peer review process is provided free by scientists like myself, and it is our duty to provide this review. However, I'll spend 1-3 hours on a paper reviewing for content. What I'm not doing is copyediting. You're assuming that the papers submitted are in good shape when they arrive, and I would say out of the hundreds of papers I've reviewed over the years, only rarely have I found one polished and ready to go. Almost all of them have formatting errors, typos, and grammatical errors. The worst ones sometimes are those where the author is not a native English speaker. They could have absolutely fantastic results, but the spelling and grammar is so bad you can't exactly figure out if they've discovered something novel or if their results are totally bogus. You need to pay for someone (or multiple someones) to clean up, copyedit, and format each paper.
2) Electronic review system. I'm not seeing how your model pays for this. Someone has to pay to host, maintain, and power those servers - they don't set up themselves. That is a cost that can be divided per paper submitted to the journal - but then onto #3.
3) Many of the open-access journals make the author pay to submit the article upon acceptance to the journal, thus paying for items #1 and #2, but with budgets being cut you're asking the author to sacrifice even more of his small budget (which in my case pays some of my salary). So who pays in the end is always going to be a sticking point.
4) Not all peer review is fast. You're assuming all scientists are ideal and get right on the paper as soon as they get it. I've had papers that came back in a week, and others that took 9 months (reviewer #3 sat on it and the editor couldn't get them to follow up after they had accepted the invitation to review). So you need to pay for some infrastructure to either pull the paper back from the offending reviewer, or pay for automatic reminders and follow-up.
I personally like the existing system as is - it works well for me and I can usually rest assured that the content which does finally get published is polished and ready to use. But I'll agree that the journal costs are not sustainable. What I'd rather see is that after 5-10 years, any federally funded research automatically becomes public domain. That way the journal publishers make their funds to sustain the quality of the journals (and I'm talking print quality here only) and the system continues to run smoothly, plus the public domain gets to build off of the results that we as taxpayers paid for.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
He has no idea what he's talking about, as he only sees the problems at the surface.
But there are some folks who have given better suggestions that are actually involved in the publication process. Take for instance Jason Priem and Brad Hemminger's article last year, "Decoupling the Scholarly Journal" (note -- which actually *was* peer reviewed, unlike someone using Slashdot as editorial / soapbox.)
For those not familiar with the authors, Priem is one of the people behind the Altmetrics Manifesto, which argues for other way to measure the value of scientific articles other than h-index and impact factor. Unfortunately, a lot of tenure & promotion committees look at those as being their all important measure.
There *are* folks working on the issue ... I'm involved with it from the side of data citation. Some of the societies care ... I know AAS (one of the societies I'm a member of) published a statement that they open access to anything 12 months old automatically, and have for years.
But we've got it now where the publishers are paying the societies for the right to publish their journals ... and for societies who were losing members due to the recession, a few of 'em took the bait. It's going to take some time to figure out what the best models and infrastructure are for each discipline, who's going to pay for it, and for all of the existing contracts to run out.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I generally agree, but it would be easier if federal funding for research were a bit more generous so it actually paid for it, rather than paying for only parts, sometimes not even very large parts.
For-profit journal companies are one side of the problem, but there are even a lot of non-profit professional organizations which don't publish open access, because they need the revenue provided by library subscriptions to keep the organization going: organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and the American Mathematical Society. If these organizations were funded by taxpayers instead of having to rely on raising their own funds, they would not have that problem, and would have no problem going open-access.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That is going to be a potential problem with journals, open or not. The closed journals I've dealt with had appeal processes and ways to bring extra editors into the process if there is a perceived conflict. So while single people can have their influence, either way there would be some amount of review and oversight possible.
You can't just send the paper to random people to review. They do, at least, need to have some expertise in the subject. On the other hand, I don't think you can rely on people to accurately portray their own level of expertise. (I'm an expert on zero point energy fields and over unity devices.) So, you need some way of reviewing the reviewers. I suppose I could think of some algorithms for doing this (using some kind of impact factor), but I don't think the results would be as good as the results from a committee of humans. That said, I don't have any idea where all that money is going for a journal.
If you want it freely available then lobby your granting agencies to pay for it.
Most granting agencies take a dim view of high publication costs in grant budgets.
Change college ranking criteria, and you will change tenure requirements. Change tenure requirements, and you will change publishing habits. University presidents care how they appear in the college rankings, and faculty productivity (publishing in big journals) in on key to those rankings. So they help to create tenure requirements that ensure that faculty publish in top journals. They don't care if those top journals are open access or not.
This essay completely ignores the costs of editing and typesetting.
A journal editor is not an automaton but rather an expert in the field who spends a lot of time making decisions that require expertise: summarily rejecting papers that wouldn't be worth a reviewer's time; judging who is qualified to review an article; weighing conflicting reviews; handling appeals and all the other special circumstances that come up. Some editors go further and work with authors to improve papers in a variety of ways. And very few scientists are good enough writers that their manuscripts won't benefit substantially from professional copy-editing.
Finally, there's the process of converting author-submitted LaTeX or MSWord files into professionally typeset journal pages. This process is not automatic and requires quite a bit of skill. Only a small subset of authors will ever learn to produce typeset manuscripts that approach professional quality. You might claim that readers don't care about these things, but in fact, it's far easier and quicker to read an article that is properly typeset.
So the challenge of open access (which I'm all for) is to find a way to pay the salaries of the editors and typesetters. Anyone arguing for open access who doesn't even acknowledge the importance of editing and typesetting shouldn't be taken seriously.
The real reason journal articles should be free is that right now science is like a secret behind a paywall.
If everyone has it, no one has it. The essence of prestige is eliteness... "I'm better than you..." "You can't be one of us..."
It's the same impulse which makes every bloody-handed barbarian who smacks down all the neighboring barbarian call himself a noble. It's what makes a lot of people look up to some fairly terrible examples of Homo Sapiens as celebrities or leaders. It's what makes a lot of people struggle to join organizations pre-populated by horrible people.
Theodor Geisel did some significant research on this subject.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I cannot speak for academia in general, but I can provide a bit of insight for how this works in computer science. I have published articles in journals and conferences in computer science, and they are all available for free on my website. In fact, I have found that most researchers in computer science make their work available to the public, on their website, free of charge. Think about it -- we want our work to get out there and be read. Ideally, we would even like it to be cited. And keeping it behind a paywall does nothing to further this.
Some academic conferences, such as the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2013/), explicitly allow authors to post their publications on their websites. Other venues may technically prohibit this practice, but authors in computer science tend to post their research online anyway. In general, I have found computer science articles far more accessible than, say, those times I have been looking for an article in psychology or economics.
if one gets an article published and it has gone thru peer review and peer acceptance it carries the prestige. The problem is, the peer process limits the amount of people looking at it, thinking about it, or working on it. Opening the articles up to be free is gonna open them up to a whole new audience that may have a new concerns. Now the publisher or writer has to spend resources to investigate the concern or lose credibility. As long as it costs something to get a copy of the journal, then readership is limited to those willing to spend the money. A passing interest in a subject may get people searching the web on the subject, but not spending money on a magazine they aren't going to read regularly. Heck, I hardly ever read the ME magazines I get with professional memberships.
1. Recognize the way it is
1a. And the why of the way it is
2. Recognize the way it can be
2a. And the why of the way it should be
3. ?????? (the how to move from 1 to 2 part)
4. Change Achieved (Equivalent to Profit!)
2 and part of 1 are recognized in TFA. (Way it is, way it can be, why it should change - free information is good.)
Prestige may be part of it why the way it is, though I'm skeptical that this is the whole. But let's say it is.
What TFA completely misses the point on is part 3. The question seems very simple. How do Open Access journals then gain the ability to confer more prestige? Or how do academics recognize those who publish in the open source as gaining more prestige?
Until that question is accurately described and answered, there is no way to reach step 4.
The idea of getting everyone to "decide" a random new open access journal should be high prestige may be a pipe dream, but a top-flight open access journal can spring up overnight, with the right backing. There is a recent example of this in the biosciences, http://www.elifesciences.org, backed by several big funding bodies.
I'm sure it's not much cheaper to publish there than other open access journals, but it aims to be on a par with Nature & Science, and the articles in it look of a similar quality from what I've seen. If enough high-prestige universities and funding bodies back a new open access journal it can go right in at the top...
But if someone from a journal or conference I never heard of asked me to peer review something I may simply say no. It's not just the prestige of the author that matters. The reviewer has to feel they are actually reviewing peers and not just random crazy people.
Yeah, it would quickly turn into the spam we all get from random publishers asking us to contribute to their journal we've never heard of... So how would a scheme like this pull itself up by its own bootstraps out of the morass of publication spam we all get already?
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
It ensures data isn't faked or fraudulent.
NO. That is absolutely not the point of peer review.
Peer review is designed to ensure that there are no methodological or logical flaws in the project. Essentially, peer review assumes that the data is accurate, but makes sure that the conclusions derived from the data are reasonable. It will also check to make sure that the methodology used to collect the data is sound.
I agree that the point of peer review isn't to guard against fake data but this view is overly narrow. The point is (or can be) much broader than error trapping. Done right (according to me, anyway, and I do a lot of it) peer review for journal articles helps make papers better. Reviews in my field (geosciences) can address writing, logic, figures, ties to previous work... I have been asked questions as an author that made me entirely rethink the point I was making. Constructive peer review leads to better papers, and that's why it's important to the scientific community as a whole.
The scientific societies, not for-profit companies like Elsevier, are the major publishers in my area. It's interesting that some European and American societies now have open-access journals. The American Geophysical Union publishes Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, which operates under a Creative Common license (even though the AGU just entered a partnership with for-profit Wiley). The European Geophysical Union has a couple of open-access journals (one on building computational models, another more general, and I may be missing some. The EGU journals published the author/reviewer/editor dialog as "comments" and allow for anyone to comment (up voting!) but I've never heard anyone say they find that more useful than careful peer review.
>"Are academics in the [UK] desparate for tenure because without that job security they would be left in poverty?"
Yes.
It is ok when you are young to work for a while then get government benefits when you are out of work, when all you have are a few possessions that you can throw in your car, and go and sleep at a friend's house for a few months until another job comes along. But as you get older you buy a house and have to keep up the payments, and many people start families and have to think about feeding and clothing their children and maybe supporting a partner who might be not working or only part time working. In the UK some universities assume academics are young, single, highly mobile, with no ties or relationships or financial commitments beyond cheap rent and pizza. It is harder as you get older.
>"here there's no need to worry about tenure, because it's rarely a problem to keep renewing one research or teaching contract year-in, year-out"
Not here in the UK. You are only going to get a few contracts, then they will start looking for somebody younger and cheaper than you and asking why you are not getting promoted (and thinking maybe they should get rid of you...).
Historically the act of publishing (making work available to readers) was tied to the quality control (QC) processes of academia. When you publish on paper this is a necessity, but where I see publishing headed is a separation of these two functions. In an online world there is really no reason to conflate the two. (My main reservation about open-access journals like PLoS One is that they are too much a replica of traditional journals.)
In my ideal world:
1. Everyone publishes their articles for free in an online repository (say Arxiv), starting as early as the preprint stage. If an author needs help with document preparation (typesetting, graphics, proofreading), they can contract with a freelancer through the repository. (I.e., you really don't need an editor at Nature to help you find typos.) An author can revise their paper at any time, but previous versions are kept. Additionally, data that is commonly not published today (code, complete datasets, analysis scripts) could be attached as reference, and publishing these supporting materials would be strongly encouraged.
2. Authors can submit their work to one or more editorial boards, for evaluation and (potential) selection. They pay for this service, likely several thousand dollars since the work is expensive. If an editorial board approves their work, it gets tagged in the repository in a very visible way, which can then be used for filtering/reading. Multiple tags could be attached to an article. Some editorial boards might for example only check a piece of work for accuracy (say in its statistical analysis, or simulation code). Others may focus on importance and potential impact. All of these tags together form one component of the article's "reputation" (see below).
3. All references to works submitted after the introduction of the system, are links to those articles in the repository. So the repository can easily track the number of citations a given article has, and from articles of what reputation. The number and reputation of citing articles forms a second component of the article's "reputation".
Initially the editorial boards would evolve out of the current journal hierarchy, so for example in physics there would be a "Physical Review Letters" editorial board. (Which may continue printing a hardcopy of the PRL journal, at their discretion, if they can make the economics work.) New editorial boards could come into being, for example on specific functions like fact- or accuracy-checking. The reputations of these editorial boards would likely be relatively persistent over time, like the perceived reputations of print journals today.
I would submit this would also be imminently practical for the academic community to move into. It builds on the publishing and QC mechanisms that currently exist.
http://www.freeimagehosting.net/newuploads/v74bu.png
There is no way around peer review
I was not disputing that. I'm only wondering about the possible ways of maximizing the amount of quality peer-review with the limited human resources that we have.
Ezekiel 23:20
Other than the integration into a single database/site, that is how it already works in many fields. You are free to just post it up to a preprint server without review. You can pay to get it reviewed by someone like PRL, and they let you keep it on the preprint server or any other free access server without paying anything (or you can pay $1-2k, although sometimes a lot less, to let them host it for free too). You can then stamp your paper as accepted by the journal.
Although I am a senior technologist in industry, I once struggled with the academia vs. industry question. What decided me was a fellowship I earned with a university research institute. The only people who were deep into research and development were the graduate students. The "professors" were spending all their time chasing after little philanthropic sub-man-year grants. Beyond that were my experiences with professors who could not care less about communicating outside their immediate peer group. There were even those who could not see why something not working was a bad thing. They could not creating anything that actually worked based on their theories but that did not bother them. In industry I have found considerable funding laying on the floor waiting to be scooped up by those who can transition theory to industrial reality so that companies get serious problems solved and new capabilities created. Yes, I do publish. Companies like that too since it is additional advertising. But, the money comes from measurable traceable accomplishments. It is interesting to note that there is NO shortage of jobs for Ph.D.s who can make their knowledge worth something to organizations with money to spend. These practitioners never forget that if funders do not understand a development then they will not use it. If funders do not use a development then they will see no value in it. If funders see no value in a development, one should expect funding to disappear.
As mentioned in the other recent academic publishing story, there has been some progress but it has been slow. One thing that I am hopeful about are "epijournals" which separate the review from the distribution by serving as overlays to the remarkably successful arxiv preprint servers, at least in many areas of math and physics.
There are a number of issues here, many of which have been brought up often before. A few to recap:
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Open Access Journals, like the vanity journals, have very little in the way of committment to maintaining quality, hence you get all sorts of crap "papers" published in them.
If Nature prints a paper that's crap, its reputation gets hit and if this continues, they WILL die. Why pay to print in Nature if they'll print any old shit as long as it pays?
Open Access have no financial incentive to take anything, unlike the vanity journals, but they have no ablity to accrue value being published in and they ARE gamed.
This is an interesting idea and I can see how the process can bootstrap itself to become more visible over time.
Now, if Prof. "X" wants to boost his reputation by publishing in a 'prestigious' journal
Last I heard, Prof. X tries to stay out of the public eye for the most part. He doesn't want his school to get too much attention. This isn't typical behavior for academics, I admit, but it seems to work for him.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In other fields this process is sometimes called 'building a brand' and once you have it you charge a premium for it. And now that it exists, it is self-sustaining to a degree.
So you claim that scholarly journals are a Veblen good: they're desirable because they're expensive.
He mentioned "editorial excellence", do you really need that to weed out outright crap?
Yes. You need an editor that has some knowledge of the field so he can be the front line filter. To reject things that aren't formatted correctly, contain extraneous material, etc.
You don't need to get them shoved to you, researchers simply publish online and the rest of the community then reviews the things that have been published.
That pushes an awful lot of work out onto an awful lot of people, most of whom are not qualified to do it. You want me to be a reviewer for your work? Ok. I have neither the time to do it correctly nor the temperament to deal with nonsense. Send me your article, I'll shoot the review right back to you.
Something like Slashdot comments, only more thorough.
Right. We want a system where mod stalkers moderate everything that some people say down until it is hidden. That's the best way to produce really good science. Absolutely. And every reader of your ./ journal has the time to read at -1 to pick out the good things that were modded incorrectly or maliciously.
And more important, every reader of the ./ journal has the ability to determine which articles at -1 have been modded correctly and which have not. Nobody is there trying to learn new things, they're all there looking for old stuff they already know.
I guess the real problem is the automated logic that would select appropriate reviewers for the respective articles in an unbiased, yet meaningful way.
You mean like the job of the EDITOR that you want to do away with?
There's a reason why Wikipedia articles don't count towards tenure. It's not because they are easy to produce, but because anyone can edit them to say anything, and there is no real method to determine who is qualified in a topic to vet the material. Would you want your name on a Wiki article that half a dozen nitwits with no understanding of the topic and a hardon for putting you in your place have edited? I don't think so. Even the current review system has times when reviewers aren't fair or unbiased. Keeping that from being a regular occurrence is one of the jobs of the editor. Knowing who's who well enough to know who not to send something to is just as important as knowing who it should be sent to.
Researchers should be required to publish their findings, not for the prestige but for the simple reason that their research is worthless if it is not conveyed to other people. From the viewpoint of governments as funders the more the merrier ( save of course for classified work, but even there the more scientists with the appropriate clearance the better ). So in general open access is the preferred choice. When I was a grad student, the areas of physics which were serviced by arXiv and it's predecessors the citations were to arXiv by the top researchers. Simply because by the time the paper was published two levels of citation passed. The people in the area knew who the top tier researchers were, they read their papers, read teir cites and often read the papers by people they cited. It worked well enough. If the top researchers simply started publishing their works in places like arXiv and the overlay journals and avoid the publishers that would be enough prestige. Overall I think that "science libraries" should simply go away. In most such libraries, even if they only subscribed to journals that someone had read an article or two, they would find that 90% of the publications were never read. Keeping all those paper journals is a waste of dwindling space, and once tje journals become ejournals, one can restrict access to certain people, or one has to open the journals completely. Making the journals available at a site to the public simply wont work ( logistically eg which terminals does the public use? ). The thing is that no matter what the short term outcome is, the long term outcome is going to be open access.
Basically, I think TFA's author is too impatient. Let the open access journals publish for 10-20 years, and the good ones will naturally replace the for-profit ones. Best of all, due to the low cost of creating and operating open access journals compared with commercial ones, waiting 10-20 years is entirely feasible and realistic.
Science moves slowly. That's a feature, as its role is to be at the foundation of knowledge.
Who pays the fees to publish a paper? Grants and research contracts, (generally, the government).
Part of almost every government research grant and contract is that the government has unlimited data rights, including unlimited rights to every publication which comes out of the research.
Academia started these journals. Academics run the journals. Academia (tries to) negotiate away these data rights from the government. Academia itself is a closed model.
You can go to DTIC and read any unclassified military research report for free. Try it! It's fun reading about Russian nuclear reactors from 1969. NRL and Lockheed have to put stuff up there, Harvard doesn't. It used to be we all knew the government owned government funded research.
Academia has an immense lobby, bigger than the defense industry. They've displaced the contractors and government labs in basic research and closed it off from the public. Why is it easier to get a military report on nuclear reactors than to get a report of what a professor did with the tax dollars we sent him?
All we need to do is remind Academia that we own this stuff, not them. The executive branch already has the power to do that.
I'm an expert on zero point energy fields and over unity devices.
Would Mark Shuttleworth be an expert on Unity over devices?
#1 is called an overlay journal (they don't actually host the content, they just review & link to stuff on other servers).
#2 is effectively part of what Priem and Hemminger suggested as a Decoupled Journal, in which you break up the various tasks and pay for them individually.
#3 is is just simple bibliometrics / scientometrics, which are easy so long as you have sufficient identifiers (DOI, bibcode, etc.), and can agree on what the proper thing to measure is.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Dating site OKCupid does something like the negative of this:
This is not terribly different from the moderation system here at /. in that all content is initially visible and is only moderated after publishing. But it's similar to the academic case in that items go to anonymous peer review and then to a non-anonymous editor for final decision.
Traditional (capital-intensive) publication provides a framework of impartial reviewers and editors to maintain 'prestige'. The publishing corporation's income depends on maintaining that image of impartiality. There are plenty of problems with the cost of this framework and with the reality (as opposed to image) of impartiality, for instance undeclared influences. Uncritical acceptance of open access journals can also be problematic, where the quality of the science is not ensured.
Ted-X Espana provided an example recently when its editorial and reviewing process was hijacked by a collection of alternative therapists and nutritionists. They successfully submitted, accepted and presented a wide variety of completely unscientific material that supported their own practices and businesses, material which no scientifically-trained medic would accept as valid.
In my field there is a huge problem currently of materials that look like scientific journals, but are not. Most are in-house publications of particular nutritional suppliers or therapy associations, and are easy enough to identify. Some look much more like journals - what Ben Goldacre calls 'truthiness'. Most doctors have been presented with miracles and self-diagnoses based on quackery. Patients refer to papers in these publications because they can not tell the true value of the editorial process behind 'real' journals.
If we want open access then we have to collectively stand behind creditable publications like Plos (while criticizing any appearance of poor standards) and collectively discredit imitations of scientific publication.
If you have a university or college near by check with them. They may have a subscription. Also check your local library, if there is a particular article you want to read, they can probably get the article by interlibrary loan. The fact of the matter is that publishing an article and maintaining a website is not free so, the subscription fees go to support these journals in providing a high quality publication. Although it may require one to step away from their computer for a while and do some actual leg work.
You need an editor that has some knowledge of the field so he can be the front line filter.
That's exactly what I had in mind, but "having some knowledge in the field" and "excellence" somehow don't feel like belonging into one sentence to me. I'd expect "excellent" editors to work on the later stages of scrutinizing the paper. I.e., if the paper is "crap", as you said, why do you need to be "excellent" in order to recognize it?
Right. We want a system where mod stalkers moderate everything that some people say down until it is hidden
How would the meta-reviewers know who wrote the review they are reviewing? They're not supposed to be given this information. I'm not suggesting an outright copy of the system, nor would I dare to make an assumption that these two communities are directly comparable.
You mean like the job of the EDITOR that you want to do away with?
I've never said anything like that. Where have I said anything like that?
BTW, could you point me, as an non-academic outsider, to any sources describing the current editorial practice? Any books, web pages, any other materials like that? Or is something that you learn informally as you climb up the degree ladder?
Ezekiel 23:20
The question isn't 'why don't academic publish in open access journals', its really 'why aren't the open access journals as good'?
I publish in both. My papers get read *more* in the open access journals. But the quality of scholarship of those papers, and the ones published along with it is lower. The simple reason is that the open access journals need my money to stay afloat - the fees I pay them to 'publish' (really for the copyediting, layout and coordinating peer review) bias their decision making. Its like an investment bank paying a credit rating firm to rate their product. Guess what - that shit smells like roses! Traditional journals are more likely to be hard-nosed, rejecting more papers up front and picking tough peer reviewers. They make their money by keeping their subscribers who want a monthly issue full of rigorously reviewed worked.
So, like my peers, I trust papers published in the traditional journals more than the open access journals, because I know that there is less financial bias. And when I have a choice because I have a great piece of scholarship to publish, I want it in with the other work that I trust myself.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
The present-day system rewards publishing in prestigious journals and punishes the choice to submit to some unheard of open-access journal. That's needed to break that system is collective action (by authors, reviewers, readers, hiring managers) enforced by another reward-and-punishment scheme, not martyrdom. It doesn't work if it's voluntary because deviance from collective action (e.g. submission to Nature) will be rewarded. So the announcement by the president is a great start. The closed journals are going to lose a lot of US-funded authors and reviewers, and then readers, unless they change their policies. Of course, if they don't, then US-funded scientists will be punished by the global system, and more international cooperation would be good.
We paid for it. We should be able to see it, and profit from it.
There is not necessarily, however, a need to see it and profit from it immediately.
A long term right of public oversight over government can be asserted as a fundamental human right in a free country. Exactly what constitutes "long term" would vary from situation to situation, but for many things meaningful oversight should reasonably be able to happen within a few years of events.
In the USA, a fundamental right such as this can be asserted under the 9th Amendment ("rights retained by the people") and the 10th Amendment ("rights reserved to the people").
As such, to the extent that current US copyright law allows publishers to keep control over publicly funded research publications for extended periods of time, that law exists in violation of fundamental rights and is unconstitutional.
The correct long-term solution to this problem is not to worry about the prestige of open-source journals, which will doubtless appear in some fields on their own, and may even supersede the existing journals, but rather to change the current copyright law. As the current copyright law violates the Bill of Rights, any treaty provisions that would prevent such changes are rendered null and void.
The vast majority of research publications (those that receive any public funding, even so much as one dollar) should be made available to the public, free of charge, in an open, easily searchable and usable format, within 1 to 5 years after publication. Making this happen is part of the responsibility that researchers accept in return for the public support they receive.
Having a delay like this between initial publication and making things freely available allows publishers a chance to make reasonable profits, which in turn allows for pre-publication peer review and editing. These processes, while far from perfect, both have considerable value to society, as most writers have difficulty assessing their own work.
This is like saying "we don't need Slashdot or Ars Technica or the NYT, just go to Twitter and let the community upvote the most important news. People with more followers have more weight when favoriting/retweeting".
Even the Slashdot voting process is readily subject to manipulation. From a social science perspective, cliques tend to form in social groupings, and members of cliques can support each other in voting situations at the expense of the group as a whole. Further, some nations (and other special interest groups) have a vested interest in manipulating the "news" about them, and are likely to be funding deliberate manipulation of votes on forums such as this.
Worse yet, so many of these academics receive funding from the government! Their research are in effect paid for by public funding yet the materials they publish become solely for private use.
Generally, if you ask the author(s) you can get a copy emailed, or even a paper copy. Many even make their papers available for download on their institutional web pages. It's not like they're trying to enforce a copyright so they can make money from the sales.
I see what you did there, sir, and I like it.
How would the meta-reviewers know who wrote the review they are reviewing?
First of all, the moderation system in ./, the system you want to emulate, isn't done by "meta reviewers". People get mod points. They sometimes use those mod points against people they don't like. Sometimes it is just they don't agree with them. This is not a system we want to bring into academic publishing.
The "meta reviewer" job in academic publishing is done by the editor, and if you don't think he knows who wrote a review, you don't understand the system. The "meta reviewer" system in /. doesn't change the moderation of the articles that are reviewed, so an article that has been maliciously moderated out of view is still out of view.
And third, in many academic disciplines, the person who wrote the article knows who the reviewer is even if the name isn't on the review when he sees it. Who is most likely to be a reviewer for an article on your subject, and who is most likely to shoot you down?
I've never said anything like that. Where have I said anything like that?
You did, when you said you wanted to get away from paying for the work, and moving to a /. moderation system. Here:
"Simply publish online and the rest of the community then reviews..." Does away with the job of the editor if the AUTHOR publishes and then everyone else is expected to review.
BTW, could you point me, as an non-academic outsider, to any sources describing the current editorial practice?
Editorial practice is, I believe, determined by the journal, and something you learn when you become one. Perhaps the publications guidelines might talk some about it, and those you'll find at the publisher's website or in a copy of the journal. Just one of those fiddly bits that someone is paid to take care of so there is some continuity and conformity.
So since many universities are publishers as well, couldn't they start the trend, and be the publishers of the types of journals mentioned in the article? Perhaps this was previously mentioned, sorry to duplicate if so.
Carrie Braaten, carrie.braaten@gmail.com, not an anonymous coward, just doing a one-time post.