Slashdot Mirror
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:
-
Author submits a paper to journal XYZ.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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:
-
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.
-
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
I think the opposite is actually the problem: salaries generally do vary based on prestige which just gives one more reason that scientists feel they need to chase it. Prestige is much more important to salary than seniority and formal credentials: a hot-shot young scientist who is getting papers in Nature on a regular basis will have universities competing to offer him or her more money than they pay many of their tenured faculty.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
2 Factors which are specific to research institutions.
Associate Professor / Post-Grad / Grad Student = indentured servant / long hours / low pay. Routinely ranked as a highly stressful. Full Prof means labs staffed by said indentured servants. Routinely ranked as a highly rewarding for the time /money.
Up or Out: Most research institutions have a 7 year limit – either make full prof by that point or start searching for your next job in a new city.
>"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.
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.
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.