Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

An anonymous reader writes "'We can enormously extend the record; yet even in its present bulk we can hardly consult it' wrote Vannevar Bush in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. Nearly 70 years later, academics are still wrapping research in inaccessible journal articles. Might they be doing it wrong?"

Comments

Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

[lgw]

Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.

There's a lot that can be done to improve accessibility without the result having an "in popular culture" section! This is a very old idea - as Vannevar Bush said in 1945

wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified"

Re:Could We "Wikify" Scholarly Canons?

[stranger_to_himself]

Well, Betteridge's Law of Headlines and all that. But don't confuse "wiki" with "wikipedia". Having reviewed scholarly journal entries published in a form where they are accessible to all, and all references are hotlinks, could only improve things. Some sort of discussion/comments associated with each article for Q&A, and forward links to all citing works would be great as well, especially works that refute the article in part or in whole.

But this is pretty much exactly what we have at the moment. Most journals will let you read papers online in this way, and provide a list of citing articles and hyperlinks to citations. Most journals accept comments, BMJ even has these as online comments. Look at PubReader for other innovations in this area. I don't think anybody has a serious complaint that academic research is organised badly, its just the cost issue that winds people up.

Academic research at the coal face is necessarily sprawling. The line in TFA that is telling is

If you’re an established researcher interested in summarizing an area of your expertise, or if you would like to write an article in collaboration with someone who is, we’d love to see you propose an article.

Which shows a fundemental misunderstanding of what research writing is. The author is asking for encylopedia or textbook articles, for which there are already plenty of outlets (these are called 'encyclopedias' or 'textbooks'). So fine if they are proposing a new encyclopedia, though god knows why we need a new one, and I'm don't see how one could or should ever become definitive. To suggest that this will replace any part of existing scientific writing is a bit misguided. Two scientists can produce reviews on the same subject given the same source material with vastly different conclusions, its important that all voices can be heard, and 'curation by a community of experts' seems like the antithesis of this.

Oh God...

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "NO".

Inaccessible to whom?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about other disciplines, but I find the literature perfectly readable in mine (computational chemistry/modeling). Not always accessible, but that's not the problem being discussed. While it might be useful for non-related fields to see a shorter, less detailed form of the information there are already too many articles lacking key details in-field.

Re:Inaccessible to whom?

[inflamed]

Having dwelved in same field (a few years of academic research), I have to point out that there is an infuriating reliance on black-box methodology in computational chemistry and molecular modeling. Conversely, I've read synthetic methodology chem papers with obvious errors (at least in the supporting information documents); e.g. describing preparing a solution with a final volume of 2.5 mL in a vessel of smaller capacity (1.5 mL or 2 mL). If a writer provides too little information, there is an implicit assumuption that the writer has the wisdom to determine what's relevant. An alternative is that meaningless yet observed (once) correlations, when observed, lead to publications. There's no such thing as too much information, but researchers become frustrated and cut corners if obligated to fill in what they perceive as the smallest details, such as the size of a microcentrifuge tube in which a solution was prepared. I think a more dynamic and accessible peer review system is warranted. A web of trust model, perhaps.

Re:Inaccessible to whom?

[gl4ss]

hyperlinking it would certainly make sense.

so hypertexting the canon papers. THAT would make a lot of sense. but doing that requires also access.

which makes me ask the question is hypertexting what they mean with wikifying? have we really gone that far off the deep end?

and well a lot of papers are simply required by customs to have such and such number of references. that's why you can get shit published if you just refer to enough other shit.

PLOS

[rueger]

Admittedly I only skimmed TFA, but the better Open Access scholarly journals seem to be already doing much of what's described.

I'm a big fan of the work for instance.

PLOS ONE (eISSN-1932-6203) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication. PLOS ONE welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline. It provides: Open-access—freely accessible online, authors retain copyright Fast publication times Peer review by expert, practicing researchers Post-publication tools to indicate quality and impact Community-based dialogue on articles Worldwide media coverage PLOS ONE is published by PLOS, a nonprofit organization. PLOS ONE is run as a partnership between its in-house PLOS staff and international Advisory and Editorial Boards, ensuring fast, fair, and professional peer review. To contact the Editorial Director, Damian Pattinson, or any of the Publications Assistants (who can be found at our contacts page), please e-mail plosone [at] plos.org. To access EveryONE, the PLOS ONE community blog, please visit http://everyone.plos.org/

Re:PLOS

[rueger]

(Damn - when will Slashdot get an edit button.) Oh well, you get the idea.

Re:PLOS

[Anonymous Coward]

(Damn - when will Slashdot get an edit button.) Oh well, you get the idea.

We could have wiki-slashdot and all edit eachother's comments instead of pointing out grammar flaws!

Re:PLOS

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree PLOS is incredibly valuable, and a great improvement over the expensive walled garden approach, but by "only skimmed TFA" you missed the key point:

PLOS ONE: original research (your quote: "reports on primary research"); written once static document, so even if they accepted reviews it would slowly continually become more and more out of date.

Scholarpedia: Encyclopedic style reviews; wiki, so continuously tracked, corrected, refined, and extended. It should, of course, also point you to all those excellent PLOS ONE articles that you absolutely should read to dig further into the topic.
   

Wait a Generation

[cervesaebraciator]

Last week I spoke at an academic conference where another scholar argued for the use of open-access, open-data journals in our field. With a representative of one of the major university presses sitting right next to him, he made the bold (and correct) argument that the presses were attempting to control content going forward, even if it means strangling libraries and stifling scholarly production. He treated open-access publication as a question of scholarly freedom.

He was completely misunderstood.

As an historian among historians, I expected some resistance to any suggestion that scholarly practices should change. In at least one sense of the word, we're a conservative bunch. But the objections which were raised made me consider a career change. I may as well be a paleontologist if I'm going to walk among living dinosaurs. Nothing's free, one opined, as someone has to pay for the servers. Never mind that our presenter wasn't speaking of cost. We're in a golden age of plagiarism, said another, and this would make things worse. Never mind that we're actually in a golden age of catching plagiarists. A third worried that the ability to search for a keyword in a document would mean people wouldn't read the larger context in which the keyword appears. I can't help but imagining this individual using a razor blade on the indices of her student's textbooks.

Between embargoes, copyright restrictions, and the extraordinary expense libraries have to accept to keep subscription, scholarship is suffering when it ought to be flourishing. Of all people, we in the humanities ought to recognize this fact (last I heard, academic libraries tend to spend around 70-80% of their budgets on science and medicine journals, the rest going to facilities, staff, and last of all humanities). But there I watched a generation of scholars fail utterly to see the copyrighted text on the wall. A shift to open-access is the future of scholarship, but it will take a generation before it can happen. Rather, I should say it will take two generations. The first, mine, will publish in open peer-reviewed journals but not exclusively. We know we need to publish in the older titles if we want jobs and tenure. But once we're in place, we'll be able to accept open journals for their potential, recognizing the value of the next generation's publications in quality open journals.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Anonymous Coward]

It's interesting that in math, the transition to open access journals is being led by some of the most prominent mathematicians, such as Tim Gowers and Terence Tao.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Kevin Fishburne]

Awesome post; couldn't agree more. When you consider how ignorant a lot of people are about science, the idea of making it difficult for those inclined to better themselves through reading journals seems detrimental to society and archaic. The "oracle on the mountaintop" shit really needs to go.

Re:Wait a Generation

[icebike]

With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.
With modern indexing tools (to day nothing of Google or Bing), making these accessible while not actually centralizing their storage is trivial.

Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs. That is why journals sprang up in the first place. It has always been a process of gate-keeping.

Science might take a look at the model of Kernel Developers, and other avid PGP users and hold key signing sessions at their public meetings. Then start using those keys to sign their works. If for no other reason than to make it easier for all to know, by listing the signers of any author's keys, whether the guy is a kook or not.

You may know your peers, your students, or your teachers, but does anyone 4 time zones away, or will anyone in 20 years?

Re:Wait a Generation

[cervesaebraciator]

With every university running a computer network and a web site, paying for servers is the least costly component of research.

One of the interesting points the speaker made concerned exactly this. If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so. More importantly, they'd retain their function as a repository of knowledge, a function increasingly challenged by the presses.

Still, the transition to open journals you postulate can't forget that the whole process depends on some method of distinguishing actual scientific research from junk science posted by whack jobs.

Indeed. But in principle, there's no reason peer review cannot also occur in an online open access journal. In fact, such things already exist. (Work by NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World highlights the potential of this.)

The big hurdle is one of prestige. Publishers hold the prestige for now. Being published is a means of getting the bragging rights necessary to get a job, tenure, and promotion. But the only thing that really gives the publishers such prestige is the voluntary efforts of generations of scholars doing peer-review. The sooner scholars realize that they themselves are the real basis for scholarly prestige, the better.

Re:Wait a Generation

[VortexCortex]

HTML was created to be one giant open access journal of information. Thus heralding the dawn of The Information Age. Of course the "academics" will be the last ones to abandon their bogus and wrong practice of artificial scarcity of information. Instead of monetizing information which is infinitely reproducible and thus ECON:101 says has zero price regardless of cost to create, they could instead pull heads from asses and market that which is actually scarce: Their ability to do the work to create said information. Monetizing their ability more strongly would naturally follow the decrease in ablitiy to monopolize information. No work is done in a vacuum; The more information available to work from the better. Somehow they think that putting barriers in place to limit access of their work to those who would fund their future research is a good idea...

This is the first generation of the Information Age. Of course there will be some adjustments, but you'd think the supposed learned individuals wouldn't be so daft: The mechanic doesn't change you for each time you start the car, they charge for the work done once. Try getting a loan for your business plan of selling ice to Eskimos -- You'll be a laughing stock. Yet, somehow people think selling 1's and 0's to people with computers is a valid business strategy -- And we let them call themselves "scientists".

For shame.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Anonymous Coward]

The last thing ignorant science people want to do is to read scholar journals. If it is out of their field, most of the scholars don't want to read them either because they would be hard to understand. That's like saying how we should strive to put more and more things out there in sanskrit because the masses of people who don't know sanskrit are really losing out.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be so sure. There can always be a snow or ice shortage, but cheaper alternatives exist. http://www.wwlp.com/weather/us-wx-news/snow-shortage-hits-mushers

Re:Wait a Generation

[DingerX]

Well, I don't know what part of history you're in, but such a group of neanderthals sound like nineteenth-century Americans. Then again, by your beery name, you could be classical or heaven forfend, 'Renaissance'. No matter. I'd put the matter a little differently: most humanities professors stop studying broadly about the time they get a job. I mean, hell, I'm too busy publishing and running a journal that I don't have time to dedicate to most other things. So that means that, on the whole, their image of the field is fossilized at that moment (and maybe updated by a few fancy theoretical buzzwords).

I'm co-editing a (mostly) closed-access journal that's fairly highly rated in my little field. In many places, scholars are scored according to where they publish, so an article with us is worth (for performance review) four articles elsewhere. That's obscene, and the huge part of the problem is a systemic belief in the "quantification of academic outcomes"; you can't easily answer the question "Is this person good?", so you answer the question "How many articles in INT1-ranked journals did she publish?". The predictable results are: bloating of INT1-ranked journals, increase in number of INT1-ranked journals, and reorientation of scholarship aimed at what those journals are interested in. You can see the same argument, mutatis mutandis with impact factors: if you select from intelligent agents based on a measurement that has some correlation with performance, those agents will perform to the measurement, weakening the future correlation.

While professors may not care about which way the wind is blowing, academic publishers do. So our publisher recognizes that the winds are blowing open access (indeed, many European funding bodies require OA publication when possible), and offers an open-access option. They see the writing on the wall, and the copies of their works on the Russian websites, and the people at conferences with removable hard drives. As academics, scholarly work is the very air we breathe, it is a necessity, and as a group we find an inequality in access to such work more unjust than people making questionably-authorized copies of copyrighted works for their own research. Open Access, like Open Source, is a great idea, and one that can lead to great riches. The challenge lies in transferring the costs of the work: it is in the interests of academic institutions to support OA publications with material and labor, but there aren't many institutions that are willing to hire people to work exclusively on the heavy lifting behind such publications.

Finally, TFA is a scholarly-sounding advertisement for Scholarpedia. As an historian, I don't see how a wiki can function for scholarly work. Put another way, the wiki model is built on assumptions concerning human knowledge that makes it inappropriate for the humanities; TFA furthers these assumptions. The major assumption is that, since we base our knowledge on the field on the work of predecessors, we build upon that knowledge incrementally. One of the major traits of the Social Sciences and Humanities, however, is that we constantly reflect upon the nature of our discipline and, in building upon knowledge, restructure the foundations of the discipline. That means that our criteria for meaningfulness and even truth are constantly changing. So, even when I set out to do something that lends itself to an encyclopedia-style article (which happens occasionally, but not most of the time), I review as much historical data as I can and work through the reconstructions of my predecessors. Inevitably, I can't build on them so much as rewrite them, and I can't rewrite them in a series of edits, but I have to make a single narrative that is my own. Most of the time, however, I'm not writing encyclopedia entries. Encyclopedia entries are not for producing historical arguments, but for guiding readers to those arguments. There isn't a single vision of the discipline, and there isn't even a privileged voice that would express a consensus of the various approaches and interpretations.

Re:Wait a Generation

[Anonymous Coward]

>if you want tenure

What's tenure? To get a one year contract in history in my country you need an University Press monograph.

The problem is the wage labour system. Closed journals is just one way that workers are excluded from the use of the tools and subsistence.

Re:Wait a Generation

[maxwell demon]

Of course the "academics" will be the last ones to abandon their bogus and wrong practice of artificial scarcity of information.

Yeah, academics certainly want nobody to know their work ... sure. That must also be the reason why so many scientists put up their published articles (and often even preprints which are not yet accepted in a journal) on places like arXiv.

Making information available is just one function of journals, and not even the most important. The most important service journals provide is peer review. So if you want to replace journals, don't think about how to make articles available. That problem has already working solutions. Think about how to either organize peer review differently, or how to better organize peer review, or how to replace it with something which is better. Note that one of the important points is that on one hand, the reviewers should have the expertise needed, and ideally people with known interests that the article does or does not appear are excluded. Therefore you cannot allow just anyone to review the article; indeed, much of what goes into the reputation of a journal is how well they choose their reviewers. On the other hand, the author should not know who reviewed the paper, to allow the reviewer to be honest even if it is a paper by an influential author. As reviewer, you have to be able to say that an influential author has written shit without fear that you risk your career for it.

Also note that currently Open Access journals require payment from the author to get the article published, and the fees are not that low. Which has its own share of problems:
* Since now the income of the journal doesn't any longer depend on the number of readers (and thus on the quality of the articles) but on the number of published articles, there's the danger that an open access journal lowers its quality standards in order to get more articles published and thus paid for.
* While OA journals don't restrict reader access, the publication fee creates a barrier for authors who only can publish if they can pay the money (either by being part of an institution which pays it for you, or by having enough money yourself to be able to pay it). I'm not sure that Einstein would have been able to pay for a publication in an Open Access journal from his patent officer's fee.

Yet, somehow people think selling 1's and 0's to people with computers is a valid business strategy -- And we let them call themselves "scientists".

You just showed that you have not the slightest clue about how academic publishing works. The scientists get not a single cent from the publisher for their articles. Let me repeat that, so that this is absolutely clear: The researcher does not get paid by the journal for his article. The scientist profits only and exclusively through the reputation the publication gives him (and the indirect effects, like being able to get funding).

Re:Wait a Generation

[mcelrath]

It will not take "a generation" to make the shift. It will take a systematic change in the hiring and funding priorities of universities, labs, and grant agencies. A faculty candidate who has chosen to publish only in open access journals (with no articles in Science or Nature or other "prestigious" journals) needs to be able to win the job over another candidate with publications in "prestigious" journals. Likewise, a researcher must be able to win a grant over other researchers under the same circumstances.

Currently, choosing to publish in open-access journals is arguably career suicide.

Re:Wait a Generation

[spasm]

In a lot of disciplines, the most prestegious journals are actually owned by scholarly societies, and are published under contract with publishers. 'Science' is the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 'Addiction' (the highest impact journal in my own field) is the journal of the British Society for the Study of Addiction., but is published under contract by Wiley. In other words, publishers *don't* actually "hold the prestige".

A lot of the contracts between scolarly societies and publishers are 25 year kind of things, and were signed long before open access was a thing. But for a lot of journals those contracts are coming towards their end, and I suspect in the next decade we'll see increasing numbers of high impact journals go open access as a consequence.

Re:Wait a Generation

[smaddox]

ECON:101 is wrong about the cost going to zero. The linear, intersecting supply and demand curves still taught in ECON:101 are an obvious absurdity since they predict a negative price at sufficient demand. It doesn't just end there, though. The modified curves that only approach zero are also wrong. It's been known for a while now that the price of a commodity is determined by the cost of production, and therefor does not approach zero at infinite supply.

But regardless, you're right about there being a shift in the way content is created and purchased. We already are starting to see it with video game development being funded by kickstarter. The model that I think will eventually dominate is that the consumers will pay the creators for their time and the content will then exist in the public domain. Attribution will ensure that the creators continue to receive funding.

Re:Wait a Generation

[smaddox]

*absurdity since they predict a negative price at sufficient supply.

Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[Zero__Kelvin]

Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia. Anybody saying things like "Oh God ... How about "NO". is doing exactly that. Wikis are a powerful tool in the right hands when configured properly. There is absolutely no reason why it wouldn't be an excellent idea to leverage the technology in this and many other areas. It is a way to capture content and content history that is searchable, and it can be done with login only access. Right now if you read an article you only get to see what they print. With a wiki you could see the entire history and have far more information at your disposal, including the dead ends explored, etc.

So in conclusion? Oh God no? Nah.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout no, you crazy dutch bastard

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[RobertJ1729]

I don't think there is any confusion. The article linked to in the submission specifically mentions wikipedia by name. Didn't you read it?

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[AthanasiusKircher]

Don't confuse the Wiki as a tool with Wikipedia.

A lot of the discussion here doesn't seem to have much to do with TFA. (Surprise, surprise...)

People seem to be missing the importance of "scholarly canons" in the summary. TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly). This is NOT about Wikipedia (except perhaps as a model of how to do certain aspects of a scholarly encyclopedia better than Wikipedia).

TFA holds up Scholarpedia as its main exemplar of a better kind of scholar online encyclopedia of canonic knowledge in a particular field.

That's not the only one out there, and Scholarpedia does have its issues. Personally, I think if our goal is to produce a standard scholarly encyclopedia for a particular discipline (or for many disciplines), we could also take the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a great example of a model project of collaboration by scholars to produce a summary of research and ideas in a discipline...

... and it's been around for nearly 20 years already. Long before most of these other things have existed.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[AthanasiusKircher]

Sorry to self-reply, but to clarify

TFA is NOT about open-access publishing (except indirectly).

What I meant here is that TFA is about creating open-access resources in the form of a kind of collaborative scholarly encyclopedia summarizing the main consensus of ideas in a discipline. It's NOT about open-access publishing in the sense of publishing your random research out of context, as in a journal or something.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think there is any confusion. The article linked to in the submission specifically mentions wikipedia by name. Didn't you read it?

They did, but someone had changed it.

Re:Wikimedia != Wikipedia

[DingerX]

SEP is great, and it has the advantage that, as a freely-accessible encyclopedia, it's where everyone goes first.

But TFA formulates the problem conflating encyclopedic work with scholarly research and open access:

When academics have been asked why they do not contribute to Wikipedia, or why they do not make their data more easily available, or why they continue to avoid new âoeopen accessâ publication venues, one of the most common explanations is âoenot enough timeâ [7,8]. Academic hiring, tenure, and grant review boards preference most strongly the publication of scholarly results in prestigious outlets. In the sciences these are journals such as Nature and Science, and in the humanities a book published by a selective university publisher [7]. By communicating through such media, an academic can be sure that his or her peers will see (or at least, should have seen) the researcherâ(TM)s contribution. By contrast, contributions to Wikipedia, or to writing popular blog posts, generally accord no academic recognition to a contributor. This may help to explain why, for those without access to institutional journal subscriptions, the claims of todayâ(TM)s academics may at times appear as trustworthy as those of the pre-Enlightenment alchemists.

The "researcher's contribution" is not generally an encyclopedia chapter. Academic recognition distinguishes between advancing the field and serving society by communicating the current state of the field. Both are necessary and rewarded activities, but they are evaluated separately. "Open Access" journals are fair game because they form part of the problem TFA formulates as solvable via Scholarpedia.

Doing It Wrong!

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely.

Pay per read journal were all the rage 20 year ago.

Geophysical Research Letters,

Journal Of Geophysics,

Nature,

Science!

They are all whores! Unlike 'Jesus' I would advocate the killing of the whores!

Our world is better off without them!

Our world will be less polluted without them.

Peoples of the world will be less troubled without them.

Kill Them! Burn Them! Scatter Their Ashes.! Forget Them! They should never have been born.

QED

PS In 200 years hence, Anthropogenic Global Warming ... not even recognized ... in the human vernacular of that time to come.

From a Student Perspective

[windwalker13th]

As a student in the sciences, the most annoying thing is when you are writing a paper and looking for sources you find this great journal article for a source and it only costs $45 to see more then the abstract. This article is essential for your paper so first you try through your library, then you look on the web, then you call your friend at a different college and see if they have access to it. I've never met a student that has paid up front for a journal article.

While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system. I had a friend who worked for a publisher and it was her job to edit journal articles and she was astounded and the poor writing that was submitted and confided that some articles didn't get published because they were so poorly written. What does need to happen though is Publishers need to realize that in this modern age they need a different distribution framework. If you take the approach of netflix and make every journal article available for a small price to individual subscribers everybody would sign up. In one state Instead of having say 10 individual libraries paying 5000 each, you have 60,000 students paying $30 each. There is still a way to make money from this they just need to realize that they need to modernize their distribution methods.

Bottom line, the idea of having only certain articles get published in special prestigious journals because of their significance is still a good idea. However maybe in this future age of article accessibility having articles are voted to be part of a collection based on how often they are cited would be a better indication of how "prestigious" an article is and how well it reflects on the author.

Re:From a Student Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of university students have access to the vast majority of (worthwhile) journals through subscriptions at their libraries. Those subscriptions cost far less than $30 per student and only require the publishers to send a few invoices, rather than trying to manage tens of thousands of small payments. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. If the particular journal isn't available, most universities are also part of a network that allows them to access journal articles that they don't have through an associated library. So if you can't get an article for free through the universities' online access, you just submit an online request and receive a scan of the article from some other university within 72 hours (and normally within 24).

A problem that does exist is access to journals for non-university students, citizens and companies. The subscription costs in these cases tend to be prohibitive leading to "interesting" solutions. I've had co-op jobs where the company was far more excited by my ability to have access to engineering journals than for any other potential skills. This is a market that could be better exploited.

Re:From a Student Perspective

[icebike]

So, 30 dollars per student in a mid sized institution like, for example, the University of Minnesota, comes to a couple million dollars per year.
Average that across the 50 states, and you have a cool Hunderd Million. Throw in non-state institutions, a few Canadian institutions and you have to wonder where 250 million per year is going.

Re:From a Student Perspective

[VortexCortex]

While I am all for having science knowledge be free, somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system.

What the hell are we paying colleges for then, eh? Hosting data is fucking cheap. I got 10 Terrabytes with unlimited bandwidth for $100 a year, and that's not the cheapest. Your concerns are ridiculous. Think. If people are doing work: We can pay them for that work. It matters not if that work is done behind a paywall or on a university's paper publishing wiki, except one way the work benefits the most people and the other the information is made artificially scarce so that publishers can extract money from the system for doing essentially nothing and adding no benefit.

Your move.

Re:From a Student Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

somebody has to edit and layout and do a quick check of the articles to make sure they are making sense, and somebody does have to host the articles and provide the delivery system.

In my field, layout is done by the author (LaTeX), reviewers are volunteers, (I've reviewed dozens of articles, nobody pays me for it), and the one time (so far) I've had a professional journal staffer edit my article, they fucked up a bunch of things because they don't understand the field and turned all my nice vector graphics into pixelated bitmaps. As for hosting articles, this costs pocket change.

Re:From a Student Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

How is the current model different from Netflix? You pay for access to an article for a limited period of time or your sponsoring institution pays a recurring subscription fee for access to all the articles. The only difference is price. (Netflix is generally affordable.)

"Accessibility" has multiple dimensions.

[leftover]

One aspect of "accessibility" is certainly the freedom of access, to get a copy of the paper. This aspect is being discussed most and for good reason.
A second dimension, less discussed, is readability. Scholarly articles are written to be information-dense and unambiguous, communication from a specialist to another of the same. Writing more broadly readable articles is difficult and really not in the skill set of most science specialists. The more expository translation of a scholarly article will be longer than the original and will take a great amount of work to develop. Who is going to do this and how will they be compensated?
I think we need an even greater breakthrough than the Internet for this one.

Re:"Accessibility" has multiple dimensions.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that if the articles are specialized then they remain inaccessible to the masses wether they're open or locked up. But if they're open, someone may translate them into laymen's terms. If they're locked up, very few people have the chance to translate them, and even then they may be stopped by the journal's TOS.

Who pays for the translation? Do you or I get paid for posting on slashdot, or other Q&A forums? Lots of people want to make knowledge more accessible, even if they do it for free. Working people will do it as a hobby, retired people will do it out of boredom. And the post-arpanet internet was exactly about sharing knowledge, not shopping or playing games. No need for a new breakthrough, we just need to slap the young'uns hard and remind them what the net is all about.

Re:"Accessibility" has multiple dimensions.

[maxwell demon]

Do you or I get paid for posting on slashdot, or other Q&A forums?

No. But I wouldn't want the average quality of a Slashdot comment in scientific publications.

motivation

[green is the enemy]

Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing because researchers have no strong motivation to publish there. The cost of access is not an issue to the researchers themselves. Prestige is a huge issue.

Re:motivation

[binarstu]

Open-access journals and scientific wikis are failing...

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? In the sciences, at least, open access journals are thriving. Take a look at any of the PLoS journals, for instance. These venues are well-respected and scientists are eager to publish in them.

Re:motivation

[sconeu]

Netcraft confirmed it.

Re:motivation

[green is the enemy]

Admittedly, that's an observation of the situation in my own field: electrical engineering. The attitude of most professors is pretty horrible: They will basically laugh at you if you try to publish in a non-reputable journal, be it open access or not. I never said any of this was good or desirable. It's just an obstacle these journals face. It's good to see that in some science fields open access is slowly becoming the norm. These people deserve lots of respect for this achievement. Lets hope this success snowballs. It's just hard for me to imagine the IEEE journals and conference proceedings being replaced... maybe they will open up access.

Re:motivation

[lorinc]

Exactly. My guess is that this publishing method is not the cause but the consequence of the current disfunction. Researcher are evaluated on prestige, exactly like businessmen are evaluated on money. That alone means that as a recognized researcher, you have absolutely no interest at seeing concurrent work get published, or perhaps only if they heavily cite your work. With such system, young researcher in small labs will never get any good publication (read in famous journals), whatever the quality of their work, except if they manage to attract a big name.

We have completely reproduced the capitalism system, albeit replacing money with citations. If you were "born" with a good initial capital because your advisors were rich, then you'll easily get more capital, creating dinasties of researchers. I'm not saying these dinasties are incompetent, I'm saying they are after some point barely correlated with competence, and that they mask really brilliant people, which in the end will lack proper funding and quit science.

You would have guess the world of science would have been more objective than that of business, but truth is humans are the same everywhere.

Wikipedia

[Anonymous Coward]

At least one good reason why I don't put my research on Wikipedia is that it's explicitly against Wikipedia policy ('no original research').

That aside, there are journals such as PlosONE and the new Nature journal Scientific Reports which openly encourage comments by anyone. Whether genuine scientific debate gets lost in the noise is another matter.

please don't throw Wikipedia into this

[binarstu]

From TFA: "When academics have been asked why they do not contribute to Wikipedia, or why they do not make their data more easily available, or why they continue to avoid new “open access” publication venues, one of the most common explanations is “not enough time” [7,8]."

The article gets a lot of things right, but that sentence is not one of them. The reasons that academics do not contribute to Wikipedia have been well documented and discussed here and elsewhere. In brief -- you get no credit for your work, and your contributions can be totally wiped out at the whims of editors. The reason experts don't contribute to Wikipedia is not a lack of time; rather, it's because doing so is perceived (quite reasonably) as a waste of time.

In contrast, most scientists I know are quite receptive to publishing in open access journals. Some are still suspicious of them, but I've never heard "I don't have enough time" given as a reason for not publishing open access. Honestly, that objection wouldn't even make sense.

Re:please don't throw Wikipedia into this

[bussdriver]

I contributed a few times and both times an editor jerked me around so I've not bothered since and I was an expert in the topic I was contributing to.

Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

"Look, with just a little bit of learning this new wiki, you can give away the results of your years of hard mental effort and expensive education for free!"

"Er, thanks, but no."

As an overall observer, it seems clear that the very notion of "crowdsourcing" (i.e. free labor) is reaching its nadir on the internet. It's becoming clear that, eventually, all the contributed effort usually serves only to enrich a very small number of owners of the web sites, and the "community's" engagement with the site ends up being one long overextended bait-and-switch. The ideals by which much of the internet's content was built are becoming passe, and that's greatly accelerated by all the cynical "monetization".

What will, IMHO, be needed is some form of "social contract" embedded in the EULA or other form of enforceable mutual understanding between the site owners and the contributors, such that some set of the expectations that enticed the contributors to do so in the first place, will be reliably maintained. Otherwise, offers such as TFA touts end up being simple rip-offs.

Re:Economics

[Anonymous Coward]

Except academics don't get paid by journals anyway. Academics are paid by the university and evaluated by their ability to get their work into top venues.

It seems odd to me

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems odd to me that (taxpayers) that fund public universities are not allowed access to this publicly funded knowledge; that patents don't go to the people who paid for it. That's how it works in the private sector-patents go to the one who pays for it. Yet university scholars (or the university) and not the public are the ones who pay (yet more) for patents used against them. Likewise published articles. Where I live (Canada) taxpayers fund most of the universities, yet researchers will publish pharmaceutical research, obtained at public expense, then its read by someone working for a pharmaceutical company, they patent it, and taxpayers pay (once again) for pills that their research dollars developed. If we are paying for it, at least let it be published in the open, where (if Big Pharma(tm)) tries to patent it, we can claim prior art and give rightful attribution.

Ya think?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol. Huh. Imagine.

Circumstances vary a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "academic journals" covers a lot of ground from professional society journals to commercial publisher products. The latter generally having the worst access restrictions, but not exclusively. The society of Exploration Geophysicists makes all the journals and conference abstracts available to members at no charge other than annual membership. The Society of Petroleum Engineers wants $8.50 US from members and $25 from non-members for a paper. What's really sad is many SPE papers are very short. Commercial journal charges can make your eyes water.

This is a major obstacle if you're not at a major university or company. When the company I worked for closed the company library I wound up spending $1000+/yr to get basic literature access (7 societies, no commercial journals).

There is a lot of reinventing the wheel being done because people are too lazy to research the literature. The access restrictions just make it worse. Same problem with standards documents. People don't read what they can't afford and their employer won't pay for.

Scholar of open access estimates up to 96% savings

[Geof]

If more of scholarship turned toward open access, libraries could shift money from paying for subscriptions to supporting journals or journal mirrors. They'd likely save considerable cash doing so.

Heather Morrison, a colleague of mine, researched this. She estimated savings as high as 96%. The details are in her dissertation, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age - which is, of course, open access. The cost estimates are on page 86 (the 98th page of the PDF).

Human Knowledge Locked Behind Paywalls

[Anonymous Coward]

Something has gone horribly wrong when human knowledge is locked behind paywalls where people can't access it. Even in the bad old days people could freely access human knowledge at libraries. The Internet with paywalls is a giant leap backwards into the middle ages, where knowledge was kept locked up. We need a new renaissance. We need to reinvent the printing press.

Re:Human Knowledge Locked Behind Paywalls

[maxwell demon]

You can still access the knowledge at libraries.

Writing is difficult and time consuming

[godrik]

(disclaimer: this being slashdot I did not RTFA.)

Speaking as a scholar, the main problem that I see is that is that communicating to the public is not my job. Writing for some wiki is not my job. My job is composed of 3 components:
1/ teaching: in class and mentoring students.
2/ research: conduct, manage and fund.
3/ service: for my university in comitees and for the community by taking part in conference/journals by submitting/reviewing paper and hleping with organization.

Moreover, writing is difficult. Especially that form of quite high level all-encompasing writting. Writing a good survey paper takes months. It is a significant endeavour.

As you can see, wikifying scholarly cannons is not really a part of my job and takes a lot of time. It is not unrelated, but it is a more abstract thing. As such, it is not directly useful to my advancement. (In other words, my tenure commitee is not going to care.) I just can not afford to spend that time if it is not part of a clearly identified project.

Publish on Wiki? Never

[golodh]

No scholar worth his salt would ever publish his own articles on a Wiki (although he might help Wikipedia by publishing articles anonymously if he's got a lot of time to spend).

Now why would that be?

Well, the whole point of a Wiki is that every man jack with an internet connection can edit it.

And that's totally unacceptable on three counts.

Firstly because, as regards my own articles I won't accept random idiots modifying what I wrote because I'm reporting *my own* work, which nobody in the world except me has any business editing.

Secondly for any article I would want to cite I can't accept something that the author (or anyone) else might modify behind my back after it was published. Simply because I'll be citing from, referring to, or commenting on that article in my own work. I can't have it change and then have my own article out of sync.

Thirdly, a pile of articles serves as a scholar's professional CV. If you need to know if someone is any good as a scholar (e.g. because he's applying for a faculty position) you read his articles. Then you know most of what matters without ever going to the trouble of speaking with him. You simply cannot have it that someone can make himself look good by retroactively correcting his articles, changing his findings, or wiping out his mistakes.

I'm afraid that these are the reasons why publishing scholarly articles on a Wiki is out.

Already exists?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the author describes sounds a lot like Citizendium.