Paywalled Science Journals Under Fire Again

The Real Dr John sends this report from The Guardian: Emeritus professor Stephen Leeder was sacked by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) in April after challenging a decision to outsource some of the journal's functions to the world's biggest scientific publisher, Elsevier. This month he will address a symposium at the State Library of NSW where academics will discuss how to fight what they describe as the commodification of knowledge. Alex Holcombe, an associate professor of psychology who will also be presenting at the symposium, said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine. Some of the 1,600 titles published by Elsevier charged institutions more than $19,000 for an annual subscription to just one journal. The Springer group, which publishes more than 2,000 titles, charges more than $21,000 for access to some of its titles. "The mining giant Rio Tinto has a profit margin of about 23%," Holcombe said. "Elsevier consistently comes in at around 37%. Open access publishing is catching on, but it requires researchers to pay up to $3000 to get a single open access article published. What other options are there for making scientific publications available to everyone?

Comments

With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Host it yourself, if you fear band-width, host only between universities. It might not be public-ally available, But it's a start at least.

Also wonder: how do these magazines help in reaching your target audience. I'm sure some consumers would be more then happy to subscribe to a free mailing list.

Re:With those figures ?

[ArmoredDragon]

Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc. So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.

Not only that, but a journal that frequently publishes whitepapers that have withstood scrutiny tend to attract more readers, so if you publish your material, somebody is more likely to take it seriously than if they just found your blog somewhere on wordpress.

Some of these journals however don't stick to these higher standards, and will just publish anything. These sham journals are basically just a scam some unscrupulous people run (similar to say, a spammer, a snake oil salesman) for nothing more than to just make a quick buck, and aren't inclusive of the group of journals I'm referring to.

The problem in all of this is that most of these researchers are working on a skeleton budget as it is, and it's a bit of a shame that more of that money can't go directly to them. IMO this has all of the hallmarks of a market ripe for disruption; the question is who can come up with a good business model that meets all of the above needs.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound as if some journals employ experts on the topic of the journal. I don't believe that is true. The peer reviewers are volunteers who also publish in the field.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Host it yourself, if you fear band-width, host only between universities.

Hosting isn't the problem. The major problem is researchers have to publish to important journals - publish or perish. These journals usually demand the rights to publish your work, so while you can host it yourself you'd be breaching the agreement (depending on your country's law) and asking for a very nasty letter from a lawyer. Remember that guy who killed himself after they caught him trying to host the whole archive himself? They don't kid around when you fuck with their market.
It's a very difficult fight, but not impossible. arxiv.org for instance is pretty successful.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

correct.

Re:With those figures ?

[michelcolman]

Can't they set up some kind of peer to peer system between universities? Set up some central server keeping track of everything published at all those universities (or use some kind of distributed consensus system), host the articles themselves on the universities' own servers (must cost less than the millions they are currently paying Elsevier et al), and let researchers vote for each other's articles (score based on some formula taking into account how many people from different universities voted). And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.

I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a university researcher... what incentive do I have to change the system? You're talking about a lot of work for something that will be seen as risky at best, which I will not (actually, in my present country, legally cannot) be paid any extra for, and which is more administrative than anything, which would take time away from my own research (of which I work about 2x as much time as I'm paid for). Also, except for the occasional times where I need to discuss with the lab director about publication costs, I am totally fine with the current system. So, screw you.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You naively think that universities are interested in expanding human knowledge. They are primarily businesses focused on profit, the sharing of knowledge outwith themselves doesn't factor into it.

Re: With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are fine with current system as long as the university pays for the astronomical prices.

Re:With those figures ?

[Uecker]

Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.

The problem is the huge momentum to publish in traditional journals with big impact factor. Young researchers have few options to publish is lesser known journals because this would hurt their careers and most older researchers do not seem to care to much. The problem is that there is no direct incentive because the cost of the libraries to for the subscriptions is shared by all researchers of a university or paid by the tax payer.

The most effective solution is simply for the funding sources to require open access.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

ding ding ding ding!!!!

It's not the '60s any more. The better unis are - from an administrator's PoV - incubators for private business, and the rest are like churches, banging some ideological drum for funding. There are some damn brilliant academics dotted around them, often from older generations who were brought up in a very different environment (social-democratic in Europe, and protestant-work-ethic in the US), but these are in the minority.

Re:With those figures ?

[udippel]

[why AC?]
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, even as AC.
That's exactly the situation! You can as well see the standing of public U-s in the USA vs the private ones. 2 generations ago the public U-s were often great places of academic activities, and with a high standing (leave out Harvard and a few more). Recently, the funding for the public U-s has gone down, and businesses have bought in. As of 2015 ever more public U-s are on the decline while private ones rise. Naturally. Naturally? Naturally; in case one agrees with academia and tertiary education as just another business area.

Personally, I'm much too old to buy into this crap, though when I talk to younger colleagues, for them all this sickness seems just plain normal. The worst part, at least to me, is the consequence over the long run: when almost all third party funding is done from business-minded people with 'industrial applicability' within less than 3 years, we obtain some serious refinement of existing technologies in the best Confucian sense. But why did China drop off the scientific map centuries ago? Because their inventions, from porcelain to dynamite saw but small refinements, but no larger work, no application beyond a narrow field. In short, effective stagnation. So the Europeans could harvest everything and re-invent it.
Back to the topic in question: Who in our days is given the liberty and the funding to think the thoughts (often enough out of the box or ready applicability) that can lay a foundation over one or two generations into the future?

Re:With those figures ?

[michelcolman]

Well, maybe you could get funding for a research project that sets up such a system to see if it works, "setting up an alternative peer review system to screw the big leeching science journals" and try to get it published in a few major... errr... oh, wait.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a meeting with the director of research for a university once, regarding career issues... publication and citation record on Web of Science or Scopus concerning a certain type of publication (refereed, internationally recognized journals) were the only two things considered. The only. There is good reason for this. There is also good reasons for the complaints about "paywalled" journals. But when the existance of my job depends on the traditional publishing model, you bet I'm motivated to stick with it. Loss of my job -- should I choose to stay in the same field of work -- involves finding another job in (at a minimum) a different city, if not (more likely) a different country.

When you apply for funding, you don't actually get paid any more than you do before. Your salary is set by the instutition, and is fixed. This is because research is unpredictable. So when in the media (or even Slashdot) there are comments about how scientists are in it for the money... wtf?!? Extra funding money, if not for needed equipment, at best goes towards supporting students that get paid barely above minimum wage.

You want to create a new publishing model, you go for it. I'll cheer from the sidelines until it's been successful for a decade or two.

Re: With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Next question?

Actually, I would be fine if the library dropped access to these journals... the lab I work out of isn't located on the main campus, so I can't access the paper copies anyway, and so much of the needed research is online anyway these days, or I get from colleagues directly... I'm fine if the university doesn't pay the prices either. Would be nice if they gave an email address with a non-trivial amount of storage, though.

Re:With those figures ?

[The Real Dr John]

Agree completely. America is leading the world down a very dark path where everything, including education, is monetized, turned into a commodity, and slowly but surely destroyed. Higher education is one great example, leaving graduates with relatively poor educations and crippling debt. The NIH has been turned into a "translational medicine" adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry. Money is a great motivator, but the things it motivates people to do are usually negative or harmful (think pollution, lack of worker safety, habitat destruction, species extinction, etc.). Scientific publishing is also now highly monetized, and that includes hundreds of so-called predatory journals (kept track of at Beall's list http://scholarlyoa.com/publish...). People need to understand that when only things that make money get done, that lots of good things worth doing don't ever get done.

Re:With those figures ?

[tburkhol]

Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.

The NIH, through PubMed Central, already provides the infrastructure for archiving (biomedical) articles. In fact, they demand that any publications resulting from NIH-funded research be archived there (with a 1-year delay from release by the official publisher). I believe ERC has a similar requirement for European research Some of the best journals have put their entire historical archives there (J Physiol back to 1878), but most journals only since the 2008 NIH mandate.

The problem is not the infrastructure to do online publishing. The problem is incumbency. The people who actually run the journals are, for the most part, tied to their historical publishing partners. I'm thinking especially of the 'big' journals that are the official publications of various academic societies. They are as locked in to publishers' workflow software as most people are to Microsoft Office.

Personally, I think every academic society, each of which claim education and public dissemination of science as core values, should make their historical archives available through PubMed Central, arXiv, or similar. Most of them have been digitized. Most of them are available to society members or journal subscribers. Most of them cost $30-$50 per article for the public to read, and there's no reason for that. If the society you belong to has not released its legacy content, ask your leadership, Why not?

Re:With those figures ?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc.

Yes, that's all true. Which is why we need journals with some standards.

So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.

Huh? Do you actually know anything about how academic publishing works? Peer reviewers are generally VOLUNTEERS. And they certainly aren't part of the journal's (paid) "staff." They may be part of the editorial board of the journal, but again those are usually unpaid positions that academics take for the prestige. (On the rare occasions where reviewers are paid -- usually only by journals with poor reputations, it not outright disreputable journals -- it's generally just a very small amount to get the reviewer a little motivation to complete the review in a timely fashion.)

Journals do have to pay for publication costs, like copyediting, layout/formatting/typesetting, etc. But those costs these days are minimized as much as possible (often outsourced), and the quality level of copyediting, etc. is often quite low -- even at good journals. The only people generally paid on a journal's "staff" these days are a few (often part-time) assistants who do the grunt work of collecting incoming submissions, preparing those to be sent out to reviewers, gathering everything together for final publication, etc.

In any case, any actual publication costs are generally tiny compared to these excessive subscription fees.

Not only that, but a journal that frequently publishes whitepapers that have withstood scrutiny tend to attract more readers, so if you publish your material, somebody is more likely to take it seriously than if they just found your blog somewhere on wordpress.

Yes, this is true, and there are metrics ("impact factor," etc.) that are published about which journals rank high. Not surprisingly, some of those metrics are compiled by the major journal publishers, which is a serious conflict of interest.

On the other hand, numerous studies have shown that even major journals (particularly outside of "hard science" fields) tend to publish a high percentage of articles with questionable statistics or methodology. Peer reviewers and journal editors tend to go by "standards in the field," rather than insisting on better statistical or methodological rigor. Frankly, most of them probably don't even realize how bad the situation is, since most researchers in various fields do not receive detailed training in statistical analysis (often just one or two graduate courses, or whatever informal stuff they pick up from colleagues and mentors).

Bottom line is that an article even in a very reputable journal often can have significant problems. But that's more a problem of the peer review process and community standards in general, rather than one unique to top journals.

Anyhow, the biggest issue is INERTIA. Scholars depend on journal publications to get tenure and promotions, as well as to maintain their careers and labs. Their career path and list of publications are periodically reviewed by other academics, who obviously tend to evaluate those publications on the basis of what they know and are familiar with -- which means that "performance reviews" by other academics will tend to give more weight to journals that are already established well in the field.

And that ultimately means that it becomes a bunch of circular reasoning -- this journ

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think some people have their wires crossed... If you're okay with the current system, then the suggestion of fix-it-yourself is not generally directed at you and I don't know why the other posters are trying to keep the conversation going with you.

What we have is a number of folks criticizing the current system. At least some of these people actually work in academia and are directly impacted. Those people are the ones who are complaining about the current system, have the means available to do something about it, but choose not to.

I've been hearing criticism of the academic publishers for about 20 years by people who are directly impacted and who also have the ability to do something about it. They choose not to. If their reason is because any new expert-peer-reviewed model -- whether substitute or supplementary -- won't be considered, they should be speaking to their colleagues and university administration about that issue, not complaining about the publishers who offer a service that their customers are clearly willing to pay for.

There are enough reputable national and international academic organizations in different academic areas that have the organizational wherewithal and suitable reputation to come up with some alternatives. Their membership does not demand it and their leadership does not offer it.

But the publishers make easy targets for people who want to complain but don't want to do anything of substance about it.

Re:With those figures ?

[ColdWetDog]

You make it sound as if some journals employ experts on the topic of the journal. I don't believe that is true. The peer reviewers are volunteers who also publish in the field.

"Volunteers who publish in the field" would be a reasonable definition of an expert, especially in the narrow and esoteric fields where many scientific articles live.

Re:With those figures ?

[theguyfromsaturn]

I'm sorry. The journals do not have "staff" that peer review the journals. The peers of the authors, i.e. other authors do all the peer review. The only job of the journals is managing those lists of reviewers and assign reviews. With electronic publishing reducing costs, and software to do most of that "managing" there is very little value to those journals. Sincerely, libraries should pitch into a "common" pool. On a national basis perhaps, they should create a number of peer reviewed journals for the various topics.. and instead of spending that 20000$ per journal, they could contribute to the administrative infrastructure of those new journals which could then offer their content openly. I consider that my university's library funds would be better spent that way than paying the indecent fees for minimal contribution from the journals. I certainly know that as I reviewer I don't receive a dime from any of the publications that I review articles for. I think that is OK, but I don't think the indecent cost of subscribing to journals or publishing in open access is justified given that the vast majority of the potential cost of the peer review process is already being externalized by the journals.

Re:With those figures ?

[dcollins117]

I've been hearing criticism of the academic publishers for about 20 years by people who are directly impacted and who also have the ability to do something about it. They choose not to.

Aaron Schwartz did choose to change the system. I likely don't need to remind you how that turned out.

Re:With those figures ?

[KGIII]

I think one of the complaints is that they do not really cost that much to create, from what I have seen. It is not like there is a lot of payout to peer that do the review - there's no payout in my field. I am not sure about other fields but I have had to delve into their journals in the past and it did not appear that there was a payout being mentioned anywhere. If I review I get AMS points... *nods* I can buy books with 'em, or I could - no idea if I still can. I am pretty sure the process exists still. Of course, well, the AMS is not a journal.

It's math. I am in it for the sin...

*is only a little sorry*

Re:With those figures ?

[Bing Tsher E]

One person can't change "The System" with a giant hack.

Re:With those figures ?

[pepty]

The (reputable) journals are typically founded by experts in their fields (the editors on the masthead), when they retire they are replaced by other experts in their fields. Those editors are typically paid. If you go to a kick-ass research university or institute, you will run into quite a few journal editors on the faculty.

Re:With those figures ?

[pepty]

And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.

I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.

That already happens: things like impact factor and citation numbers are used alongside the number of publications when ranking professors. And University of California did take things into their own hands - they get a big fat discount from publishers like Elsevier. So do other large universities.

Re:With those figures ?

[pepty]

Peer review is free, the people haranguing the reviewers to actually submit reviews (peer review coordinators) are paid. So are the editors, the admin assistants, the multimedia, web design, and IT staff , the rights and permissions managers, the advertising staff ...

Re:With those figures ?

[pepty]

If the society you belong to has not released its legacy content, ask your leadership, Why not?

Probable answer: Because we gave an exclusive license (with an option to renew) to that content to the publisher, and because the society gets some of that $30 to $50 per article that no one actually pays.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. So if the writers are not paid for their contributions, or only paid a stipend, and the reviewers are volunteers who are not paid at all, what are we paying the journals for? Electronic publishing is almost free. Even paper publishing in the present time is very cheap. No wonder their profit margins are so high.

Re:With those figures ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been hearing criticism of the academic publishers for about 20 years by people who are directly impacted and who also have the ability to do something about it. They choose not to.

Aaron Schwartz did choose to change the system. I likely don't need to remind you how that turned out.

So what you're saying is, if a group of academics decided to collectively lobby university administration to change how promotion and tenure is handled at reputable universities, and if those academics decided to collectively lobby the leadership of academic organizations to offer reputable affordable alternatives to for-profit publishers, then those academics will be charged and threatened with jail...?

Oh wait, you're not saying that at all.

Simple advice

[Anonymous Coward]

"What other options are there for making scientific publications available to everyone"

You could, well... post em on the IntarWebz?

Re:Simple advice

[Anonymous Coward]

The place that I used to work for had their own Imprint. Preprints and finished articles were available for a fee that just barely covered reproduction costs. If one wanted, one could just browse through the dusty file cabinets upstairs in the Reception area or downstairs in the Library. (That's where I found the Preprint of Lawrence's seminal paper on Cyclotrons, with Author notes, which is now on display.)
The best stuff ended up in the APS Physical Review C, or Letters.
We had that kind of clout.
With some effort, most of our papers can now be found on the Internet for free. (This is one of the advantages of being funded primarily by the DOE. The People paid for it; they should have easy access.)

The contempt for Reed Elsevier and its ilk in the Nuclear Physics community has been growing for decades. Some Institutions, primarily Private or Corporate, are stuck with Elsevier because of Tradition or Shilling. (That would be largely the Biomedical Community- for shame!)
  I had the unpleasant task of having to deal with one of their Editors. Before he got his Degree, he worked selling Movie Tickets from a booth, and he was barely qualified to do even that. His job was primarily checking that References actually existed, and Indexing- putting and pulling Keywords stored in a decades-old Database. He had no need to know what the Keywords actually meant.
The people at APS were much nicer to deal with. I wasn't a Reviewer; I mostly worked over an article to make it relevant and succinct on our end, before the Reviewers got their mucky hands on it. (This was part-time; I had an Accelerator to run.)
    There actually are good writers in the Nuclear Physics community and it was a joy to work with them- some of their puns can be subtle; and some date back to the Manhattan Project era. ("Barn" is a now accepted term for a Cross-Section; the probability that an effect or reaction will occur. It comes from "Hitting the broadside of a Barn"- a 1940's Baseball metaphor. I doubt that _anybody_ at Elsevier knows the origin. Especially that fat bastard.)

EVER HEARD OF A

[Anonymous Coward]

BLOG?

#2

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[Anonymous Coward]

Can BLOG do peer review?

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[davester666]

probably as good as half the so-called peer reviewed journals out there.

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[Edis Krad]

Can BLOG do peer review?

Short answer is: Yes.

Long answer:
Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science, and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable. This is because the article is often not reviewed by someone that is interested or a major expert in the field, but instead publishers select reviewers at random and assign them papers to review. In some cases, professors and researches hand down the papers are then given to grad students, who have no expertise in the field, to actually review the papers (my thesis adviser gave me a couple to check a once or twice during my PhD). And as someone who has had his articles reviewed, the criticisms are poor and usually minor (readability is poor, maybe add a chart or more experimental results, etc)

Before the age of peer-reviewed journals, the scientific article was published openly an ANYONE in the same field with an invested interest could attack it. The reviews were helpful and really good science came out of it, because the publishing scientist would have to defend or give up his theory. Now this only happens in very rare cases.

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[udippel]

Would be nice, but isn't.
Peer-review is a crazy thing, I agree. Too often my own contributions were not understood, or deliberately brought down for offending the reviewers' personal opinions. Too often my own reviews were lousy, or I didn't understand the papers, or brought them down for not agreeing with my opinion.

And yet, the process as such has often resulted in my re-thinking my own papers, improving them, and often my reviews have resulted in papers of others being improved.
Try this in blog format, and 90%+ of a******s don't have a basic idea what the whole thing is about, and those who'd know don't come to view it. No, academic progress is not possible in selfie format, but in collaborative ways, with ever changing contributors.

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[serviscope_minor]

Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science,

Not sure I'd cound 1667 as "new", personally.

Re:EVER HEARD OF A

[AthanasiusKircher]

Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science

Well, it's not a new thing -- it dates back at least a few centuries. But it became more "standard" roughly 75 years ago as a way of evaluating quality journals. It may not be very old, but it has a few generations of history behind it, which is enough to become entrenched practice.

and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable.

While that's true, the standards do vary significantly from journal to journal. Top-tier journals tend to try better to find real experts to do the reviews, and their standards tend to be a bit higher. The bigger issue with peer review is cases where most "peers" within a field are not sufficiently qualified to spot errors. The most common problems are statistical and methodological errors; most peer reviewers will be fine with articles as long as they show "standard practice" in a discipline. Peer reviewers aren't generally expert statisticians, for example -- they are just academics in the same field, and most fields don't have high standards for statistical rigor (and researchers don't generally have a lot of formal statistical training).

Uh, there is this thing called the Internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Upload a PDF to Google Drive, share it publicly, post the link to Twitter with the hashtag #scientificjournal

Problem solved.

Re:Uh, there is this thing called the Internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

They could do that but the universities promote academics depending on how many papers they get published which only encourages to game the system. Solution is to deny government funding to those academics and universities who want to whore their findings to predatory academic publishers.

corruption in academic publishing

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cracked.com/article...

"Since most research is taxpayer funded, you're paying for a product and then paying again to actually use it"!!! From TFA:

#6. Negative Results Are Ignored
#5. Scientists Don't Have To Show Their Work
#4. You Have To Pay To Get Published
#3. It's All About Profit "Three publishing companies (Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer) account for 42 percent of all published articles. This oligopoly has obscenely high profit margins of 30 to 40 percent."
#2. No One Can Share Their Work "When scientists can't get papers from their peers, they have to rely on subscriptions owned by their employer. Because we now know that publishing companies are at "mustache-twirling" on the evil scale, subscription fees are astronomically high. Harvard pays $3.75 million a year"
#1. Predatory Companies Publish Sham Science "Predatory publishers offer to publish any paper, regardless of quality, for a processing fee of only thousands of dollars. Often, this fee is mentioned after the paper has been accepted and the scientist has signed away their copyright, a strategy we'd expect from a shady porn producer, not the world of hard sciences. It's not one or two scummy companies, either -- one librarian has counted several thousand of these journals."

How US medical research is published

[hankwang]

Somehow, a lot of US medical research is published as open access. I think one of the major funding agencies has simply demanded that the research must be published as OA. If all funding agencies do so, I'd expect that publishers will have to compete not only on prestige, but also on publication fees.

Re:How US medical research is published

[DanielRavenNest]

If a consortium of university libraries demanded open access, the publishers would have to agree. Those libraries are generally the ones who pay for subscriptions.

Re:How US medical research is published

[Anonymous Coward]

This model seems quite reasonable and if the funding agency is willing to pay for the publication fees, it should be able to mandate it. That said, not all research requires biomed level lab costs to conduct and for those areas, a $3000 publication fee may be cost prohibitive, so all OA for everything doesn't feel like the right solution.

Re:How US medical research is published

[hankwang]

Of course, $3000 is an amount that is completely disconnected from the actual costs for the publisher; $500 would be more realistic (editor communications, language corrections, handling the layout, maintaining servers). The whole point is to create more incentives to get that fee down. (I think that fee only applies to STM fields; researchers in the humanities wouldn't be able to pay such amounts anyway.)

Scientists have the power to stop this

[Anonymous Coward]

They review the articles, they give status to the publication.

They can quit and start their own journal; go back to the way the journals were run originally.

The Elsevier journals are nothing without the scientists that enable them.

Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

Obviously you need a scientist to go over your work but I think they might lower the costs if they can make the papers easier to read or potentially release them as a series.

This sounds like complete heresy but consider the economic and logistical advantages.

By releasing something in a more intelligible format even experts will be able to review it faster and more confidently. Keep in mind that we're not exchanging dead trees with each other and there's no reason why a "paper" has to be formatted like it is written on paper. Hyperlinks for example are almost never in these studies which is too bad because they're a superior form of notation. You see this in wikipedia articles where they'll put a hyperlinked number after a statement to reference its source. Beyond that, you are not restricted to a notion. You could have the hyper link literally take you to the specific portion of the paper being referenced. Directly. No need to actually be familiar with it previously. You could also separate the data out in a raw format and include it with the algorithms used to process it in the "paper" itself. This is not practical on literal paper that you're literally publishing. But in a computer journal it is elementary. Formating the papers differently and possibly breaking that process down into specialties could really help. So Dave just examines the validity of raw data. That's all he does in any paper. Then you have Tom and he just looks at the statistical algorithms and various other mathematical models used to process things. Just the math. Then you have Eric that handles external citations and go through the claims made and the references they're citing and that's all he does for any paper. And then all those people pool their findings on that and the combination is handed off to Adam who will read the abstract, the conclusion, the comments by the people that verified or found issues with the paper, and he then decides to pass or fail the paper through peer review on that basis. And ideally all of this information would be published along with the paper itself so that other people reading the paper could see what the peer review board looked at, caught, missed, etc. But the idea is you break it down into simpler jobs and then audit the bits individually by experts that only do that.

And if that is still creating sticker shock when it comes time to publish, consider taking a big paper and turning it into a lot of little ones that can be audited more quickly individually and possibly will collectively have a smaller sticker price simply because it isn't some giant daunting monster.

Just my 2 cents from the peanut gallery. Cue the horde of people that will stick their noses straight in the air and say "who are you to have an opinion"... a comment that never stops being funny because the implication of the question is fallacious. Which undermines the scholastic weight of the person saying such a thing because if they were anyone they'd be smart enough not to ask such a stupid question.

Who am I? No one. I'm a naked man that sleeps in a rain barrel and begs for food (the educated will get the reference). Doesn't make me wrong.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Anonymous Coward]

These journals do not review the papers. Other scientists review the papers for free. These journals just publish them and scientific community does all the work.

There are other forces pushing small increments instead of big important papers. One is that you can publish earlier so that others do not independently discover the same thing and beat you to it. Other is that research funding is mostly about quantity, not about quality.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.

My suggestion was to see if there was a way to reduce the costs of publication while maintaining the rightful auditing procedures that peer review should provide.

As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?

If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?

The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.

So when I see a profit margin of 38 percent... which is very good... but not 99 percent which what you'd require for that model... it means they're paying someone a certain amount PER publication. Money is going somewhere PER publication. And without looking into it any more than that, this suggests that either the scientists are getting paid or the university is getting paid on their behalf for their contribution. You're not going to get a profit margin that low on something where you pay nothing for the paper, nothing for the review, and effectively nothing for the hosting WHILE collecting tens of thousands of dollars from universities, corporations, and media outlets all over the world to obtain access to the material.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

Obviously you need a scientist to go over your work but I think they might lower the costs if they can make the papers easier to read or potentially release them as a series.

The peer reviewing is done for free. As in the people who review do it because it's part of one's duties as a member of the community. Making papers easier to read would certainly be nice (better journals tend to have better written papers). Not sure what you mean by "release as a series".

I wouldn't want yet more stuff to review to be honest. I already am atmy limit and have to turn things down occasionally due to lack of time.

The other problem with "easier to read" is few people set out to write a badly written paper. A few do---those who want to obscure something---but most don't. The thing is scientists are on the whole scientists. Writing, and GOOD writing is a whole other career and one that scientists ocasionally master in addition to their own, but often just get by.

Writing a good paper actually has a lot in common with writing fiction. Even though it's about facts, there still has to be a narrative flow guiding the reader towards the author's ideas. An additional problem is that unlike fiction where you alter the world to fit the narritive, with science you have to bend the narritive to fit the immutable world, which can make things a bit confusing when you have s triangled of dependencies and you have to start somewhere.

I'm not a writer, and I was like many only a so-so scientific writer. I've seen a few truly excellent

There's also the problem of different styles in that some people think in different ways. And by the time it gets to a really cross disciplinary paper, not one author will understand the work in its entirety, never mind reviewers.

Oh and there's ALSO the problem that people don't seem to knoe what a literature review is for. For many years didn't, thinking like many that it's a bunch of citations you need because REASONS. They I read one by a skilled writer and I was enlightened.

A lot of your suggestions are about better tech. That would help a little, but not all that much. Citations are essentially old-fashioned hyperlinks. Modern systems can hyperlink the citation to the place in the reference list and from that to the actual paper. It would be nice if more places did that and it would be nicer if they supported richer hyperlinking as you suggest. But ultimately that's not the main problem. Reviewers tend to be familiar with the field and so often I don't have to go and read much if anything extra when reading a paper. It's the big blob in the middle describing the technique that needs improvement.

If papers could be made easier to read, that would be great, but I don't see an obvious way to do it.

Data can be provided, and some journals require it, but many don't. The problems with releasing working algorithms is that you have to be able to distribute working portable code to other people with a moderately sane user experience. This is something I actually can do and have done. It's a *lot* of work single handed (and I don't support Macs, and only partially support Windows). but I'm something of a hacker and I've got considerable industry experience. I also care about it and do it even though I've left academia for the most part. Most people simply don't have the training to do such things. I've encountered released code that I and several other good people have been unable to make run even after expending considerable effort.

One thing I learned as well is that it's not always useful. I wrote a paper with a good number of citations (650 so far and climbing at the rate of a few hundred a year which in the academic world is a very good) and I made a big effort to release the code, keep it up to date and fix bugs. The only thing people use is the code bundled with it for a much earlier, simpler system: to my knowledge not a single person has used the code I released specifically for the paper.

Other bits of code/whole programs I've

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[AthanasiusKircher]

The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.

That number is highly variable. There are plenty of open-access journals that cost only a few hundred dollars per article for publication, not several thousand. See here, for example. As that article notes, quite a few big open-access publishers admit that their internal costs for publishing are around a few hundred dollars per article.

As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?

If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?

I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of administrative work that goes on in sustaining a publishing operation, even an online one. See the first big chart in the link above, which breaks down costs percentage-wise in publication, and see the amount needed for "administering peer review; editing; proofreading; typesetting; graphics; quality assurance... covers; indexes and editorial; rights management; sales and payments; printing and delivery; online user management; marketing and communications; helpdesk; online hosting... " etc.

There's a lot of random overhead required.

The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.

Um... yeah... again, see above.

That said, it's clear that something fishy is going on with commercial publishers. As this article notes, the for-profit publishers seem to charge 2-3 times as much as non-profits, so it seems like they should be making more than 38% profit. I don't know what the explanation is there, other than that I imagine for-profit companies pay upper-level administrators more.

Anyhow, wherever that excess money is going, your weird conspiracy theory that there's some sort of "kickback" scheme to scientists or reviewers or universities just isn't happening.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

And without looking into it any more than that, this suggests that either the scientists are getting paid or the university is getting paid on their behalf for their contribution

It's astonishing that people with such deep ignorance of a field seem to feel the need to hold forth.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[KGIII]

AAM does not pay anything. AMS gives 'points' to review articles but, well, AMS is not so much a journal really. I have only reviewed for those two - mostly the latter. I did publish more in AAM but it was a bit younger then.

At one time, I envisioned my future as being crammed into a dusty old cellar at the edge of campus and being surrounded by walls covered with blackboards. Sometimes I look back and wonder, would I be happier today if I had taken that route then? Then, well, I look outside and see my new BMW is finally in my driveway and think, does it matter?

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

As to the reviews being done for free... that includes the university not being paid?

Here's the sticking point... 38 percent profit margin.

Where is the 62 percent going? Your move.

As to it being le hard to write better structured papers, we're not talking about skill or time being put into that but changing the format of the papers to take advantage of the internet age. I talked about hyperlinks and not writing the whole paper like it was literally going to be printed out on paper.

I also pointed out that you could include your data in the paper. Sometimes that's unreasonable if you're talking about terabytes or whatever of data. But in most cases it isn't that extreme.

As to paranoia... I got that general comment from a few people already in this thread so its not paranoia if it actually happens.

I'll refrain from throwing in an insult here even though you earned one.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

not as astonishing as your belief you can contradict me without so much a rebutting argument. I pointed out the discongruity in the numbers and you respond "well you're stupid"...

Fucking brilliant rebuttal.

*golf clap*

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

If the cost is a couple hundred dollars than there is no problem. That's a sustainable cost structure.

Mission accomplished. Everyone go home.

*shuts off lights and locks the doors*

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

As to the reviews being done for free... that includes the university not being paid?

Absoloutely. The universities are never and have never been paid. I am no longer at a university and I do peer review, completely for free.

Where is the 62 percent going? Your move.

Move for what? Not being able to see the books doesn't mean the universities are being paid.

They are not.

I talked about hyperlinks and not writing the whole paper like it was literally going to be printed out on paper.

Yes and I countered that that would have a rather limited effect. First papers alreasy have an old-fashioned approximnation of hyperlinks. Second it won't alter the fundemental problem that people suck at writing on the whole. Fiddling with the display parameters might help a bit but not nearly as much as you seem to think.

I also pointed out that you could include your data in the paper. Sometimes that's unreasonable if you're talking about terabytes or whatever of data. But in most cases it isn't that extreme.

I already addressed that: I note you simply ignored it. Some journals insist on it. Others don't and in many cases it's just not that useful. Should it be done more? Certainly. But making it uiversal isn't as helpful as you might think.

As to paranoia... I got that general comment from a few people already in this thread so its not paranoia if it actually happens.

Except it doesn't happen. You competely made it up.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

Actually you don't understand even what an argument and rebuttal is. An argument is a logical series of arguments reaching a conclusion. You haven't done that. All you've done is baldly state something which is in direct contradiction of actual facts. In other words:

You are completely making it up that universities and/or academics are getting paid for review.

Doesn't happen. Never has happened. And not being able to see the books of some random journal doesn't prove it happens.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

As to 62 percent, so you admit the numbers don't make sense to you either.

My statement about scientists or universities getting paid was a supposition based on the numbers. If it is in error it just means something else is going on.

When I say "your move" I am challenging you to come up with another explanation. If you don't have one... then we're both confused. ;)

As to me not getting a certain type of comment in this thread that I can quote... I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. how can you say it doesn't happen when I can quote people doing precisely that?

I think your hostility has overwhelmed your reason.

A bad trait.. and really quite unforgivable in a scientist. Scientists are people too but... try to be better. We're counting on you.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

No, I'm saying there have to be costs associated with every submission and I don't understand what they are... and neither do you. So perhaps I should send an email off to one of the journals so I can talk to someone with a clue? We'll see if I care enough.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

> My statement about scientists or universities getting paid was a supposition based on the numbers. If it is in error it just means something else is going on.

It is completely in error. I've never worked as a publisher, so I can't easily judge the 62%, but the excess is most certainly not going to universities or academics.

>When I say "your move" I am challenging you to come up with another explanation

I don't have one, but that doesn't mean filling in work a god of the gaps is valid.

> I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. how can you say it doesn't happen when I can quote people doing precisely that?

Are you still claiming that academics and/or universities are getting kickbacks?

PS hostility to wild ass claims of borderline fraud is not irrational.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[serviscope_minor]

No what you did was suggest academics and universities were getting paid. They aren't, and you seem incapable of admitting you were very much in error. All you are doing now is trying to obscure your error in sophistry. As for where the money goes have you read anything?

http://www.webcitation.org/64j....

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Anonymous Coward]

One issue with such a splitting up the process like this is that it takes away the benefit for the referee to do it, namely gleaning new insights before they are even published. If I referee a paper, I am interested in whether the result is true, whether it is interesting and what novel techniques are used. If I only verified the data, I have gained nothing. If I am an expert on modeling and am only verifying that the model functions as described, I have likely gained nothing (assuming that the model was not the main point of the paper). Suddenly, you are having to pay highly educated specialists to perform these separated tasks and your publishing costs have skyrocketed.

Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much?

[Karmashock]

I didn't claim fraud. I don't mind scientists getting paid to do peer reviews or universities getting paid to do them.

Fraud might happen if the person submitting the paper had any control over who reviewed it. My understanding is that the reviewers are generally kept secret by the journal so its hard to see how it would be biased by payments.

In any case, you can't explain the numbers either.

We agree on the mystery. ;-)

fascism isn't science, it's psychopathy

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much this is one of the DELIVERY METHODS OF PSYOP for the United Nations Agenda 21 - Global Warming Fraud to make Carbon into a fuckin greentard demons to STEAL YOUR HEALTH, WEALTH, and PROSPERITY through their plethora of proxies from organizations with acronyms like ICLEI, and agencies with acronyms like EPA too fucking MANY for me to LIST here. I am going to turn this Science thing into a HORSESHIT FIASCO, cause it is a fucking calamity when money trumps truth.

Yes we should been interested in alternative energy --- ala PESN not via SUBSIDIZING losers over and over and over and over and over and over and then put the bill on tax payers. Where did all those fucking panels go from Solendra and the rest of the Shitstain Companies that went tits up? TO the fucking POWER COMPANIES? Like they needed them... The people need them. But they just get the bill. FUCK OFF.

Agenda 21 spreading with Common Core as sub routine with other fucking gay ass horseshit. The SYSTEM (government) is running on a bad instruction set. Quite similar to the shitty fucking wrong nutrition advice in the food pyramid (s) (plural jesus fuck, moar than one pyramid MOAR PYRAMIDS OF FOOD BULLSHIT BITCHES don't get me goin on how this ties with the 36 agencies in the unconstitutional fascist fucking spying gun grabbing OBAMACARE)

So then, Colleges have lost their credibility pretty much full spectrum, speech /censorship failure, loan/fraud/finance failure, degree in worthlessness or misdirection failure, feedback loop / arrogance failure, I don't see how they survive, personally I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a campus with this current police state, yet I always see another low brow sucker who just obeys orders blindly apply like it's another State Job fillin up the empty slots. (it's "similar to" why DMV SUCKS, your tarded fucking "sometimes racist" diversity and wrapped in arrogance, blindness, and apathy--the phuck no wonder the system is crashing now! Stop listening to the SAME FUCKS and put them in Fort Leavenworth already! Listen to what I am telling you or there WONT BE SHIT LEFT IN THE USA! ) And the paper -- but I see plenty of clueless fucks with degrees who can't do jack shit that "old manly labor" with only a self acquired set of tools can out DO your lame excuse for a fucking tech! And he can DIG with a SHOVEL, and shoot firearms TOO! Jesus tits. Get it through your ugly fucking stinky ass head It ain't your DEGREE, it's MY COMPANY!

Fuck your shitty rainbow skittles out of your unicorn asses I want to speak at your college about these topics. NO? Then you really don't represent reality.

Indians from INDIA are smart -- great programmers!
Mexicans are STRONG and natural green fingers
Irish are awesome fucking bofh by day and drunk by night (Just ask me)
Blacks are STUPID in Ferguson again
Jews in Government ARE EVIL
Russians are Good at MATH but slow to kick NED and FREEDOM HOUSE out

How about instead of having these discussions how about we talk about GEO ENGINEERING

How about publishing some shit on that.
You know the "REAL MEN" behind the "man made global warming" Lets get into physics, and power and frequency. And tie together enough topics that the fucking COLLEGE WILL BE CLOSED BEFORE THE SPEECH IS FINISHED!

FUCK THE COLLEGE.

One possible solution...

[Dutch Gun]

We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.

The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.

If you need to, set aside some of the grant money for some quality peer review. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that you can do everything for free, but let's make effective use of that grant money and make sure the published results are open and accessible for everyone. Hosting the data costs nothing nowadays. This is a racket that should be broken.

Re:One possible solution...

[paskie]

Actually, peer review is done for free. People see it like their academic duty, chance to get to some new interesting results first, and like to see their name in a program committee list.

(At least this is how it works in Computer Science.)

Re:One possible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

In America especially, all your laws are bought and paid for nowadays, nothing will change.

Re:One possible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't disagree with you that it's an racket that needs to be broken, but clearly you don't understand how public funding works. This has nothing to do with advancement of careers and completely about survival. Researchers hate the system more than you do.

It's the ol' chicken and egg problem. The demand for any available funding is always greater than the amount available. Therefore it has to be determined how it is best distributed. The best way to distribute it is to give it to the teams and researchers that have a proven track record of success (as measured by published articles).

If everybody wants to publish their results in the same journal it acts as an auto-filter; only the best, and most interesting results get in. Ergo, articles in the prestigious journals carry the most weight.

The researchers only prefer these journals as it's the only way to secure funding for the next two years. Otherwise, no money, no research, no job.

Post-docs typically live contract to contract as funding is approved for individual projects. There is no job security for the majority of scientists in public institutions.

Re:One possible solution...

[manicb]

I am a researcher in the UK, and this is pretty much happening here. It's required by the national body which the government uses to fund research (some info here) and that requirement gets passed on to the subject area-specific research councils.

Basically, work I publish needs to at least be available on a University-level preprint server ("green" open-access); many publications allow this now. For publishers that don't, the research councils have arrangements with research institutes to pay the fees for the final published versions to be publicly available ("gold" open-access). It's not ideal as we're still overpaying the publishers, but it's a compromise that sets a pretty clear direction. In addition, I'm required to make research data readily available. Rumour has it that my research council will soon be picking random papers, trying to get the data, and kicking buttocks where they encounter a problem.

I don't think legislation is necessary; policy at the funding level seems to be doing the trick, and is a bit more flexible.

Re:One possible solution...

[tburkhol]

We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story.

In the US, NIH policy requires that NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central, a taxpayer-funded archive of published work. This is not quite unfettered access, as the incumbent publishers forced them to accept a 12-month lag between publication and archiving, but it's pretty good. The NSF (which is only ~25% as big as NIH) claims public archiving as a goal, but not a requirement. I believe ERC has a similar policy.

For the most part, these policies date to about 2005, and most journals have been very reluctant to give up control of their 'legacy' content. That's what the publishers are holding hostage behind their paywalls: the most recent 12 months and everything older than 2005.

Re:One possible solution...

[serviscope_minor]

The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.

Well, the public also demand their money is well spend. So they want research money to be spent on GOOD researchers, not mediocre ones. And how is goodness judged? Well, did those researchers do prestigous things...?

If you think it's "whoopee-fucking-do" then you have seriously underestimated the complexity of the problem.

Re:One possible solution...

[messymerry]

NO! The problem has been overly complexificated...

Re:One possible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally agree. Problem is vested interests. Academic publishers are so incredibly wealthy they can afford lobbyists, lawyers and politicians to protect their interests and MIT came down hard on Aaron Swartz because they were making money out of JSTOR. How do you change this? Software patents are so wrong yet in years we've made little progress. Lessig for President?

Re:One possible solution...

[swell]

"We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results..."

ABSOLUTELY, and let's take that one step farther. If tax funded research leads to a patentable result--the patent belongs to the taxpayers.

Far too often, one of the researchers walks off the university campus, gets funding, and makes millions for himself from a patent that we paid for.

Re:One possible solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.

I'd say the right to such access already arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right retained by the people. The right to the results of research one pays for should be a fundamental right in itself, plus there's the right to long term oversight over government, so multiple rights come into play.

A violation of this right, like other 9th Amendment rights, should disqualify the individuals involved from holding any position of public trust or responsibility, in public or private employ. Further, since owning land, or being in a caretaker position with respect to land, or managing the care of land, is considered holding a position of public trust, with respect to future generations, this would prohibit a substantial penalty for any executives foolish enough to want to deny the public its rights.

No extra law should be needed. However, since some contracts were doubtless entered into with the expectation of return resulting from paywalls being able to protect this data, some steps might have to be taken to provide reasonable compensation. To some extent the companies that rely on these paywalls are like people who have received stolen goods (however innocently): they are benefiting from a violation of fundamental rights, so the compensation would have to take that into account. It wouldn't have to be generous.

Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Peer reviewed Wiki anyone?

Reputation

[paskie]

Of course, people are trying to explore other options - e.g. http://www.iclr.cc/doku.php?id...

The problem is reputation. *Where* was the paper published carries huge weight on both the repute of the paper and change in repute of the author, because noone figured out better ways to quickly judge a result than by the venue (which implies certain acceptance rate and level of peer review standards). If you move from the established institutions to elsewhere, you need to build up your repute from scratch and until you do...

Well, it just takes long time. That means decades when it's not a new emerging field. Many decades when the academics are particularly conservative.

Re: Reputation

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading the paper. Why do you have to have the paper from a reputable source? One would think people in academia could form their own opinions (not be told what opinion to have).

Software developers figured this out long ago (ie: open source and licensing line GPL, LGPL, Apache, etc).

Re: Reputation

[paskie]

I said *quickly* gauge the paper. Of course I can read it, but there's a lot of papers and my time is limited. If it's published in a reputable venue, that's an endorsement that helps me order the papers preliminarily.

Of course, there are other sorting criteria like a number of citations, but they have their own issues - time lag, variability across (sub)fields, biases towards certain kinds of papers, etc.

Re: Reputation

[Anonymous Coward]

Software developers figured this out long ago (ie: open source and licensing line GPL, LGPL, Apache, etc).

I don't think the analogy works, but even if it did, it disproves your point.

When you download and install open-source software, do you go through all the code to verify it for quality or at least non-maliciousness? No, you don't and the reason why you don't is because you don't have the time.

So, developers download open-source software and how do they typically judge it? Reputation.

I download Linux (Ubuntu and at least one EL derivative) and FreeBSD even though I don't look at most of the source because I depend on reputation. Similarly for other software. I'll download firefox but I won't download plugins from unknown developers.

Yes, I do look at Linux and FreeBSD source when there's something pissing me off, but that's not what we're talking about.

Re: Reputation

[Anonymous Coward]

"If it's published in a reputable venue, that's an endorsement that helps me order the papers preliminarily."

I recommend spot checking the literature in your field and then reassessing the usefulness of this heuristic. I suspect you will want to at least modify it.

Re:Reputation

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is reputation. *Where* was the paper published carries huge weight on both the repute of the paper and change in repute of the author, because noone figured out better ways to quickly judge a result than by the venue (which implies certain acceptance rate and level of peer review standards). If you move from the established institutions to elsewhere, you need to build up your repute from scratch and until you do...

Well, it just takes long time. That means decades when it's not a new emerging field. Many decades when the academics are particularly conservative.

The problem with your viewpoint is that "New Emerging Fields" are often heavily planted with Crackpots. I can think of a couple that aren't:

Real Time System Design. This has been ignored at large for a long time, even though there are terrific people working on it, because the Big Four: Windows, UNIX, OSX, and Linux, are Systems that are inherently Non-Real Time. As is the x86 architecture.
I have a Great Story to mention here, but I won't, because Slashdot can't handle the Truth. (Also, it's a very long Story.)

Femtosecond Level Chemistry. This is related to the Above. It's a minor niche in Light Source Science, and way below Protein Crystallography in fame.
  I was at the Experiment, where for the first time, H2O became H2O2, and then H2O3, and eventually H8O15, and then back again to H20, all within a few Femtoseconds, and this was well documented. The Field is called WETRIXS- Aqueous Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering. Without fast, and more importantly, _very accurate_, in Time and Space Data Acquisition, the Experiment would have been a muddle, and the PI would have been laughed at, which by the way, he initially was. (Not me, and not by me.)

There is not yet a Journal devoted to WETRIXS; the Papers are currently scattered all over.

(I should like to point out that my creation of the term "WETRIXS" warms the cockles of my aging and retired heart. It's almost up there with my coining of the recent term "Tendrils", for the basis of a Decent and Modern Time-Signatured RTOS.)

Self Journal of Science!

[mouf]

Actually, there might be an easy to use solution! It is called "Self journal of science" and is available here: http://www.sjscience.org/artic...

Think about "Github, but for scientfic papers!"

It features the possibility for any scientist to publish a paper (in Latex because this is what scientists use). The document can be viewed online and each paragraph can be discussed online, using a revision system where pears can review your article (think about a start system on steroids, for scientists).

The project was started by Michael Bon, a researcher who was fed up with the way scientific papers work today.

Disclaimer: I know the developers who work on this project. It is still in development but is already usable. They definitively need some help to spread the word, and more than anything, I know they need papers published on the website. If you happen to know scientists who might be interested, please let them know the "Self Journal of Science" exists! These guys are really trying to make things change and they need your help!

Re:Self Journal of Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

It features the possibility for any scientist to publish a paper (in Latex because this is what scientists use).

I feel a no true Scotsman coming on....

Re:Self Journal of Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

That project looks incredible. It would be great if published research was as available as information on wikipedia. After all isn't that what the internet was originally designed for? This makes me curious about a possible sister project. Essentially, a mega.com equivalent to the open access journal, where everyone does their best Aaron Swartz impression. Users could download and commit any papers they have access to, regardless of copyright status.

iTunes...iBooks...

[magusxxx]

Why not iJournals? If an app can cost 99, why can't a journal be $5.

Are you kidding?

[Anonymous Coward]

On a web site, you ask for a way to make information accessible to everyone? Email of course!

Publishers are monopolists

[n0w4k]

The main problem with the current model of scientific publishing is that every publisher is effectively a monopolist. Because scientists can't publish the same results twice (it's unethical), each piece of scientific advancement is held by one journal published by one publisher. Therefore, university libraries don't have a choice and have to get subscription to all reputable journals. It's not surprising that a bunch of monopolistic publishers can charge excruciating fees. The most prestigious journals like Nature or Science can sell a small number of papers for exorbitant fees, knowing that everyone will subscribe anyways, and then use that money for god knows what: Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature, estimates his journal's internal costs at £20,000–30,000 ($30,000–40,000) per paper.

On the other hand, open access publishing brings more free market into the system. A scientist can decide which journal to choose (based on the licence, prestige, reviewing time, target group, etc) and how much money to pay for it. Thus, publishers will have to compete for scientists' money, which should bring down the costs of open access publishing.

Ha, remember El Naschie?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember reading a math forum site for hours laughing my butt off the whole time, all about El Naschie's Elsevier papers. Funny stuff.

This is true... sorta

[Anonymous Coward]

Said publishing house has made many efforts to search for early drafts and separate legitimate publications of papers to stop them on the web, not just illegal republications. They are a pretty evil business as are all academic publishing houses.

Not as easy as it seems

[lfp98]

Academics have been complaining for decades about profiteering publishers and the high cost of publications, but when they've tried to bypass the system, they haven't done much better. When the open-access movement started, estimates were that $1000 or less could easily pay for reviewing, formatting and archiving each article. After all, most of the reviewing is volunteer labor, the cost of data storage is practically zero, and since access is free, you don't have to maintain a paywall. But turns out you still need a full-time well-paid executive editor to oversee the reviews, you have to pay the associate editors something, you still have to pay copy-editors to get everything in a common format, and you still need to pay IT people to keep the site secure from hacking. It's a robust market, with many open-access journals competing, and more starting up all the time, but ~$3000 seems to be the going rate, the cheapest anyone can handle an average article - and even at that, the nonprofits still claim to be losing money on every article they publish. So I wish these folks well with their conference, and more power to them in trying to come up with a cheaper model. But I wouldn't count on it.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

And the shills come out of the woodwork to spread the FUD.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Complete bullshit. Everything you said.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[messymerry]

Since when is an editor in some bullshit journal a "peer" in the review process. This is a scam from start to finish. Put the papers out on the web and you have 14.4 billion eyeballs scanning them. The chances are pretty good that someone will notice if there is a problem. ALL publicly funded rsh should be in the public domain...and that includes datasets.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Odd. We got some publications in an open access journal (ISI indexed) for free. And conference proceedings we get hosted for free as well. Mostly because the university that provides the service does not like to pay for accessing its own researchers' publications. There are similar services out there, mostly from universities that know they profit from hosting materials for free.

Just because most organizations want to profit from scientific publications does not mean everyone will.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[manu0601]

Put the papers out on the web and you have 14.4 billion eyeballs scanning them

Even if you only get one thousand of comments on the paper, how do you distinguish valuable critics from random trolls?

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is an editor in some bullshit journal a "peer" in the review process.

The copy editor is not. The editor-in-chief almost always is. I know of several journals where I've known the editors, and they were highly respected members of the scientific community.

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[messymerry]

I envision a two tiered scheme where there is a sort of fast track for established researchers in the relevant field and an open venue for everybody. Filtering heuristics are good and getting better. These could be used to weed out most of the spam and trolls... The important point is anybody and everybody can get access to the research and analyse it themselves... We paid for it, it's ours!!!

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[manu0601]

And how do you identify "established researchers in the relevant field"?

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[messymerry]

I would say, "by consensus". Remember, this has to all be done in a completely open and transparent manner, otherwise, people will misbehave... Say for example, I am a post doc in high energy physics. I ask to join the high energy physics comment thread and then the incumbents on the thread discuss my qualifications to be permitted to join. Assuming I have established a reputation among my colleagues, then I am allowed to post to the thread. Remember, even the public thread for this discipline while overwhelmed with thousands upon thousands of comments from the general public could relatively easily be scanned for relevant comments and these given scrutiny... This idea runs counter to the narcissistic and sophomoric attitudes of many of the super educated elites and so will be met with intense resistance. They like the current air of exclusivity. This is all well and good until they run out of other peoples money... ;-D

Re:Not as easy as it seems

[manu0601]

Right, this works if the article author knows the candidate to the review. What do you do with someone that claims to be a reputed professor from a remote country? That person may give you someone else's name which got published, how do you check identity?

kill the goose that laid the golden egg

[AndyKron]

Like schools and everything else that could be good, fuck academic publishers. Why must people always kill the goose that laid the golden egg?

why do we do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we (as in the researchers at my org) submit to the paywalled (elsevier, ieee, etc) journals?
Simple:
1) The high-ranking journals are all paywalled
2) We are judged/scored/ranked/etc based on papers accepted in high-ranking journals (ERA journal lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excellence_in_Research_for_Australia#Journal_lists)
3) The journals that do open-access as well as paywalled charge a fortune for open-accessing it. As others have said, they still need to make their money
4) It takes several years for a journal to get enough credibility to become a high-ranking journal, so unless the new journal is an off-shoot from another (for example a subset of the topics from one journal moved to their own journal) it's unlikely people will start going to it.

Principle versus practicality.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been discussing a lot this subject with a coworker which also shows an inclination to philosophical rumblings.

IMHO this has become akin to the patent thing or the media conglomerates... it's about control -- of ideas, of music and movies, of books, of knowledge.

Those guys went from a business with a noble aim -- i.e. they needed money to serve the greater ideal of disseminating knowledge -- to a business with a profit aim (yes, I know you see what I did there).

Even if you're going for profit, there things to be observed... like whether people can count on other alternatives instead of being subjected to a monopoly.

In the end, the great culprits are none other than ourselves: we can not buy music from folks who use DRM, if we want. We can have our own Wikipedia of scientific papers if we want. Peer review? As others pointed out, those publishers only organize the mechanics by which such reviews work. We can do that now that there is the interweb. And do it a lot better(*) than them.

(*) Not better for everyone, though. This is where we must put a lot of effort to come up with a feasible model. But then, their present way of doing things is wrong, anyway. This is a discussion for another day, I'm afraid.

Your own work? That'll be $50!

[Anonymous Coward]

This article hits home a little with me right now since I'm currently reading many papers a week for a report I'm writing. More often than not, my place of work has a subscription to all of the relevant journals and I'm happy, quietly wondering how much is being spent on access but otherwise content that I'm not plagued by paywalls. Every now and again I hit an article I can't access, and my associated University library picks it up.

Last week I came across a paper in a reference I wanted to read. I knew all three authors, two of which worked upstairs in my office and the other worked in the department at my Uni. Neither work, nor the university library had access to this particular conference proceedings, and I couldn't get the paper. I could have gone upstairs and asked the first author for a copy, but that's not the point. I didn't have access to our own research!

Eventually google came up tops, and my workplace had a google-indexed PDF of the paper. Which brings me to the point about the online sharing of journals. I feel that 'sharing' papers online is mostly prevented by libraries being so well subscribed to journals that it's hardly worth bothering, at least where I'm from. That being said, I have been asked before by people in other Universities whether I can get access to a paper that they can't, and I see no problem with giving them a copy from our e-Library. In terms of people downloading whole archives of journals and posting them on the internet, I don't know where these repositories are, but they must exist because now I have to identify several blurry images of pizza or road signs every time I do a search on google scholar, and even a highly regarded American journal wants me to perform a CAPTCHA every time I want to download a paper in their journals.

Finally, I'll say that in the UK all publicly funded research (such as my own) must be published open-access. In some journals relevant to me, this is quite simple - the author pays more(!) and gets the paper in the same journal but with open access rights. At least it's a step in the right direction.

Torrent

[behrooz0az]

One word.

Re:Torrent

[n0w4k]

There is a gossip that #icanhazpdf works better than torrent for scientific articles ;-)

Easy solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

"What other options are there for making scientific publications available to everyone?"

Anything funded or partially funded by a governmental entity should be free to the populace of that country.

Anything privately funded, well, you should have to pay for.

Why should someone who spends their OWN money not be able to get repaid if they so choose?

Peer review is not the main cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Peer review is almost a trivial cost to the journals, as academics don't generally get paid for doing that.

However, peer review does take time, and can be something of a cat-herding exercise as the journals hunt down the reviewers and do their best to maintain their anonymity.

The bigger costs, though, come after peer review is done:

• Publication costs - even for online-only journals - are a big part of it. This isn't just web hosting, it is indexing so that people can start at your front page and find the paper they are looking for.
• There are also indexing costs so that the papers are indexed by relevant search engines (ISI, Scopus, Pubmed, Google Scholar, etc) so that people can find the papers. Human and machine time go in to this to make sure that the search engines find the papers.
• There are also costs associated with tracking references to and from papers; this is one of the most valuable services that journals provide now

Don't forget also that the publication cost at a journal is effectively a promise from the journal to keep the article available in perpetuity. They can't just put it up once and hope it stays readable forever. This is an IS problem, a linguistics problem, a formatting problem, and other problems as well. Imagine if you were a webmaster and someone gave you a WordPerfect document 15 years ago to host on a web page for them. What would you have to do today to make that document readable if they wanted to look at it now after it had not been viewed that long?

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Karmashock]

Wait wait, you're saying the big cost is getting the paper listed in indexes? That's like saying the big cost on the internet is DNS servers.

I'm going to repeat again here... Big journals are saying they have a profit margin of 38 percent. That means that 62 percent of their revenue goes to expenses.

Where is that 62 going?

We were also hearing that open journals that don't charge people that read the journal are charging the people that submit the journals 3000 dollars per submission.

Why does it cost the open journal 3000 dollars?... or if you prefer... 2000 dollars with 1000 being profit?

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait wait, you're saying the big cost is getting the paper listed in indexes?

Do you have trouble reading? The previous AC said that indexing services were one of the additional costs. They also gave you several others.

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Karmashock]

He offered three explanations for where 62 percent of revenue goes:

""
Publication costs - even for online-only journals - are a big part of it. This isn't just web hosting, it is indexing so that people can start at your front page and find the paper they are looking for.

        There are also indexing costs so that the papers are indexed by relevant search engines (ISI, Scopus, Pubmed, Google Scholar, etc) so that people can find the papers. Human and machine time go in to this to make sure that the search engines find the papers.

        There are also costs associated with tracking references to and from papers; this is one of the most valuable services that journals provide now
""

1. Publication costs. Zero dollars. The cost of maintaining one of these sites should be so marginal in the scheme of things that if it is consuming more than 5 percent of their revenue then I'd look at it very closely. Possibly they're doing something funky with their site which could be used to squeeze a few percentage points but we're talking about something that should be one of the smallest expenses in the organization.

2. Indexing... care to put a percentage of revenue they spend on this? Because I would have thought this was free. So... what percentage goes to that?

3. I'm not even sure what they're talking about here. It sounds sort of like he's trying to list item 2 twice.

Yeah I'm not seeing 62 percent of revenue in that. Collectively that looks like less than 10... significantly less than 10.

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still not getting it. "Publication costs" is a huge category that includes copy editing, layout, and so on. You're assuming that "publication costs" means "maintaining a web site." That is false.

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Karmashock]

Copy editing, layout, etc for given papers should be handled by the submitting scientists. You're acting like the journal writes the fucking thing for them.

As to my assumption being wrong... explain to me why it is wrong? I reject the notion that the journal itself spends much time worrying about the layout of someone's scientific paper.

I've read more scientific papers than I'd actually prefer over the years and the layout is terrible. They're all laid out like its 1942... on the internet.

Contradict me. Pull up a scientific paper right now. No no... now. Look at the layout and pretend that is modern or ideal.

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Pull up a scientific paper right now. No no... now. Look at the layout and pretend that is modern or ideal.

How different do you want the layout to be in order to be "ideal"? That is a purely subjective criteria. Nonetheless, here is a recent psychiatry paper that does not look like it was laid out in "1942". It has modern references with hyperlinks, it is easy to search, and there is a PDF version as well if you want to print it. You can also access it through pubmedcentral where additional viewing options exist.

Re:Peer review is not the main cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Copy editing, layout, etc for given papers should be handled by the submitting scientists. You're acting like the journal writes the fucking thing for them.

>As to my assumption being wrong... explain to me why it is wrong? I reject the notion that the journal itself spends much time worrying about the layout of someone's scientific paper.

Anyone who's been involved in scientific publishing, even from the sidelines, knows that the good journals do copy editing and layout. Scientists just submit a basic word processing document or latex file and that's it. Whether or not you "reject the notion" doesn't change the fact that it happens.

At this point, I'm concluding you are a troll. You have multiple people on this thread who actually know something about the topic patiently explaining to you over and over again that you are flat out wrong, yet you persist in trying to argue your roundly discredited ideas. You're not here to learn -- you're here to argue.

Reviewers should stop reviewing for free

[Anonymous Coward]

I am faculty and I receive approximately 10 invitations to review journal papers from Elsevier/Wiley to which I polity reply: "I am sorry but given your exorbitant profit margins and fees you charge universities, I have decided to only review papers for non-profit journals."

And things seems to be changing as recently I was asked to review a paper for a non-profit open access journal, with reasonable publication fees who offered to pay me $200 to do a review.

In my field (CS) it seems people are moving more towards conference publications, which have a much faster turnaround time, are reviewed by more faculty (5 as opposed to 3) and non profit publishers like ACM have very reasonable open access fees ($750) or even free if you use their ACM Author-Izer service.

Preprint servers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution is easy. Apart from publishing in peer-reviewed journals with impact factor, which is pretty much necessary to keep a job as a scientist, authors can self-publish themselves e.g. on preprint servers, such as arXiv. In physics this has become common practice. Almost everybody does it.

We need Amazon for journals

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a company like Amazon to come in and completely dismantle the status quo, automate the workflow processes, create a new distribution mechanism, and reinvent academic journals so they're cheaper and user-friendly. Oh, wait, there's no free-market incentive to do this because there's no profit to be had in doing it.

I see a lot of FUD being distributed here

[Applehu Akbar]

There have been several recent threads on this subject, and what has emerged is that there is no reason why Elsevier couldn't be replaced by a series of cheap websites for research areas. On each, researches post papers and there's a wiki for peer commentary. If you want to get fancy, there might be a public commentary forum.

There's nothing innately expensive about the publishing process. Peers review for free because they publish too, and you will one day return the favor. There's nothing about copy editing and formatting that can't be done cheap by a template based site maintenance app like RapidWeaver.

So why does Elsevier and its $19,000 a journal subscription monopoly persist? Because it's always been done that way, apparently, and because you can't expect today's universities to be innovative in exploring new ideas, or anything like that.

Oddly, for technology try the patent offics

[MountainLogic]

While not the usual scientific publications there was until reciently a "non-pantent" filing with the USPTO called Statutory Invention Registration (SIR) that is used by someone wanting to prevent an idea from becoming patentable by making this public disclosure. This effectively put an idea into the public domain. Now days I guess you can file a preliminary patent and then just abandoned it to the public domain. Still cost about $300, but that is less than many open source publications. I assume that most academic departments would still count this as a publication.

You're missing something else big, too

[Anonymous Coward]

The other big difference between printed and online-only journals is in their revenue streams. The print journals are largely supported by advertising and subscription costs. Don't believe me? Go to a library and open up a recent issue of Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, or JBC. They all have ads in them, generally of the full-page and full-color type. That is a huge part of how they keep going. Online-only journals don't have those revenue streams, they need to make up for it somehow.

Publicly funded research should be free right?

[brainchill]

So my problem with all of this is that a huge % of the research happening in the US is funded, at least in part, through grants etc made using state/federal tax dollars. I can't see how they can justify putting what amounts to crowdfunded research behind a payperview gateway.

Yep, public price-blocked from scientific papers

[servant]

As a techie, that does have trouble understanding some scientific principles (at least deep ones in many fields), I do like to still TRY to understand the things I don't. Following up on references in open papers and books, where even government sponsored research is published and put behind commercial pay-walls I find tough to stomach as a taxpayer who helped pay for the research and publication. Yes the scientist still has access to their own work, and many 'people that matter' have access either by paying or agreement with supporting associations, but it still leaves the Joe-Blow-technophile in the dark other than a few line summary of teaser.

They failed

[cwsumner]

Originally the journals provided and organized verification of the papers. Their reputation was that the journals published stuff that could be trusted.
I think the problem is that several (all?) of them have recently been shown to have failed their verification, publishing things they should not and not publishing things that they should have published.

The high price is no longer justified, the reputation is tarnished and they are in big trouble.

The problem is, that we need that functionality. But others will rise to cover the need.

Someone doesn't know much about mining.

[RockDoctor]

said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine.

Most gold mines are not very profitable. They need a long-term investment of quite large amounts of cash, and the product has a pretty volatile price.