Slashdot Mirror
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?
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."
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.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
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!
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.
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.