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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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!
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.
Why not iJournals? If an app can cost 99, why can't a journal be $5.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
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.
[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?
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.
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.
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.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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?
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
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).
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.