Slashdot Mirror
New Ideas for Scientific Publishing Online
The printing press provided a means to distribute multiple copies of political pamphlets, advertising posters, legal documents, novels -- and Journals containing scientific discoveries.
Scientific Societies use these Journals to disseminate research findings. The expense of Society membership and the additional fees for subscription to multiple Journals has gone out-of-bounds for both individual investigators and institutional libraries. It is just not feasible to expect a scientist/researcher or a member of the public to be able to subscribe to all of them or even to a few specialized Journals.
PubMed provides a powerful search engine for locating biomedical articles. PubMed searches are superior to browsing the specialty Journals. However, once you have used PubMed to find an article of interest you must then locate a library housing the Journal in which it appears, that has a Xerox machine with which to make copies of the sought-after articles.
Harold Varmus proposes that an open access e-repository be established to maintain permanent on-line and downloadable archives of scientific literature. The most obvious advantage of this to the researcher is immediate access to any published report via a hyperlink from the PubMed database. E-reports can also contain more information than print Journals, including larger data sets in various formats, pictures with greater detail, or even movies. Many of the costs associated with the publication of a Journal are avoided. Cited literature [footnotes] can also be hyperlinks, which simplifies in-depth background analysis for serious researchers.
Harold Varmus's proposal describes two methods for submission of a new report that could operate side-by-side. The first is to use the established editorial boards, and the second would be through a publicly available preprint repository.
European backers of Varmus's Proposal tend to favor the first, "closed" method of submission. Their claim is that by sticking to the traditional method there is less chance that the database would be flooded by poor quality reports. A subliminal reason for their desire to maintain editorial control might be that delayed publication gives the group that reviews the data extra time to analyze and extract ideas for future research before it is made available to the world.
With the second submission method, each submitted report would only need to be given a cursory review to eliminate voodoo science (SPAM for health care scams or unhealthy foods, etc.) before it was placed, unedited and unreviewed, into the preprint repository, where any interested party could read it. Each "preprint" report could be given a version number like most Open Source Software projects use. Perhaps the "development" version could show editorial strike-outs and new text in different colors from the original. The next higher, "stable" version would be the reviewed, edited, author-corrected copy. Still higher versions might contain supplementary information. Even after they are published, the lower versions should be archived and accessible for historical use.
The Harold Varmus Proposal would require an article to obtain two favorable reviews, perhaps from members of established editorial boards, before it was transfered from the preprint repository to the general repository. Varmus also touches on the possibility of more open reviewing "in which critiques of the scientific reports are accessible and signed." (Today, most scientific papers are reviewed anonymously.) I suggest that, in addition to solicited reviews, signed, unsolicited reviews should also be considered.
SummaryThe electronic submission, publication, editing, indexing, archiving, retrieval and utilization of scientific reports, abstracts, and data is taking a significant turn, and Varmus's Proposal may help make that a turn for the better.
I, like Varmus, believe that since most scientific research is funded by the public, the public should have free access to it from open E-libraries via the Internet, and that the only person who should be allowed to claim "ownership" of a scholarly article is the person who wrote it.
No Scientific Society or Journal Publisher should be allowed to hold a copyright on scientific knowledge. The researcher is the only one who has the right to claim, "I discovered it and I reported it."
Not new. Scientists have been talking about this since before the web. A decade ago we were all using e-mail to swap preprints in TeX, and common repositories sprung up at various places. The biggest (in my fields at least) is xxx.lanl.gov.
The problem with these -- and this was well-known at the start -- is the editorial and review process (or lack thereof). Five years ago at CERN there was some sort of conference on faster, more widespread and community-based systems than traditional peer-review-by-old-fogies.
There are some good ideas going around, but scientists are naturally going to be cautious about changing the present system: after all, there's an awful lot of pseudoscience knocking at the door, trying any trick to look respectable. In light of that, and the awesome responsibility "science" has in today's society, I think the caution is understandable.
BTW, in the earlier discussions of this topic (e.g. that conf. at CERN), I didn't get the impression that the traditional journal publishing houses were luddistically trying to hold on to their current niche. Fewer and fewer libraries are subscribing to the ever-more-expensive journals, and the printers know they're in a shrinking market. Everyone, including the publishing houses, is well aware of the fact that killing large numbers of trees isn't the effecient solution we're looking for.
I'm subscribed to a few journals, and I figure the open-source method of having journals would reduce the cost of journals (paying in upwards of $200 a year for a journal is crap).
However, I'm not so sure that we should open it up to people outside the discipline. This is my major concern. I don't want non-mathematicians reviewing SIAM, as I'm sure that non-physicians should have no right to review medical journals.
Most hip journals post their articles, or most of their articles online already. SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Mathematics publications aren't that sexy, so that attracts a limited amount.
My major concern is that if we start pushing biomed articles, it'd be a good idea for academics to push open discourse. However, I do agree with the major concerns for health care providers. If a research article takes one position on a health condition and this is open to the public, this could damage health care treatment. An example of this is if there was some new fangled cancer treatment and it got published in a journal online and if I was a cancer patient, knowing this could present problems with dealing with your health care provider. What if the published research is wrong and incorrect? What if it's misleading to the untrained eye?
Another topic that we have to talk about is whether or not most people would a) be interested and b) can understand topics in journals. I realise that the Slashdot reader is more intelligent than your average web surfer, but realistically, would your average AOL user be able to adequately understand stuff published in the NEJM (New England J. of Med)? Would they really care?
All I'm saying is that we can't go nuts and start open-sourcing everything. Patience...
When I review papers for a conference, the on-line forms require that I rate myself as a reviewer (often as an "expert" or not). The conference committee members are made up of respected researchers and there is an implicit assumption that these members will pick reviewers that know what they are talking about.
If I rate myself a non-expert, I cannot recommend a paper for acceptance or rejection. I can only make comments and weak suggestions (i.e. a "weak accept" or "weak reject"). Is this good or bad? I could argue it either way.
I'm not saying that a totally open review process can't work. I'm just saying it needs to have some thought put into it. Ultimately the conference committee members are responsible for choosing the papers (based on the reviews they receive and their own opinions). Who takes on that responsibility in an open system?
One final point is that nothing prevents researchers from publishing material on the web. I often see pre-published papers made available for download. The consumer understands that the papers have not gone through a formal review process yet.
The problem with this is that you're trusting the general public to make decisions on the validity of a scientific paper. The average person does not have the knowledge to do so. In order to have an effective system, you need experts to actually peer-review the material, to assure that there are no factual errors in the material, or procedural errors in the experiments.
That's the problem I see with this type of site. Any sort of crackpot scientist could put up an article and get a bunch of media attention, without there being any peer-review of his work first. Do we really want crackpot scientists getting easier access to the media?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why?
The various LANL preprint servers have been running since 1991 with no such scoring system. Everything that's submitted from somebody associated with a university or research institution is simply accepted.
People are pretty knowledgeable about their own fields; it doesn't take more than skimming the abstract to see if its written by a crackpot, and only a bit more to see if its interesting to them. (And if it is to them, it need not be to someone even working on very similar problems.) People looking for info out of their fields shouldn't be reading the current state-of-the-art; they need to get up to speed first with, eg, review articles.
So I'd tend to just skip the `rating' totally; other than an ego boost/dasher, I think most scientists would skim with, in Slashdot terms, the threshold set to -2 anyway.
A lot of modern journals are on-line now, but they require a subscription (of sometimes over $300). So, net access has started, that's a given.
The problem is accessability, not peer review. Peer review is valid, very very valid. You can't do away with it or the result will be the "waste basket journals" that now exist in print being on the web. There are many "free" journals that will publish anything, send it to everyone they can, not peer review, and they don't care because they get advertizing money to print the journal.
I have sketched out a very elaborate plan for an online journal about 3 months ago, and it is possable, but it would require a total "rewrite" of the whole peer review process. And, like it or not, a whole lot of money is involved. In my plan, there would be extensive peer review, yet, completely accessable to anyone free of charge across the net. And, the peer review would be structured so that "old boys" and "grudge reviewers" would be cut out of the loop. (Yes, sometimes scientists who are working on similar projects can shred a journal submission, without makeing any valid points, and the editor is forced to "accept" this review, because it's "an expert" in that field).
The whole process can't be summed up in a "slashdot" story, it's very intense, and a very serious subject. But, I can say, there is a way, and from what I have seen that needs to be done, it will be a long way off, and we will be subject to years worth of "screwed up implementations" of the process before anyone fixes it.
Being that the scientific publishing world is a very high dollar buisness, I won't spell out how I think it can be done _correctly_, because I don't want to see someone else who is already exploiting scientists get a better idea to further rape the real solid scientists out there.
Now, if there were about a dozen strong willed, hard working scientists with the support of about a dozen hard working coders that were masters of system admin, web servers, and php3/sql, I would be happy to share the ideas I have _privately_ with them, only if they were willing to work on it, debate it, and develop something that worked the way _science_ should (meaning, the good work doesn't go unnoticed because it's not popular, the bad work was pointed out quickly and the authors shown the real holes in thier assumptions by real helpfull experts, and the scientists benifited from the process insted of further feeding the wealth of the publishing world).
Don't get me going on this, because it's an ugly mess, and slashdoting solid science isn't the answer. For one, slashdot is a "discussion/news" forum, and if a story isn't "accurate" it fades away into the archives before someone invests half a million dollars and 3 years of work trying to build on that idea.
I personally have strugled with getting Linux and FreeBSD accepted at my work. I know what it's like. Also, I have delt quite frequently with a range of quality and peer review in publication of scientific studies, and know what stands a chance at working, and what wouldn't.
I'd give anything just to get a chance to go to that confrance... But, as it now stands, I am very busy getting some new work published, writing up to graduate this fall, and getting things together to present at the 218th ACS National Meeting, and 2000 PittCon. :-( So, all my money and most of my time is wraped up in that.
If there is anyone out there going, please write me, and let me know if you could take notes, tap the talks, get me a program, or anything...
This is the kicker really. Paper is physical. While this is looked down upon by most techies it really has several advantages:
Wide distribution of the paper materials make ex-post facto modifications (i.e. rewriting history) much more difficult and almost impossible to hide.
There are no format or obsolescence issues involved. I can go to the right library and read scientific literature from the 3rd century B.C. while demographic data from the mid-60s on punch cards is basically lost forever. The rapid changes to information format and medium in the information age means that keeping things in a format available to all would be a massive and expensive project over time.
Dead trees work. So far nothing electronic has come close to this for the long term storage of information.
jim
While I agree that having non-physicians review medical journals would probably be a mistake how do we say whether someone is a mathematician?
Only someone with a degree in that area is a mathematician?
I would suggest that there are a lot of people that do not have a degree in a certain area of math or science but that still know a great deal.
I think instead the way to go is a
We could also give a higher starting number to the comments of recognised scientists or experts. This would funtion similarly to the way anonymous cowereds start at -1 on slashdot where as people that are logged in start higher.
Perhaps we could even have someones starting point be figured by some sort of average of how they have been promoted or demoted in past postings. Start new posters with a 0 and let them climb their way up or down from there over time.
Probably not. But the fact that your average AOLer doesn't care about a subject doen't mean that you want to prevent him from reading about it if the urge strikes. Saying that he can't handle certain information is a mistake. There are plenty of places to read about junk science (like the supermarket rags), having seachable access to "real" science would be a nice balance.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
Well Slashdot moderation is probably too democratic and anonymous for some. The mod scores don't have a lot of credibility behind them.
I always though the best overall solution, which would work for anything from scientific peer-reviews to Slashdot or even entertainment reviews, would be to have non-anonymous reviewers, where everyone who wants to be a reviewer can give a rating to as many things as they want to. Then each readers simply pick what reviewer they consider to be the most credible, or best matches his own tastes. (And then sort or filter items based on the reviewer's scores.)
You could even have "virtual" reviewers that are made up of composite of other reviewers. A total democratic virtual reviewer would be an average of everyone's scores, or a Slashdot-style virtual reviewer would be an average of a randomly-selected sample of reviewers, or a "board" that averages the scores of some select group.
Do it that way, and it can have just as much credibility and high signal-to-noise ratio as a medical journal, or as much variety as Usenet -- it would all be up to the reader to choose who is the most trustworthy.
And, of course, readers would pick different review settings for different topics. You might pick Charles Emerson Winchester III as your medical reviewer, Bourbaki-the-math-board for your math stuff, and Opyros-the-metal-dude for your music reviews. Whatever.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
These issues have been discussed in great detail in sci.math.research over the last few weeks. The final conclusion: lots of people continue to disagree with lots of other people. One of the best ideas that came out, in my opinion, is that the journal's real job is lending credibility to a paper. This purpose might be better served in the future by journals publishing reviews of articles available electronically, instead of the articles themselves. Of course, not every journal that's being published today could survive that way, but I don't think that's any real loss at all.
The problem with slashdot style peer review is that is might lead to slashdot style posts, I can see it now:
Today on the Quantum Physics Review - Harvard professor Robert Gregors posted an article detailing a simple method of producing measurable quantities of strang quarks. Dr. Vanesh Purgabedi of Princeton responded with 'FIRST POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' This was promply moderated down to -1. A physicist calling himself 'Lord Voltron' observed that 'RED HAT SUCKS!!! I hate them.' This was moderated to a 3 for 'Insightful' MIT graduate student Allen Andrews observered that the energy requirements of Gregors' method would render it impractical for event the most well funded institutions. He was then accused by several 'Anonymous Particles' of beeing an 'AzzL1ck1ng M$ Wh0r3.' and moderated to -1 for being flamebait.
--Shoeboy
I think this could work, for a couple of reasons.
/. moderation itself would not be good science, a formalized method of review by ALL peers could be successfully implemented. I think. :)
1. This is what we have now. You can determine the validity of an article by seeing how many other researchers cite that it. Not a perfect method, but it does work. Of course, it implies that most master's theses are pure crap, as they are never cited.
2. A mathematical technique for quantifying and validating this approach has been developed. I don't remember where I read this, but it was 5-7 years ago. The writer indicated that the technique could be used for ranking college football teams or for separating scientific research articles from pseudoscientific ones. You started by assigning values to some teams/articles, and an iterative process based on who played those teams or who cited those articles would eventually produce values for all teams/articles.
So while
...a monthly email with a dozen or so article ID #s...
The thing is, stuff published on the web is evanescent. We've all encountered broken links, or links to pages that aren't what they used to be, etc. Sites come and go, and even archive sites eventually offline the stuff.
The nice thing about paper journals is that you can usually find a copy *somewhere*. Maybe in some obscure library at the university of outer gondwanaland, maybe even only on microfiche, but the stuff doesn't go away just because somebody typed 'rm *' or reformatted the hardrive or rearranged their web site. I can dig up papers published fifty and a hundred years ago -- and sometimes that is very worth doing (among other things, consider the issue of prior art in patents). Try finding a web document from even five years ago, or five months in some cases.
This is particularly relevant with articles that may not be "politically correct", whatever that might mean in a given context. Aside from the ease of simply destroying the article in question, it is comparitively trivially easy to change the offending article. Remember Winston Smith's job in Orwell's "1984"?
I'm all for web publication -- when the pages are there it certainly simplifies finding them, and hyperlinking the citations to the originals and summaries to the raw data, etc, would be wonderful. But we need to give some thought too to how this stuff gets archived for accessibility ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now, and how the electronic copies avoid mutation. (PGP checksum, perhaps?)
-- Alastair
From the Preamble:
When authors of scientific papers submit their manuscripts for publication in scientific journals, they are frequently asked to sign a copyright-transfer agreement to the publishers of the journal. After such a transfer, the authors may retain little freedom to use their own papers. For example, some copyright agreements forbid authors to make their works available on a web page: you might be reading something more interesting than this, now!
We feel that such copyright policies greatly reduce the freedom of scientists and researchers to exchange information and ideas. In our view, what is important is making scientific literature fully available to all scientists, free of the restrictions that are imposed today. Who owns the copyrights is a secondary issue (please read our objectives for more information).
If you are a scientist or researcher, or simply an interested person, please read on.
One point missed here (probably because there are very few biologist reading ./) is that in biology (or in life science in general) the amount of published is much greater than in physics. Further it is often very difficult for a non expert to know if an experiment was carefully done or not. (How long was the incubation time, what cell-line was used etc etc). Finally no life-scientist write pappers in TeX and reading a word-double-spaced manuscript is much more difficult than a properly formated paper.
./ style or somehow) that tells me (a) if this paper is correct (b) how important it is
So what an e-journal need to provide is:
1) A ranking (peer-review,
2) Someone formatting the paper into a nice layout.
3) A good capacity for me to search of all papers, new papers, papers with keywords etc.
Copyright 1998 arne Verbatim copying and distribution is permited as long as this message is preserved
One reason that there is a stigma attached to non-peer review and net based papers is that you can write any old garbage. I should know, my most cited paper (by a factor of 5) is in an electronic journal (It's not garbage, but it is informational rather than scientific peice).
Publication lists are often used by funding boards to asses the credibility of a proposal from an author. While less than ideal, this is necessary because it would be impractical for every funding board to review every aspect of every proposers work - they have neither the time, or the breadth of expertise. If they included non-peer-review publications, then there would be some people who like writing churning out heaps of garbage papers.
(I've reviewed some which are clearly rubbish. I've also asked for the editorial board to pick another reviewer when I disagree with the author concerned).
At the same time it would be wrong to deny that there are a few fields in which a viewpoint has acheived 'monopoly status', and alternate views cannot be expressed, although it is uncommon for all the journals in a field to be so dominated unless the field is very narrow. Experience shows that the situation usually resolves itself as the current generation of reviewers retire, although that is frustrating for individual authors at the time.
Given the balance between not abusing the nations tax $ on project with no scientific merit, and not holding up the progress of science, I think the balence in the current system is about right, even if it goes wrong in a few specific cases. If peer-reviewed electronic publishing can reduce the number of bad cases, I'm all for it.
This is partly dealt with by weighting reviews by the authors credibility, and an author has no credibility until they have published something credibile.
There are openings for abuse, for example a small group could submit papers and lend eachother support. A more complex formula for credibility of papers and authors would help. It also won't help the problem of communicating an unpopular idea.
The system could also implement the traditional approach, by simply giving the editorial board and their chosen reviewers credility, and giving none to anyone else.
What I slightly object to in the current system is that my best and worst peer-review papers are given equal weight in any funding review, and all are given equal weight with papers from scientists both better and worse than myself.
The one thing I think they'll kick and scream about the most is the notion of "peer reviewed" content, notably how the status-quo, published journal system is reviewed by professionals. My girlfriend is an oncologist (always digging up papers from somewhere) and some med friends of hers were discussing this the other night at dinner; there really seems to be a stigma attached to non-official net-papers. I think that's bunk myself, but perhaps a well-established site could develop its own mechanisms for developing the public-accepted pretense that its content is "peer reviewed", and still maintain the open-source ethic...
Back when I was in grad school, my research happened to make a notable contribution to a hot topic at the time. I was (usually with other authors) submitting papers to IEEE journals at a rate of about 1 per 3-6 months. I also attended several conferences and got to know a lot of the major contributors in my research area.
Typically, every submission got sent to 3 experts for review. My professor (and one of his collegues) even forwarded to me several papers they were asked to review. I noticed a couple of things regarding peer review:
1. For every submission, there was a 50/50 chance that none of the three reviewers would know what the paper is really about. Part of this problem is that the IEEE journal editors simply can't know about all the topics being researched in their area and would often pass the submission to the wrong experts. These "experts" (in the wrong subject matter) often wouldn't give a shit about trying to learn about the topic at hand and would just give it a bad review. You could tell this was happening when you got your submission back with comments and criticisms that simply made no sense. I was asked to review a couple of papers that were out of my research area, and I did my best to research the prior literature on the subject and give a fair review, but many professors didn't have the time and would slam the paper rather than pass it on to somebody who would understand it.
2. There is an "old boys" network present in every field of research. Most of these operate like an old fashioned closed businessman's club. Once you are accepted into the fold, everyone else kisses your ass and gives great reviews to any paper with your name on it, regardless of whether it is worthy of publication. The people who make it to this stage rarely make useful research contributions anymore, but they get their names on lots and lots of papers. All of the lesser known researchers practically beg the big boys to co-author their paper, thus virtually guaranteeing its publication. Some of the members of the "old boys" network have unbelievable egos that require constant stroking if you plan on ever making a name for yourself in the field.
3. There are some researchers who will go to great lengths to stab you in the back. I remember the case of one little known French researcher who wrote a landmark paper in our field. In the review process, it was sent to one SOB who was a big player in the field but was notorious for being a backstabber and had questionable intelligence (I never knew how he got so well known in the first place). The SOB managed sit on the review and delay the paper's publication for over a year while he attemped to figure out what the French guy had done and duplicate his results. He sat on it so long in fact that he got his own paper published on the subject before the French guy's and stole all the credit. This dickhead, and several others like him, were also notorious for attacking their peers (and especially their peer's grad students) at any conference where one of their sponsors or potential sponsors were present.
I left grad school thoroughly disgusted with the whole research community. Your status was measured by how many papers you published, not how many real contributions you made. There were too many people who capitalized on the original research of others by pumping out lots of papers covering slight variations in the application of the aformentioned original research. To keep up, you had to sell out and produce lots of junk papers with the right names on them. I managed to get published in IEEE journals 6 times in 2 years, but I'm only proud of two.
This proposal is reminiscent of Drexler's suggestions for effective use of hypertext as outlined (for instance) in Engines of Creation (which is web-available, but I'm too lazy to find it right now). In fact, when he was describing hypertext in that context (before it was layered on top of the internet to create the Web as it exists today - which actually only implements about a third of the features of his proposed system) his discussion seemed to think of it primarily as a means of publishing scholarly information, reviewing it, and correcting for the lag-times and lack of back-links in conventional print media.
This proposal doesn't seem to implement backlinks, but the availability of updating to correct bad information makes up for some of that.
Some benefit might be had by looking at integrating some of the features found in the CritSuite (authored by Ka-Ping Yee and to be found at crit.org), which uses a proxy-server method to implement many of the missing features of true hypertext as a layer on top of existing WWW content.
A good versioning system with history information available (analogous to CVS) is also desirable - this is somewhat reminiscent of Daniel Dennett's "Multiple Drafts Model" (which he used as a metaphor/model to describe how the mind handles memory, but which could equally well be taken at face value as a method for handling bona-fide document drafts in an electronic environment), but with better memory.
I'm kind of skeptical here: a poorly implemented system is in some ways worse than no system at all, because it can lead to complacency. As long as careful consideration is given to which features are desirable, this could be a Very Good Thing.
One characteristic to watch for is how much centralized control is given to "editors" over content and filtering. Automated filtering methods, trust networks, reputational ranking, etc. have been fairly well-developed ideas for years. It would be an unfortunate oversight to fall back on print-age social technologies when something better is available.
Academic publishing seems to be mostly based on the reputation or authors and reviewers (in fact, some papers originating from students of influential professors get published even though they are total crap).
The other flaw in the current system is usually hidden from the masses - most professors don't review the papers themselves, but their grad students do. The professors rarely have the time to go in-depth on the paper, check the math, etc.
Sometimes the name of the grad student is attached to the review when it's sent out, and sometimes not. So it's impossible to determine the reputation of the real reviewer of the paper.
--> Any fool can criticize - and many do --
as stated in previously, without an editorial process, preprint servers are largely useless because of the amount of garbage one must wade through to get something useful.
well, there are free, online journals that exist. they use the same peer-review process that print journals use, but eliminate the cost by eliminating the printer! for examples, The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics has been around since 1994. if you look at the list of editors, you're sure to recognize a few names.
i believe that this is the answer. the free availability of this information is what is sought after.
- palspeaking as a biocomputing geek, the NCBI website is a great starting point...
Subscriptions to scientific journals easily cost $3,000-$5,000 a year. For this, university libraries get a bunch of scientific articles written by scientists (who are mostly fully paid by universities and science foundations), and reviewed by the same group of people. All of this costs the publishing company about $0.00. The publisher then has to do a bit of editing and finishing up. It's practically a free lunch. And Elsevier (to name just one) is raising it prices by 10% each year.
On top of that, almost all journals demand the scientist to sign a Transfer of Copyright Agreement. If you're not careful, you could be sued for publishing your paper on your homepage.
But now there's internet. We don't even need a press anymore. Potentially, there's lots of (library) money available that can be used to replace the old-style publishers. All it takes is for scientists to unite.
A subscription to this journal, I might add, costs several hundred dollars per year and of course it does not pay any of its reviewers (like most academic journals, it is considered an 'honour' to be asked to review a manuscript.)
Someone, somewhere is making a lot of money out of the whole journal scam.
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I agree that peer-review is vital to filter out crackpots and commercial propaganda. But rather than the traditional editorial board approach, why not slashdot style moderation?
Give each reader and each paper a credibitlty score. The credibility of the reader is based on the average credilibity of each paper they have submitted. Each reader can give a credibility score to each paper they read. The score for the paper will be the submitted scores, weighted by the credibility of each reviewer.
Now it is easy to make foulups in a paper the first time round, so an initial submission could be made to an editorial area. People could add comments slashdot style, and the authors could use these to revise the paper for final submission.
When I started reading this, I hated it. But now I love it! If someone launches a journal in my field this way, I'll gladly submit a paper. Of course, there is no real need to have individual journals, if the database can be searched flexibly.
In the various subfields of Physics, this idea
of a public "preprint server" has been implemented
for some time: check out the Los Alamos
Physics Preprint server.
I've been active in research (astronomy) for
the past ten years or so, and I've had many
conversations with other researchers on the
future of scientific publication. Some of the
main points are:
1. Review/moderation is necessary. There are
a _lot_ of people who have crackpot theories
about the universe, and some of them aren't
shy. Without refereeing of some sort,
the number of scientifically worthless --
see definition below -- papers will grow to
the point that they may swamp the worthwhile
papers. At that point, many users will stop
using the archive.
Note on "scientifically worthless": science
is an enterprise which depends on its
workers to adhere to a set of rules, such
as understanding basic physical principles,
checking the existing literature, creating
falsifiable hypotheses, verifying new
results, repeating experiments, etc. Papers
describing ideas which aren't developed
along these rules are, by definition,
scientifically worthless.
2. Scientists depend on their publication
records to land good jobs, and to advance
in those jobs. At the moment, in astronomy,
at least, the existing
electronic archives are NOT viewed as
"real publications". There's a little bit
of a chicken-and-egg problem: until the
electronic archives are taken seriously,
many people won't publish in them
exclusively. But if everyone publishes
elsewhere, why take electronic archives
seriously?
3. Many people, myself included, worry a great
deal about the use of electronic archives
10 or 20 years hence. I have paged through
bound journals dating back more than 100
years, and used them occasionally in my
research. I can interpret the information
easily. But I don't think it will be an
easy matter to keep electronic media up-to-
date over a century. The librarians to whom
I've talked are _very_ worried about this.
Yes, I know that it may not be difficult
in THEORY to copy old materials to new
formats and new media every N years;
but in practice, it's a royal pain. In an
era of shrinking library budgets, it may
become fiscally impossible.
On the other hand, I do very much support the
idea of "Open Source" publications. It will
enable many more scientists to publish their
ideas. In my field, for example, the authors
have to pay the journals about $125 PER PAGE
for the papers they publish. My last paper cost
over $2000, and I had to pay for some of it
myself (since I work at a small university that
doesn't have a lot of money to support research).
The tricky thing will be to find a mechanism
which keeps the good points of the current
scientific journal system, while avoid the
pitfalls (some of which I've mentioned above).
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu