All of this works only because the journals retain copyright and can restrict access to journal archives in Mickey-Mouse perpetutity
Then surely the answer is to fix the copyright system. God knows there are enough other areas where the current system causes problems that accademics should be lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks and joining everyone else who is pissed off. Remove the right to transfer copyright and link copyright to the life of the author(s). Finding work-arounds just benefits Disney and Elsevier and their evil bretheren.
However, I don't see how copyright is a problem in the way you seem to be saying. Once a library has a copy of `Journal of Earwax, May 1997', then it doesn't matter who owns copyright on it, anyone the library serves can go read the ground braking paper on the density of yellow crusty bits. If the journal stopped publishing anything interesting after the great earwax editorial panel wars of '99, then they can drop their subscription and subscribe to `Earwax Review 2b' or wherever the worthwhile research went. I take your point about bundling though.
The cost to the researcher is nil, because his/her grant money is paying for the journal either way
But in the one case he has influence over what he reads (by nagging the librarians to spend the limited money on different journals), in the other he has influence on whether his article gets published. I can see that might be attractive to accademics trapped in publication metric hell, but I doubt it would be good for the quality of what is published.
it takes less time for me to buy a single track on iTMS than it takes me to walk from the front door of the store to the area where CDs are sold.
Badly designed store then. I pass the CDs and other high-markup potential impulse buys (magazines, lottery ticket machine, flowers etc) any time I go into the supermarket before I get to whatever I went for.
Buying a complete album takes about as much time as picking up the CD in the store, waiting in line, and completing the purchase
But I don't have to wait in line to buy a CD, it gets rung up with things I was buying anyway.
(actually, I have never bought a CD from a supermarket, but theoretically it would be very convinient if I were to want to pay those prices for the crap they stock:-)).
Downloads have alog way to go to compete with that convinience, so I think physical media sales have quite a life ahead of them still.
while i agree that you'll have to Burn a CD yourself, how are downloads ephermeral?...
You answer yourself. Until I burn that CD, they are just files on my PC, and will evaporate when I buy a new one, have a crash, make a mour error etc.
Remember I'm talking about how normal people operate, not nerds around here. I run a network backup system (bacula) and burn data too big for overnight backup on a regular basis and so on, because this computer network is my livelyhood. J random teenager just piles files up on some bit of mummy's PC which mummy doesn't even know exists until the copyright police kick the door in.
Even I, a complete packrat, don't have all the computer files I have created since I was 14 and first met a teletype. I do have many of the LPs I bought before that, and some my parents bought so long ago I don't remember the house without them in it.
And the way you portray "serving their constituency" is quite cynical.
You mean doing what their constituents would want them to do? Oh the cynicism of it all.
I've stated elsewhere I'd have it advise the President
He already apoints people to advise him on science. The point is that a president will apoint people he trusts to advise him and that is a political decison which will result in him hearing things not very different from what he first thought of.
"is there anything the government can do to reasonably make things better?"
Keep it's nose out and let people who give a damn get on with it would seem to be the obvious thing. The problems science has in the US seem from this distance to arise from government intervention (eg bans on stem cell research, pressure on environmental scientists to pervert reports) rather than requiring more.
It seems obvious to tap the potential government provides.
The point is that government provides very very very very very little potential in this area, beyond providing block grants for blue sky research, and what it does potentially provide is via the education system in the form of enabling people to access information.
If i could download 15 songs for only $0.75, so why should i ever buy a CD again?
Depends on who `i' is. For variosu people there are:
Downloads, as easily available to the bod in the street now, sound crap, so if you will ever listen to music on something other than a crappy little MP3 player you will have to buy it again.
Downloads are ephemeral, so you have to burn CDs and life is too short to do grunt work.
Downloads don't come with artwork, lyrics, credits etc. unless you go download them and print them and life is too short to do grunt work.
Downloads are harder to buy than picking up a CD at the supermarket, and life is too short to do online grunt work.
You said: "It's not about the current president. Any politician must act that way, it is their job to maximise their political support". Please demonstrate how that's critically different in a way which relates to the discussion at hand?
A politician's desire is to gain power. Their job is to serve their constituency. I was arguing based on the latter. That is the rose coloured glasses view of politicians. (compare with a CEO whose desire is to be rich and powerful, but whose job is to serve the shareholders)
Too bad, the politicians are part of the package. Either you get the resources, support, cohesion, and the politicians, or you get nothing.
So all resources in the US (or wherever you are) are now controled by the government? Was there a coup I missed?
What do you mean by "politically unacceptable"?
In a democracy, aspects of science which are deeply unpopular either in content or in association.
It is not the democratic state's job to try and change public attitudes, that means the state is a very bad organisation to have in any way guiding scientific investigation, because it is science's job to look into cans of worms which make the population in general deeply uncomfortable.
But the whole point is that the journal isn't readily available currently,
If it isn't readily available currently then the scientists you would have on your comittee have decided it's not worth having in the library.
Obviously someone thinks that the journal isn't as freely available as they'd like.
Well, someone will always dissagree with whatever system you set up. My point was just that current availability is based on the decisions of accademics in the relevent subjects who are (indirectly via librarians) allocating money, sometimes provided by the state, sometimes by private endowerments. I don't see that bringing the politicians directly in into the selection will improve things, just teh reverse.
As an example of what that level of availability is, 1 year's access to all the journals found useful enough to be having on hand by the accademics in all subjects at Edinburgh university (plus all the books and archives etc of course) costs 100 quid IIRC. That's equivalent to the subscription to just one magazine. I think that counts as reasonably easily available.
Your claim is that it's impossible for the government to help out.
I have, of course, claimed no such thing. If you want to propose that 100 pound grants for external membership of private libraries be made available by the state, say via the education department, then I would have no complaint to make.
You stated that the politician's job is to gain political power.
No I didn't.
Such a system would also bring resources, support, and cohesion. These are not problems.
So, bring in resources, support and cohesion without politicians.
Do you actually believe government is incapable of promoting science?
No, I believe it is, and should be, incapable of promoting politically unacceptabale aspects of science.
So what's wrong with polling scientists to ask them which journals are most influential then subsidizing public access to the journals?
That is, in effect, what happens now. if I wanted access to a specialised journal, I'd go to one of the local Universities' libraries and if enough scientists (for a science journal) thought it was a useful journal it would be there on the shelves, or available for loan from a cooperating institution.
Specialized journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Journal of Virology also add targeted advertising.
I'm sure they do, but I doubt they cover any noticable portion of their costs that way.
And there is a limit set by the need to guard the reputation of the publication. The moment the readership suspects that the loss of an advertiser would significantly affect the publication, that publication is not going to be trusted. That means that unless a very wide variety of organisations want to advertise, the income from advertising is going to have to remain small.
Finish the loop: publisher selects a poorer panel and publishes more and lower quality articles in order to make money, readership drops off as the journal loses its reputation for quality, [etc]
Which is, of course, what I said about there being a floor.
The overall change is that the quality is controled by the lowest quality level a readership will accept, rather than being the maximum the publisher can achieve given the limited supply of good authors and reviewers.
Given that there is a supply of authors who are motivated to publish any old drivel by publishing metrics, and that the readership must read the few good papers in any sea of dross that is thrown at them, this is a recipe for sub tabloid quality levels.
So, how would BSD developers feel about creating something, having it ripped off, and bandied about by someone else as if it was their own creation, with the original developers getting no credit?
If they cared they wouldn't have used a licence which allowed it, so your question makes no sense.
Put another way, it wouldn't have been `ripped off' but `used as intended'.
No I wasn't. If you are not going to read what I wrote, why reply? Assuming that people will do their jobs properly is not cynicism, quite the reverse.
[Indeed, you can keep politicians out of areas where politics is a problem not an advantage, such as control of what gets published.]
Thus giving up any potential benefit of the program
There is no potential benefit in bringing politicians into an area where politics is a problem not an advantage.
Your position is contradictiry. You want to set up a government body and keep it out of the government. Any advantage you think you would get from it being part of the state, you are saying it can't have because it must be kept separate from the state.
Science and Nature (and the Proceedings of the Royal Society and a few others) are in a very special position. They have a relatively large circulation and a quite general coverrage. There are journals connected to professions which can act in a similar way, eg The Lancet or New England Journal of Medicine. Even there they don't give the publication away free, advertising only provides some income.
You are probably not going to fund
`High Engergy Density Physics' or `Literrary and Linguistic Computing' on that basis.
The author-pays model does not limit submissions to subscribers only
vanity publishers don't limit selection of authors to the set of readers. Indeed they work on the asumption that there will be no readers.
nor does payment guarantee you publication.
But the publisher only gets payed if you are published. Vanity publication.
You pay to have your work reviewed by an independent panel of experts in the field
No, you pay to have your work reviewed by a panel selected by the publisher. If the publisher only gets payed if you are published that might just influence selection don't you think?
The alternative (current model) is to have readers pay, which (i) reduces the potential audience of your work
This is a Good Thing. The total number of reader-hours is severely limited. A system which puts your work undr the eyes of interested readers optimised use of those hours.
reduces scientific advancement because it is more likely that someone who is in the right position to build on your work doesn't subscribe to that particular journal
Almost no one subscribes to journals. Institutions do. If, for instance, everyone who could be associated with every university with a physics department, and everyone in every company doing work in a related area could read your physics article, I doubt there is a problem. The remaining potential reader can find out about it second hand.
is ecnomoically more costly as a whole because of the filtering that must take place to eliminate "chancers".
Ie the people who would pay to vanity publish if they could. I don't feel that the overall economic cost of the journal system is at all significant in the context of the economy of the world, so optimising it is really not something I care about.
And to turn that last point on it's head, what about the guy who has a bright idea unrelated to any funding he has access to, and so can't pay to get published? Isn't it good that you (or your institution) get to pay to read his article (assuming it is in fact a good one and so gets through peer review)?
Anything run directly by the office of a politician will be operated politically. If you say the decision should be made by prominent scientists, then the selection of those scientists will be political. If you say the selection of those scientists should be made by some kind of peer selection or publication metric, the selection process or metric will be manipulated to get the politically desirable result.
It's not about the current president. Any politician must act that way, it is their job to maximise their political support, just as it is the job of a company director to maximise shareholder satisfaction and the job of a commercial TV executive to maximise advertiser satisfaction. When we give someone a task, we must take into account their job performance measure, because they will do the new task in accordance with that measure.
Just because the author pays a fee does not mean there is no peer review process.
But it does mean that the publisher's income is inversely proportional to the quality of that process.
There is a lower limit, set by the fact that if a journal gets too bad a reputation people will submit elsewhere, but still I think that a system where the publisher is rewarded for the quality of the content is better.
Most of the current peer reviews are not done by paid people anyway [but by people who know what they are talking about].
Because the publishers are financially motivated to have the content match the requirements of the readership, because the reader pays (or at least they get to nag their institution to pay). If we motivate them to have the content match the requirements of the writers, the selection of reviewers will change.
So the author-pays model is about paying for the stuff you submit to be reviewed to ensure that it is of high enough quality to be disseminated via that channel.
the President should have a "Department of Science" cabinet, where it's made explicitly clear that science from that department will be clear of political influences,
why isn't anyone talking about ADs ?. They are the natural revenue for an online magazine ?
Because we aren't talking about magazines, but journals. Magazines are high circulation, low content. Journals are the reverse. A company might want to get their name in front of the eyes of the 50 top nuclear phycists in the world, but if they do they would be better off picking up the phone or writing personal letters than trying to create a half page add to describe why their superconducting filament is the best for bulding accelerators.
The mass audience for journals is postgraduate students, but they have no money to speak of, and anyway there are already enough places to advertise beer.
The question would be how to choose what to pay for. The current system has the advantage that only journals which at least someone (even if it is some insane clique of social scientists) reads get money.
Perhaps a system where any journal which sold a minimum number of subscriptions to recognised libraries coule get funding to provide a lower quality, but same content, publication online (and would be expected to)? The problem would be working out a way to make the library subscriptions have enough added value for them to be taken up.
Only a politician could think author pays is a reasonable model, because that is how they publish, paying to dump masses of unwanted and seriously derranged literature on my doormat at every election.
Positive and negative feedback needs to come from the output end to get useful results. Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
There is an existing model for making access more open while preserving the useful feedback from readers - public libraries. Money goes from the state to authors based on demand for the books.
Imagine the public library which would result from the authors paying for inclusion. Come to think of it we are back to my doormat. I need to go throw away the junk mail and local politician's drivel now so I can open the door to get out to buy some coffee. Anyone have a shovel?
They keep making these bigger screens to keep up with the need to fit in the male stars who have taken advantage of all of the amazing products and services they get email about.
I bet you can pick up one of those bonds on ebay for $20, so long as you don't mind it on a CD-R. Of course, the licence conditions mean you have to buy a senator at the same time.
ISTM that there is a contradiction in the original question. He (there is an assumption!) can either further his education or increase his marketability.
Taking a degree in history or philosophy would od wonders for the education bit, but not much for the marketability. Getting some real world experience would increase marketability to people who actually want work done, but just plough the same educational furrow a little further. Getting an MBA would increase marketability to HR and associated types without giving any noticable increase in education or actual usefulness to an employer, but may be the best bet for purely improving expected income.
Slashdot Mirror
Then surely the answer is to fix the copyright system. God knows there are enough other areas where the current system causes problems that accademics should be lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks and joining everyone else who is pissed off. Remove the right to transfer copyright and link copyright to the life of the author(s). Finding work-arounds just benefits Disney and Elsevier and their evil bretheren.
However, I don't see how copyright is a problem in the way you seem to be saying. Once a library has a copy of `Journal of Earwax, May 1997', then it doesn't matter who owns copyright on it, anyone the library serves can go read the ground braking paper on the density of yellow crusty bits. If the journal stopped publishing anything interesting after the great earwax editorial panel wars of '99, then they can drop their subscription and subscribe to `Earwax Review 2b' or wherever the worthwhile research went. I take your point about bundling though.
The cost to the researcher is nil, because his/her grant money is paying for the journal either way
But in the one case he has influence over what he reads (by nagging the librarians to spend the limited money on different journals), in the other he has influence on whether his article gets published. I can see that might be attractive to accademics trapped in publication metric hell, but I doubt it would be good for the quality of what is published.
Badly designed store then. I pass the CDs and other high-markup potential impulse buys (magazines, lottery ticket machine, flowers etc) any time I go into the supermarket before I get to whatever I went for.
Buying a complete album takes about as much time as picking up the CD in the store, waiting in line, and completing the purchase
But I don't have to wait in line to buy a CD, it gets rung up with things I was buying anyway. (actually, I have never bought a CD from a supermarket, but theoretically it would be very convinient if I were to want to pay those prices for the crap they stock:-)).
Downloads have alog way to go to compete with that convinience, so I think physical media sales have quite a life ahead of them still.
You answer yourself. Until I burn that CD, they are just files on my PC, and will evaporate when I buy a new one, have a crash, make a mour error etc.
Remember I'm talking about how normal people operate, not nerds around here. I run a network backup system (bacula) and burn data too big for overnight backup on a regular basis and so on, because this computer network is my livelyhood. J random teenager just piles files up on some bit of mummy's PC which mummy doesn't even know exists until the copyright police kick the door in.
Even I, a complete packrat, don't have all the computer files I have created since I was 14 and first met a teletype. I do have many of the LPs I bought before that, and some my parents bought so long ago I don't remember the house without them in it.
You mean doing what their constituents would want them to do? Oh the cynicism of it all.
I've stated elsewhere I'd have it advise the President
He already apoints people to advise him on science. The point is that a president will apoint people he trusts to advise him and that is a political decison which will result in him hearing things not very different from what he first thought of.
"is there anything the government can do to reasonably make things better?"
Keep it's nose out and let people who give a damn get on with it would seem to be the obvious thing. The problems science has in the US seem from this distance to arise from government intervention (eg bans on stem cell research, pressure on environmental scientists to pervert reports) rather than requiring more.
It seems obvious to tap the potential government provides.
The point is that government provides very very very very very little potential in this area, beyond providing block grants for blue sky research, and what it does potentially provide is via the education system in the form of enabling people to access information.
Depends on who `i' is. For variosu people there are:
``dcma-me-harder.fbi.gov''?
A politician's desire is to gain power. Their job is to serve their constituency. I was arguing based on the latter. That is the rose coloured glasses view of politicians. (compare with a CEO whose desire is to be rich and powerful, but whose job is to serve the shareholders)
Too bad, the politicians are part of the package. Either you get the resources, support, cohesion, and the politicians, or you get nothing.
So all resources in the US (or wherever you are) are now controled by the government? Was there a coup I missed?
What do you mean by "politically unacceptable"?
In a democracy, aspects of science which are deeply unpopular either in content or in association.
It is not the democratic state's job to try and change public attitudes, that means the state is a very bad organisation to have in any way guiding scientific investigation, because it is science's job to look into cans of worms which make the population in general deeply uncomfortable.
But the whole point is that the journal isn't readily available currently,
If it isn't readily available currently then the scientists you would have on your comittee have decided it's not worth having in the library.
Obviously someone thinks that the journal isn't as freely available as they'd like.
Well, someone will always dissagree with whatever system you set up. My point was just that current availability is based on the decisions of accademics in the relevent subjects who are (indirectly via librarians) allocating money, sometimes provided by the state, sometimes by private endowerments. I don't see that bringing the politicians directly in into the selection will improve things, just teh reverse.
As an example of what that level of availability is, 1 year's access to all the journals found useful enough to be having on hand by the accademics in all subjects at Edinburgh university (plus all the books and archives etc of course) costs 100 quid IIRC. That's equivalent to the subscription to just one magazine. I think that counts as reasonably easily available.
Your claim is that it's impossible for the government to help out.
I have, of course, claimed no such thing. If you want to propose that 100 pound grants for external membership of private libraries be made available by the state, say via the education department, then I would have no complaint to make.
No I didn't.
Such a system would also bring resources, support, and cohesion. These are not problems.
So, bring in resources, support and cohesion without politicians.
Do you actually believe government is incapable of promoting science?
No, I believe it is, and should be, incapable of promoting politically unacceptabale aspects of science.
So what's wrong with polling scientists to ask them which journals are most influential then subsidizing public access to the journals?
That is, in effect, what happens now. if I wanted access to a specialised journal, I'd go to one of the local Universities' libraries and if enough scientists (for a science journal) thought it was a useful journal it would be there on the shelves, or available for loan from a cooperating institution.
I'm sure they do, but I doubt they cover any noticable portion of their costs that way.
And there is a limit set by the need to guard the reputation of the publication. The moment the readership suspects that the loss of an advertiser would significantly affect the publication, that publication is not going to be trusted. That means that unless a very wide variety of organisations want to advertise, the income from advertising is going to have to remain small.
Which is, of course, what I said about there being a floor.
The overall change is that the quality is controled by the lowest quality level a readership will accept, rather than being the maximum the publisher can achieve given the limited supply of good authors and reviewers.
Given that there is a supply of authors who are motivated to publish any old drivel by publishing metrics, and that the readership must read the few good papers in any sea of dross that is thrown at them, this is a recipe for sub tabloid quality levels.
If they cared they wouldn't have used a licence which allowed it, so your question makes no sense.
Put another way, it wouldn't have been `ripped off' but `used as intended'.
Yes, you were.
No I wasn't. If you are not going to read what I wrote, why reply? Assuming that people will do their jobs properly is not cynicism, quite the reverse.
[Indeed, you can keep politicians out of areas where politics is a problem not an advantage, such as control of what gets published.]
Thus giving up any potential benefit of the program
There is no potential benefit in bringing politicians into an area where politics is a problem not an advantage.
Your position is contradictiry. You want to set up a government body and keep it out of the government. Any advantage you think you would get from it being part of the state, you are saying it can't have because it must be kept separate from the state.
Science and Nature (and the Proceedings of the Royal Society and a few others) are in a very special position. They have a relatively large circulation and a quite general coverrage. There are journals connected to professions which can act in a similar way, eg The Lancet or New England Journal of Medicine. Even there they don't give the publication away free, advertising only provides some income.
You are probably not going to fund `High Engergy Density Physics' or `Literrary and Linguistic Computing' on that basis.
vanity publishers don't limit selection of authors to the set of readers. Indeed they work on the asumption that there will be no readers.
nor does payment guarantee you publication.
But the publisher only gets payed if you are published. Vanity publication.
You pay to have your work reviewed by an independent panel of experts in the field
No, you pay to have your work reviewed by a panel selected by the publisher. If the publisher only gets payed if you are published that might just influence selection don't you think?
The alternative (current model) is to have readers pay, which (i) reduces the potential audience of your work
This is a Good Thing. The total number of reader-hours is severely limited. A system which puts your work undr the eyes of interested readers optimised use of those hours.
reduces scientific advancement because it is more likely that someone who is in the right position to build on your work doesn't subscribe to that particular journal
Almost no one subscribes to journals. Institutions do. If, for instance, everyone who could be associated with every university with a physics department, and everyone in every company doing work in a related area could read your physics article, I doubt there is a problem. The remaining potential reader can find out about it second hand.
is ecnomoically more costly as a whole because of the filtering that must take place to eliminate "chancers".
Ie the people who would pay to vanity publish if they could. I don't feel that the overall economic cost of the journal system is at all significant in the context of the economy of the world, so optimising it is really not something I care about.
And to turn that last point on it's head, what about the guy who has a bright idea unrelated to any funding he has access to, and so can't pay to get published? Isn't it good that you (or your institution) get to pay to read his article (assuming it is in fact a good one and so gets through peer review)?
I wasn't being cynical. Indeed I was being nice and saying politicians will tend to do their job.
Politicians have been known to make decisions which make them look bad.
I din't say their job was to look good.
It's certainly possible to mitigate the problems introduced by politics.
Indeed, you can keep politicians out of areas where politics is a problem not an advantage, such as control of what gets published.
It's not about the current president. Any politician must act that way, it is their job to maximise their political support, just as it is the job of a company director to maximise shareholder satisfaction and the job of a commercial TV executive to maximise advertiser satisfaction. When we give someone a task, we must take into account their job performance measure, because they will do the new task in accordance with that measure.
But it does mean that the publisher's income is inversely proportional to the quality of that process.
There is a lower limit, set by the fact that if a journal gets too bad a reputation people will submit elsewhere, but still I think that a system where the publisher is rewarded for the quality of the content is better.
Most of the current peer reviews are not done by paid people anyway [but by people who know what they are talking about].
Because the publishers are financially motivated to have the content match the requirements of the readership, because the reader pays (or at least they get to nag their institution to pay). If we motivate them to have the content match the requirements of the writers, the selection of reviewers will change.
This is called vanity publishing.
Somebody please mod this +100 Hilarious.
Because we aren't talking about magazines, but journals. Magazines are high circulation, low content. Journals are the reverse. A company might want to get their name in front of the eyes of the 50 top nuclear phycists in the world, but if they do they would be better off picking up the phone or writing personal letters than trying to create a half page add to describe why their superconducting filament is the best for bulding accelerators.
The mass audience for journals is postgraduate students, but they have no money to speak of, and anyway there are already enough places to advertise beer.
Perhaps a system where any journal which sold a minimum number of subscriptions to recognised libraries coule get funding to provide a lower quality, but same content, publication online (and would be expected to)? The problem would be working out a way to make the library subscriptions have enough added value for them to be taken up.
Positive and negative feedback needs to come from the output end to get useful results. Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
There is an existing model for making access more open while preserving the useful feedback from readers - public libraries. Money goes from the state to authors based on demand for the books.
Imagine the public library which would result from the authors paying for inclusion. Come to think of it we are back to my doormat. I need to go throw away the junk mail and local politician's drivel now so I can open the door to get out to buy some coffee. Anyone have a shovel?
They keep making these bigger screens to keep up with the need to fit in the male stars who have taken advantage of all of the amazing products and services they get email about.
I bet you can pick up one of those bonds on ebay for $20, so long as you don't mind it on a CD-R. Of course, the licence conditions mean you have to buy a senator at the same time.
Taking a degree in history or philosophy would od wonders for the education bit, but not much for the marketability. Getting some real world experience would increase marketability to people who actually want work done, but just plough the same educational furrow a little further. Getting an MBA would increase marketability to HR and associated types without giving any noticable increase in education or actual usefulness to an employer, but may be the best bet for purely improving expected income.