Currently it's easier for me to get a copy of a Metallica mp3 than to get a research paper who's author would really like me to read it. But that's changing.
The cost of preparing a single item for a journal is at least $500+. Don't forget that for every item accepted for a (good) journal, up to ten are rejected. Then there is the costs of proof reading and type-setting. Advertising is unlikely to provide $500 per article, when some articles are probably relevant to less than 500 experts in the world.
Somebody has to pay that, it's either the university libraries subscribing to the journal, or the research projects budgets in the author-pays model. In an author pays model there should also be some overcharge so that really good work from unfunded researchers (such as those in the third world) can make it in.
It's true that some journals will be nothing more than vanity publishing, and will accept anything. But being published in such a journal will not be desirable as they will not have the same "impact" as well respected journals.
The current model and author-pays both have the same approximate cost to the tax payer, except that one provides more short and long term benefits to the world scientific community. The funny thing about reasearchers in a poor university in the middle of Africa is that they're just as smart as people in more developed countries. It's insane that they do not have access to the current state of research.
I expect that we'll see some very interesting author-pays models coming out of developing nations, as the primary costs are staff time, not technichal resources, and staff time is the thing they have as much of as us. Just slower PCs.
Christopher Gutteridge University of Southampton Maintainer of GNU EPrints - research archiving software: http://software.eprints.org/
Hear, hear! Who better to settle our oldest constitutional debates than a monarchist fantasy author?
Find wisdom where you can. Beware of easy false logic, like if a fantasy writer said it then it's not important, or the internet classic "Painting buildings is evil because Hitler did it."
For some related information have a look at www.eprints.org which is aimed at making research freely available. I am developing a system called GNU EPrints which is currently an online research archive but may well get peer review functionality in the next year or so.
I can see why you are angry at the cost of having your work printed, but even with typesetting done in India (New Delhi facility) we still make little over cost. Its just a fact of life that getting this all together, XML or Quark set, art edited and set, PDFs made and printed, and finally shipped and distributed, has a cost.
Printing on dead trees is expensive. Electronic publishing is *cheaper*, and to be honest it's the quality of the research I care about, not the spelling. Especially if the spell checking makes it so expensive poorer universities can't afford it.
These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide publication credits to researchers whose articles aren't good enough to be published in normal periodicals
In a surprising "coincidence" version 2.0 of the eprints archive software has just been released by us monkeys at the University of Southampton working for Stevan Harnad (who proposed self archiving).
The software is pretty generic, it does research papers by default but can be configured *lots*. And it's designed to add your own scripts and stuff (perl).
At one end of the spectrum (what it's funded to do) it generates archives of research papers, although you could practically implement mp3.com with it (and a huge server or two).
Although my entry won, they didn't actually publish the code. If you want to look into the evil I've put it online with an explanation of what the hell it actually does. See http://totl.net/PerlContest/
I've always coded badly, but it's nice to be recognised for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently it's easier for me to get a copy of a Metallica mp3 than to get a research paper who's author would really like me to read it. But that's changing.
The cost of preparing a single item for a journal is at least $500+. Don't forget that for every item accepted for a (good) journal, up to ten are rejected. Then there is the costs of proof reading and type-setting. Advertising is unlikely to provide $500 per article, when some articles are probably relevant to less than 500 experts in the world.
Somebody has to pay that, it's either the university libraries subscribing to the journal, or the research projects budgets in the author-pays model. In an author pays model there should also be some overcharge so that really good work from unfunded researchers (such as those in the third world) can make it in.
It's true that some journals will be nothing more than vanity publishing, and will accept anything. But being published in such a journal will not be desirable as they will not have the same "impact" as well respected journals.
The current model and author-pays both have the same approximate cost to the tax payer, except that one provides more short and long term benefits to the world scientific community. The funny thing about reasearchers in a poor university in the middle of Africa is that they're just as smart as people in more developed countries. It's insane that they do not have access to the current state of research.
I expect that we'll see some very interesting author-pays models coming out of developing nations, as the primary costs are staff time, not technichal resources, and staff time is the thing they have as much of as us. Just slower PCs.
Christopher Gutteridge
University of Southampton
Maintainer of GNU EPrints - research archiving software: http://software.eprints.org/
Hear, hear! Who better to settle our oldest constitutional debates than a monarchist fantasy author?
Find wisdom where you can. Beware of easy false logic, like if a fantasy writer said it then it's not important, or the internet classic "Painting buildings is evil because Hitler did it."
For some related information have a look at
www.eprints.org
which is aimed at making research freely available. I am developing a system called GNU EPrints which is currently an online research archive but may well get peer review functionality in the next year or so.
Dang PHP auto datestamp. I've hardly slept for 2 weeks trying to get that documentation written.
Printing on dead trees is expensive. Electronic publishing is *cheaper*, and to be honest it's the quality of the research I care about, not the spelling. Especially if the spell checking makes it so expensive poorer universities can't afford it.
In a surprising "coincidence" version 2.0 of the eprints archive software has just been released by us monkeys at the University of Southampton working for Stevan Harnad (who proposed self archiving).
The software is pretty generic, it does research papers by default but can be configured *lots*. And it's designed to add your own scripts and stuff (perl).
At one end of the spectrum (what it's funded to do) it generates archives of research papers, although you could practically implement mp3.com with it (and a huge server or two).
Links of interest:
EPrints Home: http://www.eprints.org/
Demo Archive: http://demoprints.eprints.org/
Our department adds a Mime X-Header which flags that the mail failed MAPS, but leaves it to the user to choose to filter it or not.
Actually, not many people know how to filter based on mime headers so it no adds [SPAM?] to the subject to make it easy to filter/prioritise.
Although my entry won, they didn't actually publish the code. If you want to look into the evil I've put it online with an explanation of what the hell it actually does. See http://totl.net/PerlContest/
I've always coded badly, but it's nice to be recognised for it.