---If I pay for music I should be able to play it on any hardware I own capable of audio reproduction, not just the files "authorized" for that piece of hardware---
So you should be able to play your 8 track tapes on your cd player?
What's that? You mean you'd have to convert the media format to do that? What's stopping you from doing that with your Real purchased tracks?
---Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access.---
Actually, many journals these days allow open access for all articles after a certain amount of time, 12 months in some cases, 6 months in others.
---The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification. ---
Note that the PLOS journals are all being financed by heavy endowments, and the author pays method of publishing a journal has so far not been proven to be economically viable.
---However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges----
Do you really think that most scientific societies are out to make a profit? Most that I've been involved with do a great deal for their communities. Most are almost entirely funded through proceeds from the journals they publish. Take these away, and you lose all of the good deeds that societies do for scientists. Remove their ability to publish, and societies vanish, and then all of the journals are in the hands of the greedy for-profit publishers. Is this what you want?
---Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.---
Nope. You can search all you like on Google, but unless you subscribe to the journal, or the paper is open access, you can't read the full text.
---And as for publishers. Well, that seems to have been conveniently skipped over. I mean I happen to have some small publishers in my family and in my experience they're first and foremost precisely about changing books for money and that role is indeed quite threatened by the Net---
Actually, publishers make a lot more money selling books directly to customers, rather than going through a reseller like Amazon or a book store. The net is wonderful for this, and Google's new Print function may drive even more buyers to go directly to a publisher's site. A publisher can sell a book to a buyer at a 10% discount and make more money than selling the same book to Amazon for a 25% discount. And the buyer gets the book for 10% less than on Amazon.
---Safari has one huge failing: it doesn't display the URL of the links when you hover your mouse over them like mozilla/firefox does in its status bar---
Huh? Turn on the status bar using View: Status Bar (or command/). I see the URL of all links when my mouse hovers over them.
Instrumental in passing most recent minimum wage increase; introduced bill to significantly increase commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS; passed law addressing nurse shortage; expanded early childhood development efforts; introduced plan that expanded children's health insurance coverage; stood with consumers against big banks on the bankruptcy bill and led and won the fight to pass the anti-money laundering act to stop terrorist and drug financing; secured assistance for families of Agent Orange; and led inquiry into savings and loan cleanup.
---I'd imagine that papers would be presented at random for peer review when you submit your own paper---
The problem being that, if you're in a field that isn't huge, you are bound to end up reviewing papers by a direct competitor, something an editor can help avoid happening.
---If any are way off, you can ignore the score---
Who makes that call? Sounds like you'd need to hire someone, say, an editor to make judgement calls like that. And you're right back where you started.
It's a nice idea, but how do you prevent someone from blackballing a competitor? Or helping a friend publish substandard material. The system is ripe for abuse.
The best scientists are going to be far too busy to participate except for the absolute minimum necessary. You're going to get the yahoos and the cheats participating more than anyone else.
Part of an editor's job is to find appropriate and fair reviewers for a paper. Something worth paying for.
Editors do a lot more than just hands on editing of papers. They spend a lot of time soliciting articles for their journal, requesting review articles, news articles and book reviews, determine the direction of the journal (and keep it moving that way), solicit and edit art, answer author queries, get and grant reprint permission for figure re-use and just generally deal with the day to day crap necessary to keep a journal running. Most journals have several editors on staff full time. Do you really think you're going to find volunteers to do a full time job for no pay? How many scientists have a spare 8-12 hours a day to devote to these things?
---Copy editors for academic journals do nothing - authors do the proofreading.---
Not true at all. I've read brilliant submissions that were indecipherable due to the poor English skills of the authors, and I've read absolute crap that was beautifully written. Again, you're asking scientists to devote valuable research time to picking up English skill, and writing and rewriting their papers. Don't forget layout, and correcting of figures for publication (I'm amazed at how many scientists still don't understand the concept of RGB vs CMYK).
Sometimes you have to pay so you don't have to spend all day doing crap. I'm worried that in this rush to make everything open, most scientists don't realize what they're going to have to take on for themselves if the journals go away.
Furthermore, the first journals to die are those run by the scientific societies. Which means all of those societies will die as well. Meanwhile, the behemoths like Elsevier will persevere on and pick up all those little journals' niches until they rule the world all by themselves.
---If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.---
Sure. Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all. When our taxes pay for a coup of a foreign government, are we all entitled to a piece of that country? And we should all be entitled to all sorts of services from Haliburton as well.
Don't forget, this is the man who predicted Apple would switch over to all Intel processors before the end of 2003, and of course, that the iTunes Music Store would never fly with Windows users, because it was arriving after hugely successful Windows music stores like BuyMusic.com.
"More urgent, however, the societies are worried that free publication would kill their financial base."
Then you comment:
"As far as "killing the financial base" of the scientific publication market goes..."
You've mixed up two different things, the support that not for profit scientific societies receive from publishing scientific journals, and the for profit science publication market. Many societies provide all sorts of benefits for their members, put on great meetings and give stipends and scholarships to young scientists. Take away the money they get from their journals, and these all go away as well.
Can you provide any evidence of Crick trying to prevent Franklin from getting due credit? Crick and Franklin remained friends up until her death and were frequent correspondents. Watson and Crick acknowledged Franklin in their original paper, which was published along with papers by Franklin and Wilkins in the same issue of Nature. A few weeks before Watson and Crick put the pieces together, Franklin went around her university hanging up signs declaring the "death of the double helix".
Let's be clear here, there were strong biases against women scientists at the time (and many still exist today). But she did not make the conceptual leap that Watson and Crick made. She never seemed to bear any ill will towards them, and was just happy that the truth was known. People in science get scooped all the time.
Sure, Watson made sexist and derogatory comments about Franklin in "The Double Helix", although one could argue that he made rude comments about nearly everyone involved. If you're angry at anyone, you should be angry at the Nobel committee who chose to wait until after Franklin's death to award the prize (which can't be awarded posthumously).
For the first time since Microsoft saw off rival Netscape in the 1990s Internet Explorer's virtual stranglehold on the browser marketplace has loosened. IE's share decreased slightly from 95.7 per cent to 94.73 per cent in the month up to 6 July, according to Web metrics firm WebSideStory.
Mozilla was the main beneficiary of the defection of one in 100 users from IE. According to WebSideStory, the combined Mozilla and Netscape market share rose from 3.21 per cent in June to 4.05 per cent in July. Although small in percentage terms, a defection of users from IE is something Microsoft ignores at its peril.
I work for a scientific publisher, and every time we try to put one of our manuals either on disc, online, or as an e-book, they've all failed miserably compared with the print editions. Biologists, who you'd think would be on the cutting edge of technology, want their manuals in dead tree form. So viva the printing industry.
Once one realizes that Blockbuster makes somewhere between 15% and 20% of its revenues from late fees, it's hard to believe that they're going to embrace a business model like this that eliminates those fees.
those annoying late fees -- which account for a full 15 percent of Blockbuster's $4.96 billion in revenues (Industry Standard)
One of the dirty little secrets of the home-video business, writes Lary Gerbrandt, a senior analyst at Paul Kagan Associates, is that their largest profit generator is actually late fees. (Factbook)
late fees, a revenue source that accounts for between 18-20 percent of Blockbuster's overall profits (Earthweb)
Personally, I agree that it's not a good deal for purchasing an entire album, for the reasons you listed. Where it is a really good deal, is purchasing individual tracks. For example, there are all sorts of tracks by my favorite artists available only on compilation albums. I don't want any of the other tracks on the compilation album, just the one. So it's great that I can pay 99 cents and get the song I want, rather than $18.99 in a store for the entire album, which I wouldn't listen to. The same goes for many reissued albums--Sonic Youth have put out a "deluxe" version of "Dirty". I already own the cd, but would like to have some of the new extra tracks without repurchasing the whole thing.
The idea of groups of scientists running their own types of publications and peer-reviewing all of the papers available is laudable. The problem is really one of time. Are any of you scientists? Do you know how incredibly busy the life of a well-respected scientist is? Do you really think any of them are going to be willing to cut their research time, time spent securing funding, and teaching / faculty duties time to essentially run their own journal? Sure, maybe a few, but nowhere near enough to cover the massive load of publications out there.
That's why scientists pay for publishers to do this work for them. There's an enormous body of work out there, and if Nature can winnow that down to just the absolute best, that's a very important time-saving service for most scientists, one that most are willing to pay for.
The PLOS journals are indeed an interesting experiment. A couple of things to think about:
1) Regardless of the business model, it is extremely hard to start a new journal in Biology these days. The market is flooded, and there really haven't been any new top-level journals (well, ones without the words Nature or Cell in the title) for a very long time. If you're a postdoc looking for a job, are you going to publish your paper in Nature, which goes a long way with a job search committee, or are you going to be idealistic and publish in the PLOS journal, which doesn't have the same currency?
2) Not all journals are owned by rapacious corporations. Yes, Reed-Elsevier has gobbled up many of them in recent years. But many publications are put out by scientific societies (example: Protein Science) and research institutions (example: CSHL Press). They use the profits from the journals to fund Society activities that benefit scientist members, or to directly pay for scientific research. By taking away the possibility of profit for these types of journals, you take away the benefits and the research funding they provide to the scientific community.
---They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals.---
Sure, but that's a major oversimplification of what a journal does. First, a large amount of papers submitted to a journal are never sent out to reviewers. Someone has to weed out the garbage, and somehow, that person's time needs to be paid for. Then, reviewers must be found. The process has to be organized, and kept on track, reviews accepted and the information passed on to the authors. Someone has to do that, and that person also has to be paid for their time.
Then there's copyediting, formatting and typesetting, preparation of figures for printing (most scientists still haven't realized that their RGB figures look very different when converted to CMYK). Then there are printing costs, and costs for formatting papers to html and pdf, and costs for web hosting.
How do you propose that the federation of scientists pay for these things? Where will they find the time? I'm guessing they won't be scientists any more, they'll become publishers, and just replace the one's already there.
At last count, iTunes carried music from over 450 non-RIAA affiliated independent labels. You don't have to avoid the iTMS, just be careful what you buy there.
Maybe you're not aware of how major label contracts work, but the artist has to pay the costs of recording, marketing, etc., out of their royalties. The only thing the label gives them is essentially a loan, with an extremely high cost (loss of ownership of their creation, and serious doubt as to whether they'll ever get paid what they're owed).
Some relevant links:
Steve Albini's rant on how contracts work:
http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
A recent decision showing the RIAA owed $50 million in unpaid royalties to artists "they couldn't track down", like Dolly Parton:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-05-04 -music-royalties_x.htm
And most importantly, the recent story of Marillion, who proved that you absolutely do not need a record company in this day and age:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/marillion_ comeback/
Slashdot Mirror
--- But how will all those poor Scientific journals continue to make money off of publically funded research?---
And then how will every scientific society that is funded by journal profits continue to exist and do positive things for their community?
---If I pay for music I should be able to play it on any hardware I own capable of audio reproduction, not just the files "authorized" for that piece of hardware---
So you should be able to play your 8 track tapes on your cd player?
What's that? You mean you'd have to convert the media format to do that? What's stopping you from doing that with your Real purchased tracks?
---Unlike most online newspapers and magazines, almost all the scientific journals I know of require a paid subscription to access.---
Actually, many journals these days allow open access for all articles after a certain amount of time, 12 months in some cases, 6 months in others.
---The exception are the couple of new bioscience journals in the Public Library of Science and the physics pre-print server (not peer-reviewed). But even that the author must pay $1500 for the cost of review and webification. ---
Note that the PLOS journals are all being financed by heavy endowments, and the author pays method of publishing a journal has so far not been proven to be economically viable.
---However, the greedy for-profit academic publishers and professional societies know this wall. They have the academic community by the b*lls with their high subscription and publication page charges----
Do you really think that most scientific societies are out to make a profit? Most that I've been involved with do a great deal for their communities. Most are almost entirely funded through proceeds from the journals they publish. Take these away, and you lose all of the good deeds that societies do for scientists. Remove their ability to publish, and societies vanish, and then all of the journals are in the hands of the greedy for-profit publishers. Is this what you want?
---Hopefully Google Scholar will do an end-run around these and provide a more accessable search service.---
Nope. You can search all you like on Google, but unless you subscribe to the journal, or the paper is open access, you can't read the full text.
This all may change with the proposed new NIH guidelines.
---And as for publishers. Well, that seems to have been conveniently skipped over. I mean I happen to have some small publishers in my family and in my experience they're first and foremost precisely about changing books for money and that role is indeed quite threatened by the Net---
Actually, publishers make a lot more money selling books directly to customers, rather than going through a reseller like Amazon or a book store. The net is wonderful for this, and Google's new Print function may drive even more buyers to go directly to a publisher's site. A publisher can sell a book to a buyer at a 10% discount and make more money than selling the same book to Amazon for a 25% discount. And the buyer gets the book for 10% less than on Amazon.
---Safari has one huge failing: it doesn't display the URL of the links when you hover your mouse over them like mozilla/firefox does in its status bar---
/). I see the URL of all links when my mouse hovers over them.
Huh? Turn on the status bar using View: Status Bar (or command
Here's a brief synopsis of Kerry's Senate accomplishments:
Instrumental in passing most recent minimum wage increase; introduced bill to significantly increase commitment to fighting HIV/AIDS; passed law addressing nurse shortage; expanded early childhood development efforts; introduced plan that expanded children's health insurance coverage; stood with consumers against big banks on the bankruptcy bill and led and won the fight to pass the anti-money laundering act to stop terrorist and drug financing; secured assistance for families of Agent Orange; and led inquiry into savings and loan cleanup.
To keep things fair and balanced, here's a view from a Kerry-Edwards site, and one from Fox News.
---I'd imagine that papers would be presented at random for peer review when you submit your own paper---
The problem being that, if you're in a field that isn't huge, you are bound to end up reviewing papers by a direct competitor, something an editor can help avoid happening.
---If any are way off, you can ignore the score---
Who makes that call? Sounds like you'd need to hire someone, say, an editor to make judgement calls like that. And you're right back where you started.
It's a nice idea, but how do you prevent someone from blackballing a competitor? Or helping a friend publish substandard material. The system is ripe for abuse.
The best scientists are going to be far too busy to participate except for the absolute minimum necessary. You're going to get the yahoos and the cheats participating more than anyone else.
Part of an editor's job is to find appropriate and fair reviewers for a paper. Something worth paying for.
---This, however, doesn't add so much value---
Editors do a lot more than just hands on editing of papers. They spend a lot of time soliciting articles for their journal, requesting review articles, news articles and book reviews, determine the direction of the journal (and keep it moving that way), solicit and edit art, answer author queries, get and grant reprint permission for figure re-use and just generally deal with the day to day crap necessary to keep a journal running. Most journals have several editors on staff full time. Do you really think you're going to find volunteers to do a full time job for no pay? How many scientists have a spare 8-12 hours a day to devote to these things?
---Copy editors for academic journals do nothing - authors do the proofreading.---
Not true at all. I've read brilliant submissions that were indecipherable due to the poor English skills of the authors, and I've read absolute crap that was beautifully written. Again, you're asking scientists to devote valuable research time to picking up English skill, and writing and rewriting their papers. Don't forget layout, and correcting of figures for publication (I'm amazed at how many scientists still don't understand the concept of RGB vs CMYK).
Sometimes you have to pay so you don't have to spend all day doing crap. I'm worried that in this rush to make everything open, most scientists don't realize what they're going to have to take on for themselves if the journals go away.
Furthermore, the first journals to die are those run by the scientific societies. Which means all of those societies will die as well. Meanwhile, the behemoths like Elsevier will persevere on and pick up all those little journals' niches until they rule the world all by themselves.
---If something is or should be funded with tax dollars (a category I think is best kept small or smaller, but *if*!), then it had better be available to the people who pay those dollars in.---
Sure. Let's start handing out nuclear and chemical weapons to any taxpayer who wants them. Their taxes did pay for them after all. When our taxes pay for a coup of a foreign government, are we all entitled to a piece of that country? And we should all be entitled to all sorts of services from Haliburton as well.
...SCO executives announce that, "There is no spoon."
Don't forget, this is the man who predicted Apple would switch over to all Intel processors before the end of 2003, and of course, that the iTunes Music Store would never fly with Windows users, because it was arriving after hugely successful Windows music stores like BuyMusic.com.
You've missed a key point here. As you quote:
"More urgent, however, the societies are worried that free publication would kill their financial base."
Then you comment:
"As far as "killing the financial base" of the scientific publication market goes..."
You've mixed up two different things, the support that not for profit scientific societies receive from publishing scientific journals, and the for profit science publication market. Many societies provide all sorts of benefits for their members, put on great meetings and give stipends and scholarships to young scientists. Take away the money they get from their journals, and these all go away as well.
This has been a particularly rough month for biologists as we also lost the great Ed Lewis, Nobel prize winner and father of the homeobox.
Can you provide any evidence of Crick trying to prevent Franklin from getting due credit? Crick and Franklin remained friends up until her death and were frequent correspondents. Watson and Crick acknowledged Franklin in their original paper, which was published along with papers by Franklin and Wilkins in the same issue of Nature. A few weeks before Watson and Crick put the pieces together, Franklin went around her university hanging up signs declaring the "death of the double helix".
Let's be clear here, there were strong biases against women scientists at the time (and many still exist today). But she did not make the conceptual leap that Watson and Crick made. She never seemed to bear any ill will towards them, and was just happy that the truth was known. People in science get scooped all the time.
Sure, Watson made sexist and derogatory comments about Franklin in "The Double Helix", although one could argue that he made rude comments about nearly everyone involved. If you're angry at anyone, you should be angry at the Nobel committee who chose to wait until after Franklin's death to award the prize (which can't be awarded posthumously).
---You claim Internet Explorer is losing market share without citing a single figure or study to prove that---
Here's one:
Mozilla takes bite out of IE
For the first time since Microsoft saw off rival Netscape in the 1990s Internet Explorer's virtual stranglehold on the browser marketplace has loosened. IE's share decreased slightly from 95.7 per cent to 94.73 per cent in the month up to 6 July, according to Web metrics firm WebSideStory.
Mozilla was the main beneficiary of the defection of one in 100 users from IE. According to WebSideStory, the combined Mozilla and Netscape market share rose from 3.21 per cent in June to 4.05 per cent in July. Although small in percentage terms, a defection of users from IE is something Microsoft ignores at its peril.
I work for a scientific publisher, and every time we try to put one of our manuals either on disc, online, or as an e-book, they've all failed miserably compared with the print editions. Biologists, who you'd think would be on the cutting edge of technology, want their manuals in dead tree form. So viva the printing industry.
Once one realizes that Blockbuster makes somewhere between 15% and 20% of its revenues from late fees, it's hard to believe that they're going to embrace a business model like this that eliminates those fees.
those annoying late fees -- which account for a full 15 percent of Blockbuster's $4.96 billion in revenues (Industry Standard)
One of the dirty little secrets of the home-video business, writes Lary Gerbrandt, a senior analyst at Paul Kagan Associates, is that their largest profit generator is actually late fees. (Factbook)
late fees, a revenue source that accounts for between 18-20 percent of Blockbuster's overall profits (Earthweb)
---everyone is running scared right now trying to prevent Apple from doing in Europe what they have done in the US---
What exactly has Apple done in the US, other than offering the most compelling service that customers seem to prefer over the competitors?
Personally, I agree that it's not a good deal for purchasing an entire album, for the reasons you listed. Where it is a really good deal, is purchasing individual tracks. For example, there are all sorts of tracks by my favorite artists available only on compilation albums. I don't want any of the other tracks on the compilation album, just the one. So it's great that I can pay 99 cents and get the song I want, rather than $18.99 in a store for the entire album, which I wouldn't listen to. The same goes for many reissued albums--Sonic Youth have put out a "deluxe" version of "Dirty". I already own the cd, but would like to have some of the new extra tracks without repurchasing the whole thing.
The idea of groups of scientists running their own types of publications and peer-reviewing all of the papers available is laudable. The problem is really one of time. Are any of you scientists? Do you know how incredibly busy the life of a well-respected scientist is? Do you really think any of them are going to be willing to cut their research time, time spent securing funding, and teaching / faculty duties time to essentially run their own journal? Sure, maybe a few, but nowhere near enough to cover the massive load of publications out there.
That's why scientists pay for publishers to do this work for them. There's an enormous body of work out there, and if Nature can winnow that down to just the absolute best, that's a very important time-saving service for most scientists, one that most are willing to pay for.
The PLOS journals are indeed an interesting experiment. A couple of things to think about:
1) Regardless of the business model, it is extremely hard to start a new journal in Biology these days. The market is flooded, and there really haven't been any new top-level journals (well, ones without the words Nature or Cell in the title) for a very long time. If you're a postdoc looking for a job, are you going to publish your paper in Nature, which goes a long way with a job search committee, or are you going to be idealistic and publish in the PLOS journal, which doesn't have the same currency?
2) Not all journals are owned by rapacious corporations. Yes, Reed-Elsevier has gobbled up many of them in recent years. But many publications are put out by scientific societies (example: Protein Science) and research institutions (example: CSHL Press). They use the profits from the journals to fund Society activities that benefit scientist members, or to directly pay for scientific research. By taking away the possibility of profit for these types of journals, you take away the benefits and the research funding they provide to the scientific community.
---They may talk about the value of peer review, but as you point out, none of these reviewers are really paid employees, so they are largely independent of the journals.---
Sure, but that's a major oversimplification of what a journal does. First, a large amount of papers submitted to a journal are never sent out to reviewers. Someone has to weed out the garbage, and somehow, that person's time needs to be paid for. Then, reviewers must be found. The process has to be organized, and kept on track, reviews accepted and the information passed on to the authors. Someone has to do that, and that person also has to be paid for their time.
Then there's copyediting, formatting and typesetting, preparation of figures for printing (most scientists still haven't realized that their RGB figures look very different when converted to CMYK). Then there are printing costs, and costs for formatting papers to html and pdf, and costs for web hosting.
How do you propose that the federation of scientists pay for these things? Where will they find the time? I'm guessing they won't be scientists any more, they'll become publishers, and just replace the one's already there.
At last count, iTunes carried music from over 450 non-RIAA affiliated independent labels. You don't have to avoid the iTMS, just be careful what you buy there.
Maybe you're not aware of how major label contracts work, but the artist has to pay the costs of recording, marketing, etc., out of their royalties. The only thing the label gives them is essentially a loan, with an extremely high cost (loss of ownership of their creation, and serious doubt as to whether they'll ever get paid what they're owed). Some relevant links: Steve Albini's rant on how contracts work: http://www.negativland.com/albini.html A recent decision showing the RIAA owed $50 million in unpaid royalties to artists "they couldn't track down", like Dolly Parton: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2004-05-04 -music-royalties_x.htm
And most importantly, the recent story of Marillion, who proved that you absolutely do not need a record company in this day and age:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/28/marillion_ comeback/