These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system.
I think the arXiv project has been highly successful, and is a great example of what instituional repositories should look like. But like it or not, there is still a market and expectation among many academics for glossy-looking journals. They explicitly want the things that improve the reading experience - in particular, they want to be able to print good-looking paper (ie. PDF) versions of papers, and are willing to pay extra for that. Maybe things will develop where the journal as medium becomes extinct, but not ay time soon.
Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost.
What you're describing is exactly what OJS does: sophisticated review/workflow system with a little automated validation. It provides about 90% of the quality of the journals you're describing with almost zero cost. It has been wildly successful, especially in the developing world, where starting and hosting a journal is expensive. If we're going to really break it down, how would this review/validated arXiv system you describe differ from a journal? Not much, it seems.
I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX?... Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?
Authors submit to specific journals for two main reasons: exposure and prestige. Whether this is a flawed system or not (I think it is), the fact is that, if you're a large successful journal, you can force authors to submit in whatever format you want - but then of course, you probably don't have money/cost problems. Smaller journals trying to survive or start-up journals don't have the luxury of telling authors to "suck it up". The authors will simply submit to another journal of the same class that's more lenient about their submission requirements.
Like I said, whily you may be comfortable with LaTeX and willing to take on much of the layout, etc. the vast majority of authors are not - whether through being too lazy, too busy, or simply not technically-inclined enough. Bear in mind that there are plenty of social science researchers out there who have a hard enough time with Word, much less LaTeX. If you make submission too difficult, authors will go elsewhere.
XML - and in particular the NLM format (by far the most comprehensive, in my experience), is a format that lends itself much better to multi-layout transformations than LaTeX. It also has the advantage that it can be fairly easily generated from source files, such as.DOC, via things like OpenOffice and XHTML. There is still some manual work required, but I've spent the past 3 years working on automated ways to convert articles in formats authors are comfortable with (like.DOC, but some even use.RTF or weirder) into XML. It's doable, and we're getting much closer.
The simple fact is, journals still take work, and work costs money. The Internet (and in particular, the Web) has brought an alternative for academics to expose their research other than journals (eg. IR like arXiv), but the journal paradigm still exists, and for the most part, it is the main venue for academic publicat
Authors don't get paid. Reviewers don't get paid. Editors, sometimes get paid. Authors do all the typesetting, spellchecking and formatting themselves. They draw their own diagrams, format everythign in latex and all the printer has to do is... actually, their usually just given "camera" dvi version of the file or something. This is not quite true - it depends heavily on the particular journal, and the particular author. I've run a fairly decent-quality online journal for the past few years, and I can attest that the copyediting, typesetting and formatting aspect of publishing is the most onerous and time-consuming. While you may properly format everything according to the instructions for authors (in which case, I applaud and thank you), the vast majority of authors in my experience are far more concerned about simply seeing their article on the "recently published" page than spending any time spell-checking it.
The fact is, there is a great range in submission quality (in both content and layout), and for a fairly advanced journal that generates XHTML and PDF versions of articles from a standardized XML format (the one Pubmed Central uses), this can take on average 2-4h of copyediting and layout work per article. Even at $10 an hour (pretty low for a professional editor), that's where the cost of publication primarily is.
I work developing a number of open-source tools (eg. Open Journal Systems), as well as using OpenOffice.org, etc. and we are slowly decreasing the cost of publishing, but even for a non-profit, Open Access journal, $30 per article is extremely cheap for publication costs. Who this cost should be borne by, of course, is a matter of heavy debate.
Publishers are not needed. They were needed, once upon a time, but not anymore. If they really wanted to survive, they'd perhaps try and improve the pretty mediocre standard of peer review, but I doubt the management of most publishers even know what fields their journals are in, let alone what consitutes a good paper. They are truely dinosaurs, but will probably go on walking the earth for quite some time as academics are about as revolutionary as Bourbons whos names begin with L. I couldn't agree more, and unfortunately, as a publisher (of sorts), it's a very sad statement. Journal editors, peer reviewers, copy/layout editors are all still needed to produce journals of reasonable quality (in both content and appearance), but two things need to happen to change this, in my opinion:
1) Authors need to take more responsbility and involvement in the publication process (like you seem to do). and 2) Journals need to clearly show their value to authors for doing so when submitting to them.
The current state of Open Access is a bit of a stalemate - (most) authors are reticent to change, and (most) journals are afraid to deviate from the status quo out of fear that they will lose submissions. It's already been reasonably established that Open Access increases citation impact, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be enough motivation for authors yet. Unless this changes from both sides, the well-funded publishers will continue to spread their propaganda, and maintain their share of the market.
Patents are a minefield. Copyrights are not. You can accidentally implement something that someone has patented without realizing it. But copyrights are clearly displayed at the top of every source file you use... This isn't a minefield. Nobody violates the GPL without knowing it. You seem to be implying that it's not possible to unknowlingly violate copyright - this just ain't so. Ever sang "happy birthday" to someone in a public place (say, a restaurant)? You just violatedthe copyright license for that song under the "right to perform the work publicly" clause.
People violate copyright all the time without knowing it; the problem is that, in far too many cases, the way they're notified is with a costly lawsuit. Current copyright law doesn't allow them to use the "I didn't know it was copyrighted" excuse.
The answer to this question depends on whether you choose the date the law was passed (October 19, 1976 ) or the date that it went into effect (January 1, 1978): US Copyright Act of 1976.
Yes, I realize Cisco's suit is about trademark, and not copyright; however, Larry Lessig goes into great detail in most of his writings to explain why the complete redirection in copyright law in 1976 laid the groundwork for such backwards and insane laws as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and of course, the notorious DMCA, among others.
Interestingly enough, as a law professor and lawyer, one of Lessig's proposed solutions is to "fire all the lawyers"...
I can't believe I'm reading this -- it's a sad day for information science (I'm a librarian) when many otherwise knowledgeable, tech-savvy people are blinded by Web-2.0-speak. Let me reiterate another poster's comment:
Tags are keywords. More specifically, they are subject keywords.
If you can wrap your head around this idea, then you might realize what the author is talking about is a list of 'standardized' subject headings. You may know this by its common street name: a thesaurus (although some people prefer to use the terms ontology, taxonomy, or controlled vocabulary).
There are even ANSI and ISO guideline standards for how to develop monolingual and multilingual thesauri for specific subject areas. This practice has existed well before the advent of the Internet, since before the first libraries even. Over the past hundred years or so, the practice has become highly refined in order to facilitate the practice of indexing.
That's right, when you "tag" a page, you're actually indexing it. But you can call it "tagging" if that makes you feel cooler.
Several journals are already implementing Open Access with different levels of success. I develop and publish a relatively successful online Open Access journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (apologies for the plug), and we use the author-pays model based on a $750US fee to cover (most of) the costs. Often this amount can be written into or otherwise covered by a grant supporting the research in question.
We also have additional sources of revenue, including advertising (albeit very little), and one of the most promising areas is what would traditionally be called "value-added" content. While the full-text of all articles is freely available, "extra" things like PDF versions, on-demand printed versions, etc. are on a fee/membership basis. This seems to work quite well in covering costs while not restricting access. As well, other journals such as BMJ use time-delayed access (ie. articles older than 6 months become open), which is just another way of creating "premium" content. Another interesting publisher is PLoS, who have several resources on the costs of OA publishing.
As some have said in other threads, the main cost is in the actual process of reviewing/copyediting/proofing, not the actual hosting/bandwidth. Open Source journal publication software such as OJS is lessening this barrier, as are other tools. For example, we use OpenOffice to convert articles to the NLM XML schema, automating XML/layout editing and decreasing the cost. By finding alternative, "non-traditional" sources of revenue (like tiered access/content), and using Open Source tools to simplify and automate the publishing process, bringing the overall cost of online academic publishing down to a level where Open Access is cheap is already being realized.
Slashdot Mirror
These things improve the reading experience, and I appreciate them, but I don't think they're truly necessary. The arXiv does just fine with an almost fully-automated system.
... Why re-invent the wheel for publishing? My best guess so far is to accomodate authors who can't be bothered to learn LaTeX and insist on submitting Word docs, but that's about all I can think of. Why not just tell the Word users to suck it up and learn LaTeX?
.DOC, via things like OpenOffice and XHTML. There is still some manual work required, but I've spent the past 3 years working on automated ways to convert articles in formats authors are comfortable with (like .DOC, but some even use .RTF or weirder) into XML. It's doable, and we're getting much closer.
I think the arXiv project has been highly successful, and is a great example of what instituional repositories should look like. But like it or not, there is still a market and expectation among many academics for glossy-looking journals. They explicitly want the things that improve the reading experience - in particular, they want to be able to print good-looking paper (ie. PDF) versions of papers, and are willing to pay extra for that. Maybe things will develop where the journal as medium becomes extinct, but not ay time soon.
Right now, the arXiv's goal is not to replace journals, but to be as fast and as efficient as possible at hosting preprints. If they set out to replace journals outright, and added a slighly more sophisticated review system and automated validation of input, they could do what most journals do with about 90% of the quality for about 10% of the cost.
What you're describing is exactly what OJS does: sophisticated review/workflow system with a little automated validation. It provides about 90% of the quality of the journals you're describing with almost zero cost. It has been wildly successful, especially in the developing world, where starting and hosting a journal is expensive. If we're going to really break it down, how would this review/validated arXiv system you describe differ from a journal? Not much, it seems.
I don't know too much about XML journal article formats, and would appreciate more info. PubMed's explanation didn't really help much. Why bother with XML? Why not just require authors to submit in LaTeX?
Authors submit to specific journals for two main reasons: exposure and prestige. Whether this is a flawed system or not (I think it is), the fact is that, if you're a large successful journal, you can force authors to submit in whatever format you want - but then of course, you probably don't have money/cost problems. Smaller journals trying to survive or start-up journals don't have the luxury of telling authors to "suck it up". The authors will simply submit to another journal of the same class that's more lenient about their submission requirements.
Like I said, whily you may be comfortable with LaTeX and willing to take on much of the layout, etc. the vast majority of authors are not - whether through being too lazy, too busy, or simply not technically-inclined enough. Bear in mind that there are plenty of social science researchers out there who have a hard enough time with Word, much less LaTeX. If you make submission too difficult, authors will go elsewhere.
XML - and in particular the NLM format (by far the most comprehensive, in my experience), is a format that lends itself much better to multi-layout transformations than LaTeX. It also has the advantage that it can be fairly easily generated from source files, such as
The simple fact is, journals still take work, and work costs money. The Internet (and in particular, the Web) has brought an alternative for academics to expose their research other than journals (eg. IR like arXiv), but the journal paradigm still exists, and for the most part, it is the main venue for academic publicat
The fact is, there is a great range in submission quality (in both content and layout), and for a fairly advanced journal that generates XHTML and PDF versions of articles from a standardized XML format (the one Pubmed Central uses), this can take on average 2-4h of copyediting and layout work per article. Even at $10 an hour (pretty low for a professional editor), that's where the cost of publication primarily is.
I work developing a number of open-source tools (eg. Open Journal Systems), as well as using OpenOffice.org, etc. and we are slowly decreasing the cost of publishing, but even for a non-profit, Open Access journal, $30 per article is extremely cheap for publication costs. Who this cost should be borne by, of course, is a matter of heavy debate. Publishers are not needed. They were needed, once upon a time, but not anymore. If they really wanted to survive, they'd perhaps try and improve the pretty mediocre standard of peer review, but I doubt the management of most publishers even know what fields their journals are in, let alone what consitutes a good paper. They are truely dinosaurs, but will probably go on walking the earth for quite some time as academics are about as revolutionary as Bourbons whos names begin with L. I couldn't agree more, and unfortunately, as a publisher (of sorts), it's a very sad statement. Journal editors, peer reviewers, copy/layout editors are all still needed to produce journals of reasonable quality (in both content and appearance), but two things need to happen to change this, in my opinion:
1) Authors need to take more responsbility and involvement in the publication process (like you seem to do).
and
2) Journals need to clearly show their value to authors for doing so when submitting to them.
The current state of Open Access is a bit of a stalemate - (most) authors are reticent to change, and (most) journals are afraid to deviate from the status quo out of fear that they will lose submissions. It's already been reasonably established that Open Access increases citation impact, unfortunately this doesn't seem to be enough motivation for authors yet. Unless this changes from both sides, the well-funded publishers will continue to spread their propaganda, and maintain their share of the market.
People violate copyright all the time without knowing it; the problem is that, in far too many cases, the way they're notified is with a costly lawsuit. Current copyright law doesn't allow them to use the "I didn't know it was copyrighted" excuse.
The answer to this question depends on whether you choose the date the law was passed (October 19, 1976 ) or the date that it went into effect (January 1, 1978): US Copyright Act of 1976.
Yes, I realize Cisco's suit is about trademark, and not copyright; however, Larry Lessig goes into great detail in most of his writings to explain why the complete redirection in copyright law in 1976 laid the groundwork for such backwards and insane laws as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and of course, the notorious DMCA, among others.
Interestingly enough, as a law professor and lawyer, one of Lessig's proposed solutions is to "fire all the lawyers"...
I can't believe I'm reading this -- it's a sad day for information science (I'm a librarian) when many otherwise knowledgeable, tech-savvy people are blinded by Web-2.0-speak. Let me reiterate another poster's comment:
... and hundreds more, in nearly every language.
Tags are keywords. More specifically, they are subject keywords.
If you can wrap your head around this idea, then you might realize what the author is talking about is a list of 'standardized' subject headings. You may know this by its common street name: a thesaurus (although some people prefer to use the terms ontology, taxonomy, or controlled vocabulary).
There are plenty of well-established, long-standing, open thesauri out there - a few examples:
MeSH
LCSH (Library of Congress)
CSH (National Library of Canada)
There are even ANSI and ISO guideline standards for how to develop monolingual and multilingual thesauri for specific subject areas. This practice has existed well before the advent of the Internet, since before the first libraries even. Over the past hundred years or so, the practice has become highly refined in order to facilitate the practice of indexing.
That's right, when you "tag" a page, you're actually indexing it. But you can call it "tagging" if that makes you feel cooler.
Several journals are already implementing Open Access with different levels of success. I develop and publish a relatively successful online Open Access journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (apologies for the plug), and we use the author-pays model based on a $750US fee to cover (most of) the costs. Often this amount can be written into or otherwise covered by a grant supporting the research in question.
We also have additional sources of revenue, including advertising (albeit very little), and one of the most promising areas is what would traditionally be called "value-added" content. While the full-text of all articles is freely available, "extra" things like PDF versions, on-demand printed versions, etc. are on a fee/membership basis. This seems to work quite well in covering costs while not restricting access. As well, other journals such as BMJ use time-delayed access (ie. articles older than 6 months become open), which is just another way of creating "premium" content. Another interesting publisher is PLoS, who have several resources on the costs of OA publishing.
As some have said in other threads, the main cost is in the actual process of reviewing/copyediting/proofing, not the actual hosting/bandwidth. Open Source journal publication software such as OJS is lessening this barrier, as are other tools. For example, we use OpenOffice to convert articles to the NLM XML schema, automating XML/layout editing and decreasing the cost. By finding alternative, "non-traditional" sources of revenue (like tiered access/content), and using Open Source tools to simplify and automate the publishing process, bringing the overall cost of online academic publishing down to a level where Open Access is cheap is already being realized.