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Open Access To Scientific Literature: Can It Work?
Posted by
Hemos
on Wed Jun 09, 2004 11:27 AM
from the it-darn-well-better dept.
from the it-darn-well-better dept.
evilquaker writes "Nature is running a free web focus on the issue of open access to scientific literature. The current model of scientific publishing dates back to the seventeenth century and -- like the music industry -- is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because of the rise of the internet. The main issue up for discussion is whether the author-pays/access-is-free model will supplant the author-pays-less/readers-pay-too model. "
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I think it's great (Score:4, Interesting)
Who's it for? (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
Parent
Re:Who's it for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways, whoever you are doing research for will foot the bill to get it published for the prestige of getting their guys name published. It's not like jo-bob amateur chemist is publishing scientific papers in his spare time after he gets home from the office.
The biggest part of publishing is doing research worthy of being published. If you got something that can make it into a major journal you'll get the money from somewhere.
Scientists don't live off royalties of papers they publish. They aren't novelists. They are researchers. Someone pays for their research and pays for their publishing.
The current state of scientific or even better academic journals in general (because history, anthropology and area studies all suffer from it too) needs a real overhaul. It's a really antiquated system that has basically just become a big racket for the publishers.
Publishing academics papers in peer-reviewed journals is totally different than publishing a collection of poems or a novel.
And oh ya, all the scientist I know are very well paid, even the bums that haven't published squat in ages.
Anyways, the whole point, which you apparently missed is this: You say "especially when the information is not open for all to use" well the idea is to make it open for all to use. Also the reason it costs money to publish these things is because someone with high level of expertise has to spend a lot of time reviewing the paper. So you are paying for it to be reviewed. Why paying someone to review it should mean that it's completely restricted use?
Parent
Re:Who's it for? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, publishing in Nature is free, unless you have big color prints.
Parent
There's a third option (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There's a third option (Score:3, Insightful)
Reviews and moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest challenge I find going through the technical literature today is information glut. If a publication or web site accepts just anyone's submissions, then it's going to be next to useless because it'll be so hard to dig out the gems from the chaff that it'll be totally useless. Imagine if you had to read through some of the bigger Slashdot discussions (1000+ comments) without the moderation system in place so that you at least have somewhere to start.
Today, paper reviews that decide whether your paper gets admitted or not are typically seen by only ~3 reviewers. This leads to pretty big variance on the quality of reviews -- some reviewers just couldn't care less and rush through the reviews with non-committal comments, while more rarely there are others who'd prefer to suppress competing research. Poor papers may get in if they hit a few indifferent reviewers, and good papers may be bounced for similar reasons.
I'd be curious about how well a public moderation system like Slashdot's would work in that context -- with more mods, review scores would be less vulnerable to manipulation by a small group of poor reviewers. That way, no one's work could be suppressed by negative reviewers, but the scoring system would help draw a reader's attention to the most popular articles.
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Re:Reviews and moderation (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Reviews and moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. I recently checked out Barnes & Noble and Borders for technical books. Once upon a time, I could find the books on OS Design, Algorithms, Cryptology, Data Compression, Sound Theory, Game Programming, etc. You know what I found instead? EJB for dummies, UNIX for Dummies 3rd edition, Beginners Guide to Linux, J2EE for Business, etc. Talk about dumbed down material. Half of this stuff is useless crap intended for people who won't read specs (or at least tutorials). They simply add "purdy picturz" to a minor amount of information and call it a book.
Maybe it's just me, but you know what I got for an anniversary present from my wife? A book on calculating sounds (i.e. synthesis of sounds produced by real objects) in real time. My wife pulled it from my wish list on Amazon. THAT is something I want on my shelf. Right next to the processor specs from Intel and AMD, Practical File System Design with BeOS, OS Design by Tanenbaum, Introduction to Advanced Data Structures, Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus, etc, etc, etc.
I don't even have a Masters degree. What the hell are the people who DO have one reading?
Parent
as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Interesting)
In the future, I'd expect to see federations of scientists reviewing and disseminating research results independently of the established journals. For the current gatekeepers, this would be a death knell.
Parent
Which is of little value... (Score:5, Informative)
That's really, really, crucial here. The people who gain from peer review are _not_ really the experts. Ok, there's a gain by a first winnowing, but that's not really that much, if you look at what does get published.
For example, there is not a paper in my field (thin layer magnetism) where it matters one whit if it's been peer reviewed or not. Why? Because if it's a load of cobblers, I'll spot it. I don't need other peoples opinions.
Now, outside my field, I'll accept that peer review has some merit to me. The most notable one for me is the mathematical proofs, to be checked by other mathematicians [0]. On the other hand, in the abscence of a formal peer review stage pre publication, any errors would result in a Comment publication in response. I accept that that's a time lag - but I don't think that that time lag would be any greater than the formal peer review stage as is.
No, the people who gain from peer review are not the experts. They are the general public, and those learning, or branching out. A lack of a peer review step would make it more difficult for those people.
You'll find that the drive to opening of papers is primarily driven by the experts. I think that replacing the peer review step with a structed system of comments, and keeping those comments accesable with the paper, would benefit.
The counter point to this, is that by having greater access to papers, with comments, would give benefit to all, general public and experts alike. The end point would be a net gain for experts, and probably a gain for the general public - as more reading would be needed, but all that reading would be easily accessable.
Let me close this by re-iterating that the experts don't need peer review - which is why arXive.org and pre-prints are the stock in trade of many an expert.
[0] There are, of course, similar sections of related research for all fields.
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Re:as a scientist... (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to read all the crazy ideas people want to print, there's already a medium for that - it's called the internet. Lots of things get submitted to the LANL arXiv (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) that are "fringe" science.
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Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, to try and answer honestly --- submissions editors add value. If one goes to the library and picks up the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that the articles in there fought to get in. Lots of sub-par research and writing was tossed or picked up by lesser journals. It serves as a kind of filter. If scientists just start setting up websites ad-hoc and there is no structure to papers being released, we end up with an Internet full of PDFs. What happens then, honestly, is corporate control of science. As somebody interested in say, stem-cell research, you maybe try Google to find papers, but somebody like Phizer may have it all neatly organized for you. Except it's just research by scientists paid by them, promoting their agenda.
Science is at a interesting point in history. It's primacy as technological and economic weapon is unchallenged. But there is a growing anti-secularism on the rise, in the both the West with Christianity and the middle east with Islam. People are attempting to "flood the airwaves" with pseudo-science or straight up bullshit science. Social structures to create peer review and weed out crap must exist somehow.
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Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that editors get paid quite well, and they earn every penny, but yes, reviewers and authors are unpaid, it comes with the job of being a scientist.
Nothing is stopping scientists from simply throwing their articles on a website somewhere. I can't think of a wider more free distribution method.
The reason that we give journals the right to act as gatekeepers is because we want them to do it. A scientist knows that there are journals that have higher respect in a field, and it looks good on scientists' vitas to have publications in peer reviewed journals, especially the more respected ones. The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money. Any bozo can throw something on a website. Journals have very strict standards for the format of the paper, and the methods used in the science. As far as who pays? Someone is paying the scientist and funding the research. I would guess that any costs associated with publishing the research is much less than 1% of research itself.
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Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:as a scientist... (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, Nature has a reputation for being a respectable scientific journal. You pretty much know that the people reading and reviewing your work published there will be other scientists and academics. So what other avenues does a scientist have to publish his work?
Website? Book? If so, who is your audience (as in, who is actually reading it and not who you wrote it for) and how can they generate feedback for the peer review process to work? Also, what does that say about your credibility? Lots of kooks have websites and books about all sorts of bunk science. How is someone going to tell yours apart?
Unless you already have a reputation, how do you publish something by yourself and still have people take you seriously? I think it's a fair question...
=Smidge=
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Can it work? It does work! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a crime that so many papers are still being published under licences that do not allow their free accessibility on the Web. Scientists of the future will wonder how science was even possible without such access.
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:5, Insightful)
You just described what every graduate student has to do in order to complete their work. If everything you need to do your thesis is in a book then it has already been done ad nauseum.
Another quick note. There are free journals on line that are free to publish in as well as to read. The up keep can carried simply by ad revenue or donated by people in the field or a technical organization.
Parent
Yet with no peer review -- (Score:4, Informative)
The service that journals provide isn't so much the publishing, but the fact that skilled people in that profession have reviewed the papers, and have verified that it is accurate, and worthwhile [ie, not just some rewording of someone else's research].
Parent
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example x years ago people would download many Linux distributions but now enterprises use very few - those few that have built good reputation.
So if we started with x open source journals, within 2-3 years several good ones would take lead. It's just that money would be out of the game.
Actually somewhere I read about this search engine that specializes in searching thru electronic scientific papers and journals - many customers pay lot of money 'cause thats the real value - find everything you need in 10th of time you'd need to the same on Google.
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Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:4, Insightful)
The process builds on itself. Given one good author - say, Ron Rivest - you can discover the rest by spidering outwards and using your intelligence. That's mostly what everyone else is doing.
I'm not saying that peer reviewed publications are unnecessary, but I don't want you to overestimate the role they play in being able to find the good stuff.
hell, its pretty rare to see a citation that doesn't refer to a peer reviewed publication
It's unusual, but not vanishingly rare. For example, Andrew Roos's weak keys are cited in many papers about RC4 cryptanalysis, but have been published only online. (Actually I'd love to know what happened to Andrew Roos, he seems to have fallen off the Web)
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isn't the whole point of academic publishing... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Music Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Journals per se have become a cash cow, but the structure and processes of peer review are important. It's how we tell Andrew Wiles and Murray Gell-Mann from the various witless kooks with a bogus proof or a crackpot theory. Without it, every worker in the field has to do her own comparative study of the merits of everyones work.
Until we find a way to replicate that, journals are here to stay.
[0] I don't actually, but you probably don't like AC/DC either.
Ulib (Score:4, Informative)
P2P (Score:4, Interesting)
We will still need journals for peer review, sadly.
Re:P2P (Score:4, Insightful)
BZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! We still need peer review, but what does that have to do with the journals?
The editors are professors who are supported by their universities. Their editorship fulfills the ``service to the profession'' portion of their job requirements, and brings some prestige to their department. It's generally considered to be easier to get published in a journal if the editor's office is just down the hall from yours, and he's heard your presentation of your ideas at one of the faculty brown-bag lunches. In short, the Universities support the editors, not the journals.
The reviewers are past and potential contributors. They work free of charge, and again, that's part of their university job description.
Yes, I know that the journals do have some paid employees. They seem to be associated with the print side of the business: they deal with subscriptions and money and such. If you are a contributor, you deal with volunteers who have .edu email addresses.
If Blackwell Publishers dumped Econometrica, the Econometric Society [econometricsociety.org], which is funded largely by personal membership [econometricsociety.org], could simply put its journal online, by subscription or free. Everything would continue as before: Eddie Deckel [tau.ac.il] could still edit, the reviewers could still review, and the papers could still be made available with the imprimatur of the Society. They might lose out on some revenue from the journal, but I doubt that would be an insurmountable problem. I imagine that most of us could afford to double our dues, if we had to.
You're an academic, and you know all this stuff, but I'm saying it for the slashdotters, most of whom figure that they'll get involved in some science, like java programming, when they finally get to college.
Parent
Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Free literature is great, but someone will always off the argument that making it free will discourage research.
In distribution scheme where information is disseminated freely, it is obvious that the researchers need some insentive other than making money from publication of their research. Of course, most college professor will tell you that they make next to nothing on their publications--it all goes to the publishing companies.
I personally wouldn't minde paying a little bit for really good research; on the other hand, my Computer Science class this quarter required two $90 texts. I'm not OK with that. Perhaps a balance between the two could be achieved--eliminate the middleman publishing company, and provide the information online for next-to-free.
I hope so (Score:5, Interesting)
My beef is that by going on-line only, their costs were significantly reduced (this was a hefty journal, often with color graphs 'n charts), but the savings were not passed on to the membership. My other issue centered around the fact that, like the infamous MS Assurance Program, once your membership lapsed so went your on-line journal access. At least the dead tree version ensured you had a viable resource until the acid paper disintegrated.
Open Online Journals (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open Online Journals (Score:4, Interesting)
If the PLoS model proves unsuccessful, it will not be due to the lack of peer-review as some comments here have suggested. All of the submissions are subjected to the same rigorous peer process as subscription-based publications.
The current system will eventually break under its own weight. Universities can ill afford to continue to see large increases in their subscription rates. As the prices increase, so does the number of titles being dropped. Scientific inquiry suffers as a result.
Also, niche publications are often dropped by publishers due to the small number of subscribers. The effect on the groups who need that publication outlet is tremendous. Imagine new discoveries going unpublished, regardless of whether they are part of a 'high tech' science market.
The fact remains, as outlets for research are pruned, so is the opportunity for scientific inquiry. I don't profess to have all the answers to this problem, but I do know that we need to push back on publishers to force a change in thinking.
They exist to serve the scientific community, not the other way around.
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PLoS is on to something (Score:5, Informative)
Peer review is as good as any traditional journal. In theory at least; my field is physics so I haven't actually read any articles in the PLoS journals.
With the author pays model, the articles can be distributed around the world, without restrictions. This is a big thing, for poor countries as well as people who have graduated but still wan't to keep up with their field. And we don't see the perversity were researchers need to assign the copyright to the journal and then pay to read their own words!
As PLoS is a non-profit, the per-page costs are not that big as there is no need to fatten the wallets of any shareholders. Hell, per-page costs for PLoS are lower than for many traditional for-profit journals! Additionally, researchers from poor countries are allowed to publish for free. This combined with the fact that they can get the articles for free, is about the best we can do to help the third world to increase their knowledge base.
I wish all the success to PLoS and hope that the same concept will be increasingly popular in other scientific fields as well.
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Knuth (Score:5, Insightful)
It's long, but a good read.
Peer review has a purpose (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, it's also good to have channels that don't have any filters on them. The web is the best such channel ever invented. Anybody can publish given minimal resources. Whether anybody ever sees what you publish is a different problem, but it won't happen because it's been editted.
In some sense, a Google pagerank rating is the ultimate in "reviewing" (if not exactly "peer review"), since it lets a large number of other web sites vote on how worthy your writing is. On the other hand, many high-ranked pages are from cranks, or are hate-speech (like Google's first hit for "Jew"). This is kind of thing would generally never happen in a peer-reviewed journal.
I don't know... sounds risky (Score:3, Funny)
For an example... (Score:3, Insightful)
(not linked to prevent needless slashdoting)
It's a pretty impressive resource, and not just because it's free and electronic.
Fund libraries with public access... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Journals are businesses, and will inevitably cater to their source of income. Under the reader pays system, they have an incentive to deliver what the reader wants: quality research papers. Under the author pays system, they have an incentive to simply publish as much as possible.
2) Publication of scientific research should be a meritocracy. Any system which puts large fees on publishing is going to impede smaller projects from publishing their results, no matter how worthy. Not all science is done with huge budgets.
The answer to making research more publicly available is already here: libraries. In my opinion, all university libraries should be open to the public. If they start to move their collections online, they should have computer access from the library also. If libraries are underfunded, that is a different problem entirely...
Slashdot Model (Score:4, Interesting)
Motivation is the gain for scientific knowledge. Reviews will be better because 50 eyes are better than 3. Funding for the server shouldn't be to hard.
arxiv.org [arxiv.org] is already a good place for many scientists to publish their work. All that is needed is moderation.
Re:Slashdot Model (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly, review is not *just* a moderation process, its a feedback process.
I just want to second this. I had an article published in an IEEE journal last year, and the comments from my editor were invaluable. I also helped review a textbook this winter, and I know some of the comments resulted in big rewrites of sections.
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The only problem is prestige (Score:5, Interesting)
Even big-name journals like Nature seem to be in decline. When Nature publishes articles that aren't about the biological sciences, they range from weak to totally bogus.
A friend who writes for mass-market magazines was once talking to me about journal publication. When I described "page fees", which the author, or the author's institution, pays, she said "That's a vanity press". She's right.
An academic journal is really just a blog with tough editors. Deal with it.
Just selling a brand... (Score:5, Interesting)
So when a professor can publish by himself on the internet and not give up all sorts of rights to the paper, why doesn't he? When the journal asks a professor to dedicate tens of hours of highly-valued time to reviewing articles for free, why does he?
Prestige. Professors make a name for themselves by being published in prestigious journals. They become better known in academia when they are a prominent peer reviewer for a prestigious journal.
It's a pretty sweet deal for those top journals: output nothing but brand name prestige (which is entirely renewable and not really subject to typical economics) and rake in loads of cash.
The sweetness of the deal for the journals comes at the expense of subscribing institutions: money paid for journals (which wouldn't have to be paid were it a competitive market) is money taken out of tuition and endowment revenues that could otherwise lower the outrageous price of college or add real value to the institution.
The journals must die.
Not true. Professional society journals do work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of journals is not dissemination---any monkey can put up a web page or archive---but quality improvement.
Where is the added value?
The journal editors do have to make decisions and more importantly they have to know the right people (harder than it sounds) to review, and they have to cajole people into writing the reviews.
On the technical end of things, the published finished papers in journals DO look better, their figures are clearer, the references more complete and checked, and the language is better than preprints. This takes the labor of professional copywriters, who don't work for free.
My papers have been improved by going through the publication process, both in presentation and in content.
Journals don't stay or get prestigious unless they can reliably publish good papers and reliably reject---or fix---crappy papers.
The system is hardly perfect---good papers get rejected and lousy papers do get published----but one has to consider if any alternative would have been any better.
It is extremely naive to imagine that good scientific quality control could be managed by some kind of utopian 'free' on-line review and meta-review system like Slashdot. People's scientific output is a whole lot more important than slashdot posts like this.
Professors do make a name for themselves publishing in prestigious journals. They don't become better known however for being a peer reviewer, as that service is usually anonymous. They do it because they feel they have a moral obligation to do so.
Many societies publish journals as a service and are not-for-profit, e.g. the American Physical Society. And their journals are usually cheaper, and often better, than the pay journals put out by for-profit companies.
I doubt the APS rakes in "loads of cash" without spending it back on fairly essential things.
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Profit Center (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps publications should be in some variant of the GFDL, with the entire original article, including bibliography, being included in the invariant section. To me this seems more important than exactly which form of distribution is used. The forms of distribution will vary, and vary over time, but licenses can get dreadfully permanent, and copyrights appear to be forever.
Hehe (Score:4, Informative)
I find this somewhat funny that the link would be to Nature, which is part of the academic publishing "evil empire". For a good opinion on what is wrong with academic publishing in its current form see this [guardian.co.uk]
Also, if you're a scientist and would like to publish in an open format or you're interested in scientific papers, go to the Public Library of Science [publiclibr...cience.org]
Proactively Protect Lost Freedoms (Score:5, Interesting)
I just finished reading Free Culture [free-culture.cc], Lawrence Lessig's latest book. That was an interesting read, and I found it remarkably similar on some points to thoughts I've had on the subject lately [joeysmith.com].
The last few chapters discuss ways that individuals and governments can and should act to preserve free culture and prevent the culture cartels from gaining more influence. He gives several examples of proactive efforts to preserve freedoms that were lost as technology developed. The Free Software movement was the first example, and Lessig explained how the GPL proactively protects freedom to derivitize, use, and distribute software. It has taken a couple of decades, but there is now a healthy and vibrant ecology in the copyleft commons of software.
He then listed several examples of using ideas from the FSF copyleft commons to proactively protect freedom of non-software things. The Public Library of Science [plos.org] was discussed, as well as the Creative Commons [creativecommons.org]. I remember reading the philosophy [gnu.org] section of the GNU project website a few years ago and thinking, "You know, these guys are really on to something..." The ball is rolling, and with work and time we will have a free culture protected by copyleft, including art, literature, music, software, entertainment, and scientific discovery. This is not about communism. It's about FREEDOM, sweet FREEDOM.
The Slashdot Model (Score:4, Funny)
And yet it moves (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Galileo Galilei...
Theory of general relitivity (Score:3, Insightful)
by Albert Einstein...
Eureka! (Score:0, Offtopic)
Archimedes...
Our subscription to Nature costs $1700 CAD (Score:5, Informative)
in 2002: $1400 CAD
in 2003: $1700 CAD (+21%)
This is for an academic subscription in a Univeristy Library in Canada.
Here's the irony. In scholarly publications, the contributions are mostly made from contributions from researchers who give the publisher the rights to publish their work. The publishers then turn around and sell this back to the universities for 100% profit. I remember back a few years ago, a subscription to Elsevier (the Microsoft of scholarly publishing) charged over $30K CAD for a subscription to Brain Research. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there were 4 issues per year. That works out to $7500 per issue. The publishing model is that if a reasearcher wants to be recognized, they NEED to publish, and the better recognized the journal, the better chances they'll have of being cited. The more often their article is cited, the better their chances of receiving more research/grants/money/etc...
Different models on different continents. (Score:4, Interesting)
the Astrophysical Journal [uchicago.edu], published by the University of Chicago Press [uchicago.edu] for the American Astronomical Society [aas.org]. Both of them have
respected peer review systems.
Solar Physics is free to authors but quite expensive to subscribe to. ApJ is expensive to publish in, but is quite cheap to subscribe to (at least for AAS members).
Perhaps in part because of the funding structure, Europeans seem to prefer publishing in Solar Physics while many Americans seem to prefer ApJ. It may have something to do with how science is funded: in the U.S. most of us are on soft money and budget page charges into our grants and/or overhead rates, while in Europe most folks are on fixed departmental budgets. But it's hard to say, because Solar Physics is published in Europe while ApJ is published in North America -- so it may just be the home team advantage in each case.
I tend to alternate between the two.
Archiving (Score:4, Informative)
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
Re:Kind of ironic (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a bit of experience of this having a publication list [leeds.ac.uk] of my own.
Perversely after I've had papers accepted in journals I can't leave the PDFs of the papers on my web site as I don't own them anymore, the journals do.
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