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Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 02, 2002 04:22 PM
from the challenging-the-establishment dept.
from the challenging-the-establishment dept.
bhoman writes "The San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com) has an article today about Stanford biochemist Patrick O. Brown, who helped develop low-cost DNA microarrays for gene research. He is seeking $20M to start a foundation that would fund peer-review of research papers and then make them available for free over the web, thereby avoiding the high-cost of subscriptions common in existing research publications. Predictably, some publishers seem to be warning that their publishing model is hard to improve upon.
The article mentions that a previous effort by Brown and others, The Public Library of Science garnered the signatures of 30,000 supporters, but then implies that it basically failed, suggesting that academics need the journals more than vice versa.
Sounds like Brown's idea is exactly what the web is made for."
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Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web
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Won't Work (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's publish or perish," Stern said. "As long as we have promotion and tenure tied to publishing, change won't work."
sadly.
That would have been great.
Changing the publishing system (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus, we first need to change our perception of scientific excellence and _then_ put in place a peer-review mechanism. And the new perceptions needs a peer-review mechanism in order to be reformed properly. Hen or egg?
Journal peer review is VERY strict (Score:4, Informative)
Traditionally, you first have to have the article published in a conference, which requires for you to
1) Write the article
2) Go to the conference and present your work
Submission to a conference usually happens approximately six months before the actual conference. You get acceptance about a month after submission (or you get rejection). Most conferences have an acceptance rate of 50% or worse, meaning that they turn away HALF of the applicants.
The process of selection is done by assigning reviews to major professors in the field who are not submitting to the conference. These professors sometimes pass the review work along to some of their best grad students (this happened several times in a lab that I worked in).
After you are accepted, you send the final version, which includes any changes you may have made to the rough draft, and then go to the conference.
The next step is a journal article. This usually includes some additional fleshing out of the article. Most conference procedings are between 4 and 8 pages; journal articles can be as long as you can get it to be. You want it longer, because the longer it is, the more likely that the people reading it will understand and want to use your idea, because you can explain it upteen ways and provide numerous examples of why your [whatever it is] works well, which always leads to good things for a journal article writer's career.
That often takes a while as well. Once you submit the journal article, you get a preliminary acceptance contingent upon making changes after three months of review. Of course, once again acceptance is less than 50%, usually, but if you publish in a conference first, your chances are significantly higher than if you don't. You have an incredibly powerful idea to make it without a conference first.
The reviewers in this case are required to make a very careful inspection of the article to ensure that
1) the theories presented are useful
2) the theories make sense
3) the paper is written well enough to be readable
Reviewers are also required to find ALL spelling and grammer mistakes, and they have to understand the methods presented within the paper well enough to make a summary of the journal article. Also, reviewers are the same as before - experts in the field (college professors) who are not submitting to the journal at the time of the review.
These reviewers give you a report, accepting contingent upon meeting their requirements (or defending why you can't).
You then have to submit again and your article is once again edited for approximately 6 months.
If you REALLY rush, this entire process takes one year, however realistically, it usually takes two. (Yeah, I started the game as a junior in college).
Now, I don't care if we do this online. IEEE has a research engine called IEEE Xplore, which is often purchased by research institutions such as Universities. It has the whole database of IEEE publications within it.
But I don't know how to get a much better peer-review process than this; its pretty darn strict. So professors can't just whip of papers like nobody's business - they really have to put some work into it. If they have a lot of papers, it means they've done a lot of stuff that at least six other experts (for each paper - sometimes more) believe to have merit.
Predictably (Score:2)
The question isn't whether that can be done more efficiently in electronic form, because clearly it's a slam-dunk economization.
The question is whether it can be done at a total cost lower than one at which the journal publishers can afford to compete. Their marginal costs are minimal, as their capital and organization are already in place. All they need to do is reduce their profits to non-greedhead levels. If they're forced to eliminate the hardcopy publications, that's probably a minimal net cost, too. The tax benefits of the writedowns would pay for the capital expansion of the new network and server capacity.
I don't know what their margins are now. A few bucks per issue? Half?
While most of us would love to receive Phys Rev Lett A for $3 a month, I don't think it'll happen whether or not it's on the net. The demand just doesn't exceed the supply.
--Blair
"Well, I would love it."
Value added (Score:2)
Yeah, I can see how that model is about as close to perfect as it could be.
Influence and Prestige (Score:2)
death of journals predicted 7 years ago (Score:2)
It's about time. Entire libraries should be digitized and and available to all by now - the least we can do is make lifesaving biomedical technology available without a torturous middleman content industry.
It's not hard at all-- ask the mathematicians! (Score:3, Informative)
free science research..???? (Score:1)
Er... (Score:1)
Well what the heck were you expecting them to say? "Oh, do please go ahead, because we're sure this is all for the good of science and mankind?"
peer-review on demand? (Score:2)
They will, anyway have limited funding for the reviews and can never cover everything, so why not target it based on demand. Or...is this how it works already? :)
Pedigree (Score:5, Insightful)
The implications of this are far more than simple "peer mating" and "copy editing" as one other poster suggested. Granted, there is nothing that can keep an online journal from eventually becoming the place to publish, but it will take time and a commitment to excellence that will have to be maintained for scientists to become comfortable in submitting their hard earned results to. Publication of observational science will not cut it. The implication of this is that since most scientists view Science and Nature (among a select few) as the pre-eminent journals, they will be concerned about submitting the most significant scientific results to a new online journal. Typically from what I have seen, when one gets rejected from the more prestigious journals, you start moving down your ladder of preference until somebody accepts your article. Of course results targeted for specific journals with a readership that would be interested in your results always matters and this is where online journals stand the best chance of making it as opposed to large pre-eminent general interest scientific journals such as Science and Nature.
Modern science is in a sorry state, IMHO (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point behind science, its entire reason to exist, is to provide us with a predictive explanation of the world around us. It needs the "many eyes" approach more than just about any other human endeavor, because the entire point is to model the real world and you can't do that without a lot of observation.
Of course, science has also proven to be useful, and that's been something of an anathema to it. The reason is that things which are useful are things which people (corporations in particular) want to capitalize on in an exclusive way. It seems to me that there was a time when everyone recognized the truth that public disclosure and widespread collaboration is necessary for science to advance.
That no longer seems to be the case from where I sit. Today, corporations fund a great deal of research at the university level, and there is a great deal of pressure from both corporations and from the universities themselves to keep ongoing research under wraps as much as possible, in order to maximize the chances not just of publishing but also of getting patents on the results (which are probably then transferred to the corporations that funded the research).
Those people in the scientific community that I've spoken to believe, to a man, in collaboration with their peers in order to further science. They're held up by the people that fund their research.
How does this relate to publishing on the web? Well, publishing on the web removes a lot of the exclusivity that currently exists, so there will naturally be opposition to it from those who benefit from the control they have over scientific publishing right now. And my cynical mind tells me that there's a good chance that those who fund research exert an additional level of control through the current publishers (it would make sense, right?). It's my hope that research over the web will help in reducing the amount of exclusivity that seems to exist currently in the scientific community. But then, that's probably wishful thinking.
As long as that level of exclusivity exists, our understanding of the universe won't advance as quickly as it might otherwise. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just pining for better days that have never existed. But if there's even a chance that publishing on the web will improve the amount of collaboration and peer review, I think it's worth doing.
But this proposal doesn't do much to help with that, because it still concentrates the power of peer review and publishing into the hands of a few. What prevents researchers from collaborating with each other, getting peer review from each other, and publishing on the web directly, instead of going through middlemen like they do now? Seems to me that they're being held up by those that fund the research. And unfortunately, this proposal wouldn't change that.
Yes, it's a step in the right direction, and the current scientific publishers need some competition. But it shouldn't be seen as the end goal.
The same for Software-Engineering (Score:1)
If SE researchers really want their studies applied by the community, they should not publish them in journals that require payment for access to the papers.
CS systems research model (Score:2)
Much of this has to do with CS researchers forcing the conference publishers to allow distribution of papers via personal webpages. Once you have that, the rest follows.
But in fairness, Nature [nature.org] is only $160/year ($100 students), which covers 52 issues. Of course, you have to put up with advertising and pay a subscription...
Progress is happening (Score:1)
It's already happening: JAIR and JMLR (Score:2)
This is already happening in Artificial Intelligence. The Journal of AI Research (JAIR) [washington.edu], and The Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) [jmlr.org] are peer-reviewed journals published on the web for free.
I'm not sure what the $20 million is for, since (at least in AI) peer-review is done for free anyway, as a service to the community. The big journals charge money while getting editing, review, and often even typsetting for free from their editorial boards or authors.
Since peer-review is the main service provided by the big journals, it was only a matter of time before the reviewers organized themselves. The tenure issue is a bit of a problem, since untenured faculty will want to publish in the best established journals. However, that should work itself out over time, as tenured researchers choose to publish in the new free journals. Eventually the new journals will be well enough established for young researchers to feel comfortable publishing in them.
Better searching (Score:1)
Publication itself is only the beginning (Score:2, Interesting)
to be kept alive indefinitely by the people who thrive in the
environment. Prestige is important, and those who filter through
the peer review 'moderation' of the important journals certainly
deserve it, and will get the funding to publish again during
their next study. The only people who are left behind are the
people who have brilliant insight, but don't have the patience or
skills to jump through academic hoops and climb the academic ladder.
The magic of the web is that people are going to be able to
transcend the limits of paper publishing.
Online laboratories where traditional researchers can share not
only their results, but the material at issue itself in digital
form. Check out the University of Iowa's virtual microscope,
which is currently used for educational purposes.
http://www.medicine.uiowa.edu/patholog
There's another demonstration site, where people can point out
phenomena in huge images created from a microscope...
http://neuroinformatica.com The implications of online images
of this size and quality are huge.
One paper which is tied up by Elsivier IP is a PDF file which
shows regions of the Macaque brain dyed with six different stains
that each show different phenomena. In the PDF file are links to
the full-size full-color images, which very much increases the
value of the publication.
Not only is the whole peer review process going to be
accelerated, but an online simulation of the phenomena being
studied will be able to grow and get more accurate with each
researcher's contribution.
Purdue has several simulations of yeast growth online, with the
source available.
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/cfpesp/models/models
My dream is of an online simulation where people can add little
hypothesis in the form of python scripts. The scripts which pass
peer review as properly reflecting the physical phenomena are
kept, and can accumulate into an accurate simulation of complex
systems (maybe even parts of the human brain eventually)
Even once the web pages let collaborators/peers accelerate the
scientific process, the results will still be published by the
traditional methods for years to come. (in my humble opinion)
To many researchers, scientific work has not been done until it
shows up in the prestigious journals.
Our experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, I wish Brown all the best success, but as others have mentioned, it's a somewhat harder problem than it first seems (at least he's asking for $20 million, which is somewhat realistic for handling real peer review for a substantial number of articles - 10's of thousands at least).
What's behind this nebulous "peer review" concept, at least for us, is a complex and historically based system of checks and balances involving communications between authors, editors, and (anonymous and non-anonymous) reviewers; we're essentially a legal/court system for scientific articles. There's a lot of information-related issues in there, and information technology helps a lot (that's the part I'm involved in). But fundamentally, at least the way we do it, there needs to be a paid, responsible human being reading most communications and monitoring the process, and as far as we've been able to work out, you can't get the cost under about $500 or so per article.
Now, just distributing the papers can be done essentially for free (to as many people as would want to read for about $1-5 per article, for hardware, software, disk, network, etc.) which is what the famous physics e-print archive [arxiv.org] does so well. Of course it doesn't cost publishers any more than that to distribute articles online either - the costs are in the review part (and whatever copyediting they do), not in distribution.
You'll hear about journals now that are essentially free - this is almost always for one of two reasons:
Given the $500/article cost, the other question is does science really need this level of peer review, or can it get by with less? Well, we've already seen a couple of instances of scientific fraud that slipped by in physics in the last few months even with the current level of review - is skimping really a good idea? And is the $500 minimal cost or even $1000-$2000 typical cost per article now all that bad, compared to the typical $50,000-$100,000 research grant that generally funded such research?
Yet another proposed solution has been to publish fewer papers in those journals that receive the full peer-review treatment. Unless authors miraculously constrain themselves somehow, the only way that would save us money would be to reject a lot of things without review (because the costs are in the review process itself) - but then you've thrown out the whole "peer" process you're using to determine what's published!
So, maybe Brown has found a way through this morass - but the scientific system has a complex, little studied dynamic in which peer review as it currently stands plays an important role... if we really can't afford it (the old way) any more, we're headed into some uncharted waters...
publish or perish (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Brown could learn a lot from the open discussion forum used by
Anyone could "publish" an article. People would receive alerts when an article was published in a topic area of their interest. Readers would be able to rate the article on several points, and would be able to add commentary, notes, etc.
Commentary, ratings, etc., could be sorted according to the evaluators' verified academic credentials (maybe I only care about what Harvard academics think of article X on particle physics, but someone else may be interested in what the general public, or for that matter 8th graders think of article X).
Any new system would have to preserve the aspect of the status quo that generally dictates that unless the big shots in your field think you are onto something, you don't get recognition.
This site has many answers (Score:1)
I can just see the spam now (Score:2)
This is the point of the Internet. (Score:1)
Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
It is immoral to ask the public to fund research with their tax dollars and then ask them to pay for it again if they want to see its results, via subscription costs.
Journals such as Science seem to think that this is some crazy idea, that what the public pays for should be made freely available to the public. They also try to say its impossible, since there are costs involved in what journals provide, which is essentially peer review. Please. Don't tell me it costs $500 dollars for top researchers to read a paper and offer criticism. That can be done for free.
What's needed is to set up an organization of reputable scientists willing to offer peer review to papers submitted; the organization would have some sort of signature verifying that their members reviewed a paper and deemed it publication-worthy. Then the organization would publish the paper on-line for free. Pretty simple.
In the meantime, government action is needed to mandate that all papers eventually be made free to the public; perhaps six months after initial publication, perhaps 1 year.
At any rate, nothing justifies asking the public to pay for something twice.
The SPARC project (Score:2)
Example JBiol (Score:1)
http://jbiol.com/
http://jbiol.com/info/contac
The Soros Foundation's OpenAccess Program (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems to be down now, but essentially the Soros foundation is studying this problem (and recognizing that the standard publishing model may be impeding scientific progress.)
The Best part about this: they're funding stuff too! So if you have a great solution to this mess, please go and ask for money!
academics need the journals more than vice versa (Score:2)
Why do academics need journals?
Where do I sign up? (Score:1)
older articles (Score:1)
Simple: (Score:2)
Where is the value? (Score:1)
After all it would be so much more usefull if the text was searchable, the footnotes could be implemented as popups and the references could be hyperlinked to the actual articles! And the whole idea is to have the articles be usefull to researchers, right?
Physics Journals and Other sources free online (Score:1, Informative)
"While most of us would love to receive Phys Rev Lett A for $3 a month, I don't think it'll happen whether or not it's on the net. The demand just doesn't exceed the supply."
You can view and print for free from "Physical Review Online Archive" from the American Physics Socity
http://prola.aps.org/
SPARC - The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition also works to encourage new solutions to scholarly publishing:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/index.asp?page=0
Go here to find a list of SPARC partners many of ehich have free and open access
http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?p
Open Source Literature is the real paradigm shift (Score:2, Insightful)
Take note that the real goal of this initiative is not to overthrow the time-tested process of peer review. Rather PLoS supporters are vested in changing the publishing process - away from the pay-per-view mentality and towards an open source type of license for scientific literature, where FULL TEXT articles can be viewed and re-distributed.
Of course the marginal costs for publishing and peer review remain. The PLoS leaders propose shifting the cost burden from readers to authors - by charging a certain fee to publish an article. Their reasoning is that since government agencies such as the NIH already pay millions of dollars for journal subscriptions within research grants, those funds could be used to subsidize the author's fees instead.
In case this sounds like "selling out" quality for profit, consider that it's in a journal's best interests to achieve prominence through a high citation rate. So quality would be ensured by recruiting high-profile scientists on editorial boards. Some journals are starting to adopt this paradigm, most notably the Journal of Biology [jbiol.com] and Genome Biology [genomebiology.com]
How would journals reap profits then? By charging subscriber fees for insightful commentaries and research reviews - but still allowing free access to the fruits of publicly-funded scientific research.
Can this new crop of open source journals rival the industry behemoths? Such revolutions have already rippled through the CS, physics, and math communtities, thanks to the strong support among authors. A $20 million investment, along with a firm commitment from biomedical researchers, sounds like the kick-start needed.
Also peer review is challenged now... (Score:1)
Furthermore, Brown's attempts are not so new. PubMedCentral [pubmedcentral.gov] has been created for putting scientific papers (of traditional publishers) on the web for free, but it also includes a number of autonomous publications, which are free for readers; unfortunately, they are not free for authors, as administrative expenses (which exist for web-based journals too) are covered by a submission fee. Anyway, every research project includes publication costs, so this is a way for using them.
Enzo
most publishers still live in the stoneage (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole process from beginning to end is so obsolete. I initiated contact with the journal editor more than a year ago by sending him a pdf of my article. He mailed back to thank me for my interest and asked me to send him three doublespaced paper copies to his office in the US (BTW reading doublespaced copies sucks IMHO). I did this, then I heard nothing for a long time. Finally I got a request to review a paper for the journal (this is quite common, most reviewers are also submitters). Finally after about half a year the paper was conditionally accepted (Yay!). This required an editing round and another submission of three paper copies. And several months later I was notified that my paper was accepted.
I submitted a final version (by paper and electronically). That was the last I heard from them (a letter/email would have been nice) until I received the box full of photocopies. By monitoring the site I found out which in which issue of the journal my article was to be published.
The editor of this journal is probably receiving a small fee for his efforts, which mostly consist of allocating reviewers to papers and putting stamps on envelopes. The actual technical editing is done by a bunch of latex monkeys provided by Elsevier. All communication is done by snail mail, communicating by email confuses both editors and elsevier staff (even though it would save loads of time).
The worst thing of all is that their journal is far too expensive for individuals to subscribe to. Hence the only subscriptions go to university libraries who mostly store packs of unread dead trees in their archives. In my country, a significant portion of government research funds is used for this purpose (i.e. money intended for fundamental research is flowing directly to the pockets of publishers) which I think is outrageous. I'm pretty sure the situation is the same elsewhere.
Now back to the role of the publisher. The publisher wastes everybodies time with a stupid editing process and by producing dead trees nobody reads anyway. It pays the editor a small fee and thats it. Apart from wasting everybodies time and funding the editor they do not actually contribute anything else. It is the editor who handles the peer review (100% volunteers as far as I know), it is the authors who deliver the content (100% volunteers). Taking the publisher out of the loop would save enormous amounts of money. Public funds could be used to fund editors and electronic hosting of journals for a fraction of the money currently flowing to publishers. This would not hurt the peer review process since it already depends on volunteers anyway.
I have no other choice than to either comply with this obsolete process or pursue another career. The productivity of my university is measured in terms of number of articles published. One of the parties involved in annually creating a list of acceptable journals and a nr. of publications per dutch university is
Has to be all or nothing (Score:1)
If information online is to be recognised as having scholarly worth, it must be made permanently available. I'm sick of checking over references for my thesis, and finding that half the ejournals have moved or disappeared. This is not creating credibility for a new model of distrubution.
Tenure review committees need to acknowledge the move to online publishing, and recognise it more fully before researchers will embrace it.
If everybody switches to online, someone has to make sure that that information will always be available - in print AS WELL AS electronic. Not everyone has the Internet still. Print is still vital to a large body of researchers, and the availability of print may dissuade concerns that some researchers have about publishing in a new forum.
Lastly, they need to pay careful attention to indexing, because databases are where most people find information, and where most tenure review committees get their list of approved publication journals from.
It could work, but it really does require a massive committment on behalf of the academic community.
the actual mechanics of this already available: (Score:1)
Originally I thought this might be usefull for simple spelling checking...usefull for slashdot articles, for example
Imagine my surprise when I surfed across to xerox, and found they have an actual system for doing this! (not the first time I've thought of something which had already been implemented
To me, this is exactly the kind of system which can be used for public peer review of online publication; you publish your paper online, and let everyone at it. You might even filter by IP adress to make the comments of proffessor x at university y (who would have to make his comments from a university computer) have a higher priority...
I don't know if this has been touched upon in the article, but , in true
email oops (Score:1)
"More than once I've wished I could go back in time and not press the send button on an e-mail or suck those words back in my mouth," he said.
Stanford and British Medical Journal have tried it (Score:2, Interesting)
http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/200
http://clinmed.netprints.org/cgi/content/full/200
However, it seems my two papers were the only ones submitted in August 2002. The site was started in 1999, at the height of the bubble, and initially proved popular, but papers have fallen off significantly since then.
They use online 'peer review'. Anybody that disagrees with your point of view can post a comment, which, after manual reading by an editor at BMJ, is then posted online under your original paper for all to see.
You may submit your paper to the print publications regardless of it already being posted at the Clinmed site.
--> a bit like SlashDot I guess
Some more thoughts (Score:1)
Publishers have been around for a very long time, for example one of the oldest is Elsevier Science, they were around when Galileo Galilei published his books and, indeed, published one for him outside Italy when the Pope made it clear that no Italian publishers were to handle his material. We can safely conclude that they are most likely doing something right, and by right I mean that they, for better or for worse, fill a need in a market.
The core of what publishers bring to the market is a structure in the form of an editorial process to filter and organize materials that are subsequently distributed out to whomever wants to buy them. The work associated with that is huge because of the number of papers received, the coordination tasks that go with distributing these papers, reviewing them, getting the reviews back to the authors to make corrections, getting the corrections back, organizing all this into an issue, getting it printed and sent out. Add in the fact that most, if not all, editors do this for free, and all reviewer do this for free, making motivation a difficult thing to impart. The advent of email and electronic has presumably made this process a little, but the organizational and coordination issues exist whether you use email or snail mail, and the delays are not in the transmission of information. All this is expensive as is detailed in the post from APSmith here.
What publishers also bring to the table is a brand in the shape of a journal, this is very important as people will want to publish in recognized journals and will want to read recognized journals. They do this because they trust the quality of the articles in those journals. This is not unlike people filtering articles based on ratings here on Slashdot. This touches on another task performed by the journals which is aggregation. They collect and organize articles making it easy for me to read about particular subjects in one place.
You may think by now that I am on the side of publishers, not true, I have only illustrated one side of the picture here. Publishers know their position in the market and have been very good at exploiting it. They have been very skillful at cost shifting, putting the cost of journals on libraries rather than on authors (page charges notwithstanding) and on consumers. So the people who generate and consume the information pay very little directly. This is very skillful. Because of their monopoly position in the market, this allows them to increase journal prices considerably without losing too much revenue.
So I hear cries from people all around, why not transfer the process back to the authors/consumers and publish on the web and the publishers be damned. This is a great idea, except for the fact that it does not seem to have happened so far. There have been a number of very good papers from a large number of (very smart) people as to why this should happen with all the usual arguments (I wont rehash them here), along with a number of service providers getting into the business and free software released, but, save for a few small success, this mass migration has not happened.
There have been a number of very interesting developments in some niche areas, the most famous one being the arXiv maintained at Los Alamos. There have been others successes modeled on that effort in small communities and small associations. I believe they have been successful for a number of reasons. First the community in question is small and the number of papers produced in small, making it very easy for the members to assess the quality of articles themselves, this is simply not possible in larger communities. Second the materials published have a very short shelf-life making it imperative to cut out the traditional publishing cycle which can take up to a year or more. Fast moving sciences (like physics) lends itself particularly well to that.
But as I said above, a mass migration has not happened.
My personal feeling is that there is a co-dependent relationship between publishers and the tenure system. publishers seek to build up their brands (journals) by publishing the best articles which they will attract, and academics seek to publishing in good journals because it improves their chances of getting tenure. Who would want to publish in a second or third tier journal when you can publish in a first tier journal. Until that relationship is broken, there simply is not going to be a mass migration. Where the system is fragile (in a relative sense of course) is the brand (journal). They key is to maintain the value, in all senses, of a brand (journal), and the publishers will protect that to the end. Witness the controversy when the NIH started to talk about putting together a repository for published materials called PubMed Central. The publishers were worried because the NIH brought along a brand, a sense of quality, dependability and permanence, something which could challenge the publishers.
I realized this when I was working to put together a start-up to provide an entirely electronic publishing process as a service, there is so much more you can do in an electronic environment than in a print environment (duh!), but it was clear that it would take a long time (hence money) and a lot of work to built up a brand that would self-sustain. Even then there are costs that have to be met, if you remove the publisher and the library from the process, leaving the producer (author) and the consumer (reader), you have effectively taken out the party who bears the brunt of the costs (the library). You cant ask for the producers to pay (a lot) for publishing and it is difficult to ask the consumer to pay for the information when they have been used to getting it for free (a perceived notion, but a very real notion nonetheless).
So my advice for anyone who wants to enter this market is as follows: have plenty of cash because it will take you a long time (read years) before an brand is established; start small, associations are a good place to start because they frequently do things manually and they talk to each other, referrals are important; understand who your customers are, they are not the producers or the consumers, they are the associations or sponsors; understand the market well, there are many publishing models out there, publishers, pre-print servers, personal web sites, associations, special interest groups, etc...; and last be prepared for the fact that the economics of publishing on the web are not all that different from publishing in print, just look where your costs are.
Finally, if you have made it to the end of this piece, I would be interested in talking to anyone who wants to get into this market, I have some expertise in the matter and am looking for something challenging to do.
1)On-Line Peer-Review Software and 2) Copy Editors (Score:1)
2) Seems the one thing Brown forgot is that journals pay the copy editors. In my experience working on ManuscriptCentral, we've found that just because you're a brilliant scientist, doesn't mean you know how to write a paper. In fact, many review forms presented to reviewers to fill in about a paper asks them to rate the quality of English!
Journals pay flocks of copy editors to turn the papers into something like standard English and format the papers consistently. Now, the formatting could be done through some kind of wizard, but that would require the scientist to also have some level of computer skills. Ususally, these folks have developped their professional skills at the expense of all else, including computer skills and sometimes manners! It'll be a while before a piece of software can correct grammer in a sci-tech paper.
participation of the professional societies vital (Score:2)
Now if this scheme made it EASIER, CHEAPER, FASTER to get the papers out, then the socieites would be jumping at getting to do this. The new e-media appears to be evolutionary in its advantages rather than revolutionary.
XXX (Score:2)
It was, of course. In my physics undergrad days, not long ago, I was responsible for downloading selected "preprints" from http://xxx.lanl.gov, now properly http://arXiv.org Just the ones which the professors had picked out. Of course, back then it took a bit longer to download.
Seems like all we would need is an electronic peer review system, much like slashdot. Where certain individuals given authority could rate the articles according to their merit, so that the best research would float to the top more quickly.
Some Related Information (Score:1)
www.eprints.org [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.
Re:A solution already exists: citeseer! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:peer review has outlived its utility (Score:1)
Leave ideology to the fundamentalists and let us talk about science. Science has always had a borderline to technology or engineering, which is applied science. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish, but nevertheless, we should make that distinction. IMHO, the urge fore profit comes with appliance of science, not with the original science itself. And yes, it is OK to have that capitalistic element, because it is a great motivator to actually make thinks usable. Academia sometimes has the tendency to produce proof-of-concepts and then jump to a whole different topic, like a child who has enough of it's legos for today and now wants to play a videogame...
If both sides are balanced, the system works. Unfortunately, recently the focus has dramatically shifted towards applied science. The public has somehow been told that all the other stuff going on is just some esotheric nonsense, paid by tax money. Sad...
Citations are not guarantees of quality (Score:1)
1. There are the papers that do not interest others. These, obviously, have very few citations.
2. There are the seminal papers. These, equally obviously, have a flood of citations - from tens to thousands.
3. The most cited papers are those that are spectacularly, fragrantly wrong. These are the only papers which get cited more than the best work in each field. (Think, say, Cold Fusion, to take a somewhat atypical example.)
Any publicity isn't good publicity.
Re:peer review has outlived its utility (Score:1)
If only there was a goatse.cx link in there.
Seriously however, this is an excellent point that the current system of peer review is closely tied to the marxist notions common in academia today. The reality is there is an entirely seperate system of thought going on today. Universities are becoming increasingly irrelevant in this modern society, being unable to really contribute anything of any value. With the ivy league turning out marxist teachers who turn to astrology to solve their problems, the rest of the world just thinks "whats the point?"
Academic journals ARE irrelevant, but it is not unique to the sciences. No matter what the study, teachers simply try to obfuscate the issue to their own advantage, to make us more dependent upon them. These journals are simply part of the fraud of education. People still learn, people still discover, people still create. They do this because it is the essence of humanity, we cannot do anything less. The only question is what will happen to the nations largest industry when the educational system completely collapses due to its irrelevancy? All those marxists teachers might actually back their words up with some mass protests! ooooh!!!
Re:Off topic... (Score:1)
Re:The problem with `peer-review' (Score:1)
PS - Science is not a model, it is a process that creates models. It will not be exhausted so long as humans have both intelligence and creativity on their side.