Peer-Reviewed Research Over The Web 154
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."
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.
Re:Won't Work (Score:1, Interesting)
And the rest of us just roll over and play dead when the ones who do the hiring and firing say that things will never change. Except for a few like this Pat Brown guy.
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?
does this mean (Score:2)
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."
GPL for research papers! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's why I find it a scandal that they charge that much for a copy. It is not, that they actually have pay to much for, because AFAIK peer-review is done for the fame alone. As I see it, they get copyright on articles, written by tax-funded researchers... and earn quite well on it.
I would be very much on favour for kind of a GPL for research papers. Anyone knows about such tendencies?
(By the way: I always found this link [nec.com] quite useful)
Re:GPL for research papers! (Score:1)
The problem here is that software is a concrete representation of an abstract algorithm. It's immediately demonstrable by running it and observing what it does.
Science however is largely communicated in the form of equations, diagrams, and laboratory procedures. The more complicated a theory is, the more difficult it is to verify. Historically science has solved the more simple problems first, and then worked toward the more complex. This has left us with a legacy of very difficult, complicated problems. So the question is, how do we keep up with the increasing complexity of scientific theory?
In science, once an idea has been "confirmed" to be legitimate, it is then "accepted" by a very large community who begin to do work with the new theory as a basis. So naturally it's very important to be certain that the theory is correct.
The Manhattan Project for instance cost taxpayers $2.2 billion. Back then that was a very significant percentage of the entire US defense budget. The military went out on a limb because the best minds in science all concurred that it was a realistic possibility.
The only way that industry will have that same kind of respect/trust in science is if they are assured that they best and brightest have verified the findings. And like most things in this country....everyone has a price....the best journals offer the biggest pay to the best minds, because industry is willing to pay for the information that is produced.
The point is, that the a-bomb represented a very large shift away from science as "discovery" to science as "industry". Today there is very little distinction remaining between advanced engineering and science. They are both funded by the same people, for the same purpose.
Re:GPL for research papers! (Score:1)
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)
Re:Influence and Prestige (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
Re:It's not hard at all-- ask the mathematicians! (Score:1)
Part of the problem is that the publishing rights for most of the journals are owned by two or three *incredibly* large conglomorates - who really seem to be squeezing as much money as they can from the journals in the last few years. For example, the cost of 'buying' the right to make a copy of an article in something like 'Advanced in Applied Mathematics' is double what it was five years ago.
Re:It's not hard at all-- ask the mathematicians! (Score:1)
If I remember correctly, the whole thing was sparked off by Rob Kirby's article [berkeley.edu] on the pricing of research journals. There's an interesting article by Joan Birman in the Notices of the AMS (vol 4, no. 7, Aug 2000, pp770-774) which discusses the various issues, and includes detailed discussion of the day-to-day overheads of running a free, properly peer-refereed research journal. It's available [columbia.edu] from her web page, in PostScript form.
G&T (and its sister journal Algebraic and Geometric Topology, and the related Monograph series) isn't some low-quality vanity-press thing - it's a real, proper, peer-refereed journal with high standards. At a quick glance, I recognise the names of three Fields medallists on the editorial board, as well as some other very eminent names in the field. And yet it's being run with virtually no overheads by two university lecturers (one of whom is semi-retired) in addition to their normal departmental duties (lecturing, administration, supervising research students).
I understand that a lot of the procedure is automated, with a mixture of TeX and Perl, with copies of all articles being submitted to the arXIv [arxiv.org].
Ah yes, I'd almost forgotten about the arXiv. A central repository for research preprints in mathematics, physics, and computer science. It's an unrefereed archive for research announcements, preliminary reports, and preprints. Papers submitted to refereed journals often take up to a couple of years to actually appear in print, so the idea is that you issue a preliminary version of your paper to faster communicate your ideas to anyone else who might be interested.
This stuff is great - it's all about collaborative research and the free and efficient sharing of ideas, and it gives me a great sense of hope for the future.
-- nicholas
free science research..???? (Score:1)
Re:free science research..???? (Score:1)
I had better contact my ISP and webhost to let them know...
US$20 million won't go far in running a high-load server farm.
Quinkin
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? :)
Re:peer-review on demand? (Score:2)
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.
Re:Pedigree (Score:2, Insightful)
The reasons for this are many IMO. First there is a huge amount of politics that go into getting past the first hurdle when submitting to these two journals--that is, not getting immediately rejected as "not of sufficient general interest or scientific impact."
Second, often the reviews are, as the AC put it, "fast-tracked" once the first hurdle is overcome. I would like to learn what the acceptance rate is for acticle that receive peer review...I bet it is very high.
Third, the extremely limited space allowed for articles in these two journals precludes the possiblity of (i) a thorough review, (ii) an in depth presentation and discussion of the data, and (iii) a complete and utter inability for other researchers to test and replicate the findings.
I always take articles in Science and Nature with a huge grain of salt. After citing a recent nature article as evidence for pursuing a specific line of research, one of my graduate mentors told me, "Don't believe anything you read in Science of Nature" until it shows up in one of the less prestigious, but more focused journals.
That said, publishing in these two will definitely get your CV noticed when you apply for that faculty position and I wouldn't hesitate a second to publish there if I could...unless of course I thought my work would get into Cell.
Re:Pedigree (Score:1)
Just because it's in nature/science doesn't mean it's true. I've experienced this politics. Most often you need to be well known in the field to publish to these journals irrespective of how significant/important your results are.
Re:Pedigree (Score:1)
At UC Berkeley, I have seen pedigree successfully acquired through exclusivity. Its Women's Studies Program started out with only one person in it. They didn't want more than one graduate, otherwise the perceived quality of their diploma would have been diluted. Hopefully, Brown will have the guts to implement similar measures.
Annals of Mathematics (Score:1)
Mathematics is fortunate in that the most prestigious journal is owned by a university with a quite enlightened outlook. Annals of Mathematics is now an overlay of the matematics eprint arXiv.
Other less fortunate disciplines may not be able to make such a leap without switching favourite journals.
Re:Pedigree (Score:2)
He has another way to achieve notoriety. If he can grow his lay-readership bigger than the more obscure journals, he might be able to draw submissions away from them. People doing library research will still have access to the articles if he gets them in the major indexes. He wouldn't have to focus on a specific genre of scientific inquiry, and he doesn't have a limit on the volume he could publish. His initial competitors for paper submittal wouldn't be Psychology, or even Linguistics. It would be the second-place journals that have impeccable but not groundbreaking research. I'm sure there are thousands of these journals. And I'm sure they sometimes have to turn down stories simply to conserve space.
By aiming for more obscure subjects, he could become a clearinghouse for all types of research, so long as it is perfectly rigorous. Eventually he might be able to draw submissions from the massive journals just because the researchers want their papers to be more available.
Re:Pedigree = Tabloid (Score:2)
I think that this was also driven by increased funding for scientific research in the last few years. More money for research means more people need places to publish to justify getting the funding. Nature publishing Group basically wanted to create instant "prestige" journals for papers to meet that need .... much like Cell Press has also splintered into Molecular Cell, etc.
No guarantee for quality, though. So now there is a proliferation of "review" style journals (e.g. Nature Reviews Neuroscience) to help sift through the pile of articles. Basically seems like an admittance that peer review of publications is seriously flawed ... being sited by a review or as a "featured" article is the new benchmark for prestige.
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.
Re:Modern science is in a sorry state, IMHO (Score:1)
A good deal of corporate funding for university research does not carry with it any NDA.
The biggest hurdles to net publishing (as others have mentioned) are entrenched publishers and the reputations of journals.
If the problem were corporate gag orders, we wouldn't have the tremendous academic output we have today. The fact is, that there are more articles being submitted than are (or should be) published.
Publishers manage the peer review process by providing a limited number of outlets, each with a perceived level of quality. If you could ever read some of the manuscripts that get rejected by even the best journals, you'd recognize the importance of the peer review filter.
Now, if a researcher finishes a study, and wants to publicize her results (for personal gain, e.g., tenure, and to advance The Cause of Science), she will look to present it in a respected forum. Sure, she could make a bunch of photocopies and mail them out, or she could post them on her personal web site, but to do so would give the appearance that the quality of the work is unknown (See Wolfram for an exception). However, if a bunch of respected peers in her field agree that her work is worthy of publication in a respected journal, people may take notice.
A peer reviewed internet publisher can succeed, but it would have to develop a positive reputation, maintain quality editors and reviewers, and be at least as accessible as paper journals (e.g., be listed in library databases).
One approach is to build such a system from scratch (see this article), another is to transition from existing journals (many of which now offer online versions to subscribers). Each have their strengths and weaknesses.
It is important to note that publishing is pretty expensive, even without the costs of printing and delivering journals.
Re:Modern science is in a sorry state, IMHO (Score:2)
The problem with the system as it exists today isn't that findings don't get published. They clearly do, and they clearly get peer reviewed. The problem is that the researcher is restricted in how much collaboration he can engage in prior to publication. That restriction comes from the fact that for the researcher to gain "recognition" in the current system, he has to be the first to publish on the topic of the specific research. By publicly collaborating with others, the researcher might compromise his position: someone else might end up publishing first.
Now, it seems to me that in the past, getting there first wasn't as big a deal as it is now. You might not gain quite as much prestige as a result of collaborating with others but you might gain a great deal of insight (and so would your collaborators), and that would serve to advance science very nicely. But today corporations fund most of the research that happens and as I said, they want patents. Since getting a patent depends on you getting there first, collaboration to the degree I'm talking about can prevent you from getting the patent you (or, rather, the corporation that is bankrolling the research) are after. And that means that the corporation that is funding the research, and thus the university you're doing the research for, will naturally forbid you from collaborating with others until you're ready to publish.
Now, this is speculation on my part, but I would guess that science publishers, and the peer reviewers that work for them, sign nondisclosure agreements that forbid them from saying anything about the work being submitted until the work is published. Once the work is published, the clock starts ticking and the researcher has one year to file a patent. The published research acts as proof that the researcher got there first. If things really work as I suspect, then it follows that the corporation funding the research will insist on the researcher publishing through one of the science publishers precisely because they'll sign the NDA, and thus the clock for getting the patent won't start until the peer review process is complete and the research is published.
If the researcher instead published directly on the web, the peer review wouldn't begin until that point in time. But the clock for getting a patent would then start at the beginning of the peer review period and not the end, so the risk of being forced to obtain a patent on something that hasn't been fully peer-reviewed would be significantly greater. For instance, if the researcher publishes their findings on the web, and sufficient peer review on the web ends up taking an additional 10 months, that would leave only 2 months that the researcher could file for the patent. The corporation funding the research would obviously find that situation unacceptable.
This is why I think corporate-funded university research is a bad idea: it prevents researchers from collaborating as much as they're probably naturally inclined to (many, perhaps most, researchers aren't in the game for the patents, but are instead in it for the recognition and the advancement of their field), and it keeps the science publishers in their position as gatekeepers of research publication. Most importantly, it puts the goals of the corporation (making as much money as possible, no matter the means) above the goals of science.
I hope that clarifies things a bit...
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.
Re:The same for Software-Engineering (Score:1)
Re:The same for Software-Engineering (Score:1)
Re:The same for Software-Engineering (Score:2)
Try reading most papers by David Parnas.
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...
Re:CS systems research model (Score:2)
When Sokol made his idiotic point about the arts 'journal' Social Texts the points never made by any of the attacks on post-modernism were that (1) the journal is not that prominent in the field and (2) getting an article in a journal of that sort is like getting an article accepted by Slashdot, it means precisely nothing.
Sokol's wider point that lots of people in the arts are pretentious farts is completely correct. However it is only a special case of the more general truth that many people in every academic field are pretentious farts.
The point is that in science the litterature has a specific role, it reports incremental discoveries. There is also a secondary role in reporting theories, however this is vastly overrated by the scientists as the Popper/Kuhne debate demonstrated.
The engineering litterature is quite different because it is in almost every case a secondary litterature. We publish our major findings as books, manuals, programs and documentation. If I want to find the latest on any piece of work I go to the Web.
The arts litterature is different again because there are no right answers. Points are awarded not for what is said but how it is said. Of course this is not science, but nobody ever claimed it was. For example Searle's 'Chinese Room' argument is a basic text of the philosophy of AI. It didn't get that status because anyone agreed with it and found it perceptive, in fact the reverse, everyone has multiple ways to demolish the argument which is of course the point, I can't publish my rebuttal of Searle without giving him yet another citation. I call texts of that type Koan texts because the role they play is completely separate from whether the argument is correct or even whether the argument is correctly stated. McLuhan falls into the same category, he is almows always wrong on pretty much every assertion he makes (television is a COLD medium? - NOT!), however reading his books is a useful way to start thinking about things.
So given that the litterature is not monolithic and serves multiple purposes, what can be done? Well first look at the way that the publishing houses established themselves. They started off by publishing the proceedings of conferences. These are a very special form of publication because they are largely stand alone and the whole editorial infrastructure is ready made.
People send papers to conferences so they can go to the conference, not necessarily just to get publication credits. The prominence of the conference is independent of the prominence of the journal.
The way to get open publication off the ground is to start by publishing conference proceedings. Get a small number of the worlds most prominent research libraries to kick in some funds to maintain a server infrastructure - MIT, Stanford, Oxford Bodleian, Cambridge, the cost would be less than the cost of a few journals and certainly less than the cost of book storage! Start small and work up, don't try to displace Science and Nature on the first day. Most journals are nowhere near that level of credibility, start with the low hanging fruit.
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...
e-print archive becoming the definitive reference (Score:2)
One never actually fell back to the journals unless the paper predated the early 90s. People would reference other peoples work via the e-print archive reference number. e-prints circulated so widely that most major papers had already been read and reviewed by the relavent people long before it actually hit the official peer review process at the journals. By the time a paper made it into the journals it was VERY old news.
Yes, people still submitted their papers to the standard APS journals for publication, but nobody read them. Everybody read the e-print archive. Most people couldn't even tell you what journal most of the articles had been published in, nobody cared.
Re:e-print archive becoming the definitive referen (Score:2)
High Energy Physics isn't all of physics; also our publication schedule is fast enough now we can get things up online a week or two after we receive them, if it's justified. Do people read everything in the arxiv? Maybe in those fields that are limited enough. But what we in the journal business do is sift through those submissions and try to point out the ones that are important. The arxiv caused us to do our job better - as far as I can tell, we seem to have reached a sort of peaceable coexistence...
Re:e-print archive becoming the definitive referen (Score:2)
Do people really read everything in AIP journals? Nobody I knew did. But I did know several people who would go to look at what was new this morning on arxiv.org in their field ( and possibly related fields ). They'd scan through a couple of pages of new preprints looking for people whose work they knew to be worth reading, or for abstracts that sounded promising.
Perhaps the AIP has gained some celerity recently. I would hope so, but I suspect the value proposition offered by the traditional AIP journals is wearing very thin in many subdisciplines ( like hep-* etc. ).
Re:e-print archive becoming the definitive referen (Score:2)
Anyway, the point was of course nobody reads our journals cover to cover (though I used to do that with PRL about 10 years ago) - there's too much! That's exactly why a well-known authority in the form of a journal is needed in most fields. People do browse through the titles and abstracts, and they search for particular subject areas they're interested in. Helping that somewhat now are the Virtual Journals [virtualjournals.org] that provide a subject-specific cut through a series of high-quality peer-reviewed journals, and seem to be quite popular.
The "value proposition" may be wearing thin, but interestingly enough Phys Rev D (which covers the hep-* related areas) has seen faster submission growth than most of our other journals the last few years, so there must be a lot of authors that see some value in going through our processes...
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
Re:Our experience (Score:3, Insightful)
Are we a "near monopoly"? There are hundreds of physics journals out there, in competition for authors and readers. It's a pretty free market, in my opinion, though you'll hear all sorts of arguments on that front. I assume we receive so many papers because we do our job well. Even though we publish a lot, I believe the total number of physics articles published worldwide (and we receive about 70% of our submissions from outside the US) is about five times our volume. And there's always Science or Nature!
Now the economics are a little odd because we sell subscriptions primarily to libraries, which are sort of a captive market. However, you'd be surprised at the number of small colleges and public libraries and such that subscribe - if they weren't happy, what reason would they have to continue?
The key point is your #4:
I don't know that we do. Perhaps we don't. It's an experiment worth trying. But is it an experiment that's sufficiently important to have the government force it on us (as some have suggested)?
Ummm. So you're in favor of more rigorous review? Wouldn't that be more expensive? It seems to me the current system works reasonably well, is improving in speed and efficiency, and at only a couple of percent of research dollars, is reasonably affordable.
The main complaint of the public library of science people etc. seems to have been that the research isn't available free online. Well, in our happy medium in physics we have no problem with researchers posting their research on their own web sites, or on the e-print server, etc. Go ahead and do it! That makes it available free - but don't expect the journal publishers to make everything free for you; we're doing a different job here.
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
Undoubtedly Microsoft would argue that they are not monopolists, because there are so many other operating systems out there. The trouble is that libraries can't afford to subscribe to hundreds of journals. Also, there has been a lot of consolidation in the journal market recently. IIRC, Elsevier bought up a large number of previously independent journals and then proceeded to raise their prices exorbitantly.
But is it an experiment that's sufficiently important to have the government force it on us (as some have suggested)?
I don't think you should be able to have it both ways. Your business is largely based on government-funded research. If you want to feed at the public trough, then you need to expect that the government will have something to say about it. To me, it seems absurd that papers describing publicly funded research should be the intellectual property of a particular organization. In this digital age, there is no justification for that.
Ummm. So you're in favor of more rigorous review? Wouldn't that be more expensive?
No. I'm saying that there is already more rigorous review going on: the process by which one's colleagues form their opinion of one's published work. The kind of peer review done by journals is not particularly useful, because the it sets the bar so low. A high percentage of published academic papers are never referenced in the later literature, which indicates that it had no impact in its field.
The main complaint of the public library of science people etc. seems to have been that the research isn't available free online.Well, in our happy medium in physics we have no problem with researchers posting their research on their own web sites, or on the e-print server, etc. Go ahead and do it! That makes it available free - but don't expect the journal publishers to make everything free for you; we're doing a different job here.
That's a more enlightened policy than those of some other journals, and I commend you for it. But you own the copyrights, and there is nothing to stop you from turning around tomorrow and suing arxiv.org. In fact, it's quite common for commercial publishers to experiment with a tolerant attitude toward free digital distribution, but then pull the works back into the proprietary domain. For example, there are a couple of publishers (Addison-Wesley and one other that I've forgotten) that used to have large numbers of their computer science books available for free in digital form, but they've recently cut off that option. This is exactly the kind of taking-back behavior that inspired the invention of copyleft licenses.
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
So who's the monopolist, us, or Elsevier? Or all of us together? I can't speak for the commercial publisher(s), but we're non-profit, and definitely not profitable (we eke out a couple of percent above cost in the journal business if we're lucky). The only analogy to Microsoft really is the same as for any other information good - there are increasing returns to scale, and we do have more subscribers than most physics journals would. But our marketing department (2 people) still has to work really hard to get subscriptions - one thing that makes it easier now are state-wide or country-wide "site licenses" that make everything free at point of use to every researcher in that country.
Maybe there's another business model that would work for us, but we haven't found it yet.
Which government? 70% of our papers come from outside the US. A good portion of our papers come from industry (at least they used to before the Bells and IBM cut back their research labs). We publish a few papers every year that we do not hold copyright to because they were produced as work directly for the US government, and are therefore not subject to copyright at all. The one reason we still even retain copyright rather than just asking for a license to the content (we grant the author back all the rights anyway) is due to certain European legal issues relating to derivative works, electronic format vs. paper etc. If we hadn't held the copyright (as some journals have not) we would have had a lot of trouble getting the rights to scan in our old journals and put them up online - and anybody else trying to do it would have had exactly the same problem (contacting the authors as legal copyright holders for hundreds of thousands of articles decades after the fact is no small feat).
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
As I described in my original post, you were the monopolist when I was publishing papers in exeprimental nuclear physics. There was no other viable venue for long papers. A paper published in any other journal besides Phys Rev C would not have been available in most libraries.
our marketing department (2 people) still has to work really hard to get subscriptions
Not surprising, considering that the prices are very high, and they could get nearly all the same papers on arxiv.org for free.
Which government? 70% of our papers come from outside the US.
I don't see why any government should pay tax money to support scientific research, and then allow the copyright to be signed over to a private organization.
A good portion of our papers come from industry (at least they used to before the Bells and IBM cut back their research labs).
Of course if a private organization wants to sign their copyrights over to another private organization, no government should have any say in the matter.
We publish a few papers every year that we do not hold copyright to because they were produced as work directly for the US government, and are therefore not subject to copyright at all.
I published some papers in Phys Rev and PRL as a postdoc at Argonne National Lab, which is 100% funded by the federal government. IIRC, we never even had the option of not signing over our copyrights to you. I assume the fig leaf is the word "directly," since the federal government tends to administer research money indirectly, through universities. I think all authors should have the option of dedicating their work to the public domain, or of publishing it under a copyleft license.
The one reason we still even retain copyright rather than just asking for a license to the content (we grant the author back all the rights anyway) is due to certain European legal issues relating to derivative works, electronic format vs. paper etc.
You may be benevolent today, but again, there is no protection against a change in attitude tomorrow. If the only issue is European law, how about offering U.S. authors an option of licensing you the content while retaining the copyright?
(contacting the authors as legal copyright holders for hundreds of thousands of articles decades after the fact is no small feat).
This sounds like an excellent argument for applying copyleft licenses to scientific publications. If Linus Torvalds drops off the face of the earth tomorrow, people will still be able to use, copy, and modify Linux, without having to contact him.
The easy way to publish a free journal (Score:1)
In fact, I was under the impression that most quality academic journals were already charging authors substantially more than $500.
Re:The easy way to publish a free journal (Score:2)
Also, maybe it is different in other fields, but in chemistry, one doens't pay to get a article published (unless it is for colour printing etc).
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
If he were really big, think he could charge money to submittors? If it wouldn't be a very large sum compared to the cost of the research, then this could be considered a research expense. It's the cost of auditing. There'd have to be some system that made it so the auditors would have no reward for accepting papers...
Ah, maybe it can't be done.
Re:Our experience (Score:2)
We used to charge authors publication charges (slightly different from submission charges) - in fact we still do for at least one journal. But there's a competition for authors out there too, and the commercial publishers almost killed one of our journals a few years ago by offering free publication to the same group of authors, even though their costs to libraries were far more.
Re:A question (mostly OT) (Score:2)
Standard answer: one person's quality is another person's "filler"... As somebody once said, the most important paper for your research is the one you didn't read, with the critical discovery that would have cut years off your study.
The quantity published these days is simply due to the enormous volume of actual research that is being done. If you actually look, the number of papers published per scientist hasn't changed in decades - it's the number of scientists (worldwide) that has grown so much.
I don't know that misguided is quite the right word. It's one of those "grass is always greener" things - or perhaps more nostalgia in this case. Things are really no different than they were 40 years ago, except for the volume of actual research being done. Communication is more important than ever, of course!
What does it mean to have value? Sometimes the value of a particular piece of research seems minimal for a decade or two, and then suddenly is realized as a critical foundation for a whole new research area. That said, every journal has different, specific criteria that they try to select for, and whether what they are doing is valuable or not is really measured in the marketplace: citation statistics are of course one way to measure, but the fact that a journal is widely subscribed, widely read, and that authors really want to publish there is the result of a real competition for quality and value. Maybe the competitive landscape could be organized better, but I think the value is there, and continues to be there, as long as we're all doing the jobs we're supposed to be doing.
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.
Re:publish or perish (Score:2)
Then they would have to put up with the likes of goatse.
"Professor Hawking, I think you will be happy to know that this diagram will prove that black holes are approachable to human observers."
Re:publish or perish (Score:1)
Slashdot's 'metamoderation' is a step in this direction, though it is pretty crude.
Re:publish or perish (Score:2)
Re:publish or perish (Score:2)
With collaborative filtering, an individual's preferences over a small set of data are used to predict likely preferences over a large set of data. So to take an example that is successfully in use here [umn.edu], one could rate 15-20 movies and have the system predict with a fair bit of accuracy that person's ratings of most any movie. Of course, you need a lot of people's preference data to do this, but I'm sure it wouldn't be a major hurdle to acceptance of Brown's idea, since he has so many researchers' signatures already.
Plus, with a system such as CF, one could view the articles that the system determined he/she would find most useful, OR, one could view articles only based upon aggregate ratings, etc.
Re:publish or perish (Score:2)
CF can be good to predict the individual preference over an item but not the quality of the item.
What it does is amplify the mistakes of the few who referee. Even if there are 2000 registered members and 2 referees per paper, the referee report is still based on those 2 referees.
Re:publish or perish (Score:2)
I disagree. You say the following:
CF can be good to predict the individual preference over an item but not the quality of the item.
My point is that an individual's preference is equivalent to his perception of the quality of the item. Sure, if you had only two ratings for each item the system wouldn't work, but think of it this way:
If an academic writes a paper (let's call it Paper X), we could assume (at least) that several of his colleagues are likely to read it. If the paper received a high rating from the initial reviewers, it would appear on the 'radar screen' of other like-minded individuals at other institutions. By 'like-minded' I mean people who would find the paper a worthy and interesting contribution to the literature in the field.
Over time, more people would review the paper, perhaps some people in neighboring fields, some of whom would find it MORE relevant/interesting, and some of whom would find it LESS relevant an interesting. This would add intelligence to the system.
Now, suppose that you logged on and rated a few papers, and that it turned out that your intellectual disposition was such that you tended to take interest in the ideas presented in Paper X. You would be shown Paper X on a "recommended reading list".
The concept of a "recommended reading list" is precisely what I think makes CF extremely well suited to the scientific community. Right now, each field contains its own body of cannonical literature, and over time that body is expanded as articles are published in the field's prestigious journals by the field's prestigious academics. CF would allow for several occurrences that would serve to benefit mankind (and academia). I'm not sure if you would consider them weaknesses, but here they are:
1. Looser constraints over whose ideas are exposed to mainstream scientists: An 8th grader could feasibly write a paper that would end up on the "recommended reading list" of an MIT professor, so long as the system had enough preference data to make the connection, but this would surely happen before long.
2. Better cross-fertilization between fields: Preference data from individuals with inter-disciplinary interests would help the system recommend articles from fields outside an individual's primary expertise. I've known grad students who have never visited the University Library, relying instead upon a bookshelf in their faculty advisor's office. The intelligence developed by a CF recommender system may find some interesting bridges between fields. At the very least, it would put the information out there. Of course, if an individual consistently low-rated articles outside of his field, he would soon stop receiving recommendations for them.
At any rate, I think it would work. It would take some time before the CF 'intelligence' was operating at its peak, but in the meantime the rating data could be used to show results based upon popularity.
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.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
It's true anyway. The cost is in human time: a couple dozen hours per paper of a person looking at what needs to be done with it, making sure it's going to reviewers in the field who are available at this time, reading their responses to find what, if any, of substance needs to be done by the authors, reading author responses and making acceptance/rejection decisions. There are many ways of doing it more automatically, cheaper, easier; unfortunately none of them seem to be associated with a prestigious journal. Cause and effect?
The analogy to a court system isn't precise, but the expenses involved in recording and monitoring the proceedings to ensure fairness are not dissimilar.
Many journals already do this. We don't, but we offer our back file [aps.org], scanned at several million dollars cost, for a quite inexpensive personal or institutional subscription. Should the old stuff be paid for by current subscriptions, or should it pay for itself? All economic and market questions for the publishing business. Funny that scientists seem to think they have all the answers here.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
What it comes down to is that the public is paying for something twice. This is immoral.
The public pays for the salaries of the professors who do peer review. The public pays for the research. Thus, the results should be available to the public free of any additional cost.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
If you'll check out our journal web pages, you'll see there is a LOT of information already freely available. Almost all scientific journals make all the abstracts free, for example, and you can browse through hundreds of thousands of article listings to find the one you want. If you know exactly which one you want, you can pay for full text individually - few people seem to want to do that though.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
I give less than a flying fuck about how well journal businesses do. What I care about is the privitization of public information, which is what is happening.
"A lot" of information being freely available isn't good enough. Any information that was produced with the aid of public money (taxpayer's money) must be made freely available by law.
The internet companies you speak of weren't taking information produced by gov't money and publishing it. They were producing that information themselves, thus had the right to do whatever they want with it. The information you publish is produced because of taxpayer's dollars. The public has the right to be able to freely access that information.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:2)
The majority of what we publish is from outside the US. Did the US public pay for this research? No. Should it be available for free to the US public? Why?
Forget immoral - it would be illegal for us to hold copyrights on anything that really was "public information" - however, according to US law that only covers what is written by direct government employees, which is only a tiny fraction of researchers in this country. We do, of course, publish a few such papers every year. That information is certainly "public information", freely available. Where's the immorality in us charging you for it if you can get it free somewhere else? You'll have to get it out of the government under FOIA of course
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:1)
Information may be free (or may want to be free, I always screw up that quote), but vetting that information takes time and administrative overhead. If you're any one of the journal secretaries who's e-mailed/faxed/called me 3 times to get a review done you know how much administrative overhead it is! I wish Brown & Co. best of luck with the new endeavor, but also recognize that the "traditional" publishing houses and societies provide us with a lot of value.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:1)
I just spent around 20 hours reviewing a paper for an international engineering journal. I was not paid for this activity. My review was anonymous to the authors of the paper (accept with revisions, if you must know). And this paper was exactly in my field of expertise.
At my current billable rate, that is around $1500-2000 worth of labor, minimum. I do it for free because the authors submitting to such journals are not paid.
If it were a consulting report, you can be damn sure I would charge $75-100/hour to check someones engineering analysis.
Where do you propose to get all of this free labor for reviewing? It's damned hard work.
Re:Perhaps gov't action needed (Score:1)
If you need the results, such sites as pubmed [nih.gov], infotrieve [infotrieve.com], and scirus [scirus.com] will provide you with all the results you'd ever care to read. Yes, these are abstracts and do not contain methods or detailed discussion, but the results are most often presented. Then there's pubmed central [nih.gov] that only deals in journals that are free (as in beer). Most journals allow access to abstracts and results. If you really need the article, there's always your friendly neighborhood library. Finally, it's common policy for authors to furnish reprints upon request (at no charge to the requestor).
But you're obviously bent out of shape simply at the prospect of not providing the information (and rightfully so, I suppose).
But government action? Not a chance. Current policy for public funding agencies is that developments arising out of sponsored research are the property of the discoverer. In most cases the "discoverer" is a university, who reviews the work for continued development (e.g. University-owned patents, licensing, etc). However, if the U decides not to act, that discovery becomes the property of the principal investigator who may do whatever they chose with it including: selling it as a product, patenting, licensing the technology, etc.
In this way, many many many PI's have become stinking rich from tax-dollar supported (NIH) research. It happens all the time.
So why would the gov't decide that it was their job to make it all freely available?
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
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
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.
Re:A solution already exists: citeseer! (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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...
Re:peer review has outlived its utility (Score:2)
Making scientific discoveries usable is not really part of science, but it borders on engineering.
However, the real problem is that it is rather difficult to decide a priori which discoveries (yet unmade) will lead to great applications.
It's best for society to hedge its bets and support as many scientists as possible doing research in many diverse fields. You never know where the next great idea will come from.
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.
Elsevier history (Score:2)
Other than that, I thought your comment was interesting - you're not on the side of the publishers, but you're trying to be one anyway? It's a funny business... good luck!