Open Access To Scientific Literature: Can It Work? 333
evilquaker writes "Nature is running a free web focus on the issue of open access to scientific literature. The current model of scientific publishing dates back to the seventeenth century and -- like the music industry -- is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because of the rise of the internet. The main issue up for discussion is whether the author-pays/access-is-free model will supplant the author-pays-less/readers-pay-too model. "
Ulib (Score:4, Informative)
Open Online Journals (Score:5, Informative)
EE and computer science (Score:3, Informative)
Sometimes papers are submitted to journals, and are hard to find elsewhere. Most of the time, an e-mail to the author will get a response, or it can be found using a search engine.
It's been a long time since I have looked in a paper journal, yet I still know of universities who shun electronic access...
It's all about the data (Score:2, Informative)
Who's it for? (Score:4, Informative)
Furthermore, Nature is extremely stingy with their copyright laws -- i.e. they don't let you use graphs from their papers in other scientific journals, even if it is virtually essential to the science.
I say, if you want to read it, then pay for it -- it's not fair to make people who aren't rich to begin with to foot the entire bill, especially when the information is clearly not "open to all" for use.
Technical Journals vs. Specialty Magazines (Score:2, Informative)
Some of my stuff has published in IEEE journals, other items in Electronic Design and EDN magazines. The writing style is totally different, and how you present things is totally different.
Also, what a journal rejects, frequently the magazine loves to have.
In both cases, the concept of "peer review" is important. (Although not perfect...) Out of control internet publishing means that the readers have to seperate the good and the bad themselves, and some of the readers are not qualified to do so. Peer review prior to publication at least gives some validation of content.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to read all the crazy ideas people want to print, there's already a medium for that - it's called the internet. Lots of things get submitted to the LANL arXiv (http://xxx.lanl.gov/) that are "fringe" science.
Re:Fund libraries with public access... (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly, the market has been taken over by one publisher and they are increasing all the prices so much that most universities and other similar organizations (national labs) are reducing their subscriptions!
Yet with no peer review -- (Score:4, Informative)
The service that journals provide isn't so much the publishing, but the fact that skilled people in that profession have reviewed the papers, and have verified that it is accurate, and worthwhile [ie, not just some rewording of someone else's research].
This already exists! (Score:1, Informative)
the author or the reader. In fact almost all paper of theoretical physics are published this way and
many other papers in maths, experimental physics, etc. All these archives are at:
http://arxiv.org
This net is supported by academic institutions over the world. Let the publisher quickly die. They
serve no useful purpose.
Hehe (Score:4, Informative)
I find this somewhat funny that the link would be to Nature, which is part of the academic publishing "evil empire". For a good opinion on what is wrong with academic publishing in its current form see this [guardian.co.uk]
Also, if you're a scientist and would like to publish in an open format or you're interested in scientific papers, go to the Public Library of Science [publiclibr...cience.org]
Re:Someone has to pay the reviewers... (Score:2, Informative)
I frequently review papers in my field for a variety of IEEE and other journals. I do so because, as an author in those same journals, I appreciate how others who review my papers help to make them better. Peer review, believe it or not, is done by volunteers for mostly altruistic reasons. Journal editors are often also volunteers.
Re:Who's it for? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, publishing in Nature is free, unless you have big color prints.
Our subscription to Nature costs $1700 CAD (Score:5, Informative)
in 2002: $1400 CAD
in 2003: $1700 CAD (+21%)
This is for an academic subscription in a Univeristy Library in Canada.
Here's the irony. In scholarly publications, the contributions are mostly made from contributions from researchers who give the publisher the rights to publish their work. The publishers then turn around and sell this back to the universities for 100% profit. I remember back a few years ago, a subscription to Elsevier (the Microsoft of scholarly publishing) charged over $30K CAD for a subscription to Brain Research. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there were 4 issues per year. That works out to $7500 per issue. The publishing model is that if a reasearcher wants to be recognized, they NEED to publish, and the better recognized the journal, the better chances they'll have of being cited. The more often their article is cited, the better their chances of receiving more research/grants/money/etc...
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:3, Informative)
Archiving (Score:4, Informative)
I can see how this worry is being lost especially as it is somewhat orthagonal to the issues of access, but not entirely. Archiving costs money and that money has to come from somewhere. Most academic institutions fund this work but their archival models are built around books and journals. When a new journal comes in it is archived to shelves, microfiche, cd, etc. What are they to do with preprints on a website?
Obviously of course this is something that tyhe libraries themselves would have to solve but it would be nice to hear more of it in the debate.
One of the things that I worry about as the web grows is the loss of long-term institutional archiving. Such loss can often lead to unnecessarily repeated work or worse. I remember a professor of mine once told me about a paper that is regarded as "fundamental" in the Computer vision community. This paper is fairly old (circa 20+ years) and, unlike turing's work it is not assigned in basic cs courses. Once every few years he will attend a conference where some young student is presenting his/her latest discovery, a discovery that was already made 20+ years ago.
One could argue that the student's did not make a sufficient literature search but my prof would disagree. According to him the paper is difficult to find because there is so much literature being generated in the Computer Vision community so quickly that the paper has been buried in a mass of archives.
PLoS is on to something (Score:5, Informative)
Peer review is as good as any traditional journal. In theory at least; my field is physics so I haven't actually read any articles in the PLoS journals.
With the author pays model, the articles can be distributed around the world, without restrictions. This is a big thing, for poor countries as well as people who have graduated but still wan't to keep up with their field. And we don't see the perversity were researchers need to assign the copyright to the journal and then pay to read their own words!
As PLoS is a non-profit, the per-page costs are not that big as there is no need to fatten the wallets of any shareholders. Hell, per-page costs for PLoS are lower than for many traditional for-profit journals! Additionally, researchers from poor countries are allowed to publish for free. This combined with the fact that they can get the articles for free, is about the best we can do to help the third world to increase their knowledge base.
I wish all the success to PLoS and hope that the same concept will be increasingly popular in other scientific fields as well.
Journals can be good (Score:1, Informative)
BTW, I'm only an undergrad math student and have never published, but I've used _a lot_ of journals for my research and study, and I like the format much more than going through websites or similar directories for information. Sometimes you can find good info, eg phd thesis, on the web, but it's just nicer to have a journal you can turn to and flip through.
Re:Who's it for? (Score:2, Informative)
This is the critical element here, otherwise the good science will get muddled into the google soup along with the gibberish that some religious or political fanatics or degree for hire bozos pass off as science.
Although one still needs to take anyone elses work critically, at least one can be reasonably assured that something in an establilshed journal is less likely to be hogwash, or at least it will have the equations internally self consistant and biblio's are for real.
Just today there was a bit on public radio on how North Dakota came up with their own models for computing coal fired emissions. Scientists within the EPA came up with a number concerns with their methods (which were essentially derived to fit the regulations). ND meanwhile went to Washington and got the bosses approval bypassing a scientific review. This sort of crap could become the norm if the filters for publishing are removed.
Re:Reviews and moderation (Score:3, Informative)
papers/authors found in the bibliography (if a book doesn't give references,
find a different book).
I have to disagree here. While the original papers are always best, it's often hard to get ahold of them. Take raytracing as an example. The original paper on the subject is still considered the definitive source for information on the topic. But that paper is 20+ years old and is almost impossible to find. (I don't have easy access to a University Library.) However, I was able to read a short eBook (really course material) called "Practical Ray Tracing" by Geoff Wyvill, and create a ray tracer. References are listed at the end of the book if I wish to track down more info.
My point is that books are a good way of condensing information about a sub-field. Once you understand the basics and acquire 10-20 years of catch up work, then all the modern papers on the topic will begin to make sense. Of course, it never hurts to keep feelers out for a chance to obtain the original materials. Sometimes I get lucky.
Which is of little value... (Score:5, Informative)
That's really, really, crucial here. The people who gain from peer review are _not_ really the experts. Ok, there's a gain by a first winnowing, but that's not really that much, if you look at what does get published.
For example, there is not a paper in my field (thin layer magnetism) where it matters one whit if it's been peer reviewed or not. Why? Because if it's a load of cobblers, I'll spot it. I don't need other peoples opinions.
Now, outside my field, I'll accept that peer review has some merit to me. The most notable one for me is the mathematical proofs, to be checked by other mathematicians [0]. On the other hand, in the abscence of a formal peer review stage pre publication, any errors would result in a Comment publication in response. I accept that that's a time lag - but I don't think that that time lag would be any greater than the formal peer review stage as is.
No, the people who gain from peer review are not the experts. They are the general public, and those learning, or branching out. A lack of a peer review step would make it more difficult for those people.
You'll find that the drive to opening of papers is primarily driven by the experts. I think that replacing the peer review step with a structed system of comments, and keeping those comments accesable with the paper, would benefit.
The counter point to this, is that by having greater access to papers, with comments, would give benefit to all, general public and experts alike. The end point would be a net gain for experts, and probably a gain for the general public - as more reading would be needed, but all that reading would be easily accessable.
Let me close this by re-iterating that the experts don't need peer review - which is why arXive.org and pre-prints are the stock in trade of many an expert.
[0] There are, of course, similar sections of related research for all fields.
Further reading about open access (Score:2, Informative)
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html [earlham.edu]
SPARC Open Access Newsletterh ive.htm [earlham.edu]
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/arc
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm [earlham.edu]
What you can do to promote open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#do [earlham.edu]
Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ [soros.org]
FAQ from the Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm [earlham.edu]
Disclaimer: I'm associated with all of the sites above.
Peter Suber