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. "
There's a third option (Score:4, Insightful)
as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it work? It does work! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a crime that so many papers are still being published under licences that do not allow their free accessibility on the Web. Scientists of the future will wonder how science was even possible without such access.
isn't the whole point of academic publishing... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Music Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Journals per se have become a cash cow, but the structure and processes of peer review are important. It's how we tell Andrew Wiles and Murray Gell-Mann from the various witless kooks with a bogus proof or a crackpot theory. Without it, every worker in the field has to do her own comparative study of the merits of everyones work.
Until we find a way to replicate that, journals are here to stay.
[0] I don't actually, but you probably don't like AC/DC either.
Of course! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's a third option (Score:3, Insightful)
Knuth (Score:5, Insightful)
It's long, but a good read.
For an example... (Score:3, Insightful)
(not linked to prevent needless slashdoting)
It's a pretty impressive resource, and not just because it's free and electronic.
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slashdot Model (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, review is not *just* a moderation process, its a feedback process. The comments and corrections of reviewers are used to *improve* the original paper. Thats no small thing, and completely lost if you replace it with a "this is good / this is bad" button, or "(+5 Seminal)" rating scheme.
Re:If author pays, publications go the way of pate (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is expensive to publish, then most publications would become "an organizational property" -- if you look at patents, the CEO puts his/her name even though he/she is not involved in it, and the patent will anyway be the property of the company.
With a fair number of journals, the author already pays. I am fairly certain that the author or institution has to pay for articles in the IEEE Transactions, and the ACM SIGs may be the same way. In most instances, articles are written by college researches, so the school picks up the tab.
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:4, Insightful)
For example x years ago people would download many Linux distributions but now enterprises use very few - those few that have built good reputation.
So if we started with x open source journals, within 2-3 years several good ones would take lead. It's just that money would be out of the game.
Actually somewhere I read about this search engine that specializes in searching thru electronic scientific papers and journals - many customers pay lot of money 'cause thats the real value - find everything you need in 10th of time you'd need to the same on Google.
The added value is review. (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone has to pay for the time and effort of the reviewers and someone has to qualify the reviewers. On the other hand, humans have an inherrent need to compete and rise to the top of the heirarchy, so I expect that a non-economic system of pecking order based on status and recognition can supplant the economic model.
Bloodthirsty politics is rampant in university acedemic settings with very little economic basis. The drive for that could be harnessed in this system.
There are some experimental review systems in place for budding writers to review each others' work -- something similar (yet better working) could be designed for this purpose.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:3, Insightful)
But paper is good! (Score:3, Insightful)
So a joint paper/electronic model seems like the right balance. Most journals do that already - libraries subscribe to dead tree versions, and individuals can access the papers online, usually through a school-related discount subscription. Seems to work quite well although, paradoxically, it increases the cost per unit (because now you're printing far fewer issues).
But there's simply no incentive for publishing houses to make the online content completely free. Professional organizations can do it themselves (e.g. the AI Access Foundation [jair.org]), where they publish online papers themselves, and contract with a publisher to print each entire volume as a book. Non-profits like these will probably be the harbingers of new method of distribution for scientific findings...
Profit Center (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps publications should be in some variant of the GFDL, with the entire original article, including bibliography, being included in the invariant section. To me this seems more important than exactly which form of distribution is used. The forms of distribution will vary, and vary over time, but licenses can get dreadfully permanent, and copyrights appear to be forever.
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:5, Insightful)
You just described what every graduate student has to do in order to complete their work. If everything you need to do your thesis is in a book then it has already been done ad nauseum.
Another quick note. There are free journals on line that are free to publish in as well as to read. The up keep can carried simply by ad revenue or donated by people in the field or a technical organization.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, to try and answer honestly --- submissions editors add value. If one goes to the library and picks up the New England Journal of Medicine, you know that the articles in there fought to get in. Lots of sub-par research and writing was tossed or picked up by lesser journals. It serves as a kind of filter. If scientists just start setting up websites ad-hoc and there is no structure to papers being released, we end up with an Internet full of PDFs. What happens then, honestly, is corporate control of science. As somebody interested in say, stem-cell research, you maybe try Google to find papers, but somebody like Phizer may have it all neatly organized for you. Except it's just research by scientists paid by them, promoting their agenda.
Science is at a interesting point in history. It's primacy as technological and economic weapon is unchallenged. But there is a growing anti-secularism on the rise, in the both the West with Christianity and the middle east with Islam. People are attempting to "flood the airwaves" with pseudo-science or straight up bullshit science. Social structures to create peer review and weed out crap must exist somehow.
That was the whole idea... (Score:2, Insightful)
And now that we have PageRank, a simple google for any topic would bring up the most-cited papers...
Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who's it for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyways, whoever you are doing research for will foot the bill to get it published for the prestige of getting their guys name published. It's not like jo-bob amateur chemist is publishing scientific papers in his spare time after he gets home from the office.
The biggest part of publishing is doing research worthy of being published. If you got something that can make it into a major journal you'll get the money from somewhere.
Scientists don't live off royalties of papers they publish. They aren't novelists. They are researchers. Someone pays for their research and pays for their publishing.
The current state of scientific or even better academic journals in general (because history, anthropology and area studies all suffer from it too) needs a real overhaul. It's a really antiquated system that has basically just become a big racket for the publishers.
Publishing academics papers in peer-reviewed journals is totally different than publishing a collection of poems or a novel.
And oh ya, all the scientist I know are very well paid, even the bums that haven't published squat in ages.
Anyways, the whole point, which you apparently missed is this: You say "especially when the information is not open for all to use" well the idea is to make it open for all to use. Also the reason it costs money to publish these things is because someone with high level of expertise has to spend a lot of time reviewing the paper. So you are paying for it to be reviewed. Why paying someone to review it should mean that it's completely restricted use?
Re:as a scientist... (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that editors get paid quite well, and they earn every penny, but yes, reviewers and authors are unpaid, it comes with the job of being a scientist.
Nothing is stopping scientists from simply throwing their articles on a website somewhere. I can't think of a wider more free distribution method.
The reason that we give journals the right to act as gatekeepers is because we want them to do it. A scientist knows that there are journals that have higher respect in a field, and it looks good on scientists' vitas to have publications in peer reviewed journals, especially the more respected ones. The peer review is essential, and that is what costs money. Any bozo can throw something on a website. Journals have very strict standards for the format of the paper, and the methods used in the science. As far as who pays? Someone is paying the scientist and funding the research. I would guess that any costs associated with publishing the research is much less than 1% of research itself.
Length Restrictions (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the interesting aspects of journal publication is the restriction on the lengths of the articles. This forces authors (by-and-large!) to adopt a terse manner of writing ("telegraphic style" as Landau puts it). I think with online publications, the style of scientific writing will change, for better or for worse (I fear for worse!).
Articles could be less cryptic, but verbosity is also not nice. [As in Yes Minister - using fifty words where five would suffice!]
Re:Just selling a brand... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a pretty sweet deal for those top journals: output nothing but brand name prestige (which is entirely renewable and not really subject to typical economics) and rake in loads of cash.
I think we need a www.journals.gov. All that publically funded research should be open to every citizen to review. Odds are very few would actually look, but that's a different issue. I've read posts about using the
1. "Everyone" should be able to look at "any" of the "research" posted.
2. Any one willing to go through the "process" should be able to review.
3. The "process" should encourage "reviewing" other "papers."
4. Those that are "modded up" need to be eligible for grants and what not.
5. Posting papers to this theorical site should be like second nature to any serious scientist.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, Nature has a reputation for being a respectable scientific journal. You pretty much know that the people reading and reviewing your work published there will be other scientists and academics. So what other avenues does a scientist have to publish his work?
Website? Book? If so, who is your audience (as in, who is actually reading it and not who you wrote it for) and how can they generate feedback for the peer review process to work? Also, what does that say about your credibility? Lots of kooks have websites and books about all sorts of bunk science. How is someone going to tell yours apart?
Unless you already have a reputation, how do you publish something by yourself and still have people take you seriously? I think it's a fair question...
=Smidge=
Re:Can it work? It does work! (Score:4, Insightful)
The process builds on itself. Given one good author - say, Ron Rivest - you can discover the rest by spidering outwards and using your intelligence. That's mostly what everyone else is doing.
I'm not saying that peer reviewed publications are unnecessary, but I don't want you to overestimate the role they play in being able to find the good stuff.
hell, its pretty rare to see a citation that doesn't refer to a peer reviewed publication
It's unusual, but not vanishingly rare. For example, Andrew Roos's weak keys are cited in many papers about RC4 cryptanalysis, but have been published only online. (Actually I'd love to know what happened to Andrew Roos, he seems to have fallen off the Web)
Not true. Professional society journals do work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole point of journals is not dissemination---any monkey can put up a web page or archive---but quality improvement.
Where is the added value?
The journal editors do have to make decisions and more importantly they have to know the right people (harder than it sounds) to review, and they have to cajole people into writing the reviews.
On the technical end of things, the published finished papers in journals DO look better, their figures are clearer, the references more complete and checked, and the language is better than preprints. This takes the labor of professional copywriters, who don't work for free.
My papers have been improved by going through the publication process, both in presentation and in content.
Journals don't stay or get prestigious unless they can reliably publish good papers and reliably reject---or fix---crappy papers.
The system is hardly perfect---good papers get rejected and lousy papers do get published----but one has to consider if any alternative would have been any better.
It is extremely naive to imagine that good scientific quality control could be managed by some kind of utopian 'free' on-line review and meta-review system like Slashdot. People's scientific output is a whole lot more important than slashdot posts like this.
Professors do make a name for themselves publishing in prestigious journals. They don't become better known however for being a peer reviewer, as that service is usually anonymous. They do it because they feel they have a moral obligation to do so.
Many societies publish journals as a service and are not-for-profit, e.g. the American Physical Society. And their journals are usually cheaper, and often better, than the pay journals put out by for-profit companies.
I doubt the APS rakes in "loads of cash" without spending it back on fairly essential things.
Re:P2P (Score:4, Insightful)
BZZZZZZZZZZT! WRONG! We still need peer review, but what does that have to do with the journals?
The editors are professors who are supported by their universities. Their editorship fulfills the ``service to the profession'' portion of their job requirements, and brings some prestige to their department. It's generally considered to be easier to get published in a journal if the editor's office is just down the hall from yours, and he's heard your presentation of your ideas at one of the faculty brown-bag lunches. In short, the Universities support the editors, not the journals.
The reviewers are past and potential contributors. They work free of charge, and again, that's part of their university job description.
Yes, I know that the journals do have some paid employees. They seem to be associated with the print side of the business: they deal with subscriptions and money and such. If you are a contributor, you deal with volunteers who have .edu email addresses.
If Blackwell Publishers dumped Econometrica, the Econometric Society [econometricsociety.org], which is funded largely by personal membership [econometricsociety.org], could simply put its journal online, by subscription or free. Everything would continue as before: Eddie Deckel [tau.ac.il] could still edit, the reviewers could still review, and the papers could still be made available with the imprimatur of the Society. They might lose out on some revenue from the journal, but I doubt that would be an insurmountable problem. I imagine that most of us could afford to double our dues, if we had to.
You're an academic, and you know all this stuff, but I'm saying it for the slashdotters, most of whom figure that they'll get involved in some science, like java programming, when they finally get to college.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:3, Insightful)
Peer review is the single most important feature of a journal. If you read a random paper you find on the internet, you have no idea whther it's true or not. With a reputable journal, you know people considered experts on the topic have looked at it and haven't found any obvious flaws with it.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:3, Insightful)
I am currently studying a Phys. Rev. B article (which of course I will not disclose) that is full of typos, the kind of typos that are OBVIOUS to the eye, the kind of typos that any self-respecting editor should catch with no problem, let alone the referees that read the article (supposedly). This article got published!
Additionally to the typos, there are formulas that are completely wrong (this is easily checked because the paper is based on an older paper with the same kind of calculation done right).
In short here we have a paper full of typos and inconsistencies that passed through the "referee" and "editor" bus-stops and got published in a prestigious magazine. The same kind of magazine that you need to subscribe in order to view.
This is only one of the many similar examples that show a pattern formulating. If the corporate scientific magazines can not even keep up with what they are supposed to do, safeguard the integrity and accuracy of the published information, what's their use anymore?
Answer:
The "prestigious" publications are the current measure of scientific "success". The more crap you publish the more "successful" you are!
You're confusing free as in speech with beer again (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fund libraries with public access... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:as a scientist... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're in college then you probably have free access through your institution, and you can probably afford it if you're working in the field, but there are a number of inquiring laymen, myself among them, who are interested in science and don't want the dumbed-down popular science magazine and newspaper versions.
If a good number of your available T.V. programs, radio programs and print publications feature Creationist speakers (I hesitate to call them thinkers), and you don't see much of the opposition, then it becomes much easier to convince yourself that there's a vast Creationist science movement out there that's about to take the scientific establishment by storm. Some people I know actually believe this.
I don't think this is the only cause of the problem mind you, or even the main cause. And I don't think, if you allow the public access to research, that a majority, or even a large minority, of people will actually read them. But I think the right people will read them, and I hope you won't think me immodest when I say I suspect I may be one of the right people.
Re:isn't the whole point of academic publishing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not the whole point, no. Information dissemination is one of the two major goals accomplished by the current academic publication system. The second is peer review. Journal editors and their staffs manage the peer review process: they find reviewers (often a rather arduous process), disseminate submitted papers to them, receive and evaluate the reviews, and make the final editorial decision on the inclusion of the paper. All of this takes time and money. Peer review is the gatekeeper for the scientific method: science fails without multiple, objective evaluations of the quality and merit of research. It's how we keep the S/N ratio high.
Re:as a scientist... (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely, it's of particular importance to new people in the field.
In the case of a Ph.D student for example whos name is the first on the paper the they do not have a "reputation" per se (since they have not published or are relatively unknown). Personally, and I don't think I am alone in this, I find the "reputation" aspect of the paper has far more to do with the supervisors name (which should appear in the author list) and the group to which they are affiliated that the journal in which it was published.
If the supervisors name is on the paper, and they are well respected within the field, it is reasonable to assume that they don't want any old crap being affiliated with their name. As such they effectivly act as initial reviewers.
This may well be a hint as to the best way to engineer quality control (since that is what the review process should be), and that is the abolishion of that most sacred of proceses the anonymous reviewer!
Of course, persuading people that this is ultimately in their best interests will be difficult since it would reduce the ability for reviewers to covertly engage in politics by rejecting competitors otherwise decent papers (though I'm sure no reviewer would admit to this).
There is a sense in which the review process would become like the gpg "web of trust". Getting people to break out of the mold of course would be no easy task!
Re:Who's it for? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sence when is $250/page expensive? When a research project takes 6-9 months of your life to perform and write up (or more), 2K for a 10 page paper is well in the background of what the science cost to do, from start to finish.
I'd wager that the ammount of money spent paying scientists salarays while they read
Re:as a scientist... (Score:1, Insightful)