Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results 50
Tim O'Reilly has a post about how the prominent scholarly journal Nature has recently launched an open-access service for pre-publication research and presentations. In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.
Science databases (Score:5, Informative)
Cool subject (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm [earlham.edu]
wonderful (Score:5, Informative)
I'm writing up my phd, and for months (years if you actually include research time), I had to beg/borrow access to pay per bloody paper portals, or hunt around for non locked up copies of papers. Even then I have often had to rely on abstracts and what other people cite papers for as a guide to what I myself can cite, it's not easy.
I guess it would be if I were more monied, but I'm not. Yes my uni has subs to some portals, but not them all, and usually not the ones I find in the middle of the night after searching for hours.
Anything that makes new research more readily available is great news in my book.
Re:just the prepublications? (Score:4, Informative)
Open Access is already widespread in certain areas (Score:5, Informative)
While it's certainly very nice that the big journals like Nature take steps towards offering Open Access to (some of) their material, it has already been a growing trend in certain research areas for the past, say, five years or so. I do research in the field of Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology and except for high-profile stuff that could go into Science or Nature, I simply will not publish anything in a journal that is not Open Access.
The journal being Open Access is of tremendous importance to the researcher as it makes it _much_ more likely, that your paper will actually be found and read by other scientists. I know this from my own literature searches: hits found the PubMed [nih.gov] database links to the journal webpage, and if no Open Access version is available, it really have to look like a promising paper, before I spend my time ordering through the University Library.
Also, it should be noted that an ever increasing number of Open Access journal exists in the areas of Life Science in general - for example all the BMC journals [biomedcentral.com], the PLoS journals [plos.org] and even journals from "old school" publishers such as Oxford University Press (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research [oxfordjournals.org]) have gone Open Access. Also an increasing number of traditional journal now offer an Open Access option, where your pay to make your specific paper availably under Open Access.
Re:Data availability (Score:3, Informative)
The way I see it most journals (even the closed access ones) actually require that you make your data available. This is especially true for DNA microarray studies, where you will be required to deposit the data in a public database - for example ArrayExpress [ebi.ac.uk] or the Gene Expression Omnibus [nih.gov] at NCBI. Personally I see the publication of the data as a very important way to drive citation of your papers. When I link to data on the department webserver, I group the data into specific directories depending on the area of research - that way a person look for data from one particular paper will also find data and reference to our other papers within that area (for example see: Probe Design datasets [cbs.dtu.dk] and Cell Cycle datasets [cbs.dtu.dk]).
Regarding the fee for Open Access publication: In my personal experience this has not really been a problem - performing the experimental work behind the datasets has always been the expensive part and the Open Access fee has been paid using the same grant as the one paying of the experiment. For non-experimental papers ("pure" Bioinformatics) the department or the University pays the fee (of cause it may not be as easy everywhere - I work at the Technical University of Denmark).
It should also be notes that for some new grants your are actually required to publish your finding in an Open Access journal (I think this may the true for the EU grants, but I am not completely sure).
Re:wonderful (Score:2, Informative)
So you're technically not allowed to do that.
Re:How Useful Is It? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDe
lightening introduction to open access (Score:4, Informative)
For many years researchers (academics) carry out some research, write up the findings and try and get the results published in the the most prestigious journal as possible (there are tens of thousands of journals now available), on submitting to a journal, a paper is peer reviewed. Peer-review is carried out by other academics (normally for free), they will either reject, make corrections or just (rarely) simply accept an article for publication in a journal.
For years this was fine. Then the web happened. (well the web was originally designed for communicated research). Journals became online journals, requiring authentication to prove you are part of a paying institution. Academics could access them from anywhere, print their own copy, access them the same time as others etc. The advantages were huge. But something else happened, journal prices increased way out of proportion with inflation, sometimes 10% a year. End result, libraries had to cancel them.
So two points:
One: Your article, the result of years of research, can only be read be a very small number of people who work at Universities (and other research organisations) which can afford to subscribed to the journal (and not even Harvard can subscribe to them all). Your work is hidden to the vast population of the world. Even when it was tax payers money paying for it
Two: The key to academic publishing is the peer review, it's the step that ensures quality. That is done by other academics for free (and overseen by an editor(s) also normally for free).
Hang on, your University, and Research Funding body (such as the nsf) have paid for months/years of research, which you have written up, peer reviewed by others for free, and now a journal - which charges huge amounts for access - takes the copyright, pays you nothing, pays the peer reviewers nothing, formats and proof-reads it, and then sells it to Universities (basically the very people who supplied the content) for huge amount of cash. Universities rely on journals and have to pay what ever the price. Meanwhile academics are not allowed to send their own research to their peers, colleagues and students because the publisher now owns the copyright. It is (cliché alert) a licence to print money.
Open access (making research free to all) comes in two forms:
- open access journals, which are freely available on the web (either working at no cost, costs covered by a sponsor or by charging institutions to submit articles).
- Author deposits their article on to their institution's website, namely in to an Institutional Repository (or a subject specific website such as ArcXiv), as well as submitting it to a journal. This means the article is always freely available online.
The advantages of making research (normally publicly funded) free to all, are numerous and hard to exaggerate. Hobby scientists, school children, the press, the third world, and smaller universities have access to research that they just could not afford to access in the past (and of course, unlike freely available research, subscription only research can not easily be googles).
The main two software systems for Institutional Repositories are Dspace (MIT/HP) and Eprints (Southampton, UK).
Nature, they are a pain, they are one of the biggest journals, and they of course know it. If we (my university) were to subscribe to Nature online, we would have to cancel hundreds of other important journals, probably more. We can just not afford it.
Re:just the prepublications? (Score:3, Informative)
That was my thought. I'm happy to see they've made it clear that they're not competing with arxive.org. (Not that they'd stand a chance in hell of winning if they tried now.)
Of course, arxiv has the serious advantage that it's *not* directly associated with a commercial journal. That seems like it could be a serious handicap.
For example, last I knew, Science explicitely granted authors the freedom to publish preprints (but not, sadly, post-prints) only on publicly funded, non-profit sites. Anyone want to guess that the odds that they'll change that policy in order to give Nature a more robust preprint site?
According to the Sherpa/RoMEO stats, only about 60% of journals allow archiving of post submission content, and a full 30% don't allow any self archiving at all. Among thosethat do, there an array of strange conditions: personal or institution specific hosting only, non-profit database archiving only, etc. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php?stats=yes [sherpa.ac.uk]
It's probably true that in order to change those policies, one needs to establish a preprint culture within disciplines that lack it, which requires well administered and adequately advertised servers. Is Nature the organization best placed to succeed at establishing them? Probably not. (Although they may be the only organization trying to do so which is large enough to have a realistic chance at success.)