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.
Universities are Partly to Blame (Score:4, Insightful)
Most universities base political progress within the organization, at least in science, largely on the number and prestigiousness of journal articles published by an author/researcher/scientist.
If publishing in Nature and Science is going to get you a nice raise, a full professorship, tenure, chairmanship, etc. then that's what people are going to do. Is that different in small universities? If not, they need to do some introspection.
This scheme is also under pressure from women in science who have to balance their biological clock with their career ambitions, therefore the system is already seen as broken from a sexism perspective. Unfortunately, the replacement system is still in the requirements phase.
Re:wonderful (Score:4, Insightful)
this system is good for at least two reasons, in my mind
1. eliminates abstract citations, which are nearly worthless because they're not archived : i.e. citing conversation, manuscripts in progress, "results not shown."
2. can save time for the authors if the rest of the community thinks the study is a waste of time by modding down articles. Mind you, this will probably not deter scientists trying to pad their publication lists.
However, I'm in favor of having publicly available peer-reviewed journals. This is a necessary first step to that -- the only requirement now is the participation of "peers" and credibility of the journals. (chicken and the egg problem)
Re:wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)
As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.
About bloody time! (Score:4, Insightful)
--almost all scientific work that appears in journals like Nature or Science has been done on government grants. You already paid once.
--page charges are included in most grant funding. The author pays the journal so much per page of his/her article to cover the journal's costs. The journal not only doesn't pay the author(s), it RECEIVES payment from the author. You, once again, have paid for that.
--The journal then charges you for the content. That's the third time you're paying for it.
The amount they charge is non-trivial. $30 / per electronic copy in Nature's case, for instance. The cost to them is whatever that space on their server costs. A tenth of a cent, perhaps? (The other aspects of their costs they've already been paid for a couple of times.)
It's about bloody time they published ALL their articles under CC. The commenter who said scientific work is about open and free access has it absolutely right. Anything less than that is indeed not science.