Faculty Votes For Open Access Policy At UC San Francisco 146
Marian the Librarian writes "UCSF is among the first public institutions to adopt an open access policy, and is the largest scientific institution to have such a policy. The policy, voted unanimously by the faculty, will allow UCSF authors to put electronic versions of their published scientific articles on an open access repository making their research findings freely available to the public. Dr. Richard A. Schneider, who led the initiative, said, 'Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals. The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research.'"
University of Alabama retaliates (Score:3, Funny)
UA faculty voted unanimously today to restrict all university research to millionaires and large corporations only.
Good, now... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, this is a good first step.
Re:Good, now... (Score:5, Interesting)
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The Internet already made this point moot, friend.
Re:Good, now... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The problem is not reviewing, the problem is gaining sufficient reputation.
You see, the internet replaces the distribution mechanism. It does not replace the reviewing process. So that we keep that as (as topic starter said) the way we already did it -- by academics, unpaid. Whether this is distributed electronically or on dead trees does not matter. The label that is on the distribution matters -- that is the seal of quality.
To generate a new seal of quality, we'll have to start from square one: building r
Re:Good, now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to guess who does the actual "peer reviewing"? You know... who judges the validity of published information and analysis...
Hint: it's not publishers.
It's the scientists themselves. And they do it without any type of monetary compensation (i.e. for free/gratis).
Scientists do the work.
(Other) scientists review the work.
Publishers only do typesetting, rip-off scientists of their intellectual property right and little more than that.
On the other hand... taxpayers ALREADY have to pay scientists to do research, already have to pay for scientists to spend their time doing peer-review, already have to give money to libraries so they can pay the publishers for their subscriptions (i.e. access to the research that was already funded by taxpayers to begin with). And... yeah... if they want to access that research that was bought and paid for them, guess what? THEY HAVE TO PAY YET AGAIN.
Here's a crazy idea... take all the money that universities and libraries pay to publishers worldwide and use it to enable "open access initiatives" to have the required tools and expertise (mostly at the level of typesetting, since everything else is already covered by scientists anyway) for preparation and free dissemination of high-quality publications.
Meanwhile... in the real world... current (i.e. already existing) open access journals are ALREADY some of the most reputed venues for scientific publication (e.g. "BMC Genomics"). So... yeah, no need to refute you when Reality already does it for me.
Please... do tell... in what way does the "open access" model (as opposed to the "pay-wall" model of scientific publishing) prevent scientists from doing what they already are doing for free (i.e. peer-review)? I await your answer!
Re:Good, now... (Score:4, Informative)
Here's your answer - open access is just one piece of the puzzle, and without a peer review certification process it is meaningless. If you're a senior academic and leader in your field, then your reputation precedes you and people will turn to your stuff regardless of peer review. But if you're a junior academic / post doc, perhaps your stuff is legit or perhaps it is crap and you're pushing it out the door to up your publication count. We need a certified peer review process for this.
FYI, these open access internet journals, you typically have to pay money for the paper to get peer reviewed. I'm fine twith that. as long as there's a process!
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Have you ever heard of a search engine? It's this fancy tool that uses an algorithm to determine the most relevant webpage for your query. Somehow, I think there's space here to use that technology to build a search engine that will return you the most relevant article for your query. For example, beyond keywords, it could leverage highest number of citations, most blue-ribbon reviewers, best ratings, etc. You could even build reputation graphs for papers and reviewers.
All of that is old hat. And, if it is
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here's a fact that blew my mind when my advisor told me - 90% of published articles are wrong. If this gets through the peer review process, how are you going to tell through your search bot which is best?
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If 90% of published articles are wrong, the current model is already failing. What you're absolutely missing, is that there is nothing in the journal model that can't be replicated online. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. And since the heavy lifting - the writing of the paper and the review - is already done for free for the papers, it's trivial to put that process on the internet.
Looks like your other accounts managed to get some modpoints. Nice going.
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Or, alternatively, it means you're a moron and your posts are a waste of screen space. Na, couldn't be. It's all a giant conspiracy to keep you from speaking the truth to power. What the hell is "power" in a Slashdot discussion anyway?
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Hi Bonch. Your OCD is showing again.
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Same way it's always done. You do realize that any idiot with a computer and a web page can put up whatever they want, right? How do we judge the validity of information we find on the Internet?
No reason we c
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Peer review happens constantly - you're reading papers from your field, you're publishing papers others are reading.
That's not "peer review". Peer review means changes are made to correct errors prior to publication, or entire papers are withdrawn because they are bogus. It's not a "peer review" when someone arbitrary reads your paper. Google won't help you figure out if a paper is crap or not, it will only tell you that it contains a high percentage of the right keywords.
And peer review doesn't mean the paper is sent to your friends to review, it is sent to people who sometimes are your harshest critics. If a paper ca
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The devil's in the details, but that's the basic idea.
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Also it would help the person who's writing the paper decide whether a citation is worth using (or whether it might undermine their paper).
And yes, I'm sure there's room for abuse if it's not thought out well enough.
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In any case, that's the system Google employs for their ranking technique.
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I think the conversation has drifted a bit since we started...
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Re:Good, now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because we all know you can believe everything on the internet.
Seriously, look at Wikipedia and loads of other things which get petty little squabbles about what is "true" and people spinning it to make their own point.
Good, solid, reliable peer-reviewed stuff (and I mean qualified peers, not random people on the internet) is much harder to achieve than wikipedia.
Think of how many "think tanks" put out position papers on behalf of whoever is paying for them -- much of that would utterly fail in a peer-reviewed context, but they get put out there to say "see, our opinion on science is just as valid as these guys". Joe Average has no idea this is just a tactic to muddy the waters -- it sounds awfully science-y to him.
I think the internet has done the opposite of making peer-reviewed journals moot. Hell, we keep hearing how much of science is absolutely unbelievable as the authors fail to use any meaningful scientific rigor.
Re:Good, now... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Good, now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Like journals, the groups of reviewers could be organized on a per-month basis, and the names the whole group would be published -- with only a fraction actually reviewing any particular paper. It is not a complete break from journals as a system, it is just a way to use computers and the Internet to publish instead of relying on the old publishing companies; the way researchers communicate with each other has changed, and publishing articles should change too.
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mod parent up! I was just about to post about the problem of maintaining the anonymity of the peer review process while guaranteeing peer review. Science and Nature obviously have a different levels of rigor from the Journal of Your Mom's Basement. Your idea has merit.
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In the consortia model, if "University of California" (10,000 professors?) signs a review, there's a good chance someone knowledgeable in their field could narrow it down to 2 or 3 professors before reading it, and know exactly who wrote it after reading it.
Sure, but this is not something that will be true regardless of what system you use to manage peer review. My only point is that we can and should take publishing companies out of the loop -- they serve no purpose that cannot be served better / at lower cost using the Internet. The only requirement is that we do not weaken the security that publishing companies provide as a service right now -- in technical terms, I should be able to simulate a publishing company facilitating the peer review process, an
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I think the way PLoS does it is better then the current peer-review model: Everything that is technically sound gets accepted, and then the readers can comment and rate the article publicly.
One place where traditional peer review can excel above PLoS is that it is an editing process. Peers have the chance to suggest additional experiments and explanations, catch errors, improve clarity, and genuinely improve the paper before the rest of the world sees it. Of course that benefit is balanced by peers who just say "you need to cite (my totally irrelevant) article before you publish", etc.
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You're just replacing journals with universities. And universities a) don't want to run journals, b) can't run anything else effectively anyway, c) have a built in conflict of interest and d) journals accept papers from people who aren't affiliated with universities.
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That being said, point (c) can be addressed by having many institutions collaborate on managing journals. I do not think that this is inherently problematic, and if the process is completely transparent then conflicts of interest could b
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Why do you keep talking about cryptography? There isn't really a problem verifying that someone is who they say they are. The problem is that somebody has to do the organizational work, and no, your computer won't replace a good editor. That editor can be paid by a journal company, or by a university. It doesn't really matter, but there are some advantages to having some arm's length organizations, not the least being that most universities are already huge, bloated and inefficient.
"Publishing" companie
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That editor can be paid by a journal company
But similar organizations are still needed to do all the things that journal publishers do now OTHER than printing and distributing paper journals
Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors; this is not something that requires some huge bureaucracy, nor does it require a publishing company. Everything else can be done over the Internet.
using open access journals is going to have to lead to some serious cuts to library funding and fees universities skim off grants for services.
We can dream, but my guess is that universities will still take as much grant money as they can. They can always claim that we get to sit at their desks, and must therefore give them a boatload of money for that privilege...
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"Really, the only thing that needs to be done is to select the reviewers and editors;"
And maintain archives, and run the web site making everything available, and provide the reputation, etc. It doesn't require a huge bureaucracy, but it does require some organization, as the existing open source journals demonstrate.
You can wave your hands all you want, but EVERYTHING requires someone to organize things. Usually more somebodies than you'd think.
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This is not a hard problem. The mere fact an article appears in a reputable journal is evidence it was properly peer reviewed. This can be replaced with digital signatures. An online journal could sign each approved article. Or if that's too hard, a journal can list on their own website (which itself is verified with a Domain Keys kind of scheme) all accepted papers and their digests, rather like most download site's md5sums.txt and sha1sums.txt files. Wouldn't even have to have the papers themselves,
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Meantime, in many ways better than peer review is number of citations. The more a paper is cited, the more significant it is thought to be.
that's super, but...
peer review is intended to vet the paper BEFORE it's published - you know, when it doesn't have any citations? Also, peer review isn't just a thumbs up / thumbs down. You get valuable feedback from leaders in your field, and can redo your paper and research so make it stronger. I don't have the link but search youtube for "hitler third reviewer" for a funny video on the topic.
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peer review is intended to vet the paper BEFORE it's published
Why is that so important? You wait for a formal review if you want. I want to see new work right away. Publish and go! Yes I might waste time on garbage, but the lengthy delay of a review is more costly. If a work is crap, it won't hold up long. Besides, I've seen plenty of crap that was peer reviewed.
Some researchers want their work reviewed, but most do not. I've seen people practically write papers on the back of reviewers' efforts, which seems to me to be a bit unfair. The reviewers point out
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I can see it now. there will be a paper clearinghouse. it'll be like Digg for academics. Better start planning on exploiting the system now, I'm sure there's money to be made in this somewhere.
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Peer review is often unpaid under the current system
Peer review is often paid in a quid-pro-quo manner. I.e., if you publish you are expected to review in return.
If every scientist can publish without having peer reviews, why would they volunteer to peer review other people's work? It's not a fun job.
You do not need a journal to organize peer review when researchers can communicate with each other rapidly on the Internet
The ability of folks to communicate quickly amongst their own group has nothing to do with peer review and does nothing to reduce the need for it. One scientist publishing a paper cannot be expected to deal with potentially thousands of other scientists in h
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You call that addressed?
Journals certify the peer review. They pick the reviewers, keep track of who's a crappy reviewer, etc. The journal is motivated to make sure things stay legit because their reputation is on the line, and that's really all they have. If you don't have someone overseeing things you get... the YouTube comment section. Or Slashdot.
Re:Good, now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Did you just not see the "peer review and editing can be done by professors at universities " part what you are replying to?
The basic model of journals (not all use it of course) is:
* Papers are submitted with no payment to the authors.
* Papers are sent for review to experts - usually university professors (who often then oass it to their doctorate students) - with no payment to the reviewers.
* The journal then prints the accepted papers and sells them to the very places that both supplies the work and the reviewers for free.
Now there is a bunch of administration work the journal does, but we have computers these days, and universities already have a bunch of admin staff.
The return the reviewers/submitters get is the prestige of being published in a respected journal and of being a reviewer/editor for a respected journal. The same thing would apply if the journals stopped being money siphoning devices.
The main issue is certain journals are prestigious now and that takes time to change. If you have what you believe is a great piece of research now, where are you going to submit it? The prestigious journal that looks great on your list of publications and likely pulls in more grant money but that charges a fortune to libraries to buy it? Or that new relatively unknown journal that sells to libraries at cost (electronic copy free)?
Hopefully the newer fields can get the ball rolling since they don't have as much of the existing prestige problem.
Re:Good, now... (Score:4, Insightful)
Aren't there some important missing steps in that process for respected journals? Those steps being performed by technical editors who:
Although these steps don't (I think) justify the outrageous prices for many journal subscriptions, it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
These steps seem to be important to maintain the reputation of the journal by not passing too much unworthy BS to reviewers (thereby resulting in them withdrawing from the review pool) and by not rejecting too much really important work (that later gets published in a lesser journal raising its relative ranking and increasing fragmentation in the field and resulting in a lot of "fairly good" journals but no "great" journals in a field)
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it's a lot of tedious work that requires technical expertise and I'm not sure one can find enough unpaid qualified gatekeepers to do it reliably and in sufficient volume consistently enough.
What I think would work well is the law school journal model, which is essentially student run but still high quality due to the extreme reputation enhancement you get from being part of the process. Have groups of graduate students and postdocs (all in the same field, but not necessarily all in the same school) be responsible for most of the editing functions; they get paid in reputation (what you need most while training) and maybe travel costs for journal-specific meetings. Students would also end up wi
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The existing open access journals have technical reviewers, do all of the things he listed, and charge hefty fees for publication to pay for it all. So they prove something, all right, but not what you think they do.
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Clearly you don't know much about scientific publishing.
Coordinating reviewers and authors is non-trivial. The journals all have computer systems that try to do it, and more often than not something doesn't work right and the actual live editor has to step in.
The (paid) editor makes the publish/no publish decision. Not the reviewers. Not whatever a "program committee" is. The reviewers make (frequently contradictory) recommendations. The editor looks at what the reviewers said, what the authors said, a
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Quite often you have an idiot reviewer who would sink the publication of a paper if not for an editor who recognizes the reviewer is an idiot.
One way to fix that is doing it in the open so people can learn who's usually a moron and who's not.
Or perhaps just let more people read the articles and vote on whether they found them useful or not. The whole small-committee-decides-the-fate idea makes less sense on the interwebs than it did in the old world.
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Yes, I think reviews should be done in the open. But it still doesn't eliminate the need for a professional arbiter. Morons will always be morons.
"Or perhaps just let more people read the articles and vote on whether they found them useful or not."
Yes, that works just wonderfully. Slashdot comments. YouTube comments. Etc.
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>> How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
Look for +5 Insightful
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Yes, but without journals, how will we per-judge the quality of others' work? This may sound facetious, but it's not. Any fool can write a journal article, and many fools can write compelling article. A journal offers getting and review by members in the field. How else can I judge the validity of a paper, especially if I'm not in the field myself?
We are talking about science.
You know, testable explanations and predictions about everything.
You judge the validity of a paper by testing their explanations and predictions. That's essentially what the scientific community does for a living. Some person finds something odd, some other person comes up with an explanation, others test that explanation to see if its valid, and in the process might find other odd stuff. Rince and repeat.
If you are worried that, without journals, you might not get a confort
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NO!!!! the whole point of peer review is to judge a paper BEFORE it is published. whatever. I'm sick of this thread. a bunch of egghead wannabees thinking they know what goes into academic work. I'm in academia, and I know
Considering what you've been posting, your claim, that you are in academia, is not believable.
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NO!!!! the whole point of peer review is to judge a paper BEFORE it is published.
Very true. As you pointed out, most of the value added by peer review happens before publication.
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You judge the validity of a paper by testing their explanations and predictions. That's essentially what the scientific community does for a living.
Right. I want to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson, so I rent time on the SSC to reproduce the experiment. Everyone else who wants to judge does the same thing. Seems like a good use of limited resources. Can you find me a funding agency that will pay for this?
Peer review puts this work in the hands of a few people who are allegedly experts in the field, and their job is to judge the validity of the paper, not necessarily the results of the experiment that it may be reporting on. Was the sc
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Right. I want to judge the validity of a paper on the Higgs boson, so I rent time on the SSC to reproduce the experiment. Everyone else who wants to judge does the same thing. Seems like a good use of limited resources. Can you find me a funding agency that will pay for this?
Boy, aren't we exaggerating.
Before thinking about purchasing a particle accelerator, you have a considerable number of things which you can and must actually do by yourself in order to test the paper's validity. One of those things is actually reading the paper, understanding the theoretical hypothesis which were laid out, analyse the data which was used as a basis for the results presented in the paper, check if it holds out, evaluate the results... You know, the peer review process.
In this context, the n
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Before thinking about purchasing a particle accelerator,
Boy, aren't we exxagerating? Who said purchase?
One of those things is actually reading the paper, understanding the theoretical hypothesis which were laid out, analyse the data which was used as a basis for the results presented in the paper, check if it holds out, evaluate the results... You know, the peer review process.
That is not the peer review process. It is also a rare paper that provides all the raw data so someone can analyze it himself. Nobody does that, because nobody wants to give away the data they'll use for the next PhD or paper.
In this context, the need for a particle accelerator only enters the equation if you suspect that the results presented in the paper aren't up to par, and you wish to replicate them to see if you aren't being duped.
You are wrong. The scientific method does not say that one replicates an experiment only if one thinks he's being duped, it says you replicate the experiment to show that you get the same results when the experiment is done by someone e
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How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Or not. What you mind find is you judge the validity of each journal using an amazingly weak and vulnerable algorithm. Solve that problem and you'll solve the paper problem.
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How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Most readers aren't in a vacuum. The average reader (been active in the field for 5-40 years) of the average journal article probably already has a relationship with the principal author: they've known each other for years, hired each other's undergrads and grad students as grad students and postdocs, spoken to each other at conferences and seen each others' presentations. At the very least they've probably already read several articles by the author and maybe reviewed one of them. Journal articles and conf
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Good luck. Most Universities are FILLED with corporate kissasses.
I've worked at a few. The people at the top wearing suits are no different than the people at the top of the corporations wearing the suits, nincompoops that have mastered the Peter Principle.
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You're right! What we need is some entity that accepts papers, matches them up with peer reviewers, provides editors, provides a known location to find papers... oh right, that's what journals do now. I don't know anyone who actually uses paper journals, and I don't think the library at my (major) university buys most journals in physical format anymore. I also don't think PLOS even prints a dead tree version. That doesn't mean "journals" aren't necessary.
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What does this policy actually do? Faculty were not forbidden to use open access repositories in the past and under the new policy they're not required to use them either. Is this just a nudge?
More of a suggestion than a policy (Score:5, Informative)
Effect on Promotion and Tenure (Score:4, Interesting)
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Chemist here. Science will not, nor will anything else, solve all our problems.
Don't be an idiot.
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I've got a PhD in physics, my partner a PhD in Sociology. Her dissertation consisted of obtaining qualitative data regarding a social phenomenon, building a model, collecting quantitative survey data and statistically analyzing that data to test hypotheses drawn from the qualitative data.
So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis. That, my friend, is science. The only difference between her work and that of my colleagues who are experimentalists is that h
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So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis.
We did the exact same. However, the difference, and why I believe social science isn't real science, is in what is being measured. In biology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, even things like geology or archeology, the researcher is dealing with concrete, consistent laws and processes. The laws of physics do not change, basic biological processes do not change, if 2 chemicals react today they will always react. This means that, along with a descriptive capability, it allows for a very predictive capabi
Score: 4.5 (funny, but trollish) (Score:2)
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I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena. People as individuals may not obey immutable laws, but en mass they can be modeled quite effectively, just like gasses of particles can be modeled without knowing the motion of any individual particle. It is impossible to model the individual particles accurately due to their number, but given extensive properties (Temperature, Density, Volume etc) I ca
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I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena.
I never said that's what sociology can do. I said social sciences. That includes, sociology, history, political science, and others. That why I gave several different examples of thing that social sciences can tell you. Amazing, you have a PhD, and yet you can't even read....
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You know, I was trying to be polite - there's no need to be rude in response. You generalized to all social sciences, I showed that you were wrong with this generalization - that indeed some of the social sciences (namely sociology, with which I have quite some familiarity now) are sciences. Then you respond by saying things related to the outcome of wars. I then tell you that your statement isn't relevant as it doesn't address the point that indeed sociology is a science. Therefore the statement you initia
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I think we should just go back to calling them all Philosophy. Then I could stop explaining to people why they're called PhD's.
Re:Copyrights? (Score:4, Insightful)
So really, the only thing that journals have left at this point is their names -- a paper in a "top journal" looks good on a CV, regardless of whether or not the paper is really groundbreaking. Is that really something that justifies the continued existence of journals? I think not...
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academia operates on reputation, so a paper in a more rigorous journal does and should carry more weight. This is a good thing because it helps separate good work from the junk
Except that I have seen good work published in less "rigorous" journals (well, in CS it is more conferences than journals, but the effect is the same: I have seen good work presented at lower-tier conferences, and I have even seen people cite groundbreaking papers and get published in top-tier conferences for incremental improvements, when the groundbreaking paper itself was rejected from the top tier conferences). The name of the journal that a paper is published in is only loosely related to the quali
Re:Copyrights? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only thing that needs to be done is for the researchers to be organized, but that is something that can be done cooperatively and which does not require a publishing company to facilitate.
I can see a role here for a peer review facilitiator to come in, manage the process, and give it a certification that the industry accepts as valid. Perhaps this would cost the publishing institution ~$1000, but then the paper would be free to all. Once this piece of the puzzle comes into place, then I agree that journals can go by the wayside. You wanna go into business?
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You wanna go into business?
Thanks for the offer, but what I am trying to do is take the entire business aspect out of this ;-)
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* peer-review coordination and facilitation
* copy editing and type setting
* distribution and storage repository. Other posters have commented on the dangers of papers no longer being available.
*
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Bear in mind that in many journals you'd have to go through that whole process for each individual paper
OK, but if it is already happening under the current system then we have not really taken any steps backward. If that is not happening under the current system, why would it happen under the system I described?
a random subset could quite well include people who have no qualms with actively screwing over an author they hate/compete with.
I know for a fact that happens under the current system; it happened to one of the people in my own research group. It is unfortunate, by as was noted elsewhere there are limits to how anonymous authors and reviewers can actually be, especially in very specialized fields where everyone knows wha
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A paper cited in a journal will be there indefinitely. One can always get a hold of the original paper even for papers written decades ago. Can you guarantee that the URL for a paper that is available only online will still work in 10 years? How about 50?
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journals still serve a valuable function
I disagree on this point; I think that it is possible with today's technology to do away with publishing companies entirely and to basically put all published research in the public domain (where it really should be). In the absence of a need to publish bound copies of journals, publishing companies really act as a trusted party that anonymizes submissions and reviewers, as well as randomly (and hopefully in an unbiased way) selecting reviewers for papers. I think the following building blocks could be
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Go to a university library and you'll notice how the annuals from the mid nineties onward are all in pristine condition. Nobody uses them anymore and all they do is take up valuable library space, so many institutions have cancelled paper subscriptions
Preserving paper archives is much more difficult and costly than digital archives, but there's a catch: Current copyright laws make it illegal for institutions to maintain their own archives, so they need to perpetually pay the journal subscription to access a
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last time I looked through the Elsevier policy, you have rights to the manuscript, you have rights to the modified manuscript after peer review, and they have rights to the version of the peer reviewed article that they typeset for publication. they may also ask you to agree to certain limitations to your distribution of the pre-prints, but many of those are fairly tame.
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