Mathematicians Aim To Take Publishers Out of Publishing 162
ananyo writes "Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK. The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial publishers. 'It’s a global vision of how the research community should work: we want to offer an alternative to traditional mathematics journals,' says Jean-Pierre Demailly, a mathematician at the University of Grenoble, France, who is a leader in the effort. Backed by funding from the French government, the initiative may launch as early as April, he says."
Great idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)
you have to convince 1)young scientists they can still get employed and grants publishing there and 2)old faculty who do the highering and grant reviews that these are just as good as normal journals. As an academic myself, I'd prefer to publish in open source journals but the powers that be want high profile journals like science, nature, PNAS, etc. You can't even get an interview unless you have papers in a high profile journal anymore. Until this mindset changes, these 'publishing free' journals are dead in the water.
Re:Great idea but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a Fields Medal winner leading the charge helps. If you can point out that this is where the greatest in the field are publishing, old faculty will have difficulty in denying their relevance. Those who are "names" in their respective subjects can make this happen.
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Make them useless (Score:1)
What they need to do is add deniability to the free ones and sell access to the official ones. [This document contains one factual error]
Call it anti-sarcasm for me.
Editorial work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately the vast majority of posters have never had any work published and make the false assumption that its all gravy for the publishers. Editing anything - scientific papers, manuscripts, text books is a considerable effort, far more than spell check in word. Layout is also important to make best use of space and present the work clearly to the reader. So the text (including tables and figures) that the author sends to the publisher do not equate to editiorial review or layout work. All costs must also be spread over the expected readership of the journal, which in the case of most scientific journals is not a very large audience.
Demailly statement about authors doing all the typing already - did he really think publishers sent stenographers to take dictation? Hand written submissions? Sure, maybe in the 1920s.
In the case proposed here, there is also the added need for peer review with checks and balances, not just peer review by the guy who has plenty of free time because he has nothing else going on. Who is going to run this process? Who is going to prod slow reviewers? What about the final decisions to accept or reject? The opporunity for bias in decision making is going to be far higher. While academics are involved in the process now, the publisher (in theory) acts as last guarantor of good behavior.
Re:Editorial work? (Score:4, Informative)
I have had many articles published in several journals, including the maligned Elsevier. If publishers add any value they have not educating me on what it is. I write the paper. I typeset it (in LaTeX); text, figures, and all. They require me to sign away the copyright. They put it on a web server. They charge me (and University libraries) to gain access to my own work. And the kicker is THAT THEY DON'T EVEN EDIT ANYMORE. I haven't submitted revisions or check galley proofs since the late 1990s. In other words, the only thing that I can see that they do is host a web site (that incidentally is more complicated than it needs to be because of the pay wall). Bah, good riddance I say! And three cheers for the mathematicians.
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Where do you publish that you do not check galley proofs? I too have had a few articles published and am always forced to approve the galley proofs before they document goes to press. Maybe there are journals that don't require this, but I know many have it mandatory step. If you choose to blindly accept the proof without changes that reflects more on you than the publisher. Not submitting revisions either means you write perfect and no reviewer/editor has any questions/comments (congratulations if th
Re:Editorial work? (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately the vast majority of posters have never had any work published and make the false assumption that its all gravy for the publishers. Editing anything - scientific papers, manuscripts, text books is a considerable effort, far more than spell check in word. Layout is also important to make best use of space and present the work clearly to the reader. So the text (including tables and figures) that the author sends to the publisher do not equate to editiorial review or layout work. All costs must also be spread over the expected readership of the journal, which in the case of most scientific journals is not a very large audience.
Last time I had something published in a peer-reviewed (Elsevier) journal, I sent them a LaTeX file using their stylesheets, all formatted and ready to go (and boy are tables a b*tch in LaTeX!). They don't give you the actual styles they use to format papers, but presumably the ones they do make available are compatible, so there was very little work on their end. Then, I went and did it all a second time myself (the published styles are not very readable, and I wasn't sure about copyright issues), so that I could publish a readable version as a preprint for free access through my institution's repository (which is allowed). Granted, most people in my field will just send in Word files and some images, and someone has to arrange them neatly. That's not that big a job though, and they're certainly not going to make your pictures prettier (unless you pay them a hefty fee for that service) or do much more than running a spelling checker. If it's badly written, the peer reviewers will politely suggest you (note: not the publisher) get a native speaker to fix it up for you. I know several colleagues (none are native speakers) who have some or all of their papers checked for proper English by professional editors before submitting them, at their own expense.
In the case proposed here, there is also the added need for peer review with checks and balances, not just peer review by the guy who has plenty of free time because he has nothing else going on. Who is going to run this process? Who is going to prod slow reviewers? What about the final decisions to accept or reject? The opporunity for bias in decision making is going to be far higher. While academics are involved in the process now, the publisher (in theory) acts as last guarantor of good behavior.
The editor, like they do now? As far as I know, editors at least in the West generally do the job for the reputation capital and as a kind of community service, not for the money. I could see people volunteer some of their time as a (co-)editor just for the credits. Anyway, even an open access journal could charge a small submission fee to cover this, or it could be subsidised by bodies like the NSF.
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I have had a mathematical paper accepted for publication. I very much doubt that you have, or you would know that the process is nothing like getting a textbook published.
To answer your points individually: editorial review and proof-reading is done by referees, not the publisher. A given layout is mandated by the journal, and putting the paper into that layout is done by the authors, not the publisher. Selection of referees, prodding slow reviewers, and making the final accept/reject decisions is handled b
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A given layout is mandated by the journal, and putting the paper into that layout is done by the authors, not the publisher.
This is not usually the case in biomedical sciences - the layout is created by the (paid) journal editorial staff. However, it's totally unclear to me why this is even necessary, for several reasons:
1) The pretty layout adds nothing to the scientific content of the paper - all it does is make it look pretty and cram it into as few printed pages as possible.
2) The fancy layout adds con
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A given layout is mandated by the journal, and putting the paper into that layout is done by the authors, not the publisher.
This is not usually the case in biomedical sciences - the layout is created by the (paid) journal editorial staff. However, it's totally unclear to me why this is even necessary, for several reasons:
In mathematics, however, everything is typeset in LaTeX, and the journals all provide a LaTeX style file, or document class for you to use. Papers are all formatted exactly as the journal wishes by the authors of the paper at the time of submission.
I agree that the model proposed in TFA doesn't work for all cases quite as easily, but in the math world it is definitely very practicable.
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While academics are involved in the process now, the publisher (in theory) acts as last guarantor of good behavior.
There's no point in having a body which in theory prevents bias when they can actually be a large part of the problem [the-scientist.com] themselves.
Your arguments for the effort publishers go through are also very variable depending on who the publisher is. I'm quite "early career", so I've one paper published and one going through review at the moment. For the first paper, pretty much everything was done ourselves. The journal pointed out that it had procedures and protocols for format and specific grammar, but it was cle
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i've published. what happens is, my article proofs get sent to generally unpaid reviewers; i edit; i resubmit; and it gets published completely unchanged. the only work done is adding a table of contents and managing page flow. the former is trivial, and the latter is basically obsolete with electronic journals. even spell-checking would be an overestimate of the work involved. the publishers are pure brokers, plain and simple. the idea that they would even know what "good behavior" is, without their unpaid
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In the case proposed here, there is also the added need for peer review with checks and balances, not just peer review by the guy who has plenty of free time because he has nothing else going on.
That could be handled by a system similar to the Web of Trust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust [wikipedia.org]
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I've published several papers in scientific journals. I write the paper in LaTeX using a document class that the journal provides. I sent it to an unpaid editor-in-chief who just sends it on to an unpaid coordinator. The coordinator chooses unpaid reviewers who send back a report. I make changes to the document based on the report. I hand over the copyright to the paper to the publisher. The paper is now published without any changes. I don't believe I've ever interacted with or observed the work of a paid
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Clearly from the replies the involvement of pulishers (and their editors - staff or consultant) vary considerably across academic fields, as well as individual journals.
One thing publishers/paper journals offer (Score:1)
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Free open journals are great, but we need a way to ensure anything published will be accessible even if their servers went down
It's called the internet archive, and not making a robots.txt file that denies it access.
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It's called the internet archive, and not making a robots.txt file that denies it access.
They guarantee to index all other content? Every last little boring bit? And they guarantee to have the data continue to be available in 30 years? Really?
Turnabout is fair play (Score:2)
Hey, if you've been watching the publishing industry lately, it looks like the publishers have been trying to remove simple math from their own industry!
Ebooks where the majority of publishing-related costs disappear, but where the publishers keep a larger percentage of the revenue from sales and pay authors a smaller percentage...
Trying to make it so that textbooks are no longer reusable, while attacking the used-book submarket...
Oh, and this gem...prosecuting someone for reselling the exact same book that [huffingtonpost.com]
Occasions of pride not so often for French people (Score:2)
All is in the title -at least we may start forgeting Claude Allègre and homeopathics...
Indeed -real pride there, an unusual feeling.
What a money-saver! (Score:2)
Consider that *you* pay to publish in most academic journals; they don't pay *you*. Then you pay for access....
mark "and should lit fic, in the same pay-to-publish journals, be considered vanity fiction?"
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
Converting to mechanized agriculture had its casualties too.
Converting to steam power had its casualties too.
Converting to digital IC computers had casualties too.
Invading Nazi germany had its casualties too.
I call Godwin (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, did you really need that last night to prove your point?
Re:I call Godwin (Score:5, Funny)
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Someone's going to mention the NAZIs eventually, might as well get it over with right out of the gate.
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Re:I call Godwin (Score:5, Funny)
Oh how clever you are. Someone is going to mention something eventually, so it should be you first. fuckwit.
You're not supposed to sign your posts when you post as an AC.
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Someone is going to mention something eventually, so it should be you first. fuckwit.
If you end a post with name-calling, some people will comically miss the point and joke that you're signing the post with the insult as your name: "so it should be you first. Signed, fuckwit."
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no he didn't mention Gun control Bob Heinlein and that R.A.Y.N.D person
Man, that must have been quite a night.
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Could have been this night [youtube.com].
And I don't agree (Score:4, Insightful)
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You Godwin'd this article in within 6 minutes.
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Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, slave traders also had to feed their families. And they all got out of job when slavery got forbidden.
Also, you should welcome all spying on you, because it gives jobs for spies.
On the other hand, it is not a given that this will kill publishers. It might just force them to make a better offer. Note that there are already commercial Open Content journals. The only effect on those might be that they get a bit cheaper.
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
That's dangerously close to being a "Think of the publishers!" argument. It's not convincing.
If you want to keep people employed then give them something of positive value to do, not the negative value of restricting access to academic research.
Let's not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater (Score:3, Informative)
Things which typical on-line systems don't do which publishers do:
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others) .png on-line, but it's wasteful if instead it could be a nice re-drawn or re-created graph or chart done as a vector graphic)
- editors (for some reason, people take the content of text more seriously when it's to be printed)
- graphic artists to re-draw illustrations, colour correct and fix graphics (sure, you can just slap a
- designe
Re:Let's not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater (Score:5, Informative)
Very little of this happens in maths journals, and when it happens, it is usually the editor that does it, and he does it for free. Or rather, payed by his employing institution, not by the publisher.
When the plots look ugly, it's usually the author who gets to fix them.
I don't think any of that has happened in ages in maths. Perhaps the publishers pay for the cover illustrations, and a secreatary for handling correspondence, but everything else is done by people who are not paid by the publisher.
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Very little of this happens in maths journals, and when it happens, it is usually the editor that does it, and he does it for free. Or rather, payed by his employing institution, not by the publisher.
Rather they get payed from their grant money--although it may get cycled through the institution.
Re:Let's not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you are talking about fiction and general publishing? Because in research publication, it's not the publishers who do all those things, it's the authors and fellow authors. And it's all gratis. Publishers really are not adding any value whatsoever.
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others)
Fellow experts in the field do this, because they're the only ones with the expertise to judge a submission, and spot mistakes. Even the editorial/management process of finding and choosing reviewers is done by fellow experts. This practice is so ingrained there's even a name for it: peer review.
editors
Authors are asked to do basic proofing themselves, so as not to waste peer reviewers' time on trivial errors such as typos.
graphic artists to re-draw illustrations
What illustrations? Perhaps biology uses illustrations, but an abstract science such as mathematics does not.
designers to create pleasing layouts
The typical journal spells out those details. They specify what font sizes authors must use, and often fonts as well. The onus is on the authors to follow the specifications to prepare camera ready documents. A typical research journal will have some variation between papers. Unless the journal has specified otherwise, most papers might be in a serif font, with a few in a sans serif font mixed in. There will be slight differences in the spacing of lines and other fine details. Not everyone uses LaTeX. Probably almost no one still uses a typewriter, but there is other software. Usually, there is no color. These are research papers, not glossy magazine articles. But with e-readers able to substitute on the fly whatever font at whatever size the user likes, these issues are quickly fading into irrelevance.
Re:Let's not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, mathematics often does use illustrations - I'm in graph theory and my next paper is going to have quite a few. They're entirely supplied by the authors, though, and the publisher doesn't change them at all.
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What illustrations? Perhaps biology uses illustrations, but an abstract science such as mathematics does not.
The well-written papers sometimes do have many illustrations. The illustrations are entirely done by the authors - if the journal cannot use the author-provided illustrations as-is the authors get to redo them in whatever way the journal requires.
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1- Quality selection is 100% in the hands of the editors, who are all academic volunteers. The math journal may sometime provide a web site for entering and managing the reviews (and the reviewers ;-)
2- Math papers are rarely, if ever edited. The reviewers might ask for changes, clarifications, etc, which the authors implement. Eventually they vet or reject the paper, and if accepted, the last version is the one that gets published verbatim.
3- 100% of figures are made by authors.
4- Pleasing layouts are prov
Re:Let's not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater (Score:4, Insightful)
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For the last few journals I submitted to, the document class was on the publisher's web site, not CTAN.
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AFAIK only low-ranked publications do this, and they do it to attract people as a compensation for their low rank, since scientists usually try to go for high-rank publications since they're more valuable.
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Yes, think of the publishers. Think of the people who work in publishing houses. Think of everybody. Why does "think of the consequences of your actions" necessarily have to be a bad thing? He didn't say "don't do this cause someone may make less of a bonus", he said "think of the consequences of having a large group of people who are trained for one type of work now out of that work".
But information wants to be FREE! Every book should be FREE! Well, that's great and all, but how do I (theoretical publishe
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:4, Insightful)
Industries change, people find new careers. It's evolution, baby!
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You're saying one should feel bad for putting a small privileged group out of their society-damaging jobs?
Not buying it, sorry.
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
The articles are written by scientists, generally using taxpayer money to do so.
The scientists pay the publisher to publish their work.
Other scientists, who are usually not paid, review the work before publication.
The publisher uploads the pdf to a website and then charges universities thousands of dollars to have unlimited access to their pdfs.
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing some points -- adding them strengthens your argument though.
Other scientists, who are usually not paid, review the work before publication.
They are paid, usually by the taxpayer (as they tend to work at public institutions).
The publisher uploads the pdf to a website and then charges universities thousands of dollars to have unlimited access to their pdfs.
Universities are again funded (to a greater or lesser extent) by taxpayers, so the taxpayers pay again. The system continues to exist because the publishers own the "big name" journals like Nature, and because the insiders (e.g. established peer-reviewers) get fast-tracked when they want to publish in these journals. It's a racket which siphons huge wealth from the taxpayers to the publishers for little effort. May it end quickly.
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and because the insiders (e.g. established peer-reviewers) get fast-tracked
Nonsense.
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Not complete nonsense. Read the controversial story of the article "Manifold Destiny" [wikipedia.org] published on the NYT.
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
I want to state at the outset that I'm a firm believer in open access publishing, and believe that academic writing should move more toward things like academic blogging. (I'm a tenured research professor, BTW).
However, I don't think the solution is quite as simple as everyone makes it out to be. For example, even with everyone posting papers on their own blog (which I see as the ideal), there's a certain amount of peer review that disappears. You can institute it in a journal, but then who pays for the costs of maintaining the journal?
Pay-to-publish, which is a common response to this problem, sets up an incentive scheme with an inherent conflict of interest. This is a fundamental ethical problem that people do not want to acknowledge. The journal has an incentive to bring in money to support its own existence (even non-profit journals are presumably interested in maintaining their own existence), which then creates an incentive to publish more papers regardless of quality. It also creates a bar to researchers to publish in a peer-reviewed journal--even with exceptions for hardship, there's still a bar.
Whether you want to admit it or not, the traditional publishing model follows solid economic principles: someone produces a product, and the quality of the product affords a price that can be charged for it. If papers aren't good, people should stop subscribing to the journal and not pay for it. We can argue about who produces the product, but ultimately under the traditional model, you are paying for the correct product--the published papers, not the privilege to publish.
Just to be clear--I submit, review, and edit papers to and for journals. However, there's lots of tasks that I do not do. I do not do administrative tasks, for example. I do not do copyediting (editing for style, spelling, etc.), or deal with all of the page design issues that produce a high-quality publication. These issues are important, and are not handled by any of my fellow scientists.
Open access is critical, but I think the problem now is not the basic economic model, it's the fact that there is a bubble, where journals are overvalued. There are lots of reasons for this, but one is that there's a bubble in terms of professional advancement in academics (e.g., to get tenure, get a pay raise, etc.). The right solution to the problem is to encourage researchers to start publishing on their own websites, and to encourage departments to not value frivolous peer-reviewed papers that could be posted as a blog post or directly on a researcher's website when they're evaluating professors and researchers for promotion and salary. When this happens, libraries will be able to say "sorry, we really don't need to subscribe to your journal," and will drop them. Maybe open-access will be seen as a feature that encourages libraries to subscribe to one journal versus another, when all other considerations are the same?
I'm all for multiple journal models, and wish there were more non-profit open-access journals maintained by professional membership dues. But those are increasing at unreasonable rates also. Maybe this is what the mathematicians have in mind--we'll see. I'm just troubled, as someone who sees open access as fundamentally important, to see so many people so blindly willing to dispense with basic economic and ethical principles in trying to achieve it universally. Pay-to-publish will make things worse, not better (articles under that model used to be required by law to be denoted as advertisements--maybe they still are?).
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Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Insightful)
Well those people can now be employed by the universities that no longer have to pay the extortionate journal subscriptions, with the end result that more research can be done for the same amount of money.
Re:Let's not celebrate on the graves of too many (Score:5, Informative)
Absolutely disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
that those commercial publishers and traditional academic journals employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families. Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.
I am about as liberal as a person can be, from the point of view of someone who is educated in the best ideas of conservativism, and from that point of view, I gotta say that you have /specifically/ suggested what Hayek correctly articulated as "The Road to Serfdom" -- the thesis of his most famous book. If we are going to prevent economic disappointment, then the will end up in totalitarianism, and also reduced prosperity for everyone. Read the book for the arguments... they are compelling.
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And that is exactly why we should have a strong social safety net that provides a good standard of living while the people who take one for the team make the necessary adjustments. It would still be cheaper than the costs of holding up progress.
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They employ relatively few people, add very little value, but make billions of dollars in profit each year. These industries constitute a massive misallocation of wealth and the meagre employment they provide does not justify the potential jobs being lost to this profiteering.
Rent seekers are never worth it. Never.
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I know it's verboten to point out any downside to this sort of thing, in this age of "Everything should be free and open!" But I just wanted to point out, before the flood of "This is great!" and "All academics should do this!" posts that are inevitably to follow, that those commercial publishers and traditional academic journals employ a lot of people who still need to feed their families. Converting to free and open source everything, whatever you opinion of it, does have casualties.
And someone has to pay for the research, and the researchers themselves have to actually get published or they have no career. So let's also think of the consumers' families and the researchers' families as well/
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Re:Free?--Nyet (Score:1)
Re:Disingenious (Score:5, Informative)
I've reviewed several articles and I've never been paid. Nor has anyone I know. Reviewers work for nothing, it's considered part of the "service" portion of your employment contract - so I guess one could say that they're being paid by their employers, not the journals.
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I have!
Seriously. I reviewed an article for the British Medical Journal some years back (some time between 2005 and 2008), and I got paid either £20 or £50 for it. I think it was an experiment they tried for a short time before dropping the idea.
It's the only time I've ever been paid for reviewing papers; and the only journal I've ever heard of doing it.
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Worst than that! Most of the time you have to pay an extra fee if the paper exceeds the limit set by the journal, and most publisher try to re-organize your paper (enlarge the figures for example) to get you beyond the limit.
And I'm not even talking about the extra fee if you have figures in color...
Re:Disingenious (Score:5, Informative)
The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this:
1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
2) it's sent to a journal, where the editor (paid) looks and decides whether or not to pass it on to reviewers (only the journal staff are paid)
3) the paper is sent to reviewers who make comments and suggest whether to publish or not (no one gets paid)
4) if the paper is not-worthy it's sent back to the author/s who decided to revise and resubmit or whatever (no one gets paid)
5) if the paper is accepted, the author has to sign over copyright (no one gets paid)
6) the paper is published, and if the author wants more than the "complementary" copies, has to pay. If anyone else wants to see the article, they have to pay. The journal makes loads of money for very little work.
Another model cuts out the last two steps, and the journal makes their money from ads, donations, grants or other sponsorship (e.g. from a university). Another model has volunteers all the way through. It's not difficult.
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Point (6) needs to be expanded to include the physical costs of printing and distributing the paper version of each issue. There are also costs associated with the servers needed to distribute the electronic version of the journal. These costs, particularly for the paper version, can be quite high. The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Re:Disingenious (Score:5, Informative)
I worked as a research assistant for several years and I have never seen a paper on physical paper. I could have (universities tend to stockpile them) but who wants to? 5% of papers are even interesting to read beyond the abstract. So I better print the 5% (if i am so inclined) and have all of it digitally. Get over it: Journals and other publications on paper are slow, expensive and practically dead. Oh and I stopped like 3 years ago.
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My experience has been that people under the age of about 45 tend to use arXiv and digital copies of research papers. People older than that tend to use paper copies. The standard deviation in this, however, is very large. I usually only print a paper if I want to quickly add some data to a figure, or do a chi-by-eye fit, or something similar. It is still easier to do this with a piece of paper than it is on a computer screen
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I don't think you have the ages right - I'm 56 and I use online references whenever possible. Then, if they are interesting and it's necessary, I'll print them out, otherwise, they go onto my hard drive or onto my Kindle for later perusal. Of course, this may vary from field-to-field. I'm pretty used to computers, having used them from my college days. People in fields who have had little exposure to computers or the internet during their training (medicine, social sciences, etc.), may not be so comfortable
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The high printing and distributing costs are a major reason why academia is (oh so slowly) moving towards publishing on-line instead of in traditional paper journals.
Almost no individual scientists or laboratories in my field (biochemistry/molecular biology) actually gets the paper copies of any journal except for Science and Nature, unless it's specifically a journal they're an editor for. Everyone else either reads the papers online, or prints out a PDF (or reads them on their iPad or similar device - si
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Peer review is part of the job of an academic- they're not paid by the journal to do it, but it's something you're expected to do as part of your job if you're an academic.
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The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this:
1) a paper is written (no one gets paid)
A minor correction to this-- the authors are typically paid (often poorly, especially in the case of mathemeticians) by their institutions to do some combination of research and teaching, and writing papers falls under the research part of things. They don't get paid specifically to write any paper, but it's part of the general job.
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To put a finer point on it, no one gets paid by the publisher that will make all the money from that work.
Socialized costs, privatized profits.
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The same way as at present. Reviewers are not paid, they are basically volunteers.
The traditional model works like this: 1) a paper is written (no one gets paid) 2) it's sent to a journal, where the editor (paid) looks and decides whether or not to pass it on to reviewers (only the journal staff are paid)
Actually most of the editors I heard of rarely got paid, and if they did get paid it was very little. Most were premier scientist who did it for the prestige of being an editor.
3) the paper is sent to reviewers who make comments and suggest whether to publish or not (no one gets paid) 4) if the paper is not-worthy it's sent back to the author/s who decided to revise and resubmit or whatever (no one gets paid) 5) if the paper is accepted, the author has to sign over copyright (no one gets paid)
In my experience, a lot of time the publisher got paid for printing the article. They called them "page fees". Ain't "publish or perish" great?
6) the paper is published, and if the author wants more than the "complementary" copies, has to pay. If anyone else wants to see the article, they have to pay. The journal makes loads of money for very little work.
Another model cuts out the last two steps, and the journal makes their money from ads, donations, grants or other sponsorship (e.g. from a university). Another model has volunteers all the way through. It's not difficult.
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I like your subject. Disingenious is what your comment is.
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The commercial publishers add price.
Re:Disingenious (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks for voting me to -1, as if my arguments were 100% troll. You are fucktards and you obviously cannot accept differing opinions.
You were peer-reviewed and we as a community decided not to publish you.
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Ironically you are wrong, and at the same time also just proved your whole point wrong. You see, he *is* published (I can read his comment). The reason is of course that there is no proper selection of peers, but rather some mob-moderation facilitated by some script. If you think that is the future of publishing than think again. I prefer my articles more carefully picked.
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most people won't see the original AC post or your response or this response. I believe the default on slashdot is not to show posts with 0 or negative score. I have to go through extra steps to see posts which have been downvoted, which is the equivalent of purposefully reading bad journal submissions.
A journal will have a "better" mod point system than slashdot. The easiest way is something along the lines of only giving users who are proven/qualified reviewers more mod points or make their mod points wei
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Brilliant. I love it.
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really? apple is almost standard in many applied math departments; i think that counts as "good at math" by slashdot standards. pure math maybe not quite as much, but definitely not rare.
people who are good at math often want a unix, but they don't want to waste work time wrestling with their os, leaving apple as (unfortunately) the only option. those who are doing serious compute projects might have a linux box for heavy or GPU-based number crunching, but that's about it.
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i disagree (assuming you're not trolling, which might be a stretch).
math journals are for mathematicians. they don't need apple's magic touch of marketing and "it just works," because it's for their own community. this is the first step; what you're suggesting is years done the line.
now, if academics were trying to replace nature or science or some other technical magazine, then yeah, apple would be someone to seriously consider, but for this project, it would be a total waste for both sides. academia would
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and when he did, the author of the then-state-of-the-art proprietary typesetting system launched bitter polemics against TeX to anyone who would listen. his main point was that it wasn't fair that TeX was 1) orders of magnitude better than his software and 2) free, so that he would now lose all of his support contracts. sounds familiar.
the letter was published in the bulletin of the ams (i think), with a rebuttal from Knuth telling him, politely, to go fuck himself.
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the letter was published in the bulletin of the ams (i think), with a rebuttal from Knuth telling him, politely, to go fuck himself.
This sounds fascinating (especially since I occasionally encounter similar problems) - do you have a URL for this? Google wasn't very helpful.
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i've tried to find it a few times myself as well... sorry, but it was in a journal i just happened to pick up and read in my college's math lounge one day. :-/
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I used to be a french taxpayer (I no longer live in france, so i no longer pay tax there). and i'd be very happy to pay that tax. That effort might end up saving millions of dollars in jounral subscription that will go toward something else (research or not). Maybe they will even lower the tax (Hey! I can dream).