Paywalled Science Journals Under Fire Again 131
The Real Dr John sends this report from The Guardian:
Emeritus professor Stephen Leeder was sacked by the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) in April after challenging a decision to outsource some of the journal's functions to the world's biggest scientific publisher, Elsevier. This month he will address a symposium at the State Library of NSW where academics will discuss how to fight what they describe as the commodification of knowledge. Alex Holcombe, an associate professor of psychology who will also be presenting at the symposium, said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine. Some of the 1,600 titles published by Elsevier charged institutions more than $19,000 for an annual subscription to just one journal. The Springer group, which publishes more than 2,000 titles, charges more than $21,000 for access to some of its titles. "The mining giant Rio Tinto has a profit margin of about 23%," Holcombe said. "Elsevier consistently comes in at around 37%. Open access publishing is catching on, but it requires researchers to pay up to $3000 to get a single open access article published. What other options are there for making scientific publications available to everyone?
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Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc. So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're a
Re:With those figures ? (Score:5, Informative)
You make it sound as if some journals employ experts on the topic of the journal. I don't believe that is true. The peer reviewers are volunteers who also publish in the field.
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You make it sound as if some journals employ experts on the topic of the journal. I don't believe that is true. The peer reviewers are volunteers who also publish in the field.
"Volunteers who publish in the field" would be a reasonable definition of an expert, especially in the narrow and esoteric fields where many scientific articles live.
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Can't they set up some kind of peer to peer system between universities? Set up some central server keeping track of everything published at all those universities (or use some kind of distributed consensus system), host the articles themselves on the universities' own servers (must cost less than the millions they are currently paying Elsevier et al), and let researchers vote for each other's articles (score based on some formula taking into account how many people from different universities voted). And c
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As a university researcher... what incentive do I have to change the system? You're talking about a lot of work for something that will be seen as risky at best, which I will not (actually, in my present country, legally cannot) be paid any extra for, and which is more administrative than anything, which would take time away from my own research (of which I work about 2x as much time as I'm paid for). Also, except for the occasional times where I need to discuss with the lab director about publication cos
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Well, maybe you could get funding for a research project that sets up such a system to see if it works, "setting up an alternative peer review system to screw the big leeching science journals" and try to get it published in a few major... errr... oh, wait.
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I had a meeting with the director of research for a university once, regarding career issues... publication and citation record on Web of Science or Scopus concerning a certain type of publication (refereed, internationally recognized journals) were the only two things considered. The only. There is good reason for this. There is also good reasons for the complaints about "paywalled" journals. But when the existance of my job depends on the traditional publishing model, you bet I'm motivated to stick wi
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I think some people have their wires crossed... If you're okay with the current system, then the suggestion of fix-it-yourself is not generally directed at you and I don't know why the other posters are trying to keep the conversation going with you.
What we have is a number of folks criticizing the current system. At least some of these people actually work in academia and are directly impacted. Those people are the ones who are complaining about the current system, have the means available to do something
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I've been hearing criticism of the academic publishers for about 20 years by people who are directly impacted and who also have the ability to do something about it. They choose not to.
Aaron Schwartz did choose to change the system. I likely don't need to remind you how that turned out.
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One person can't change "The System" with a giant hack.
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I think one of the complaints is that they do not really cost that much to create, from what I have seen. It is not like there is a lot of payout to peer that do the review - there's no payout in my field. I am not sure about other fields but I have had to delve into their journals in the past and it did not appear that there was a payout being mentioned anywhere. If I review I get AMS points... *nods* I can buy books with 'em, or I could - no idea if I still can. I am pretty sure the process exists still.
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ding ding ding ding!!!!
It's not the '60s any more. The better unis are - from an administrator's PoV - incubators for private business, and the rest are like churches, banging some ideological drum for funding. There are some damn brilliant academics dotted around them, often from older generations who were brought up in a very different environment (social-democratic in Europe, and protestant-work-ethic in the US), but these are in the minority.
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[why AC?]
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up, even as AC.
That's exactly the situation! You can as well see the standing of public U-s in the USA vs the private ones. 2 generations ago the public U-s were often great places of academic activities, and with a high standing (leave out Harvard and a few more). Recently, the funding for the public U-s has gone down, and businesses have bought in. As of 2015 ever more public U-s are on the decline while private ones rise. Naturally. Naturally? Naturally; in case
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Agree completely. America is leading the world down a very dark path where everything, including education, is monetized, turned into a commodity, and slowly but surely destroyed. Higher education is one great example, leaving graduates with relatively poor educations and crippling debt. The NIH has been turned into a "translational medicine" adjunct to the pharmaceutical industry. Money is a great motivator, but the things it motivates people to do are usually negative or harmful (think pollution, lack of
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Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.
The problem is the huge momentum to publish in traditional journals with big impact factor. Young researchers have few options to publish is lesser known journals because this would hurt their careers and most older researchers do not seem to care to much. The problem is that the
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Libraries of big universities could simply provide the infrastructure to publish (online only) journals. There is not much needed as most of the work is already done by volunteers (reviewers / editors) so this could be really cheap.
The NIH, through PubMed Central, already provides the infrastructure for archiving (biomedical) articles. In fact, they demand that any publications resulting from NIH-funded research be archived there (with a 1-year delay from release by the official publisher). I believe ERC has a similar requirement for European research Some of the best journals have put their entire historical archives there (J Physiol back to 1878), but most journals only since the 2008 NIH mandate.
The problem is not the infrastruc
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If the society you belong to has not released its legacy content, ask your leadership, Why not?
Probable answer: Because we gave an exclusive license (with an option to renew) to that content to the publisher, and because the society gets some of that $30 to $50 per article that no one actually pays.
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And count the number of cross-references to increase an article's score (like Google's index). Instead of promoting people based on the number of articles published in some magazine, base it on the score they get on their published articles.
I don't understand why universities haven't taken things into their own hands yet. It's not like they haven't got any smart people to figure this out.
That already happens: things like impact factor and citation numbers are used alongside the number of publications when ranking professors. And University of California did take things into their own hands - they get a big fat discount from publishers like Elsevier. So do other large universities.
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Any idiot can write a whitepaper and claim a new discovery, confirm one, etc, but there are a lot of crackpots out there who make dubious conclusions based on their data, fudge their data, etc.
Yes, that's all true. Which is why we need journals with some standards.
So it's not just that your research is published, the value add of these journals is that they have expert staff who peer review your work and ask questions (to test your conclusion) that you yourself may not have thought of, and somebody who isn't an expert in your field of study may not have thought of. If you're an independent researcher then you can't afford to retain the services of more experts than just yourself, so you'll need their publishing services.
Huh? Do you actually know anything about how academic publishing works? Peer reviewers are generally VOLUNTEERS. And they certainly aren't part of the journal's (paid) "staff." They may be part of the editorial board of the journal, but again those are usually unpaid positions that academics take for the prestige. (On the rare occasions where reviewers are paid -- usually only by journals with poor reputations, it not outright dis
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I'm sorry. The journals do not have "staff" that peer review the journals. The peers of the authors, i.e. other authors do all the peer review. The only job of the journals is managing those lists of reviewers and assign reviews. With electronic publishing reducing costs, and software to do most of that "managing" there is very little value to those journals. Sincerely, libraries should pitch into a "common" pool. On a national basis perhaps, they should create a number of peer reviewed journals for the va
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The place that I used to work for had their own Imprint. Preprints and finished articles were available for a fee that just barely covered reproduction costs. If one wanted, one could just browse through the dusty file cabinets upstairs in the Reception area or downstairs in the Library. (That's where I found the Preprint of Lawrence's seminal paper on Cyclotrons, with Author notes, which is now on display.)
The best stuff ended up in the APS Physical Review C, or Letters.
We had that kind of clout.
With
Reputation (Score:2)
Of course, people are trying to explore other options - e.g. http://www.iclr.cc/doku.php?id... [www.iclr.cc]
The problem is reputation. *Where* was the paper published carries huge weight on both the repute of the paper and change in repute of the author, because noone figured out better ways to quickly judge a result than by the venue (which implies certain acceptance rate and level of peer review standards). If you move from the established institutions to elsewhere, you need to build up your repute from scratch and u
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I said *quickly* gauge the paper. Of course I can read it, but there's a lot of papers and my time is limited. If it's published in a reputable venue, that's an endorsement that helps me order the papers preliminarily.
Of course, there are other sorting criteria like a number of citations, but they have their own issues - time lag, variability across (sub)fields, biases towards certain kinds of papers, etc.
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probably as good as half the so-called peer reviewed journals out there.
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Would be nice, but isn't.
Peer-review is a crazy thing, I agree. Too often my own contributions were not understood, or deliberately brought down for offending the reviewers' personal opinions. Too often my own reviews were lousy, or I didn't understand the papers, or brought them down for not agreeing with my opinion.
And yet, the process as such has often resulted in my re-thinking my own papers, improving them, and often my reviews have resulted in papers of others being improved.
Try this in blog format, a
Re:EVER HEARD OF A (Score:5, Interesting)
Can BLOG do peer review?
Short answer is: Yes.
Long answer:
Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science, and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable. This is because the article is often not reviewed by someone that is interested or a major expert in the field, but instead publishers select reviewers at random and assign them papers to review. In some cases, professors and researches hand down the papers are then given to grad students, who have no expertise in the field, to actually review the papers (my thesis adviser gave me a couple to check a once or twice during my PhD). And as someone who has had his articles reviewed, the criticisms are poor and usually minor (readability is poor, maybe add a chart or more experimental results, etc)
Before the age of peer-reviewed journals, the scientific article was published openly an ANYONE in the same field with an invested interest could attack it. The reviews were helpful and really good science came out of it, because the publishing scientist would have to defend or give up his theory. Now this only happens in very rare cases.
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Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science,
Not sure I'd cound 1667 as "new", personally.
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Peer-reviewed articles is a fairly new thing in science
Well, it's not a new thing -- it dates back at least a few centuries. But it became more "standard" roughly 75 years ago as a way of evaluating quality journals. It may not be very old, but it has a few generations of history behind it, which is enough to become entrenched practice.
and most often than not, and the review process is highly questionable.
While that's true, the standards do vary significantly from journal to journal. Top-tier journals tend to try better to find real experts to do the reviews, and their standards tend to be a bit higher. The bigger issue with p
corruption in academic publishing (Score:5, Interesting)
"Since most research is taxpayer funded, you're paying for a product and then paying again to actually use it"!!! From TFA:
#6. Negative Results Are Ignored
#5. Scientists Don't Have To Show Their Work
#4. You Have To Pay To Get Published
#3. It's All About Profit "Three publishing companies (Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer) account for 42 percent of all published articles. This oligopoly has obscenely high profit margins of 30 to 40 percent."
#2. No One Can Share Their Work "When scientists can't get papers from their peers, they have to rely on subscriptions owned by their employer. Because we now know that publishing companies are at "mustache-twirling" on the evil scale, subscription fees are astronomically high. Harvard pays $3.75 million a year"
#1. Predatory Companies Publish Sham Science "Predatory publishers offer to publish any paper, regardless of quality, for a processing fee of only thousands of dollars. Often, this fee is mentioned after the paper has been accepted and the scientist has signed away their copyright, a strategy we'd expect from a shady porn producer, not the world of hard sciences. It's not one or two scummy companies, either -- one librarian has counted several thousand of these journals."
How US medical research is published (Score:4, Interesting)
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If a consortium of university libraries demanded open access, the publishers would have to agree. Those libraries are generally the ones who pay for subscriptions.
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Why does Peer Review cost that much? (Score:3)
Obviously you need a scientist to go over your work but I think they might lower the costs if they can make the papers easier to read or potentially release them as a series.
This sounds like complete heresy but consider the economic and logistical advantages.
By releasing something in a more intelligible format even experts will be able to review it faster and more confidently. Keep in mind that we're not exchanging dead trees with each other and there's no reason why a "paper" has to be formatted like it is written on paper. Hyperlinks for example are almost never in these studies which is too bad because they're a superior form of notation. You see this in wikipedia articles where they'll put a hyperlinked number after a statement to reference its source. Beyond that, you are not restricted to a notion. You could have the hyper link literally take you to the specific portion of the paper being referenced. Directly. No need to actually be familiar with it previously. You could also separate the data out in a raw format and include it with the algorithms used to process it in the "paper" itself. This is not practical on literal paper that you're literally publishing. But in a computer journal it is elementary. Formating the papers differently and possibly breaking that process down into specialties could really help. So Dave just examines the validity of raw data. That's all he does in any paper. Then you have Tom and he just looks at the statistical algorithms and various other mathematical models used to process things. Just the math. Then you have Eric that handles external citations and go through the claims made and the references they're citing and that's all he does for any paper. And then all those people pool their findings on that and the combination is handed off to Adam who will read the abstract, the conclusion, the comments by the people that verified or found issues with the paper, and he then decides to pass or fail the paper through peer review on that basis. And ideally all of this information would be published along with the paper itself so that other people reading the paper could see what the peer review board looked at, caught, missed, etc. But the idea is you break it down into simpler jobs and then audit the bits individually by experts that only do that.
And if that is still creating sticker shock when it comes time to publish, consider taking a big paper and turning it into a lot of little ones that can be audited more quickly individually and possibly will collectively have a smaller sticker price simply because it isn't some giant daunting monster.
Just my 2 cents from the peanut gallery. Cue the horde of people that will stick their noses straight in the air and say "who are you to have an opinion"... a comment that never stops being funny because the implication of the question is fallacious. Which undermines the scholastic weight of the person saying such a thing because if they were anyone they'd be smart enough not to ask such a stupid question.
Who am I? No one. I'm a naked man that sleeps in a rain barrel and begs for food (the educated will get the reference). Doesn't make me wrong.
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These journals do not review the papers. Other scientists review the papers for free. These journals just publish them and scientific community does all the work.
There are other forces pushing small increments instead of big important papers. One is that you can publish earlier so that others do not independently discover the same thing and beat you to it. Other is that research funding is mostly about quantity, not about quality.
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The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.
My suggestion was to see if there was a way to reduce the costs of publication while maintaining the rightful auditing procedures that peer review should provide.
As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?
If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for f
Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much? (Score:4, Informative)
The cost comment was in reference to the complaint that OPEN journals cost upwards of 3000 dollars to get a single paper published.
That number is highly variable. There are plenty of open-access journals that cost only a few hundred dollars per article for publication, not several thousand. See here [nature.com], for example. As that article notes, quite a few big open-access publishers admit that their internal costs for publishing are around a few hundred dollars per article.
As to the notion that the scientists are not being paid to audit the papers, then why do the paid journals only have a profit margin of 38 percent?
If I'm getting the papers for free, people are auditing the papers for free, my cost structure is a website, and people are paying me 20k for a subscription to access the journals... then why is my profit margin so low?
I think you are significantly underestimating the amount of administrative work that goes on in sustaining a publishing operation, even an online one. See the first big chart in the link above, which breaks down costs percentage-wise in publication, and see the amount needed for "administering peer review; editing; proofreading; typesetting; graphics; quality assurance... covers; indexes and editorial; rights management; sales and payments; printing and delivery; online user management; marketing and communications; helpdesk; online hosting... " etc.
There's a lot of random overhead required.
The profit margin if what you're saying is true should be closer to 97~99 percent basically meaning the journal has a small staff that matches X scientists with Y papers... and then whatever the web hosting costs which in any of these businesses is basically nothing.
Um... yeah... again, see above.
That said, it's clear that something fishy is going on with commercial publishers. As this article [lse.ac.uk] notes, the for-profit publishers seem to charge 2-3 times as much as non-profits, so it seems like they should be making more than 38% profit. I don't know what the explanation is there, other than that I imagine for-profit companies pay upper-level administrators more.
Anyhow, wherever that excess money is going, your weird conspiracy theory that there's some sort of "kickback" scheme to scientists or reviewers or universities just isn't happening.
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If the cost is a couple hundred dollars than there is no problem. That's a sustainable cost structure.
Mission accomplished. Everyone go home.
*shuts off lights and locks the doors*
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And without looking into it any more than that, this suggests that either the scientists are getting paid or the university is getting paid on their behalf for their contribution
It's astonishing that people with such deep ignorance of a field seem to feel the need to hold forth.
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not as astonishing as your belief you can contradict me without so much a rebutting argument. I pointed out the discongruity in the numbers and you respond "well you're stupid"...
Fucking brilliant rebuttal.
*golf clap*
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Actually you don't understand even what an argument and rebuttal is. An argument is a logical series of arguments reaching a conclusion. You haven't done that. All you've done is baldly state something which is in direct contradiction of actual facts. In other words:
You are completely making it up that universities and/or academics are getting paid for review.
Doesn't happen. Never has happened. And not being able to see the books of some random journal doesn't prove it happens.
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No, I'm saying there have to be costs associated with every submission and I don't understand what they are... and neither do you. So perhaps I should send an email off to one of the journals so I can talk to someone with a clue? We'll see if I care enough.
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No what you did was suggest academics and universities were getting paid. They aren't, and you seem incapable of admitting you were very much in error. All you are doing now is trying to obscure your error in sophistry. As for where the money goes have you read anything?
http://www.webcitation.org/64j... [webcitation.org].
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AAM does not pay anything. AMS gives 'points' to review articles but, well, AMS is not so much a journal really. I have only reviewed for those two - mostly the latter. I did publish more in AAM but it was a bit younger then.
At one time, I envisioned my future as being crammed into a dusty old cellar at the edge of campus and being surrounded by walls covered with blackboards. Sometimes I look back and wonder, would I be happier today if I had taken that route then? Then, well, I look outside and see my new
Re:Why does Peer Review cost that much? (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously you need a scientist to go over your work but I think they might lower the costs if they can make the papers easier to read or potentially release them as a series.
The peer reviewing is done for free. As in the people who review do it because it's part of one's duties as a member of the community. Making papers easier to read would certainly be nice (better journals tend to have better written papers). Not sure what you mean by "release as a series".
I wouldn't want yet more stuff to review to be honest. I already am atmy limit and have to turn things down occasionally due to lack of time.
The other problem with "easier to read" is few people set out to write a badly written paper. A few do---those who want to obscure something---but most don't. The thing is scientists are on the whole scientists. Writing, and GOOD writing is a whole other career and one that scientists ocasionally master in addition to their own, but often just get by.
Writing a good paper actually has a lot in common with writing fiction. Even though it's about facts, there still has to be a narrative flow guiding the reader towards the author's ideas. An additional problem is that unlike fiction where you alter the world to fit the narritive, with science you have to bend the narritive to fit the immutable world, which can make things a bit confusing when you have s triangled of dependencies and you have to start somewhere.
I'm not a writer, and I was like many only a so-so scientific writer. I've seen a few truly excellent
There's also the problem of different styles in that some people think in different ways. And by the time it gets to a really cross disciplinary paper, not one author will understand the work in its entirety, never mind reviewers.
Oh and there's ALSO the problem that people don't seem to knoe what a literature review is for. For many years didn't, thinking like many that it's a bunch of citations you need because REASONS. They I read one by a skilled writer and I was enlightened.
A lot of your suggestions are about better tech. That would help a little, but not all that much. Citations are essentially old-fashioned hyperlinks. Modern systems can hyperlink the citation to the place in the reference list and from that to the actual paper. It would be nice if more places did that and it would be nicer if they supported richer hyperlinking as you suggest. But ultimately that's not the main problem. Reviewers tend to be familiar with the field and so often I don't have to go and read much if anything extra when reading a paper. It's the big blob in the middle describing the technique that needs improvement.
If papers could be made easier to read, that would be great, but I don't see an obvious way to do it.
Data can be provided, and some journals require it, but many don't. The problems with releasing working algorithms is that you have to be able to distribute working portable code to other people with a moderately sane user experience. This is something I actually can do and have done. It's a *lot* of work single handed (and I don't support Macs, and only partially support Windows). but I'm something of a hacker and I've got considerable industry experience. I also care about it and do it even though I've left academia for the most part. Most people simply don't have the training to do such things. I've encountered released code that I and several other good people have been unable to make run even after expending considerable effort.
One thing I learned as well is that it's not always useful. I wrote a paper with a good number of citations (650 so far and climbing at the rate of a few hundred a year which in the academic world is a very good) and I made a big effort to release the code, keep it up to date and fix bugs. The only thing people use is the code bundled with it for a much earlier, simpler system: to my knowledge not a single person has used the code I released specifically for the paper.
Other bits of code/whole programs I've
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As to the reviews being done for free... that includes the university not being paid?
Here's the sticking point... 38 percent profit margin.
Where is the 62 percent going? Your move.
As to it being le hard to write better structured papers, we're not talking about skill or time being put into that but changing the format of the papers to take advantage of the internet age. I talked about hyperlinks and not writing the whole paper like it was literally going to be printed out on paper.
I also pointed out that yo
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As to the reviews being done for free... that includes the university not being paid?
Absoloutely. The universities are never and have never been paid. I am no longer at a university and I do peer review, completely for free.
Where is the 62 percent going? Your move.
Move for what? Not being able to see the books doesn't mean the universities are being paid.
They are not.
I talked about hyperlinks and not writing the whole paper like it was literally going to be printed out on paper.
Yes and I countered that tha
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As to 62 percent, so you admit the numbers don't make sense to you either.
My statement about scientists or universities getting paid was a supposition based on the numbers. If it is in error it just means something else is going on.
When I say "your move" I am challenging you to come up with another explanation. If you don't have one... then we're both confused. ;)
As to me not getting a certain type of comment in this thread that I can quote... I'm not sure if we're talking about the same thing. how can you
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> My statement about scientists or universities getting paid was a supposition based on the numbers. If it is in error it just means something else is going on.
It is completely in error. I've never worked as a publisher, so I can't easily judge the 62%, but the excess is most certainly not going to universities or academics.
>When I say "your move" I am challenging you to come up with another explanation
I don't have one, but that doesn't mean filling in work a god of the gaps is valid.
> I'm not sure
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I didn't claim fraud. I don't mind scientists getting paid to do peer reviews or universities getting paid to do them.
Fraud might happen if the person submitting the paper had any control over who reviewed it. My understanding is that the reviewers are generally kept secret by the journal so its hard to see how it would be biased by payments.
In any case, you can't explain the numbers either.
We agree on the mystery. ;-)
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Wait wait, you're saying the big cost is getting the paper listed in indexes? That's like saying the big cost on the internet is DNS servers.
I'm going to repeat again here... Big journals are saying they have a profit margin of 38 percent. That means that 62 percent of their revenue goes to expenses.
Where is that 62 going?
We were also hearing that open journals that don't charge people that read the journal are charging the people that submit the journals 3000 dollars per submission.
Why does it cost the ope
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He offered three explanations for where 62 percent of revenue goes:
""
Publication costs - even for online-only journals - are a big part of it. This isn't just web hosting, it is indexing so that people can start at your front page and find the paper they are looking for.
There are also indexing costs so that the papers are indexed by relevant search engines (ISI, Scopus, Pubmed, Google Scholar, etc) so that people can find the papers. Human and machine time go in to this to make
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Copy editing, layout, etc for given papers should be handled by the submitting scientists. You're acting like the journal writes the fucking thing for them.
As to my assumption being wrong... explain to me why it is wrong? I reject the notion that the journal itself spends much time worrying about the layout of someone's scientific paper.
I've read more scientific papers than I'd actually prefer over the years and the layout is terrible. They're all laid out like its 1942... on the internet.
Contradict me. Pul
One possible solution... (Score:5, Insightful)
We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story. Why else could you justify using public funds otherwise? I see no reason to fund research that private corporations can charge arbitrary amounts of money to simply access.
The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.
If you need to, set aside some of the grant money for some quality peer review. I'm not ignorant enough to believe that you can do everything for free, but let's make effective use of that grant money and make sure the published results are open and accessible for everyone. Hosting the data costs nothing nowadays. This is a racket that should be broken.
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Actually, peer review is done for free. People see it like their academic duty, chance to get to some new interesting results first, and like to see their name in a program committee list.
(At least this is how it works in Computer Science.)
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I am a researcher in the UK, and this is pretty much happening here. It's required by the national body which the government uses to fund research (some info here [rcuk.ac.uk]) and that requirement gets passed on to the subject area-specific research councils.
Basically, work I publish needs to at least be available on a University-level preprint server ("green" open-access); many publications allow this now. For publishers that don't, the research councils have arrangements with research institutes to pay the fees for t
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We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results... end of story.
In the US, NIH policy requires that NIH-funded research be deposited in PubMed Central, a taxpayer-funded archive of published work. This is not quite unfettered access, as the incumbent publishers forced them to accept a 12-month lag between publication and archiving, but it's pretty good. The NSF (which is only ~25% as big as NIH) claims public archiving as a goal, but not a requirement. I believe ERC has a similar policy.
For the most part, these policies date to about 2005, and most journals have been
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The researchers prefer these publishers because they're "prestigious"? Whoopee-fucking-do. Why does that concern me in any way? That sounds like an issue solely concerning the researchers and the advancement of their careers, not the public good.
Well, the public also demand their money is well spend. So they want research money to be spent on GOOD researchers, not mediocre ones. And how is goodness judged? Well, did those researchers do prestigous things...?
If you think it's "whoopee-fucking-do" then you ha
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"We should pass a law: if any public funding is used for research, the public has a right to free and unfettered access of your research results..."
ABSOLUTELY, and let's take that one step farther. If tax funded research leads to a patentable result--the patent belongs to the taxpayers.
Far too often, one of the researchers walks off the university campus, gets funding, and makes millions for himself from a patent that we paid for.
Self Journal of Science! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there might be an easy to use solution! It is called "Self journal of science" and is available here: http://www.sjscience.org/artic... [sjscience.org]
Think about "Github, but for scientfic papers!"
It features the possibility for any scientist to publish a paper (in Latex because this is what scientists use). The document can be viewed online and each paragraph can be discussed online, using a revision system where pears can review your article (think about a start system on steroids, for scientists).
The project was started by Michael Bon, a researcher who was fed up with the way scientific papers work today.
Disclaimer: I know the developers who work on this project. It is still in development but is already usable. They definitively need some help to spread the word, and more than anything, I know they need papers published on the website. If you happen to know scientists who might be interested, please let them know the "Self Journal of Science" exists! These guys are really trying to make things change and they need your help!
iTunes...iBooks... (Score:3)
Publishers are monopolists (Score:2)
Not as easy as it seems (Score:1)
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Put the papers out on the web and you have 14.4 billion eyeballs scanning them
Even if you only get one thousand of comments on the paper, how do you distinguish valuable critics from random trolls?
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kill the goose that laid the golden egg (Score:1)
Torrent (Score:2)
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I see a lot of FUD being distributed here (Score:2)
There have been several recent threads on this subject, and what has emerged is that there is no reason why Elsevier couldn't be replaced by a series of cheap websites for research areas. On each, researches post papers and there's a wiki for peer commentary. If you want to get fancy, there might be a public commentary forum.
There's nothing innately expensive about the publishing process. Peers review for free because they publish too, and you will one day return the favor. There's nothing about copy editin
Oddly, for technology try the patent offics (Score:2)
Publicly funded research should be free right? (Score:1)
Yep, public price-blocked from scientific papers (Score:1)
They failed (Score:1)
Originally the journals provided and organized verification of the papers. Their reputation was that the journals published stuff that could be trusted.
I think the problem is that several (all?) of them have recently been shown to have failed their verification, publishing things they should not and not publishing things that they should have published.
The high price is no longer justified, the reputation is tarnished and they are in big trouble.
The problem is, that we need that functionality. But others wi
Someone doesn't know much about mining. (Score:2)
Most gold mines are not very profitable. They need a long-term investment of quite large amounts of cash, and the product has a pretty volatile price.