Electronic Access to Scientific Journals 111
LMCBoy writes: "Nature is hosting an online debate on Future e-Access to the Primary Literature. There are points of view from scientists, librarians and publishers (both for-profit and not). It's a good place to get all sides of the issues." It's interesting, because extremely expensive and restricted journals are now competing with services like xxx.lanl.gov, and it isn't clear how peer review will work with more open systems, how they will be funded, etc.
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
The argument that journals need to be priced sky-high is pretty ridiculous when you look at comparable journals published by for-profit vs. not-for-profit organizations. I subscribe to several journals which offer very reasonable prices because they are published by professional societies. Similar journals published by the large for-profit publishing houses cost on the order of several thousand dollars a year, even for students. And no, peer review is not funded by these large publishers. Reviewers of published papers are generally not paid anything for their services, the idea being that their own papers will be be reviewed for free when it comes time for them to publish.
I see a lot of the claims that journal prices will skyrocket if we make back issues available for free as scaremongering by people who stand to lose profit if their chokehold on access to the literature is threatened. This really is information that needs to be free. It's kind of like the whole CDDB debacle - scientists have produced this literature and reviewed this literature for free, but a few corporations want to profit off the fruits of our collective labour.
Previous work (Score:1)
If anybody is interested in rescuing it from its abandoned state: The GPLed source is here [uct.ac.za].
Its architecture is wacky: It uses a journalling filesystem instead of a database, does aggressive caching and on the fly compression. All written in C, so probably needs an audit.
Ginsparg's opinion (Score:2)
the bible guys ! :) (Score:3)
The Nature of the Firm (Score:2)
This it [google.com], perchance?
30 seconds with Google.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
If it's not online, I haven't read it (Score:3)
Most papers can be found if you know how to search - find the exact title from CiteSeer, then search for that with Google, failing that search for the authors. If you get really desperate, as I have twice, you can mail the authors and ask very nicely for a copy - most authors want to help. I'm planning on offering hosting for some authors who don't have web pages of their own, because I'd like to see their papers online but they don't have time to maintain them. I go to a lot of work to make my online papers as useful as possible: see http://www.ciphergoth.org/ for examples.
This has to be the future. It's crazy to make amateurs like I was jump through hoops to get access to this information, there's no longer any sane reason for it. I hope the move away from print publications for academia happens as fast as possible and if there's anything I can do to hasten it, I'm there.
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I'm a bit more fortunate (Score:2)
Peer review works exactly the same; things are just sent electronically. Most of the cost, and a large chunk of the waiting time get removed.
Still, though, I'd send to a paper journal if it was ranked more highly for tenure purposes. All else being the same, I'll send it as bits, but I'm not risking my chances at tenure and promotion over the issue.
hawk
citeseer! (Score:3)
For research on programming languages and cryptography (two of my favourite areas of research), citeseer.com [citeseer.com] has all you need. It is a really beautiful system that allows you to traverse the graph of which papers reference which others, for example.
It does other kinds of papers in addition to those two areas that I mentioned, but I can't vouch for the usefulness of those areas.
Zooko
Time delay (Score:2)
Re:citeseer (Score:1)
Reseach Index is the wave of the future, I believe. It exploits key properties of the web -- global, open access of documents in standard formats (mostly PostScript and PDF), and therefore susceptible to automatic analysis.
Incidentally, there are papers I (Robert Dodier) have written which are indexed by Research Index. I didn't do anything other than put my papers on the web (or contribute to a conference which put its proceedings on the web). I notice that I've been cited exactly once -- O happy day!
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Is Peer Review funded by the likes of Elsevier?
You're right, it's done on a by-request basis by others in the field (in some cases passed on to students by busy but well-reputed professors) in what amounts to communal work. Or you could say it's payed for by the same people who paid for the research in the first place, and the journal afterward.
And further, you're correct that we've smartly passed the point where cutting out the publisher as an editorial element and coordinating the process online would save everyone money. Maybe not books, but certainly all I ever did to with journal articles was to photocopy them and read them somewhere else; being able to download and print on demand would easily be preferable. Up until 15-20 years ago, I'd say subscription costs did match material and administrative costs pretty well. Since then, publishers have been squeezing a captive market for profit.
But it's not Elsevier's lack of benevolence that's the problem. Most scientists seem woefully unaware of these issues, and even younger ones say "but I must publish in established journals for the sake of my career." Many do take the 'P2P' approach to the copyright assignment and make electronic versions available anyway. But more need to take the next step and ask "how can we fix this?" and "when will those we can't convince retire?"
There is one argument against taking everything online. What many librarians will tell you about paper journals is their archive value. We know how to make books that will last for 500 years, and they'll be just as legible then as now. No system crashes, no technological obsolescence. Of course the exploding volume and cost of academic publications is making this a little moot, but it is one to think about.
My two bits, anyway.
slashdot stylee? (Score:1)
In addition to moderators moderating comments every commenter would be able to mod the paper.
Yes it might be a nightmare in terms of mods, meta-mods and meta-meta-mods but over all you could end up with a system whereby you'd know what the general feeling about the quality of your work and perhaps some useful proof-reading. The site could be cited as editor, perhaps.
This is by no means more than a half-baked idea of mine, merely a point of discussion perhaps...
BSY
Aw hell (Score:2)
Heh. Fools.
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Re:It's not an ego-trip (Score:2)
OTOH, peer review is highly useful, also. I'm less certain that particular journals are, outside of the ego-trip factors (aka self aggrandizement).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:Perils of Open Peer Review (Score:2)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:already happening ... (Score:2)
IANAL.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:alternate mixed opinion (Score:2)
This would get you your peer review.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:alternate mixed opinion (Score:2)
OTOH, though the electronic form wouldn't be as durable (without extra work), it would be more rapidly disperseable. I'm thinking of a site that is a cross between
This is no big step technologically. It's the sociology that may prove challenging.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:alternate mixed opinion (Score:2)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
Re:xxx.lanl.gov - impolite (Score:1)
It would be nice of them to explain this more politely at the top of the page, before launching into an anti-robot diatribe, but there's no reason to take the page personally unless you're responsible for an automated download attempt.
Re:Public Licences for the Publically-funded Resea (Score:2)
Well, I hate to tell you this, but if it's not "more complicated than you think", it is certainly different from what you think.
While scientific publishing rakes in "hundreds of millions a year" (maybe a billion world-wide total (not net) revenue) the total costs of scientific research worldwide are a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than that. Counting both grants (close to $30 billion now at NIH alone) and salaries, that's a lot of money. From the publishing perspective, they are providing a communications, peer review, and ranking service to science, coming at a cost of 1 to 2% of the total spent on science. Is that such a terrible charge for such apparently useful services?
The "public library of science" provides only one of the three services I mentioned (communications), and simply assumes the other services publishers provide will continue on somehow even while they are forced to give up some or all of their revenue from their monopoly on communications. Where do you propose the money come from to support these services? Would you be willing to pay all the costs ($1000 to $4000) as an author? What about authors of important research with not so much funding (at institutions in Africa, say). Or should government grants support these activities? Without laying that support foundation, taking away journal revenue is a sure-fire recipe for failure, one way or another.
Re:xxx.lanl.gov - impolite (Score:2)
http://aps.arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org].
Send me email if you can't get in there.
Re:Public Licences for the Publically-funded Resea (Score:2)
First, either 1-2% is way too much, or it's not, so I don't understand why you say it's ok but then "we are vastly overcharged for such services". You can do the exercise at your institution in fact - compare the total budget for research journal subscriptions in the library (probably under $1 million for a typical mid-size university) with the total research funding + university researcher salary numbers. The real problem is accessibility for smaller institutions and developing nations, which under the old paper-based pricing model would have to pay the same as a big institution for access to the same material. But electronic content means publishers can (and have already started to) differentially price so that the smaller institutions can get access to far more for the same price, or even get a discount.
Your second, and main point, concerns copyright. We've had this debate for a long time; the problem is that if a publisher gets only a license and not copyright ownership, the publisher loses the right to publication in new forms (such as bringing older content into the electronic world). Do you really want a system where each author has to be consulted (as copyright owner) before his content gets included in any new database, for example? In any case, our attempt at resolving this has been to be very liberal in rights granted back to authors, once they give us copyright; for example our authors retain full rights to repost their articles to web sites or on preprint servers. They just can't use the actual file we created for the article without our copyright notice and a link to the official journal version, and they're not allowed to provide it to another publisher who will resell it for a fee, without getting our permission. In the last 5 years we've had roughly this policy in place, we've not had any authors come to us needing more than these rights.
We've also made some attempts at liberalizing access as far as we could be comfortable with it. One of our journals has been completely free from its start 3 years ago, and is doing quite well; it's funding comes from national laboratories and institutions that "donate" for its support, rather than paying a subscription price. Something like that model would be great to generalize if institutions could actually be committed to it - even for a small journal it's rather a lot of work though. The "public library of science" could be interpreted as another route to this sort of funding mechanism - but it's a backhanded route; why not make it explicit and provide free access (in exchange for institutional "donations") from the start rather than waiting six months?
Anyway, I'll check out the debate you mention at the publiclibraryofscience site; probably worth bringing out some of the old arguments again in the new forum.
On the specifics of the debate at Nature (Score:5)
Where I work (The Physical Review [aps.org], published by the non-profit American Physical Society) we've spent the last few years scanning in all our old papers (going back over 100 years) to make them available online for a fee. Last month people downloaded over 150 Gigabytes of these old papers from our site (something like 200,000 individual papers downloaded) -- but these would never have been put online without a publisher with a steady revenue stream to sink a few million dollars into them. And in the long run we expect them to more than pay for themselves, so as we're non-profit that lowers the cost to libraries and other subscribers of the new material we publish.
What about those ridiculous journal prices? Some of the publishers are indeed for-profit companies (Elsevier Science being the biggest now) and many of them have Microsoft-sized monopoly profit margins of 30 or 40% on their scientific journal business. Which is why boycott or other proposals that strike all journals equally are going to weaken us with our 0% profit margin a lot faster than a commercial publisher...
But journal pricing is a tricky business. Unlike what has been suggested by others in this forum, except for very high-volume items (probably no journal in the sciences qualifies), printing and distribution are very far from dominating the costs these days. For us they amount to 20-25% of total costs, and are dropping quickly as our subscribers move to online subscriptions. Another big area of costs for us is the copy-editing process that turns whatever files or pieces of paper we get from the authors into a coherent component of a larger body of work. Costs in this area have actually increased in recent years because we are doing a lot more "tagging" of the content; everything we publish now has an SGML file behind it ready for re-use (for example in constructing reliable online links to other articles cited by the authors). This amounts to roughly 30-35% of total expenses for our journals.
The final piece of the cost for us, around 40-45% of the total, is in the management of peer review. We pay the salaries of a large number of editors (PhD physicists, some full-time, some part-time) who make the decisions about what hoops they need authors to jump through to actually get their article published. Often, particularly for the papers we end up rejecting, this involves mediating a strenuous scientific debate between referees and authors. This is hard intellectual work, and involves 1 to 3 or more hours of effort for each of the 24,000 papers we receive every year. And you need a support staff, building, equipment, etc. adding overhead to it all.
And then you have to divide these costs by the number of subscribers to get a per-subscriber journal price. Some of the very high-priced journals are that way mostly because they don't have many subscribers; it's a vicious circle. Which makes it hard to compare the real costs of one journal with another, unless you factor in total circulation figures.
Could this all really be done free? Certainly not with the same level of quality. Is this level of quality actually necessary? Well, we hope so: people seem to be still paying for it. Our goal is as far as possible to lower our costs, to lower the prices we charge, and to broaden the distribution of the information. We're definitely looking at new markets (the 100+ year archive is one of them) to help broaden our cost base and keep those prices down. Electronic publishing allows you to do a lot more - lower prices to developing countries for example is easy to do. The purpose of our parent organization is "to advance and diffuse the knowledge of physics", and any way we can do that better, we'll try doing it. But giving all our stuff away for free just doesn't make any sense, at least not yet.
Archival Issues (Score:2)
Advancing technologies make storage media obsolete. When the demand for a format drops below a certain level, it is no longer profitable to manufacture the equipment needed to read it. Storage media have finite lifetimes. Much of the data collected on early tapes is not readable any more. Dead tree format is the only practical time tested format for archival storage in existence. Scientific journals MUST be archivable. The means to archive the web are not available to librarians.
Peer review of scientific journals is necessary for a variety of reasons. It prevents fraudulent data from being published. It catches many mistakes by authors. It is a necessary step in quality control - true scientific publication must include the information needed to duplicate an experiment. Without peer review the quality of the scientific record is suspect. Peer review is slow and costs money.
Electronic publication does not provide the revenue required to fund real peer review or publication in archivable format.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Re:librarians and print texts - just trying to sav (Score:2)
Google and all other search engines are FAR from complete listings of the Internet. The best estimates are that Google has maybe a 20% indexed coverage of the internet. In addition Google does not cache pages that are excluded by request, or are generated from database searches.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
The academic practice is all about money. You have to build relations so you can get funding. You have to publish to gain respect and you have to keep the university happy so you need to do all of the above or they'll cut your budget.
Unfortunately the system is obsolete. Traditionally you publish you're articles in a journal. Doing so means you go through a review process. And if you're lucky your work is published in a very expensive journal that in most cases will land in various university libraries. So where does the money go? To the publisher. The reviewers get nothing, the editor may get a small fee (I'm not sure actually), the paper writers get the honor.
At the university I work at it is required to spent a significant portion of your budget on library fees. The library uses these fees to pay for the journals, which nobody reads because the content is generally available online (though the author's homepage or through the ieee or acm sites). Some journals even offer free access! So what is it about? It is about pumping research money into publishers. Publishers aren't doing this for charity, they are making a profit here.
The only reason the system still works is that the academic world is very conservative. The CS department I work for is very characteristic. To my shock and surprise they have succeeded in making the secrateries use latex. Also they are quite clueless about such modern stuff as the internet. The department homepage design is very retro and no doubt renders perfectly in mosaic.
I think the single most important feature of journal publications is peer review. I think such a feature can survive in the internet age and in fafct I think it can be improved upon significantly. If reviewers and editors concentrate on putting their efforts online (after all they don't receive a penny for it now either) they may make the published content more accessible, they are not limited by such arbitrary measures as prining cost, they may attract a wide range of interested readers. In addition, providing a slashot like infrastructure to such an audience might also prove to be very productive. I'm not so much worried about quality. Time is a limited resource for anyone and no doubt new, reliable review systems will emerge to save others from reading badly written articles.
Re:the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
Re:the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
framemaker
It's not so much that latex is particularly bad (I've used it in the past). It just doesn't make much sense using it for day to day office work.
Wow! (Score:1)
Pretty impressive!
citeseer (Score:3)
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/directory.html [nec.com]
Re:It's not an ego-trip (Score:1)
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
Re:the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
I changed to LaTeX for this reason: it runs on virtually everything; it is free; documents will always look exactly the same, regardless of operating system and printer (unlike many wordprocessing systems); it is guaranteed to be backwards compatible `forever'; and it is excellent for integrating different authors' submissions into one uniform volume. (In addition to the document class system, and the unsurpassed quality of the typography, all authors can use LaTeX without paying for an overpriced licence, and without being obliged to run any particular operating system).
Using LaTeX means that I know I, and others, will always have access to everything I have written. There are no such guarantees with Framemaker and other proprietary systems. This will be familiar to Linux users who adopted FrameMaker, only to find that at the end of last year that all software licenses expired permanently, and that their documents were destined to be trapped in an inaccessible proprietary format unless they exported to another format before the licences died.
I find LaTeX fine for day-to-day office work, I just edit simple template documents for letters and faxes. Under X, Lyx and Klyx can be used to put a more friendly face on it. There are similar intefaces available for MS-Windows (e.g. Scientific Workplace) and MacOS.
As for MS-Word, I know of several people who used it to write academic books only to live to regret it. Most would wished they had used WordPerfect or LaTeX (if they had heard of it). In my experience, those involved in writing and editing collaborative work seem to greatly favour LaTeX once they had tried it.
I think that when it comes to digital libraries, it is essential to use open, platform neutral document formats that recognise the need for long-term support. This is one area in which there is nothing that can touch (La)TeX, at least for technical publications.
Step back and look at the overall problems (Score:2)
* Journals are inconvenient due to distribution, format, and pricing.
* There isn't a consensus opinion on how to instatiate the peer review process online.
* Funding for research and the viability of the distribution systems are money issues that can't be ignored: people need to make money on research as well as have it peer reviewed, and information distributors MUST put food on the table somehow.
Basically, it boils down to political and fiscal issues. And this is not a case of greed; rather, people have needs, there are livelihoods at stake, and we're talking about a very important process for research that basically includes ALL human scientific advancement.
So, there are no easy answers.
Here's what I think:
Printed journals are good. They just need more availability, more participation, and a reduced cost. While Internet distribution sounds great, we have a current system that needs improvement. It's more beneficial... not to mention easier and cheaper... to improve the printed journals. Plus, we need the journals. Everyone currently reads journals, it's easier for most of the scientific community at this point to deal with printed journals, and I think the scientific community would suffer if we let journals degrade further or disappear entirely. So let's think of that first.
Next, we need a prototype/pilot peer review process online. It needs to make money (not all information can be free), it needs to be more effective and convenient than published journals, it needs to be robust, scalable, practical, and easy to use. (most people shouldn't have to type %man "Mayan anthropology" or something like that) And in the meantime, articles should NOT be published freely on the net AT ALL, as it hurts our progress in both printed journals (robs them of needed revenue) and online distribution (makes it scattered and sets a bad precedent for pricing).
Here's a sample model for an online peer review process, if I were to whip it up this weekend - a Slashcode-powered subscription website frontend, with a separate domain for each journal field. Professional groups, like the ones that put out journals, are responsible for setting up and maintaining their own domains... as in, they follow a cookie-cutter method for setting it up, and it's standarized for all domains, but each group moderates and maintains their own domain so that you don't have something like one website with ALL scientific articles being maintained by the same 6 computer guys. All actual articles are stored in a networked database. The front-ends access the database for the actual articles, you can do a very broad search on that one database easily, it's nearly infintely scalable to handle any scientific field, and it keeps the subscription model centralized. Individual users are charged one of the following ways: per article, retrieve article and have commenting/review priviledges for that article for a nominal one-time fee (like $3 per article, or prepay for 20 articles for $50, something like that); per domain, access to whole domain for a modest subscription fee (like $10 a month); all-domains access for individual user, large personal subscription fee ($100 a month); and all-domains for organziation, site and user licensing fees for libraries, universities, corporations, research groups, etc. where users belonging to an organization can access the articles at a licensed computing site or they can register with the database through the organization for universal access. Organizations probably should have per-domain licensing, too. Searching would be free to all, but obviously the results would be limited to subscribers (as in, they can find what they're looking for, but they can't get to it without paying... kind of if you used Google but the links it returned asked for your username when clicked).
You could do some nifty things with personalization, information linking, relevant searches, multiple domain cross-posting, etc.
Oh, and profits would be distributed like this: authors get commissions based on article views/participation (like, $1 per user participating in an article, one time), domains get 50% of per-domain subscriptions plus 50 cents for each non-per-domain subscriber article participation (all-domain and per-article users), the main database publishing organization gets 10-15% of all fees - that leaves about $1 leftover fees from each per-article view, per-domain subscribers have their subscription fees distributed after 5 article participations in a given domain (which means money is lost after the 5th article participation), and all-domain individual users fees are distributed after 60 (!) article participations (if you made it $50/month, it would be 30 participations).
This leaves organization fees: an organization could pay for all-domains, per year: $300 per licensed site (individual computer), and for universal access user members, something like $200 for up to 20 users, $400 for up to 50 users, $1000 for up to 200 users, etc. That means, every year, each site computer could access/participate in 180 articles, and each universal access user could participate in 3 - 6 articles and you're still making money. Now, per-domain organization access, that would be an agreement between the domain holder and the organization, but the main database publishing organization should still get $20 a year for each licensed site and 50 cents per universal access user. The main database publishing organization would be a clearinghouse for user fees and author/domain payments.
The logic behind all of this would need to be refined much further and some of it just doesn't scale well... it could get very complicated, because the overall system makes 30% undistributed profit on each per-article purchase, but a university like mine (20,000 enrolled plus faculty) would pay something like $125,000 per year to the organization for full access on all library computers (not counting other computing sites) and universal user access for all students and faculty, and that pays for 75,000 participations, or about 3 per person overall... yet if all faculty members plus 10% of heavy research students viewed/participated in an average of 20 articles in a year (not a lot of views if you have a lot of research) and the remaining students averaged 2 article views/participations, the clearinghouse (which uses %10 of the original payment to stay in business) pays out to domains and authors over $30,000 more than it recieved from the group. Reduce both author and domain fees by 50%, and you scale far better, but I don't even know if $1 for authors and 50 cents for domains per view is even enough payment to maintain the system... plus, the fees from users may be entirely too high to begin with, since $3 per article, $100 per all-access user, and $125,000 per large university are all rather high... more than journals cost (to a point) and redundant since the journals are out there already...
Overall, it's a decent sized project, but it's viability can be tested on a small scale... and from there, it's all math, statistics, and consumer interest studies. Maybe the top researchers could make enough money off of such a system to rival A-Rod, and maybe a lot of researchers would find the payments affordable and worthwhile... then again, maybe everyone will starve trying to publish these articles, and maybe everyone will balk at even $1 a month for articles. And the system becomes more valuable as it gets bigger, but it might lose money faster that way, and it's always a big risk to build something that would be successful only if it gets really big. But it's worth thinking about.
Ditto to you... are you a troll? (Score:2)
Second, page hits are meaningless. Basically, authors and research groups are paid every time someone BUYS an article to read or peer review. It's akin to buying a page out of a journal - one you buy it, it's yours forever. I don't think you can model this around page hits, since people have to pay before they look (other than an overview)... and the purpose of the system is for research and peer review, I don't see how counting simple page hits has anything to do with that. Basically, the first time someone accesses the article, they've bought it. They can look at it once, or a million times, but at that point the author and the research group (the people maintaining that server) are paid. Subscribers don't actually pay, but they've already paid a subscription fee and that money is pooled and used to pay the authors and research groups. One time buyers (per-article) DO pay on the spot, and have access to both the article and the peer review system, as do subscribers... but just for that article.
Yea, there are only cosmetic differences to what we have today... if you don't count the powerful search engine capabilities, the availability, the convenience, and the ease of use for peer reviewing. Basically, no books, full searching, available anywhere, and it's easy to review an article and have the review posted RIGHT AWAY for the whole world. It's a very powerful information system, compared to today's paper journals...
Oh, did you know, corporate resarch groups and universities ARE private businesses... the last time I checked, anyway. Research needs funding, period. The more funding, the better. But experiments cost money, and researchers need to eat.
Finally, I didn't intend to suggest a for-profit system... rather, I just wanted everything to pay for itself through a solid (yet kinda complicated, I admit) business model, and I thought researchers who write articles should be compensated modestly. One dollar from every subscriber who ever read/reviewed that particular article at least once does NOT add up quickly... and if it does, then maybe it's a powerful incentive to write GOOD articles, or maybe it's a target for cutting costs and reducing subscriber fees. I think it should all cost as little as possible, both to the subscriber and to the research groups... but there's a lot of money flying around in universities and in research groups which would be WELL SPENT on a powerful and effective online peer review and article publishing system. Once again, I advised fixing the printed journal distribution system first.
P.S. - I said information should not be free in this case, and that people shouldn't be posting articles for free on the Net. I stand behind that, and because of this: you can't walk in a library and grab a copy of everything you want and walk out with it. If libraries did that, they'd be really popular, but they'd go out of business quickly. But libraries do have books and publications (among other things), and in most cases any member of the public can go there to read them if he or she likes. It's the same thing with the Internet. Furthermore, a precedent of "everything is totally free" encourages business models that emphasize being cheap, fast, and prolific. In other words, crappy. Quantity over quality. I believe that authors do themselves a great disservice by setting such a precedent. I think a little patience in this case will prevent the peer-review process from being "Napsterized". But I think ultimately, the whole process should be public and available to all. Okay, so with my system, not everyone can log in from home and read whatever they want... but I specifically wanted something where universities and public libraries could subscribe (via site licenses) to the system so that it would be another freely available resource to anyone on-premises. Just like books and journals are today. And it's more powerful beyond that, too, but if you are just some guy off the street, you can get to it if you need to. So it would be free for everyone. That's why I like that idea. For now, though, it just takes planning and patience.
Re:Step back and look at the overall problems (Score:2)
Also, I like your ideas about links, CD-ROMs, progressive reviews, and how journals work today... the nice thing about my proposed system, though, is assuming that it's not a horrible idea in the first place, people may not have to write articles pro-bono anymore, which means more people would get involved in doing research and publishing articles. Money is always good motivation
Not So Fast, Mr. "Not So Fast" (Score:1)
Bzzt - wrong. Look in the top-right corner of every abstract page - free downloadable copies! 5 million pages in all.
In terms of the citations, though - yes, you're right, not all of them are online.
too expensive (Score:1)
Right now they have banners that jump in yer face...even the physics version.
Market forces and scientific publication (Score:1)
If we can find a way to support electronic publishing without the losing the peer review process, electronic publishing methods will become more popular with the scientific community.
-Moondog
Why not use the Slash model? (Score:1)
bash-2.04$
Online Library (Score:1)
Oh sure there are tons of issues to work out (so authors know people aren't stealing their books).
An online library could even gain access to materials that my local library doesn't have or would have to borrow from another library.
How many times have you wanted to re-read a passage from a book you didn't have? I'm a lot closer to the 'net than I am to my book collection at home, a quick lookup would be perfect.
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answer is simple: no copyright (Score:1)
Authors and referees don't get paid for the article they produce (at least in the scientific community I belong to, I believe it is the case in most fields). The only justification for the copyright comes from the editing cost. This cost is reletively small and could be paid by the authors, IMO. Authors already have to pay in many cases.
Voiding copyright of scienfic publications would produce an enormous benefit for the openess of science. And science, perhaps more than anhything else, needs to be open.
Freedom already exists to a some extend. Usually you can download published articles from the authors homepage. They are either violating the copyright or making use of a special clause in the copyright which allows this exception. For this erason some people say that the copyright of scientific articles are not an issue, "if you really want you can always get it on the web or emailing the author". Well, geeks know the how half-freedoms differ from entire freedoms. In the case of articles such clauses forbids the creation of databases which are invaluable.
Imagine how nice would it be to have a single database of all scientific results. There is no doubt universities would be willing to offer such systems for free if there was no copyright. Imagine finding an article and jumping to a reference with a hyperlink.
I can easily admit the need of copyright for software, art. Scientific books -- contrary to articles -- involves a work of surveying other results, organizing theories. A copyright for such works yielding a monetary refund to the author makes sense for me. The essential function of articles is to announce new results. Copyrithing them in our time is clearly an absurd for me.
hmmmm (Score:3)
oh my, your particle accelerator is so big...
problems with peer review (Score:2)
PNAS is the extreme example. Other journals, although theoretically peer-reviewed as well, have essentially the same problem: even if your results suck (but don't suck too bad), if you're buddies with the chief editor then you can get published most of the time.
Re:problems with peer review (Score:2)
Non-peer review is certainly not the solution to the over-proliferation of papers in science; I don't know what the answer is. Nonetheless, the peer-review process is fundamentally flawed if research grants are awarded on a purely productivity basis.
Re:"open access" isn't quite open (Score:2)
British Medical Journal went free online years ago (Score:1)
This was one of their first articles introducting their online edition ( "BMJ on the internet" [bmj.com]). It also has links to many more articles.
BMJ seems to have been able to maintain their prestige, yet successfully move to the internet. As a non-doctor, I often read the articles on their site with great interest -- but would never be able to afford to purchase a subscription to keep up with research purely for interests sake.
People have praised the move for more worthy reasons too -- MD's in developing countries now have immediate and free access to valuable advances in medical knowlege. The traditional approach locks information into the developed world thus deepening the divide
This is one of their latest thoughts on the subject " What is Publication? [bmj.com]"
Nature = Bad $cience (Score:1)
The problem w/ Nature is that they are a FOR PROFIT magazine with all kinds of ads for DNA equipment. Also they only accept stories which are "stunning, groundbreaking research", which has the effect of requiring scientists to hype their discoveries far beyond what normal scientific skepticism requires. Nature=Bad Science.
Journals which tend to stick most rigorously to scientific principles are those which require their authors to pay page charges. (ie, the don't have ads). Most scientists put in a request for page charges when they apply for grants.
Re:Step back and look at the overall problems (Score:2)
I think that you're 100% wrong. The problem is that print journals are bulky, inconvenient, and expensive. The size and inconvenience are essential problems of the print format; you just can't reduce 10,000 pages of journal- which is what top publications like Science and Nature are churning out per year now- into a format that can be easily accessed and archived while keeping it on paper. Furthermore, the need to keep actual physical copies in libraries means that only one person can read a given issue (or group of issues once they've been bound into volumes) at a time, and the librarians have a mess trying to reshelve the things. And a huge chunk of the cost associated with those journals is not the cost of doing the reviews and typesetting- the reviews are typically done pro bono by other scientists and much of the design is done by the author- but with the actual physical production and distribution of paper copies.
Electronic distribution solves many of those problems at a stroke. There's no need to keep shelves full of dead trees, or to print and ship the things all over the world, which is a big cost and effort saving for all involved. Searching for articles will also be much easier. Even the argument that there won't be much real savings in terms of paper because people will print out the articles anyway is flawed because people already copy article from the library for their own personal archives anyway.
The greatly reduced costs will be very beneficial overall. You'll probably be able to pay for fixed costs like editing and typesetting by charging authors a small fee (which many journals already do) and per-view costs can be paid for by banner ads. Anyone who's seen top journals will understand that this is exactly the kind of targeted advertizing that should pay very well, more than enough to cover costs. References can be replaced by actual links to the articles being referenced, which would be a huge win. Publishers could probably also make decent money by selling an annual CD-ROM version of the whole journal for people who want to be able to access it off-line. Journals could even start having separate "passed review" and "under review" sections so that the newest, most exciting work could be available (with obvious caveats) before the review process was 100% complete. Overall it would be a huge gain.
Re:the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
Not really. Most online journals charge $$$. You pay the library fees, the library pays a subscription to these online journals. You can read them off your browser with your university's domain name, but not anywhere else. It may be transparent to you, but try accessing one of the journals with a browser running from home for example. These things cost bombs.
I don't know about IEEE ( I think it is not free). But the astrophysical journal, the citation index, astronomy and astrophysics, physrev etc..are not free.
Err, this isn't obvious? (Score:1)
Only give free users access to material that is 2 issues or older! Hey, it really is quite obvious. All of the proffesionals, or people with a real desire to learn things right now, will keep their subscription to the annual print version of the journal, while it also allows for students all around the world to have access to years of scientific research! Hey, it works for everbody. I myself have never had a burning desire to read the lastest issue of Nature, but there have been a few times when I wanted to check out some issues from a few years past to double check some articles whose names I had been given, but was not able to.
librarians and print texts - just trying to save (Score:1)
how many slashdotters are highschool students/were last year? I'm sure if your school had even a meager collection of computers conencted to the internet, you were more than happy to be able to use those to find information for research papers and the likes. The only problem was that "the internet isn't a reliable source for information. It can be there one day, 3 weeks later it's gone". Other than that, they said, anything off of an
Well now they know of google, and the librarians need another way to keep their job of "keeper of the books" seeming important, so they make you use the library's books for any of your projects, and rarely look highly upon using digital resources, and grudgingly "ok" your use of some inanely expensive and cryptic UI "online article" database they subscribed to for some unknown reason. The reason behind the cryptic UI is probably that the librarians need to look tech savvy somehow (not to say there aren't any comp whizzes out there who are librarians, just not in my schooling carreer), so they give help with the only computer system they're familiar with. If the librarians made it too easy to access the information, there wouldn't be any need for their services, their staff would be cut back, and then they'd be out of the job, replaced by computers. Personally, I'll be glad to see them when they go, replaced by friendly techies in their late 20's who check out digital equipment.
Re:Academic journals for the public? (Score:1)
SealBeater
"open access" isn't quite open (Score:4)
In many fields when you submit a paper for publication, you have to pay a fee to the journal. That's not as common in economics, but what I will have to do is sign over the copyright of my paper to the journal pubishing it. In order to participat in the intellectual life of my chosen field, I am required to give some business entity control over my work for the next 100 years or so.
Now, I'd be happy to open-source it. I'd even be happy to make it public domain. But, release the copyright to someone else? I may not even be able to put a copy on my website? Why is that good for either me, or the field of study?
There's a classic paper called "The Nature of the Firm" by R. H. Coase. Yesterday it took me a while to hunt it down. It was published in '37 and is considered pivitol. My university has one copy in a book, which I'm allwed to borrow, but undergrads aren't. The paper isn't online anywhere (at least not legally). If this paper was public doamin, it would be mirrored all over the place.
There's argument that copyright was required for the journal to recoup its costs. But, yes, most of those costs are associated with printing and distributing paper copies. Now since we can distribute the papers more efficiently online, the costs plummet.
The real problem now is not free-as-in-beer distribution, but free-as-in-speech academic research. How do we accomplish that, while maintaining the system of peer review?
The only solution I've been able to think of, and I may try, is to base things more on individual initiative. When someone has a paper, they find a person with a reputation in the field, and ask the expert to play "editor". The editor picks a few anonymous referees, who do their thing. Maybe the author submitting the paper would send along a (hopefully small) check for the editor and referees. If everything checks out, the editor gets cited as such on the paper, and the author self-publishes public domain (or some open-text license). Then any online database can mirro and index the paper.
I can dream.
Slashdot effect on a slow day (Score:1)
today's usage [arxiv.org] for arXiv.org (not including mirrors)
Huh? (Score:3)
My jaundiced (and possibly innaccurate) view is that, but for the armlock of the incumbent players, it should be possible to replicate the workflow of journals on a web-based, subscription free basis; that what real costs exist in the system could be funded by the (already tax-payer funded) academic establishments; and that we might get to the stage where publicly funded research results are made available at no cost to the public.
On this score, kudos to MIT [mit.edu] for deciding to release their courseware for free.
Peer Review had its day ? (Score:1)
Peer review is a mechanism for conservative progress. Providing your 'peers' agree with what you say, you can publish. Otherwise your screwed. In the past this was acceptable, it kept the cranks out of everyone's hair. However, the speed of developments is too fast now for such a conservative approach. And anyway, who says that your 'peers' are correct. Look around at your collegues and say if you really trust their judgement...
No, we need a different approach.
Characteristics are as follows:
- Everyone and anyone should be able to publish, quickly, easily and with the minimum of created difficulties.
- Questions are as important as solutions, we need to capture those as well.
- Everyone should do their piece in providing feedback (which is a positive help), as an element of being part of the community.
- What a paper 'says' should be open to understanding and exploration by automated means. That means less stilted, long verbose language; and more simple quick statements. An obvious place for XML?
- There should be a distributed storage and search functionality - but focusing on a common user interface and extensibility.
- University administrators, publishers and other vested interests should have no part in it.
What the above should point out is that there is no reason to continue with the old system, it doesn't work in diseminating knowledge and pushing forward the boundaries of our ideas. It is relatively easy to see a better way, based on the ideas that have been evolved on the web.It just takes some effort.
How it works (Score:5)
Let's say I finished my PhD studies and wanted to publish my work. Well, I would pay an application fee to a publishing company, who then gets peers to review it (usually for free), then, if they accept my work, I pay per page to have it published. Oh, and they retain all rights to the work I paid for. Then they turn around and sell subscriptions to their quarterly journal for $6000 a pop. Sounds fair, huh?
The publishers are putting up a fight too. Some Chemistry journals are refusing to publish scholars who publish online first.
This should be interesting to follow because there is nowhere that information should roam more free than in academia.
Perils of Open Peer Review (Score:3)
Closed Peer Reviews can lead to group think and political agendas
Open peer reviews opens the process to people who are not peers, which is fine by itself, opens up the speculations and discussions of experts among themselves to criticism buy others with other political agendas.
This is not restricted to the easily cited religious groups.
For example, there is always the competition for research dollars. In support of this idea there is this article [netslaves.com] over at Netslaves [netslaves.com], not particularly a geek site, but certainly devoted to the run of the mill technology worker. To quote one snippet:
Here we have the vested interest for research dollars that corrupts the process. Opening up the peer reveiw process would make expose this. I do not know that this fix the situation. But it would make more resources available so that it could be fixed.Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip
Re:"open access" isn't quite open (Score:1)
Re:Authors sign away their rights (Score:1)
That is the standard contract. However there are a couple of ways around it. First, authors are often publishing after they've released a departmental technical report that might differ only in minor ways from the journal paper. No journal publisher is going to try to prevent you from releasing an earlier technical report on the web.
Also, I know people who cross out offensive sections of the contract or write in the margins that they reserve the right of web publication. This generally works.
Finally, even if you sign it, the journals just don't care that much about the odd article on someone's homepage. In my field, numerical analysis, I've never heard of anyone getting into trouble with a publisher over this sort of thing.
FWIW, I've got one of the bastards to sign right now. I guess I will sign as-is so as not to annoy my co-author. But it does piss me off.
Re:Obsolete (Score:1)
Re:Quick Solution (Score:2)
Re:already happening ... (Score:2)
Remember copyright pertains to the sale of the material. Merely giving with no monies exchanged doesn't fall under copyright.
Obsolete (Score:2)
Re:already happening ... (Score:2)
If I write a book and a publisher gains the rights to publish it all they have is the right to sell the material in printed form. I still have the right to show my manuscript to my friends. I just can't sell it to them.
Re:Publish or perish (Score:2)
Sad but true.
I've just about finished my PhD thesis in Physics and found about that the hard way. I was negotiating my next semester funding with the head of our department, when I was quite bluntly told that my two Physical Review Letters and two Phys. Rev. B:s are, in fact, a lousy result. "Four publications isn't that good a result even for a lone researcher like you. You should have been able to publish at least eight papers like Dr. John Doe here." Well, he did have eight papers in 2000, but they were in sub-standard journals (two of them weren't even peer reviewed).
It's not an ego-trip (Score:2)
Do you really think that to "get validated by the community" is only of a psychological value?
It's much more than that. All scientific work is based on the idea that your peers review and test your hypotheses and results against the extisting literature before anything is made public. This process screens out the crackpots and people who don't have any idea of a scientific process. And when you get your paper published in an established journal it means that it has been deemed a scientifically solid piece of work that should be taken seriously. The more respected journal you get to publish in, the better work you have done. It's not merely an ego-trip as you seem to imply.
Re:Obsolete (Score:2)
In fact, try tracing the citations on the newest paper of a certain subject. You will probably trace the citations back to something quite dated. That's how citations work. Unless the literature has been DISPROVEN, there's no such thing as "out of date".
All valid data which fit the current model of things are relevant.
Re:It's not an ego-trip (Score:1)
This is a troll right? (Score:1)
Apart from the fact that it makes authors whore themselves out to try to get maximum page hits I only see some cosmetic differences to what we have today.
Dissemination is too integral a part of scienctific research for it to be left up to private buessinuess.
Please tell me this is a troll...
Maybe the academia should *gasp* cooperate? (Score:2)
Bandwith and storage are cheap, people are of course expensive... but if its true that peer review is usually voluntary there are no costs there, what remains is the organisation behind it. After initial costs a lot of the system should be able to be automated, leaving the task of assigning peers. I think costs should be manageable.
Like suggested here: http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/
Its of course a pipe dream, the academia working together in this day and age... what a laugh.
Re:How it works (Score:1)
Could it be that this is dependent on how much R&D dollars are spent to come up with a result worth to be published by an established scientific journal in the first place ? The higher the research costs the less likely it might be to access the results inexpensively online ? I would guess (Bio)Chemical Sciences and Mathematical and Computer Sciences would differ. Any ideas that's so ?
Not So Fast - (Score:1)
This is like the Medline [nih.gov] medicine database (11 million abstracts) except the citation analysis is more advanced for the CS database. Also, I think that medical abstracts are more useful as they usually feature the results from a testable hypothesis that describes an existing biochemical or physical mechanism. Much computer research involves the development and exploration of logical systems - this can't be boiled down to a paragraph. Proof of concept is a valid way of doing research, but five or six sentences is not enough to thoroughly describe the ideas that were proved. (see example from researchindex.com below):
Abstract: Models of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR), built according to the \make only as many distinctions as necessary" belief, partition the universe of values into a finite number of regions; elements lying in a same region are qualitatively equal, i.e., indistinguishable. The purpose of this work is not to tackle the foundational arguments of QSR, in which I strongly believe; rather, I believe as well that some application domains need a representational model based on a partition of the universe of values as ne-grained as possible: that is to say, a quantitative model. I investigate such a model, which is a constraint-based model of ternary relations on triples of 2D points; a relation of...
Re:the current system is obsolete (Score:2)
I know what you mean. I found out that depts at my school have a limited budget and can only buy subscriptions to so many journals. If there is another journal out there that is very good but if they don't have the money for it then they don't get it because then they wouldn't be able to subscribe to another good journal.
It's a case of limited resources and it limits the amount of research that you're exposed to. They should be able to open it up or at least make getting a copy reasonable.
Some journals won't even let you buy a copy of a previous journal issue unless you already subscribe to it!
Re:Publish or perish (Score:1)
Can you flesh out what you think the fundamental rethinking needs to be?
Re:already happening ... (Score:1)
Re:Publish or perish (Score:1)
That's a simple fact that you won't find in too many school catalogs.
"Experience is a harsh master but the fool hath no other."
Mathematicians begin to resist overpriced journals (Score:2)
The most preposterous thing about high-priced journals is that the "value-added" part of a journal is the peer review, which is done almost always for free. When an article is submitted it is sent out for review to someone whose research is close enough to understand the work. Getting an article to review is a chore; it can take many months to thoroughly review an article, many are poorly written and have annoying minor mistakes, and there is no recognition or pay associated to it. When it turns out that the journals are priced outrageously, that is the final straw for many. In general, reviewing articles is considered a nescessary public service, and since the editors of the highest-priced journals tend to be the super-big shots, it is not easy to refuse to review something. Hopefully, things will improve! The xxx archive is great for preprints but the reviewing process is an important part of disseminating research so it will take more than that for things to get much better.
ADS is brilliant. (Score:1)
APS page charges are voluntary (Score:1)
We need carefully crafted semi-open peer review (Score:1)
I've seen these issues from many sides: author, reviewer, editor. Totally free access and open review falls down on one important count- the prime currency of academic research reputation (not money; that's not the main impediment here). People in academia could generally make more $$ in industry or business. $$ is not their main motive (except as $$ in the form of grants is a means to research). The motives are to advance knowledge, have fun doing something intersting, and gain the respect of one's peers.
Most of the value in a research journal is in the brand: how difficult is it to publish there, how much prestige is due to the author whose work appears there, how much attention busy readers pay to publications in one journal over another. Without a strong publication record, nearly all researchers will have trouble getting funding, tenure, etc.
An open publication system needs to somehow maintain this means to rate papers based on quality. Otherwise, researchers will continue to submit their best results to Science and Nature, which will then hold copyright.
This could be done: design a semi-open peer review system whereby authors can only publish in the archive if they also provide quality peer reviews, and manage it all through community-wide feedback and also possibly the efforts of professional editors skilled in the field (who would have to be paid). And rate papers based on their importance to the community and the judgement of the referees and readers.
In the end, it sounds like a variant of slashdot itself- self-organized publication ratings with mechanisms in place to minimize abuse. Resistance to abuse is critical- junior researchers under a tenure cloud will have great incentive to work the system.
Re:Some journals are $200 per monthly issue! (Score:2)
Many specialized western journals also cost thousands of dollars per year. Of two main journals on Schizophrenia, the one published by the NIH is under $100/yr and the one from a commercial publisher is over $2000/yr.
Journal publsihing is a strange market: the author does not pay for publication so she or he is as likely to submit to an expensive journal as a cheap one. Since the journal then holds the copyright, libraries are forced to pay the exorbitant subscription rate of some commercial journals or else they have a hole in their collection. Commercial publishers figured this out several years ago- their academic publishing arms make a quite high return on investment.
Every individual manuscript published is like a little monopoly for the journal on a slice of knowledge.
Re:Publish or perish (Score:1)
Yeah right. When you can prove that you have any perspective on the topic comment away (not as AC). Academia is not the easiest of pursuits and I for one don't recommend it.
Those who have the drive and perseverance, should be applauded for their efforts, not lauded by someone who can't even state their name.
Re:On the specifics of the debate at Nature (Score:1)
Re:On the specifics of the debate at Nature (Score:2)
The post by apsmith illustrates a point we should keep in mind: Not everyone who wants to charge money for access to information is evil.
The American Physical Society (APS) is a great institution, and their line of journals (Physical Review Letters and Phys Rev A through E) are very highly regarded in the community. That high regard comes at a price (namely that of overseeing the peer review process; a staff qualified to do that doesn't come cheap), and though APS is non-profit, they do need to recover their costs. Bear this in mind next time you see someone assuming that anyone who suggests any sort of fee for information is a corporate stooge.
At the same time, we have the old "Information wants to be free" argument. It's true, information isn't subject to physical-world restrictions, so you can give it away and still have it, and essentially infinitely many copies of it can be made at essentially no cost to anybody.
So: "Information wants to be free", but "Information can be damned expensive." Wish I knew how to resolve this conflict.
I wonder if it's possible for organizations like the APS (or even for-profit entities) to make enough money from initial sales that they wouldn't need to care about attempting to implement ridiculous and enunforceable copyright restrictions? That is, sell people your information (there will always be those you can't wait for it to propagate enough for them to get it free, or those who voluntarily pay to support the organization's mandate), but don't try to control what they can do with it. Once they've bought it, they can spread it around as they like; you just have to hope that enough people buy it that you can sustain your operation. In the film world, this would be like needing to make most of your money off a film on opening weekend -- if you can manage to make enough, who cares if free copies are floating around on Monday?
At the very least, we need to work out a different approach to the legislation-and-encryption tack that seems to be the standard governmental response these days. As a friend of a friend of mine once said, "You can have copyright protection, or you can have civil rights, but you can't have both." Check out this article [discover.com] by John Lanier for a nice thought-experiment on the kinds of totalitarian measures it would take to really prevent the dissemination of digital music.
Nature Online boycotted by Harvard, Cornell, etc. (Score:1)
Recently, however, our university's trial subscription to the online edition of the prestigious journal Nature and its associated monthlies expired. Our university [library.ubc.ca] decided to join with Harvard [harvard.edu], Cornell, Princeton, and the University of California in boycotting what was deemed an untenably pricey subscription fee by the Nature publishing group ($30,000 CDN) for a service with significant restrictions in the timeliness of content. Our librarian's letter [library.ubc.ca] outlines our school's position on this issue. Nature's own site licensing policies are available here [nature.com].
Re: Quality vs quantity (Score:1)
If I am to guess at the future Id predict a tendency towards higher quality being rewarded. The reason being that more and more stuff is published so if you want to be heard, noticed and respected in your scientific community you need to put out high quality material, you need to stand out in the crowd.
Re:Huh? (Score:1)
Also, when has the last time a search engine was used on an archive of hardcopy journals?
Quick Solution (Score:1)
I mean, these articles could be rated on quality; and the quality rated on how much research time, grant money and people working on the project, combined with other factors of course, and one can see which one is more valid. It's not a perfect system, but nothing's really perfect. Eventually, people may start working harder on quality to have the "most referred to" paper on a given topic. Actually, most real researches do try for that.
In the meantime, let's just use GOOGLE! I just like to say GOOGLE! It's fun to say. Googledy-googley-goobery-gooberdy...
That could drive someone mad!
You stopped short: (Score:1)
If all the factors are properly accounted for and weighed-out, it should come out fair for everyone, no matter how small or new they are.   After all, a newer company would have fewer blackmarks in its history, and a smaller company would have a better porportional fund allocation than a larger company, assuming they're not attempting to do too much.
Less Reason for Idiocy! (Score:5)
It'll be beneficial to large sums of people who've always been right, but were the only ones in the discussion with the physical proof, and in the online world, referring someone to amazon.com means nothing.
Why, if this kicks-off, we can outlaw idiocy! "Excuse me, sir, but we have reports your an ignorant peice of crap, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to fine you...hmm, oh, your Windows user...I'll have to fine you your life..."
WE CAN COUNTER FUD AND IGNORANCE WITH ONE SINGLE BLOW! HORDES OF CLUELESS MEDIA WILL FINALLY BE FORCED TO CHECK THEIR FACTS AT A SINGLE, VERIFIABLE LOCATION! This will also cause a drop in the number of articles produced by Ziff-Davis, but that's not a loss at all. Then again...it's not like they actually check with Open Bench Labs when the put out some unconfirmable or one-sided test result as absolute "fact." BUT IF WE COULD FINE THEM...
Linus Torvalds Outlaws Cluelessness
PHB on Trial for Mispronouncing Linux
Ziff-Davis Bankrupt
Slashdot Reduces User Overhead to Only 14
I see arguments are right
articles too
I see PHBs, shoved in a zoo
And I think to myself,
"What a Wonderful World."
Re:Publish or perish (Score:2)
To get through the tenure and promotion system you need grants and lots of publications. I have colleagues who literally could not care less about their students. The Deans and administrative types promote them with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge," because they bring in money and prestige from a small academic community. I would not send my own kids to a land grant institution and would encourage them to go to a smaller institution.
As far as resources to publish, it does take a lot. For each paper the publishers have to find reviewers. They have to check up on the ones who are late in filing reviews. They have to decide what parts the reviewers got right and what they got wrong. They have to make sure that revisions are sent back to reviewers and broker disputes. The process of putting together and preparing an article is very difficult. If you think my grammar is bad, you should see some of the stuff coming from people just learning to speak this whacked out language.
Completely off topic... but...
rant on
I saw someone on this board saying that MIT should be commended for putting their education materials on the web. MIT is the worst place to go if you are looking for an education. They produce research and create a place for smart students to be together. This is nice, but the last thing they should be commended for is what happens in their classrooms.
Also, they are the place that pioneered ways to take advantage of the Bayh-Dole Act [nttc.edu] to seek patents and royalties for things created using public money.
rant off
Publish or perish (Score:3)
The academic environment has become so focused on publishing and getting grants that the focus is not on quality but quantity. At the same time resources are stretched so thin that the cost of producing these journals has also gone through the roof, and the prices that libraries are asked to pay is outrageous. Nobody seems to be questioning whether or not the current situation is good for science.
I had dinner a couple of nights ago with a guy who is one of the editors of an entomology journal. He said that it is now so difficult to get reviewers that they have had to reduce the number of reviewers per paper down to two, and it is still hard to find people! The publishers who included statements in the link above can rant all they want about "quality" and "integrity," but they should be asking more fundamental questions.
There is an old joke about a person's work, "Dr. Jones has filled a much needed hole in the literature." This seems to be a common compliment. The people in the academic community really need to rethink what their role in society is. It doesn't feel like the Deans and administrators in american universities care much at all about students and education.
already happening ... (Score:2)
This is already happening. Scientists (like me) routinely post electronic versions of their papers, making them freely available on their web sites. In my experience, typing the title of an arbitrary article into your favourite search engine will lead to a freely-available electronic version about 30 per cent of the time, and this proportion is increasing.
The key idea is legitimacy, which is touched on in the article ... that is, a researcher needs the work to be validated and published in a recognized journal first, to verify that the work is an important contribution, before making it freely available.
As an aside, I also have concerns with an online journal being freely available, because it's not clear who will be paying the bills - advertisers? donors? At my university there is already a great hue and cry about the independence of research being corrupted by corporate interest. The high subscription fees charged by journals may make works inaccessible, but they do pay the bills (in such a way that advertising is unnecessary).
Re:Huh? (Score:3)
I have the (perhaps mistaken) understanding that peer reviewers for most journals do the work for the academic kudos, not for financial reward.
In my experience, peer reviewers are normally anonymous, and are expected to take part in the process because they themselves have benefited from it (by having their previously published articles peer reviewed).
Has Someone Done This? (Score:2)
The only problem is filtering through the good, the bad, and the ugly. When I saw Paul Ginsparg (the guy who started xxx) speak about five years ago, he mentioned that he fully expected other interested parties to create "virtual journals" -- peer-reviewed, if desired -- by simply commenting on and providing links to the best of the massive xxx database at lanl. I haven't seen this happen yet, which I find strange and sad.
So it seems to me that a slashdot-style discussion board/web-log would perhaps be the most effective tool for locating the best papers. In effect, a carefully tuned version of Slashdot could act as the ultimate virtual journal, using xxx as its database.
What thinks you all out there?
-ThreeToe
-(Two Lost In Struggle With Calamari)
Re:Publish or perish (Score:2)
Online Publishing and Peer Review (Score:2)
alternate mixed opinion (Score:2)
New papers don't have metadata in statistical metrics such as number of citations and may well not be worth your time, even if written by someone with statistical repute.
Therefore the peer review and prefiltering that is done at the scientific journal is still very valuable. However, in order not to create a straw man by ignoring the already implied delay period, the profit of the journal must still be taken into serious consideration.