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The Almighty Buck Science

Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing 196

Posted by michael from the courage-of-your-beliefs dept.
Black Parrot writes: "Just got a message that was sent to several mailing lists used by machine learning researchers, announcing the mass resignation of the Editorial Board of one prominent ML journal (i.e., the scholars who make a peer reviewed journal work). The reason? 'Times have changed. ... We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers.' It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small. You can see the full text of the message at the UAI archive. This sort of thing has been bubbling for a couple of years. The letter mentions other cases, and I know that several thousand biological researchers have threatened to go on strike against any journal that does not make their articles downloadable for free after a fixed delay from the date of publication. The trend toward more toll booths is not the only force at work in the Internet Age!"
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Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing More

Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing

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  • Jordan? (Score:1, Funny)

    by chenwah ( 161707 )
    I see Michael Jordan is one of the resigning editors.

    I guess he needs to free up some time for his NBA comeback =)

    .

  • So What ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by da5idnetlimit.com ( 410908 )
    For years people had problem publishing.
    Now they say they want to remove an editor from the chain...

    Good, but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...

    Maybe the Internet will help with a peer review system, but this asks for organisation and good practice...

    Will Scientists be able to apply this instead of the usual bickering ?

    • Re:So What ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gimbo ( 91234 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:15AM (#2405399) Homepage
      > Good, but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...

      Well, no, not really. The whole idea in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is that the people performing the editing are experts in the field (ie peers of the person/people submitting the article for publication), not employees of the company which publishes the journal.

      There's no suggestion of doing away with peer review.

      > Will Scientists be able to apply this instead of the usual bickering ?

      No, they'll still bicker... :-)

      -Andy

      • Re:So What ? (Score:2, Interesting)

        by KahunaBurger ( 123991 )
        Well, no, not really. The whole idea in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is that the people performing the editing are experts in the field (ie peers of the person/people submitting the article for publication), not employees of the company which publishes the journal.

        There's no suggestion of doing away with peer review.

        well, except that the opening blurb distinctly talks about a bunch of peer reviewers quiting. The implication that they are "the middleman" is obviously wrong if you apply outside knowlege to what's said, but not from a plain reading.

        The article could have been far more clear about what the good thing about this is (putting pressure on the journal to provide free downloads through their resignations) instead of implying that lossing the peer review staff of a major journal is a good thing.

        The final problem of course, is that peer review IS a middleman coming between scientists and their readers. It's a GOOD middleman for just about everyone involved in science education and advocacy, but similar review/endorsement plans (such as the WHO proposal for a approval based .health domain) have been lambasted here as "censorship". So the idea that /. is attacking the important process of peer review is not unprecedented.

        Kahuna Burger
        • > well, except that the opening blurb
          > distinctly talks about a bunch of peer
          > reviewers quiting. The implication that they
          > are "the middleman" is obviously wrong if you
          > apply outside knowlege to what's said, but
          > not from a plain reading.

          No! The peer reviewers, ie the editors, are not the middlemen - the people who own and publish the journals are.

          Look: The peer reviewers are members of the scientific community. The publishers are businessmen. The peer reviewers in this article who "quit" haven't said they want to stop reviewing or do away with peer review, they've just said they're not willing to work within the framework imposed by the journals (which they do not run) any longer. The middleman being cut out is the dead tree publisher.

          Hope that makes it clearer...
          • The peer reviewers in this article who "quit" haven't said they want to stop reviewing or do away with peer review...

            In fact, if you compare the editorial board of JMLR [jmlr.org] with the people that resigned from JML, you will see that many of them are now just reviewing for the new free online journal.
      • A summary of the problem:

        Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.
        An illustration...

        Step 1) Come up with nifty idea

        Step 2) Decide whether you want to do it yourself, or hive it off to a phd student [see 2i].

        Step 2i) Apply to department for a phd student, hoping that your prior publishing record is strong enough to secure the funding for such from the department, dependent on the number of papers and the ammount of research funding you bring in, department infighting and so forth.

        Step 3) Write a Proposal to the relevant Research Council/Charity/etc. There a commitee of experts in that field decide on your worth, the idea's worth, whether it conflicts with how they want to help push forward their particular field, whether they got out of bed from the wrongside, whether you've pissed them off in the past.

        Step 3i) Get the funding! Yay! Now try to keep your department from getting their fingers on it.

        Step 3ii) Fail to secure funding, back to 1 and take step further towards being pushed towards teaching, away from the stars of the department who have a light/nonexistant load and spend all their time researching.

        Step 4 Do the work, avoid any fellows ripping it off (and that includes your superrvisor if you're a phd student). Many long repetative and perhaps futile days ahead.

        Step 5) Poster/Conference time. Yay! an opportunity to meet up with your peers and consume a variety of toxic to edible food stuffs with them. Incidentally an opportunity to listen to others talk about their research, hopefully being selected yourself to give a talk or a poster.

        Step 6) The results look good, hopefully you thought about their potential analysis before you started actual experiments, chat to fellows in department about such, hoiping the head of department will recognise your potential brilliance and renew your short term contract.

        Step 7)Write it all up. This may be a combination of work of a couple of your fellows whom you've spent the last three years or so working very closely with: decide who gets the top billing, primary authorship, oh and yeah you'll have to tack on your head of department/supervisor even if they didnt lift a finger to help.

        Step 8)Choose which journal you would like to try and get published in. In the world of academia such are much more presdigious than others, on some weird relative scale worth more points if it were to publish in, are the heights of Nature for you? Perhaps a more specialist journal, or something really obscure (oh well)?

        Step 9)Send of your paper to the editor of that journal, along with the fee for such. He then flicks briefly with your paper and decides whether its worth his time, whether its suitable for his journal. If so he selects a couple of people whom are friends/experts in the field/owes a favour too and sends of a copy of your paper to them.

        Step 10)Your paper is peer reviewed, by at this time by a small number (1-3) hopefully knowledgeable, impartial anonymous experts in the field poor over your work, looking for any flaws or areas which need to be explored further. Hopefully they're not too red pen happy! Now choose either 10i, 10ii, or 10iii

        Step10i) Yay! Your paper is excepted without question. This is the buzz the reason your spent months crouched over hazardous/smelly/expensive chemicals/creatures/equipment for! Time to break out the champaign. Recieve a pat on the head from the Head of Department and take a step towards dropping your teaching load! Woot! Procede to 11

        Step 10ii)Erk, red pen, flaws in your work! Hopefully it just means you need to reanalyse something, change a graph, though you may have to go back and do some more research. Resubmit to the editor once you are done: goto 9

        Step 10iii)Paper rejected, try an less popular journal: goto 9 or break out the shedder.

        Step 11)Time to cough up the goods and pay the editor per page, graph and so forth to include your paper in their journal! Order some reprints (at your expense) so if some freeloaders, I mean fellow scientists write to you directly you can send them a copy of your paper directly and something to pin to the board outside your office, a talisman against the damoclean sword of dismissal (we're reorganising the department... yes thankyou for your 40 years working for us... sod off now, clear your office by Monday...)

        Step 12) Presuming you've got your paper in a journal your university has payed (a lot!) to subscribe to, bask in the glow of you work being perused by your fellows and students in the library reading room.

        Step 13) Other researchers read you paper, muse on it, write letters to the editors pointing out potential flaws, embark upon their own reasearch to either demonstrate the flaws in your hypothesis, or push the field you've opened up a little futher. This is the gist of peer review. Goto 1

        A summary of the problem:

        Peer review is strong, valid method of rigourously insuring that research gets aired by the academic community as a whole, ideas a thrown up, explored, demonstrated to be flawed and rejected, or duplicated by others and begin to solidify into the main accepeted knowledge of the field. Parasitically upon this are the journals. You pay to submit your work and you pay to read it, though they do provide a vital initial step in the peer review process, ultimately its only the view, the accepted wisdom? of a couple of experts in that field and a couple of glossy covers with a brand name on the front. Then even more significantly, others have to pay large sums indeed to read about your work, subscribing to the journal in question, or forking out for a individual copy from the journal [£5 a shot in the UK]. Moreover by publishing you've signed over all rights to the journal in question.

        Fun-fun.

    • Re:So What ? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by CaptainAlbert ( 162776 )
      > but the editor at first was the one separating good studies from stupid ones...

      True, but sometimes not true enough. :) When I was at uni (humble undergrad) I joined one of the many reading groups run by academic staff in their "spare" time. We would pick papers relevant to the work of various group members (students and staff alike), make sure everyone had the background information they needed, and spent an hour or so picking through recently published papers.

      On maybe one occasion in three, we came to the conclusion that "this shouldn't have been published"; "This was clearly written up from a grant proposal"; "We did this last year and *we* got it to work", and so on.

      On the other hand, if it weren't for "dodgy" journals, a lot of final-year student projects wouldn't find their way into conference proceedings - a really good morale booster for overworked, underpaid students!

      I think they've done the right thing. Bringing the barriers to access down is a good thing. Hell, if they want free access with a perr-reviewed ratings system, they could always use Slashcode...

    • Re:So What ? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TheMidget ( 512188 )
      For years people had problem publishing.

      The initiators of this movements were not mediocre scientist bickering because they couldn't get there papers published, but rather the whole community, who was fed up with having to feed a middle-man that was adding no value. And by middle-man, I don't mean the reviewers (who also worked pro bono...), but rahter the fat cat corporations that contracted out everything except collection to volunteers.

      The new "free" (as in beer...) JMLR will also be peer-reviewed, so quality will still be ensured. The point is not to make a journal where every first year student can publish, the point is to cut costs and ensure free distribution of papers that are accepted by the reviewers.

    • I agree! It does seem ridiculous that journals should cream off such a large profit from redistibuting other peoples work. However, the review function that they perform is invaluable.

      I subscribe to many IEEE journals and I'm happy to pay so that I don't have to waste huge amounts of my own time wading through poorly written/researched/inaccurate articles.
      Therefore, in the absence of the editorial input of the journals there is a need for good internet based peer review systems until such time that we have automated agents to do the job for us.
      Check out CiteSeer [nec.com] to see a step in the right direction.
      • I think that you and the original poster are misinterpreting what is going on. What the letter suggests is not to remove the peer review process, but to remove the process of printing the journal and mailing it to people. For instance, would you prefer to pay money for the IEEE journals you now get in hard copy form, or pay nothing and simply download all the articles off of a web site and print them yourself? The same articles, published by the same people and reviewed by the same reviewers. Nothing about the process changes except the distribution medium and who holds the copyright.

        In fact, with the new journal the reviewers are moving to(JMLR [jmlr.org]) you can still pay money for a hard copy if you prefer. The idea is that you dont have to pay any money if you dont want to, and authors dont lose the copyrights if they dont want to.

    • The editors is not the guy separating good studies from bad ones, this is done by peer review. Doign peer review is a lot of work (if you do it correctly) and is not paid (at least not in CS). Peer review is already in place, the internet only makes thing easier (you get the papers to review as a pdf and fill a form for the review).

      The problem is that academics do a lot of work, they write the papers, review them, but get no money, and the rights you keep on your paper is limited. So basically, I write a paper, review others papers, pay my dues to IEEE, don't own my paper anymore and still have to pay for other people's papers, I don't call this bickering.

    • Maybe the Internet will help with a peer review system, but this asks for organisation and good practice...

      Well they could always go with a Slash Based system for peer review.

      But I do not know that this would be very organized. [smile]

      and keeping out the non pros would also be an issue to some degree if it is a public forum. since the fruits, nuts, and flakes may want to congregate there to push their pet theories and agendas etc.

      But can it be any worse than here?

      • But can it be any worse than here?

        yes - what goes on here is unlikely to kill anyone. A "peer reviewed" paper in a formerly respectable (and still respected) journal telling parents that vaccines will kill their kids, or germs don't really exist and antibiotics are poison, or use homeopathy for your kid with luekemia instead of actual treatment... The need for truth is not some abstract good, that we can ballance out in the end cause more truth got through than BS. In some fields, its a matter of public safety.

        Kahuna Burger
        • The humor was a little dry there, I see.

          Since anyone who has read Slash for a while realises what a fiasco it can be sometimes.

          But I think that the idea can be made to work if the back end processes in the Slash Code for submitting articles becomes sophisticated enough to handle that kind of thing. Right now they are "good enough" for the current job, and would need some work to allow for the discussion that the editors in such magazines obviously go through in choosing itmes for publication.

    • There has been a vary interesting ongoing debate [nature.com] about the role of online access in publishing original scientific research that has been hosted by the journal Nature [nature.com]. It features articles by some vary high profile contributors (from our circles) such as Tim Berners-Lee [nature.com], Richard Stallman [nature.com] and Tim O'Reilly [nature.com] although far more interesting are the opinions from members of the scientific communities directly effected by this issue.

      --CTH

    • Re:So What ? (Score:2, Redundant)

      by volpe ( 58112 )

      Maybe the Internet will help with a peer review system, but this asks for organisation and good practice...


      Don't we have a halfway decent peer-review system right here on /.? Can this mechanism be used for scientific "papers"?

  • I'm looking forward to this. If they pull this off,
    hopefully others will follow the example.

  • Thats all good and well... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...but who pays for the hosting and the bandwith?

    Information may want to be free, but a fat pipe will cost you.
    • Maybe the subscription fees currently being paid to the dead-tree publishers would help?

      Also, a fat pipe may cost you, but most academic institutions already have them, and anyway how fat a pipe do you need to host a website whose content is of real interest to at most a few thousand people worldwide? We're not talking google (or even slashdot) here.

      -Andy
      • Now, "a website whose content is of real interest to at most a few thousand people worldwide" is exactly what we try to find here @ Slashdot.

        A nice little Website with interesting, fresh data for open minded geeks (yes this IS humor 8)

        Then you get a nice 18.000 hits within 6 hours.
        And you clog the whole Uni network...

        + If you put a Freenet node on an uni net :
        1 / You won't have access, as all the students will try to connect to it to get Pr0n or Movies

        2/ Within 3 days, the FBI will come and bust the server 'caus it "could" be holding "sensible data"...

        8|

        • Good point about the slashdot effect, but on the other hand, how often does slashdot link to an actual peer-reviewed academic paper as opposed to a magazine article or just plain cool site?

          I'm just thinking that on the whole with this stuff, the content's going to be so "dry" as to make it unappetising for a mass audience.
          I agree with your freenet thoughts, mind. :-)

          -Andy
      • I think Andy is right, last poster wrong

        i was doing the sums on this a while ago. A friend of mine asked his father (a prof of Gaelic) what the distribution of a journal in the field would be, and the answer was a couple of hundred copies a month. This is tiny tiny load for a server (and Andy is right that the content will generally be too dry to encourage slashdot effect). Even a couple of thousand is still small traffic really (there are not nearly so many articles in a monthly journal as there are stories in a month of /., and people don't constantly recheck the January edition of the journal to see if there is a chance for first post)

        Hosting such a journal on the Uni network would be a drop in the ocean compared to the bandwith used by students for porn. Main cost would be making sure there was someone qualified to run the box and keep backups. Unis pay huge fees for paper journals as it is, i think they could stump up the small costs of hosting a journal or too on their networks!
        m
    • I guess it won't get as much traffic as slashdot - a superduper pipe won't be needed. Some university will probably donate the hosting. Didn't they say the hard copy will be published by MIT Press?. The editor in chief is from MIT. The whois contact is from MIT.

      I don't think MIT will go bust hosting this.
    • Press Release [mit.edu] on the Journal of Machine Learning Research site [jmlr.org] gives a partial answer to the question how they will finance this. In addition of getting money from printed version and paid electronic edition (with additional features) on the CatchWord, SPARC helps them. SPARC [arl.org] is an alliance of universities and research libraries that supports increased competition in scientific journal
      publishing.
    • ...but who pays for the hosting and the bandwith?

      The new jounal is being hosted by the AI lab at MIT. The bandwidth cost will be insignificant compared to the cost of buying just one journal for the AI lab library. The internal charge was something like $40 a month per machine for the non Tech Sq. parts of MIT. AI just paid a fixed amount and maintained its own machines.

      When I was there we were publishing all Clinton's press releases out of the AI lab before they moved the publications system down to the Whitehouse. The biggest bandwidth hog though was the 'Stockmaster' hack that took on a life of its own and eventually spun out as a business.

      The whole point of the AI lab is to work on projects of that sort. The more interesting question is how the funding model is to be scalled to more journals.

      What is needed is a repository that can provide a guarantee of persistence. This would need to be maintained at multiple sites with disaster recovery etc.

      Ultimately the world copyright libraries will step into this role, the Library of Congress, British Library, Oxford, Cambridge etc. The cost of running servers to deliver several thousand journals would be no more than a few million a year. That is much less than is currently spent on journals.

      The other part of the puzzle is finding the money to fund the publication process. However the editors generally give their time for free today and what admin support the publishers provide tends to be focused on the printing and distribution side of the process.

      It is even quite likely that there will be commercial sponsorship available. The naming rights for such a journal repository would be quite valuable.

      • What is needed is a repository that can provide a guarantee of persistence. This would need to be maintained at multiple sites with disaster recovery etc.

        I believe they do this for math, physics, cs and nonlinear science at xxx.lanl.gov [slashdot.org]. Its funded by the government so who knows how long it will last, but supposedly it was created as a permanent storage for academic papers in these fields.

  • Of course... (Score:5, Informative)

    by squaretorus ( 459130 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:19AM (#2405405) Homepage Journal
    ... this won't solve many of the real problems in getting published.
    During my time in academia I was incredibly frustrated by the senior staffs refusal to support certain PHD and post-Docs in their attempts to get published, for fear that a refused paper would sully the reputation of the department within that journal.
    Further, they refused to allow these individuals to publish their work directly online as it was copyrighted to the department, even though they did not wish to put it to use.
    We need a far reaching rethink of the whole publishing cycle to be led by a small team of forward thinking academics to route out these issues and propose a new system.

    You may be thinking 'poor diddums not getting published' but there is a good ercentage of the output of the worlds academic research that is valid, moves the knowledge forward, but fails to get published. If it ain't published a corporation can come along and re-invent it under a patent - which most /.ers would agree is a BAD THING.

    • Re:Of course... (Score:2, Informative)

      by TheMidget ( 512188 )
      During my time in academia I was incredibly frustrated by the senior staffs refusal to support certain PHD and post-Docs in their attempts to get published, for fear that a refused paper would sully the reputation of the department within that journal.

      Or worse: senior staff who refuse to support students wanting to publish their papers in some of the "lesser" journals or conferences. Fear of sullying the reputation of the lab at those journals was not even a concern, as the lab didn't publish at all in them. It was more the fear of sullying the reputation of the lab by stooping so low as to send papers to those journals that was a concern. End result: most Phd students at this only had 1 or 2 publications before their thesis, whereas in neighboring labs they totalled 50 or more...

      • Re:Of course... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by fish waffle ( 179067 )
        End result: most Phd students at this only had 1 or 2 publications before their thesis, whereas in neighboring labs they totalled 50 or more...

        I suppose it depends on the field, but if you're churning out 50+ papers in the time it takes to do your PhD, you've either hit the motherlode of all research topics, you're Erdos, or more likely:
        • you're just rehashing the same thing over and over
        • you're name is on papers you had little to do with.
        • you've managed to find 50 journals that will publish just about anything
        • you've been doing your PhD for 50 years.
        • Agreed -- tell me the names of the places that these people who published 50 papers before their PhD published in... please :).
        • A more reasonable interpretation is that the other lab(s) totaled 50 or more. 50 publications split between a lab of 10 or so students would give 3-6 publications for the average PhD student. -- not an unreasonable output for a good lab.

          At the very least, the department should allow the, otherwise unpublished, reports to be released as department Technical Reports. This would, at least, give the students some release. It would also prevent the patenting of the students' research by a leech company.

          One note here: copyright doesn't exist until a paper is published. Also: the student should have at least some copyright rights to a paper that they write themselves. The university should, at worst, have non-exclusive rights to the paper.

          I'll be visiting a lab, today, where I used to work. I'll see if I can get them to look at this article..

      • In my university they judge a person's performance by the number of papers they produce. As such some professors would frequent just about any publication at all to get the numbers. Given this context, the quality of a person's research these days co-relates poorly with the number of papers they publish. Hence I have to applaud the responsible attitude of your senior staff.

        In general, if a paper do not contibute to new understanding, better let it be unpublished than to burden the world with more garbage. Reviewers' and readers' times are not less precious than yours!

    • Re:Of course... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Optimus9 ( 236859 )
      You're right- this won't solve all of the major problems of getting published, but it will solve the problem of money-hungry publishers exploiting libraries and subscribers for every last penny.

      But if this model does take off, then interest and contributions to the journal will only rise. Which in turn, means that more good work will get out there. Hefty online interest can mean that e-journals will have the ability to dictate to print publishers the terms.

      NB: Some journals now send out articles for peer-review with the names of the authors blanked out. Blind peer-review. It's rather surprising who actually gets turned down in these cases.

  • It's not just biologists (Score:5, Informative)

    by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:20AM (#2405407) Homepage
    I'm doing a PhD in Mathematics, and as such I'm hoping that I'll be writing papers that might be publishable at some point in the near(ish :) future. Because of this, I've been looking at the publishing terms of some of the Maths journals -- and they're absolutely terrible!

    For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web. I could perhaps understand some of the restrictions if authors were paid for their work, but they're not (except in academic kudos).

    I first noticed the problem when researching using (which is basically google for CS & applied maths papers -- give it a try!) -- all the papers you can find are preprints, and many of the ones you want just aren't freely available. Even when your employer (or the university) does sign up for the site licenses to get electronic copies of the articles, they're difficult to get hold of, and almost invariably in the annoying PDF format... (hard to manipulate, impossible to extract data from). [nec.com]

    All of these small journals are owned by one or two massive publishing conglomerates. The fees and restrictions imposed are *utterly* archaic and obscene. We need freely available, peer reviewed, reputable academic journals.
    • don't know what the fuck happened there... I wrote the link correctly in the source... let's try it again and see what happens:

      CiteSeer [nec.com]

    • Re:It's not just biologists (Score:5, Informative)

      by PrimeEnd ( 87747 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:38AM (#2405626)
      For example, 'Advances in Mathematics' take basically all of your rights to your paper away. You are basically not allowed to publish the article in any form, by any method -- including making it downloadable from the web.


      All the journals of the American Math. Society allow you to keep the copyright to your papers, and hence do anything you want with them. Of course, if you keep copyright you have to grant the AMS the right to publish your article. I know this is unusual, but I doubt it it totally unique.


      There are numerous small journals which are not owned by conglomerates. In addition to those owned by professional societies like, AMS, SIAM, MAA, there are many which are "owned" by departments, e.g. Michigan Math Journal, Illinois Math. Jour., etc.


      Good online versions are often lacking, I agree but, to a large extent, this need is met by the LANL preprint server (look here [ucdavis.edu]). If you post your article here at the same time you submit it for publication, it will be available for free to everyone in a variety of formats. Just make sure you submit to a journal which allows this.


      This allows everyone access to your work and you still get the "kudos" when the paper is formally accepted and published.

  • Online conferences too, not just journals... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ami Ganguli ( 921 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:21AM (#2405414) Homepage

    I worked on an online conference about this time last year with a couple of researchers. It was pretty cool actually. Two guys who worked at universities in different continents did most of the organization and I did the technical work. We put about thirty papers on the web site and set up a nice forum system for participants to discuss the papers. Think Slashdot, but instead of short blurbs there were long detailed articles complete with diagrams and photos, and the discussion was much more on-topic. Signal to noise was excellent. We ended up with about 300 "participants".

    The interesting thing is that it could never have happened as a "physical" conference. The subject discussed (trypanosomes) affected mostly developing countries and the researchers wouldn't have been able to afford to fly from diverse parts of the world to present their work in person. And a physical conference could never be organized on a shoestring by three people living on different continents.

    Online conferences aren't nearly as much fun as everybody getting together and partying for a weekend, but it's a great way to get researchers from around the world together in one virtual space for constructive discussion.

  • Peer Review Online (Score:5, Interesting)

    by under_score ( 65824 ) <mishkin.berteig@com> on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:22AM (#2405415) Homepage

    The internet/www is one of those really nifty technologies that changes the whole way of doing many things. Because the internet allows for incredible amounts of interactivity (not taken advantage of by most sites), peer review suddenly becomes much more "real". Traditional journals have a small number of peers who serve to review any given article, and constant discussion is not generally published.

    The internet of course can completely change that where any peer can review any work. And why stop at scientific publishing? And why stop at publishing for that matter. Much published work serves an educational purpose as well as a documentary purpose.

    So, here is a plug for my online educational community, Oomind. It allows anyone to publish, and to review, and to have that review reflected in an educational context. Basically, you can write a "courselet", and post it on Oomind. The courselet is initially given an evaluation by yourself, the author based on 10 attributes including practicality, information content, beauty and creativity among others. Once the courselet is on the system, others can also review it and the attributes have scores based on a weighted average of all the evaluations. The educational part comes in when you or others add quiz questions to your courselet. These questions are also weighted based on peer evaluations, and those weights determine how much credit one gets for the courselet when the question is answered correctly. Your educational credit is cumulative rather than percentage based. There are many other features to the system as well which create a democratic and more importantly meritocratic system.

    If you are interested, you can check out: the main oomind site [oomind.com], the philosophy of oomind [oomind.com], and a general introduction to oomind [oomind.com].

    • Re:Peer Review Online (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jstott ( 212041 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @09:07AM (#2405725)
      The internet/www is one of those really nifty technologies that changes the whole way of doing many things. Because the internet allows for incredible amounts of interactivity (not taken advantage of by most sites), peer review suddenly becomes much more "real". Traditional journals have a small number of peers who serve to review any given article, and constant discussion is not generally published.

      The internet of course can completely change that where any peer can review any work. And why stop at scientific publishing? And why stop at publishing for that matter. Much published work serves an educational purpose as well as a documentary purpose.

      As someone who publishes in traditional peer-reviewed journals, let me add a few comments to this. What journal peer review provides that can never be replaced by an open forum like Slashdot is credibility. The journal editor is responsible for selecting reviewers who are knowledgeable in their field. These editors, at least in the physics journals I've worked with, are responsible professionals committed to publishing a high-quality journal and not just ego-driven hacks. Because the editors are considered trust-worther by the journal readers, articles subjected to a peer-review process can be take seriously (they can still have mistakes, of course, but usually not obvious ones).

      Similarly, because article reviewers are selected based on their professional credentials, reviewer comments in a peer-reviewed journal are worth my serious consideration. I may disagree, with the reviewer, but that's part of the process and I'm given the opportunity to respond to the reviewer's criticisms as a normal part of the review process. Finally, because the review is blind (either single-blind or double-blind depending on the journal), the reviewer can safely criticize a more established colleague without fear of retribution. On a peer-reviewd journal, with an editor as the final arbitrator, this procedure works. On the internet, though, either reviews are public which opens the viewer up to retribution, or the reviews are completely anonymous in which case the reviewer lacks all credibility.

      A comment made by a random AC on slashdot, in contrast, is not worth my [professional] time. There are just too many posts by too few knowledgable people. Even with the established pre-print servers (which are not peer reviewed but of considerably higher signal-to-noise ratio than most other public forums), it isn't worth the time and effort to read the articles unless I already know one of the authors, either personally or by reputation.

      In sort, peer-review is not some arbitrarily imposed requirement from on high; when handled properly it is a valued part of the scientific process and I will not take the time to read any journal that does not maintain peer review. There are only so many hours in a day and I would prefer to use them to get real work done instead of wading through a stack of dubious articles on the off chance that one of the authors will have something worth-while to say.

      -JS

      P.S. For the record, I read slashdot on my own [personal] time. This is entertainment, not work.

      • What you've given is an argument in favor of peer-reviewing, not an argument in favor of traditional dead-tree journals. It's perfectly possible to have peer-reviewing in a journal that's completely electronic, and free as in beer. See First Monday [firstmonday.dk] for an example.


        It's also possible to publish a journal using fairly traditional methods of distribution, but to have a contract that allows the papers to be distributed electronically for free. There's nothing incompatible about print and electronic publishing -- lots of newspapers and magazines (e.g. Scientific American) make their articles available electronically. Well, OK, they're incompatible if your prices for the print version are ridiculously high... ;-)

  • Would it be possible to do what law schools do, and create university-published journals staffed by grad students? (Not that I know how to get here from there...)

  • It's about time (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If anything, the Internet provides for the removal of the middle man. Specially on a highly coherent group such as scientists.

    Plus, most scientific publishing houses charge premium for periodicals whose authors don't get much (or don't get paid at all).

    Kudos for the scientists. I hope this becomes an epidemic.

  • Setup a peer review site like slashdot. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MongooseCN ( 139203 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:35AM (#2405447) Homepage
    Have everyone post their scientific journals, then other educated people can rate the journels. Why limit the peer review process to the opinions of a select group of people? And when people are selected into these groups, they are usually choosen because they have the same opinion as the rest of the people in the group. Then the journal published by that group becomes biased, which isn't very scientific.

    There should be some kind of registration process so some 12 year old kiddy can't submit a journel on UFO study and get all his friends to rate it up. The registration won't stop that, but most kiddies won't bother going through a registration to screw with a website.

    • Re:Setup a peer review site like slashdot. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:55AM (#2405493) Homepage
      Why limit the peer review process to the opinions of a select group of people?

      Because there's a lot of idiots in the world.

      The purpose of peer review isn't so much to decide if results are interesting enough to be worth publishing; the purpose of peer review is mainly to decide if results are *correct* enough to be worth publishing. For an average paper in a major scientific journal, there might only be a few dozen people in the world who are qualified to make that judgement. Fortunately, the journal editors know who does what research, and thus the journal editors can send papers to the right reviewers.

      If you open up peer review to the masses, you'll have people "moderating up" papers because "they look interesting", even if the papers are complete BS -- because most people can't tell the difference between a scientific paper and BS. We see the same thing on /. -- very often comments are moderated up as "insightful" or "informative" even though the comments are actually *completely wrong*.

      At an absolute minimum, peer review should be restricted to people who have published papers in related fields; ideally, it should be restricted to people who have published several major papers in related fields... which is exactly the status quo of peer-reviewed journals.
      • Maybe you should only be allowed to review a paper on a peer review website if you have submitted a paper for review. Initially there will not be many reviewers but as time goes on more and more people will have submitted papers and will be able to review other papers. Maybe even limit the reviewers ability to only review papers in the same catagory as the papers they have submitted.

    • *Worst idea EVER* (truth is harder) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by KahunaBurger ( 123991 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:31AM (#2405604)
      There should be some kind of registration process so some 12 year old kiddy can't submit a journel on UFO study and get all his friends to rate it up. The registration won't stop that, but most kiddies won't bother going through a registration to screw with a website.

      But a bunch of creationist adults will devote 5 hours a day every day to doing just that, but with papers sufficiently well written that they seem scientific to a casual reader. And all the sudden, you have a bunch of "peer reviewed" highly rated anti evolution creationist BS* sitting on a respected journals lap. NO WAY!

      And don't even tell me that the negitive ratings from all the good scientists will ballance it out. Even if they suspect its BS, a decent scientist will not moderate something down until she has taken the time to look it over and check the methodology to make sure she isn't rejecting it out of hand because she has tons of experience that the end result has to be wrong. As for "peer reviewers are biased against some conclusions", sure you get biased after the 20th time the same conclusion turns out to be supported by sloppy work, wishful thinking and all out lies, but you still check the methodology to see which one it was this time.

      But the point is that honest work takes longer than lies. Debunking lies takes more time and effort than presenting them. Moderating down conclusions that contridict your holy book takes less time than the propperly designed research it took to come to them. And the people who care the most about spreading lies are often devoting most of their lives to it, while the people most motivated and qualified to correct those lies are doing other possitive research and don't have the luxury of playing wack-a-mole with the latest psuedoscientific voodoo all day.

      Nutshell: TRUTH IS HARDER. In an open marketplace of ideas managed by libertarian principles and voted on democratically, the truth will get its ass kicked. I'm sorry that we don't live in that perfect world where "the solution to bad information is good information, not supression" or "the truth will out" or any of those other nice thoughts with no basis in reality. Really sorry.

      *and just to not pick only on the biggest target, lets not forget perpetual motion, psychic healing, ESP, alien visitation, racial infer/super-iority, gender work from both sides of the fence, conspiracy theories, power lines cause cancer, soil theory, homeopathy, dowsing, ok just put "Flim Flam" table of contents here....

      Kahuna Burger
      • Absolutely. I can cite examples from my own field, audio.

        The trouble with audio as a scientific field is that it's hugely driven by vendors: almost everything taken as gospel was being pushed by some vendor at some point or other. It's as bad as medicine- very tough to find anyone who isn't backing a commercial interest.

        Ten years ago, we had a wave of vendor-backed authorities arguing desperately that direct-sampled 16/44 digital was audio perfection. Right now, it's widely accepted in serious pro audio circles that working with more resolution is better, and you'll _still_ hear echoes from the days where the gospel was, 'CD (just any CD no matter what you do) contains all sound anyone could ever hope to hear!'.

        Currently, we have Sony trying to push SACD (aka DSD encoding), and on the one hand, trying to sell it as a multitracking/intermediate format (which is stupid, it's a final output format) and on the other, suggesting its recognizably lusher sound is due to high frequency extension- when in fact its performance at genuinely supersonic content is considerably distorted, and its real strong suit is in producing extraordinarily high resolution at LOW frequencies.

        If all you had was kooks filling the air with misinformation and noise, it'd be difficult, but when the actual 'scientists' are putting spin on things for marketing reasons (easier to sell high frequency response than resolution space?), it is IMPOSSIBLE to have an open marketplace of ideas on libertarian principles.

        Just taking my one example, Sony with its SACD, you would not believe some of the stuff I've heard about what Sony's doing. I'm given to understand they are tightly controlling what truth can get out there- for instance I've been told you can't get the recording equipment unless you legally agree not to test it, or put out noise-floor charts, that sort of thing- and the bleeding irony of this is that the format _is_ a great format. It's got striking characteristics that could be 'spun' as flaws, but really aren't. But seriously exploring the performance of this stuff in a scientific way is not an option with things controlled so tightly, and that's what happens when you have a totally uncontrolled 'marketplace of ideas'. It's not just the kooks who want to make things go a certain way. Again, my understanding is that Sony are doing the same thing, simply because they want to oversell SACD as a recording format, and because they don't trust that they'll be able to explain it to Joe Consumer as anything more sophisticated than 'more treble! Listen to the more treble!'. When in fact the real story is much more complicated and interesting than that- but requires pretty deep knowledge of the art to understand why it works as well as it does.

        Truth is harder, and more expensive: sometimes when lies have more market value, truth isn't something you can even afford to get from the idea market. You're on your own when that happens.

    • It's not going to happen (professional suicide) (Score:4, Informative)

      by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @10:29AM (#2406066) Journal
      Look, the amount of time to create a paper is *massive*. I've sat for months before writing a word, and on the currentproject I've been solving the same equations for weeks now. Two "non-evolutionary" papers a year is a staggering workload.


      I'll be able to place these in upper journals. Three or four of those will lead to tenure, giving me close to ten swings in the pre-tenure period--some of which will miss.


      If I send those to a slashdot-style forum, my boss will laugh. They'll count something less than a one-line quote in a small town newspaper.


      Also, given the areas aI work in, there are only a small handful of people world-wide qualified to comment. [I don't think a single member of my committe understood my entire dissertation, but I usually had two of the three major professors {yes, with a joint degree and resarch funding from an outside department 3 of the 5 committe members are major professors; it broke the latex style sheet} understanding any given point]. I really don't *care* what most of the readership of such a site would think of the paper--hopefully folks might learn something, but almost none are qualified to comment. (Ironic sidenote: the current project stemmed from violating my rule about battles of wits with unarmed persons here on slashdot--the proof that he's wrong is actually interesting . . .)


      On the other hand, there's clearly room for traditional peer review with on-line publication. I'll continue submitting to the theft-style journals, as they're the "A" journals [and most even have submission *fees*] until tenure. Post-tenure, I still wouldn't toss things off to slashdot-style sites, as publication still matters for raises and full professors--but I'll certainly be in a position to keep ownership.


      doc hawk

      • If I send those to a slashdot-style forum, my boss will laugh. They'll count something less than a one-line quote in a small town newspaper.

        This is true. Even though I supported the public library of science initiative (reported earlier on slashdot, and also here [genomeweb.com], I'm about to submit an article to TIBS. An article on GenomeWeb just won't cut it.

        However, that is not going to be the case forever. As data mining techniques become more available and sophisticated, that is to say, when real data mining (as opposed to just text matching) becomes a major way in which academics access content, articles in "free" journals are going to be *more* visible to your colleagues, and as important discoveries are coordinated using such techniques, citations will rise, and those journals will rise in prestige. This is going to aggravate what is allready a real schism within the academic community, of int. property versus the pursuit of truth. I think it's going to be a struggle - for the very soul of academia which is really under threat here - but I think we're going to win, because cutting out the middle-man makes for a more efficient way of sharing information, because history isn't over and materialism isn't really the driving force behind human creativity, and because people who love science for it's own sake are better at it.

        An earlier poster said that the current system drives the smartest people out of academia and into industry. I couldn't disagree more - I don't think people in (the biotech) industry are very smart at all. They're kind of pathetic, mostly. I'll agree that there are a lot of frankly stupid "scientists" doing terrible work at supposedly public universities on the private dollar, and that the people who jump ship into industry are often a bit smarter than they are; but the smartest, most devoted people are still in the public sector.
        • >However, that is not going to be the case forever.


          I certainly don't think that it's going to *stop* at the level of conversion of the current system to electronic media. THere wil *certainly* be changes, and I'd expect multi-stage review of some level to happen--perhaps the "A" journals raid the "B"'s, who raid the "C"'s, and so forth. I have no idea where it will ultimately land, but something "looser" will certainly come out of it.


          However, I don't think it will get all the way to a slashdot-stlye free-for-all where anyone can jump in. That would be as silly as a slashdot poll on which code to use in the kernel . . .(oh, dear, I probably shouldn't have mentioned that . . . :)


          hawk

  • try Selling the idea to scholars... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:42AM (#2405458)
    ...I remember attempting to convice my mother (a PhD mol-biologist researcher with Stanford at the time) that this *was* the way of the future and that she should be an early adopter.

    I was sternly rebuffed... apparently Stanford has an indoctranation lecture that all researchers are *required* to attend before commencing *any* research in labs at Stanford. Anyway... to make a long story short, the put forward a killer pitch at protecting the researcher's research efforts, while maximizing the commercial and prestege impact that Stanford can offer. After exiting the 3 hour indoct, every last researcher is completely adverse to anything that is not lock-step with Stanford's status quo.

    Reality turns out to be a little different once the politics are factored in. Get enough researchers pissed off and the only way to contol them will be to control the grant doll lists that may of these second rate academic hacks subsist off of... the rest exit academia and find a good patent attorney. Overall, peer-review and university poltics are an excellent darwinian mechanism by which the best and brightest are push into industry where they can have the most impact.

    As for all the dot-commers that are going back to Uni (or just going to school for the first time)... I think the academic status quo is in for quite a surprise. I mean once you've actually experienced Work Made for Hire, Non-Disclosures, Agreements for Non-Compete and other instruments of legal torture, you'll be less likely to enter the academic intellectual property meatgrinder willingly... After all, holding a degree or the ability to complete your education harassment free over your head is a hell of a lot less impressive than fscking with your ability to find work (academic work transfers easily... law suites linger for *years*... any time a university puts a contract in front of you that allows them to engage you ouside of their academic turf, just say "No!")

  • Giving up rights to your own work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RavenDuck ( 22763 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:44AM (#2405463)
    I'm a social scientist (criminologist), and while I'm not widely published, I've got a couple of papers out there. It's always seemed disturbing to me that you are required to sign away copyright to your own work to be published in any of the major jornals. You need to get permission from the publisher to even reproduce a section of your own work.

    Academic journals have a curious role in modern world. They are incredibly expensive to subscribe to, receive all their content at no expense to themselves, and even the peer reviewing is usually on a volunteer basis. However the "publish or perish" attitude of many in academia ensures that they are able to continue making a killing.

    One wonders how much longer these publishing companies are going to be able to get away with it, especially now when so many people are publishing themselves online first, and submitting them to journals later.

  • Two good things about dead trees (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Epeeist ( 2682 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:44AM (#2405464) Homepage
    The only couple of qualms I would have about this are
    1. Published papers are available virtually forever. Go down to the Bodleian library and book out articles published by Michael Faraday or Robert Hook. Whatever they do here has got have the same sort of permanence.
    2. Remember all those tapes that NASA has that they don't have the drives for anymore, or don't know the format? Paper doesn't have that sort of problem. Again, they need to ensure that whatever they produce can be moved on to whatever the current technology is
    Other than that I think it is an excellent idea. I hope it scares the shit out of whatever the journal publishing equivalent of the RIAA is.

    • Published papers are available virtually forever.

      While famous papers are widely available, this is not true of all papers.

      The sheer volume of pages published creates a real storage problem. Where to put all these pages. Libraries have but a finite amount of space.

      A second problem is the price of many journals. Libraries have stopped subscribing to a number of journals because they simply can't afford it. Combine this with the proliferation of journals and many aren't even available in your library today, to say nothing of several hundred years from now.

      Now if your point is that if there is one paper copy in one library then it is available well in a trivial sense your point is correct.

      But if you are claiming that publishing an article in any journal in paper form guarantees easy availability four hundred years from now you are mistaken.

      Steve M

    • True, paper has wonderful archival properties if you take good care of it. But left to its own devices, and barring fantastic OCR, it isn't machine-readable. Maybe the best of both worlds would be to accompany printed text with a 2-D bar code (see info here [rdrop.com] and here [adams1.com]), which are space-efficient and wouldn't add too many square inches.

      Maybe future researchers will have fantastic OCR cheaply available, and the benefits of barcodes won't be worthwhile. But maybe not, and why make their job unnecessarily more difficult?

  • My idea for research publication... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @07:44AM (#2405465)
    Peer-review is very much necessary for research papers; there is a lot of 'junk' science that makes it way through the process and thus contributes little to the field at large (Any journal with 'Letters' in the title typically is little or no peer review since the articles there are for fast-track publication -- this is typically where you'll see junk).

    I had an idea a few years ago, but no way to develop it further, was to create a large on-line research journal site with community moderation akin to Slashdot. That is, you would create your article (PDF format), post it to the site, and then allow anyone else to look at it. Others can then post commentary on it and given an overall rating to the article (However, these would not be anonymous; any comments you posted or rating given would be promenently displayed as to avoid abuse). In addition, there could be a time where you would post the article but only limited users of the site would be able to view or comment on it, thus leading to the initial peer-review of the article, allowing you to make changes and improvements in the paper based on these comments.

    Obviously , there's a lot of mechanism details that would have been worked out, but I feel that a concerted effort to do this would improve the research in the academic community. Not only do you gain free distribution of the work to the mass public (or at least some minimal fee for running the site), the authors would retain their copyright on the article (as it is , most journal gain copyright for publishing it). Downside, of course, is a chicken-and-egg problem; you won't have promenent researchers using the resource until it had some reputation, and the resource wouldn't have reputation until promenent researchers would use it.

    • I have to strongly disagree with the following statement: "Any journal with 'Letters' in the title typically is little or no peer review since the articles there are for fast-track publication -- this is typically where you'll see junk." Most 'Letters' journals are "short and sweet" articles, describing one or two definative experiments, and are fast-tracked for review and publishing. I can say that the following 'Letters' journals are of excellent quality: Tetrahedron Letters, Nano Letters, Organic Letters, Applied Physics Letters. Now, these are all chemical or physics journals, so maybe the 'Letters' journals you refer to of a different scientific field which I haven't read.

      Now I do like your idea of the Slashdot-based review system, but implimenting it will be difficult. Right now, the scientific community has the momentum behind it of anonymous review. It has not been unheard of for scientific peers to get a competitors paper, absolutely butcher it to slow it getting out, and then use that edge to push their results out first. Scientists can be just as petty and nasty as the rest of humanity. Occasionally you'll find a good anonymous review, where you can tell the reviewer actually read it. However, the anonymous peer review has been going for so long that it will take quite a bit of effort to remove it.

      Also, most of the scientific community (at least the ones I know) view article reviewing as a chore, not an opportunity to improve science or learn something new. Therefore, for such an online system to work, there would have to be some incentive. Let's say we offer pay for review, but then you're back to the problem mentioned in the original post, that money is needed to run the journal, and to get people to pay, you have to restrict access, because if its free access, who's going to pay to support it? Now there is another incentive which I don't think has been mentioned - that free access to journal contents is given to the reader, provided that reader reviews X number of articles, non-anonymously and makes themselves available for comments on the article. This way, you ensure a motivation to access the article, and, you improve the whole-peer review process. By making the reviewer available for comments by the original author, the article can be improved, or, the author has the chance to explain his conclusions or clear up language in the conclusions. Again, the article is improved. Idealistic yes, but technically feasible.

      I'd like to see the scientific review process greatly improved, as I have never been satisified by the experience I have gotten for all of the papers I have gotten over my scientific career. Out of 30 publications, I can think of only 2 that went somewhat smoothly, but they each took 9 months to get the review comments back. All the others had unhelpful anonymous reviews or in a few cases, just nasty comments. The system does need to be fixed, and I think with time, especially as a new generation of scientists, willing to try new things, comes into prominence, the system will change to a more open system.
    • For the computer science field, ResearchIndex [nec.com] does some of what you want. A problem as I see it is that you don't submit papers. The one option you have is to submit a URL to a web page or ftp directory where there are some papers in PDF or PS. Another issue is that this site is more or less tracking what is available in paper form (mostly conference contributions) or tech reports.

      But users of ResearchIndex then have the option of rating papers on a scale 1 to 5, and if memory serves me, also comment on the paper.

      Nevertheless, it is a great system!

  • But in a sense, not a bad thing.

    I know that sounds all odd, but ... having watched my professors pull out articles that were being reviewed and RAG on the people that wrote them for stupid, stupid mistakes.... and very poor science to boot, I think that journals must be policed.

    Now as for revenue streams, well, yeah. Vendors place ads. When I have to design a piece of equipment, I grab the latest journal and flip thru it for whatever I need. Those scientists may not need to worry about who makes their equipment, funded thru uni's and what not, but for people that actually do the designing, it's very useful

    As for free download after a certain time period... Napster couldn't pull it off ;P Maybe this is one that the courts can decide (rightly) that ... even if it's published, the author can still require downloads as free.
    *sigh* Knowledge is power... and it's for sale ;P

  • The sooner the old system is destroyed and all scientific publishing is moved on-line, the better, not just for human researchers but for the intelligent artificial minds emerging from http:// [sourceforge.net] /projects/mind -- where several hundred Open Source AI projects are bypassing the antiquated, fossilized, mercenary money-grubbing anti-freedom mobsterality of extortionary confiscation of the entire acquisitions budget of every good research library.

    Verbum sapienti et cognoscenti: If some distinguished Netizens feel that Mentifex AI memes have been hyped overmuch via Slashdot, Usenet, Salon, E2 etc., they may please be advised that the original Mentifex theory of mind submissions were rejected by Establishment journals operating under publish-or-perish peer review.

    Then came the widespread availability of Internet access and the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. Suddenly anyone anywhere could publish anything, including the long suppressed http://www. [scn.org]/~mentifex AI memes for AI minds evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and superintelligence beyond any human IQ.

    So let the Editorial Boards of all the mainstream scientific journals resign en masse and then re-establish themselves on-line in the manner and tradition of the Los Alamos archives for not just physics but all branches of modern science.

  • They should just install Slash and set up a site. Papers will be submitted as comments. Instead of anonymous peer review, we have moderation. The only trouble will be getting all that LaTeX past the lameness filter.
  • This is good. From what I skimmed of the message, they're still advocating a review process--they're only against publishing systems that take all of the rights away from the original author(s) of the paper, and/or those systems that charge extremely high fees to allow others to view the papers.

    It's important to move away from systems like that 'cause they're bad (duh). However, it's also important that there still be some form of peer review; without it, it will be impossible to seperate the actual research from the line noise.

  • Publishing With Proprietary Formats (Score:4, Insightful)

    by macsforever2001 ( 32278 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:02AM (#2405515) Homepage

    The new open journal, JMLR [mit.edu] that replaced the old one is a great solution to the problem. However, I'm dismayed to find that they publish using proprietary formats. Namely PDF and Postscript. Wouldn't it, thus, cost money to save to those formats? I think they should use open standards *only*. Why not use LaTex or just plain old HTML 4? This would better allow scientists from developing countries to publish their work rather than wasting precious money buying licenses of Adobe Acrobat. It seems they are fighting closed proprietary standards in the first place and should not be supporting them.

    Furthermore, I could actually read the articles much easier than saving to a file and launching a bloated Adobe application or, gasp, use that annoying PDF plug-in that usually crashes my browser [mozilla.org].

    • I'm dismayed to find that they publish using proprietary formats. Namely PDF and Postscript. Wouldn't it, thus, cost money to save to those formats?

      As far as I know, you don't need a licence to produce PostScript. Just get the language reference and start churning out PostScript, like you would with LaTeX. Heck, a whole lot of word processors can either save to PostScript natively or via a printer driver, which is often free. (For example, PS is the lingua franca of printing on most Linux platforms AFAIK.)

      Why not use LaTex or just plain old HTML 4?

      HTML is not such a good idea for wide parts of the scientific community IMO since it doesn't include good support for things such as equations or special symbols, without the need to resort to images for all those things. At least not until more browsers implement MathML or a fairly well-stocked Unicode font (which would help with symbols but not with equations that go beyond <sup> and <sub>).

      Cheers,
      Philip.

    • It is true that both PostScript and PDF are proprietary formats (owned by Adobe), but it does not cost any money to generate documents in those formats. In fact, it can be done entirely with free software.

      When you write a paper in LaTeX, how do you print it? It is very likely that you run LaTeX/TeX to create a DVI file, then dvips to convert the DVI to PostScript, which you then send to a printer. You could equally well run dvipdf to convert the DVI to PDF. Both dvips and dvipdf are free software. Converting TeX to PostScript and/or PDF with open-source tools is not only possible; it is a natural part of using TeX.

      $ pkg_info -W /usr/local/bin/dvips
      /usr/local/bin/dvips was installed by package teTeX-1.0.7
      $ pkg_info -W /usr/local/bin/dvipdf
      /usr/local/bin/dvipdf was installed by package ghostscript-5.50
    • Uh, PDF is my preferred format for publishing. It looks exactly the same as the paper version, can easely be viewed and printed by non-techincal people, and thanks to pdflatex I can use my favorite source language. As an extra bonus, with \usepackage{hyperref}, all my references become hyperlinks.

  • The big picture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:03AM (#2405519)
    What I don't understand about all of this is why are there so few people who can see 'the big picture', including our law makers, businessmen and leaders.

    Many people stupidly saw the .com boom and bust as demonstrating that the internet isn't as important as was generally thought, because they assumed that what would happen is just a variation on what went before. They don't understand that the internet is causing fundamental changes to the way the world works.

    The world now has a new a new set of rules which over the coming decades are going to completely change the business landscape. Record companies - which currently make money by duplicating, distributing and promoting physical manifestations of music - are going to die, because duplicating, distributing and promoting music can be done at virtually zero cost by anyone now.

    Software companies that create and charge high prices for infrastructure and very widely used software are going to die out because their software is so widely used that it will make more sense for their bigger customers (companies and governments) to contribute programming time to open projects than to pay for products from a single company.

    General travel agents are going to die out because they are middle men that will serve no useful purpose in the future. Ditto with publishers of scientific journals.

    Unfortunately some of our law makers seem to think this natural progression is unjust and are creating laws to restrict or outlaw the technology. There is historic president for this type of response - the Luddites, who smashed machinery during the industrial revolution because it threatened their professions. Hundreds of business types and professions died as a result of the industrial revolution. The same will happen over the coming decades of the Internet revolution.

    Unfortunately our leaders and lawmakers, under the influence of the threatened professions, are acting like Luddites in a very literal sense.

  • Biologists are rather late doing this (Score:3, Informative)

    by rbk ( 527224 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:06AM (#2405528)
    Physicists have actually started bypassing the reviewing/printing system by putting up arXiv.org [arxiv.org] long ago. Mathematicians have then followed, and other scientists are starting doing it now. Daniel Bernstein has some very useful advice for authors at his web page at http://cr.yp.to/bib.html [cr.yp.to].
    • Physicists have actually started bypassing the reviewing/printing system by putting up arXiv.org [arxiv.org] long ago.

      If they're bybassing the review system, I look forward to the publication of lots of perpetual motion/cold fusion papers given exactly the same weight as good science. I'll remember to ignore any study cited from that source....

      Unless of course there is still a review system, and you misrepresented the page.

      Biologists aren't late, they're concerned with not making their community a complete laughing stock. There is a small but motivated horde of people out there waiting to pour out their papers on how evolution is impossible, homeopathy works, germs don't exist, vaccines kill children and do nothing to stop disease and a dozen other piles of bullshit that range from annoying to dangerous. Any sort of open review or non review journal will become a quack journal in two months max. Why would anyone want to do that to themselves?

      Kahuna Burger

  • Has been done (Score:5, Informative)

    by Caid Raspa ( 304283 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:07AM (#2405533)
    Disclaimer: I have written three refereed papers to international science journals. Two more papers are in the writing phase. I am a Graduate Student, but I also have a 'real' job.

    Loads of papers, refereed and non-refereed are available at arXiv.org [arxiv.org]. The site is mainly for physics, math and related 'hard-core science'.

    Many people submit their papers to arXiv immediately after getting it accepted to a refereed journal. When I try to keep up to date, I do not use paper versions that come out months after they have been published at arXiv. I look at the relevant sections of arXiv. If something is not on arXiv, it is not news.

    • Re:Has been done (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:24AM (#2405580) Homepage
      ArXiv is great, but the problem is the non-refereed aspect of it. We need properly refereed free (or cheap :) journals... and there is really no reason why not. People don't get paid to referee papers, or submit papers... there is just this man in the middle eating all this money for no net gain to the community.

      A journal that had all its articles freely available electronically could easily charge for paper copies as long as it was reputable. All we need is for some big names to get their act together. An example where they *have* got their act together is from my University:

      Geometry & Topology [warwick.ac.uk]

      This is a peer reviewed journal on (guess what) geometry and topology. All the articles published in the journal are freely available electronically, or you can order the paper version at a low price.

      I don't see any reason for any extra distribution fee.
  • The trend is toward freely available (or nearly free) scientific publications, and I see very little that is going to stop it. Peer review and long-term availability are issues that are easily resolved.

    In large part, the publishers have brought this upon themselves by charging skyrocketing rates for subscriptions, especially to libraries. For quite a few years now, the vast majority of Computer Science papers have been available online, apparently in disregard of any publishers' terms. There is even a web site, the NEC ResearchIndex [nec.com], that has a fairly large collection of Computer Science papers.

    A major feature of scientific research has usually been the openness of scientific results; any result has generally been freely open to improvement (the DMCA has created some controversial exceptions). Now the results will become freely available to obtain as well.

  • More important than music (Score:3, Insightful)

    by armb ( 5151 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:38AM (#2405625) Homepage
    > It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small.

    If I don't want to buy new CDs (especially copy protected ones) I can still listen to live music, music recorded by my friends, second hand records, the radio, CDs I already own, etc..

    Doing science that way doesn't work.

  • Some journal prices etc for research mathematics (Score:4, Informative)

    by call -151 ( 230520 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:49AM (#2405669) Homepage
    Rob Kirby [berkeley.edu], a prominent topologist at UC Berkeley, has been active in trying to improve the journal situation for mathematicians. The idea is to boycott the high-priced journals by not submitting to them, and instead submit to journals, especially electronic ones, which are free or reasonably priced. Here is his orignal letter [berkeley.edu] and here is an updated price list [berkeley.edu]. A number of research mathematicians take these considerations into effect when deciding where to submit, so perhaps things will improve.

    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 arXiv [ucdavis.edu] 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.

    • 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.

      See, I would understand this if the journals kept on staff a horde of paid reviewers whose credentials were worth some cash. But it sounds like they are adopting the RIAA business model, where all the overhead is borne by someone else (in this case the scientist who submits the paper and the reviewer who checks it) and they just stand there and collect from a "revenue stream." This more than anything else tells me it's gotta stop. Copyright and patent were there to "promote the useful arts," and this process sounds like it's preventing them.

  • MJ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bopo ( 105833 ) <bopo@nerpHORSE.net minus herbivore> on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:53AM (#2405679) Homepage
    From the list of editors:

    Tommi Jaakkola
    Michael Jordan
    Leslie Kaelbling

    Returning to the NBA and striking a blow for academic research at the same time. Way to go, MJ!

  • Stop with the RIAA comparisons! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @08:57AM (#2405694)
    This is _completely_ different. The RIAA represents for-profit businesses. Everyone is clamoring for music; it's a big commodity, a multi-billion dollar industry.

    Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich. And for the most part the people who read them _like_ them. The simple problem is that someone takes months or more to write a paper, then that paper ends up in a journal that's only read by 100 people (e.g. The Journal of Southwestern Soil Science). _But_ if that paper were available on the web, then it would find many more readers, would be much easier to point colleagues at, and so on. Doing so, though, puts the reasearcher--in many eyes, anyway--right up there with high school students that start web sites for their pretend companies ("I'm the president, lead programmer, and web designer").

    For the record, some journals ask for first print rights only, and the author is free to put his or her articles on the web aftwerward. There's not much to complain about there.
    • So, if scientific papers actually made a lot of money for some third-party industry, then the scientists would then be socialists and renegades?

      The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.

      Is that the test?

      Music was free once, too, not too long ago. The aforementioned "test" is the only reason it no longer is.

      More power to the scientists. They understand what "copyrights" are. A deal between the distributor, artist, and the people. A temporary period of time to make a profit, then release of the material for all time, for the public good.
      • The test would be: if someone somewhere makes a lot of money on the distribution of some media, therefore the "product" should be sewed shut by law so that revenue can be enhanced and locked down forever for the distributor.

        You're overreacting.

        With music, it is simple. As much as some slashdotters don't want to admit it, there are lots of musicians and bands making good livings from having their CDs distributed by Evil Record Companies. The right for those musicians to make money is worth protecting. If scientists were making a direct living from publishing in journals--that is, if they were paid tens of thousands of dollars per paper--then there _would_ be incentive to blindly put those papers all over the web.
    • Scientific journals are a backwater. Mostly libraries buy them. No one is getting rich.

      This isn't true. Maxwell made his first millions at Pergammon by realising that libraries would continue to buy the journals, almost regardless of price. It's a textbook example of what happens when demand is insensitive to pricing.

      Also, web based journals often have even worse restrictions than the RIAA: instead of your $1000 getting this year's edition, you get access for a year to the whole catalog. If you stop paying, you're left with nothing.

      This is a very welcome development. It combines the added value of peer review, the backup of print, and the accessibility of the web.

  • arXiv FAQ's and design decisions (Score:3, Informative)

    by call -151 ( 230520 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @09:09AM (#2405731) Homepage
    Paul Ginsberg from Los Alamos gave a nice intro talk [arxiv.org] about the ideas behind the arXiv and some of the issues. Here [arxiv.org] is a collection of blurbs about the arXiv.

    There is a nice front end [ucdavis.edu] for the math articles in the arXiv. This FAQ [ucdavis.edu] has info about contributing math preprints to this well-run electronic preprint resource.

  • Here's a peer-reviewed Ecology E-Journal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jcc ( 55702 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @09:25AM (#2405780)
    Check this out: http://www.consecol.org/Journal/

    They started publishing a few years back, instigated by a well-known ecologist (C. S. Holling) and sponsored at first by an NSF grant, if I'm not mistaken.

    I should also say that there were, and are still good reasons for having traditional paper journals, such as permanent archiving, and also having a publishing house take care of all the details of printing and distribution, it frees the scientists to do more research.

    With self-publication, whether in print or web pages, they have to divide their time, or pay someone else to do it. Of course this is becoming much less of a problem because of easier to use software and the Internet.

    One huge difference with e-journals is that they can become much more widely available. With many print journals, only a few hundred or thousand copies are ever printed, they go to libraries and scientific association members. It takes time to get a hold of an article, and searching through abstracts on-line can reveal less about the article than searching through the full text, so you might miss information that is relavent to your work.

    The system of having a journal retain copyright, I presume, has functioned as a cost-control mechanism, since if only a few hundred copies of a journal are printed, they are necessarily expensive, so the best way to ensure the per-issue price is kept down, and to make it worthwhile for the publishing house to keep a stock of reprints for those interested, was to give them a monopoly over the work. At least, that is a theory.

    Anyway, another issue that maybe noone addressed here, is that you have to ensure that scietific papers are not altered for mischevious purposes and redistributed. That could cause chaos.

  • Back in the day when I cared about publishing scientific papers, it was sure nice to get into Science or Nature. However, 90% of what my research group published went into the Journal of Chemical Physics. Not glossy, just a solid weekly accumulation of scientific study.

    Such central, indexed, abstracted, and widely distributed and held journals are essential to science. Who knows if the "free" site is going to be there in 40 years. It is important that data survive a long time and be usable. Good solid basic data can easily be usable the better part of a century later.

    That means endowed funding to assure long-term on-line distribution , records in multiple locations (can't have one bad event wipe out accumulated knowledge), as well as a commitment by a large number of people in a given field to participate and maintain the quality of the product. That takes (gasp)... money.

    Oh, it was the need for money that this movement is railing against. Gee. Too bad.

  • Resources still cost. It's been a while and I was inspired to see what's become lately of my beloved *oof* Green Monster, the CRC [crcpress.com] Handbook Of Chemistry And Physics. Cool. Now I can haul a notebook computer into a lab and burn a hole through it with 10M HCL (c=

  • inertia, money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jilles ( 20976 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @10:36AM (#2406119) Homepage
    The whole problem is a simple economic problem. In the old days communicating peer reviewed papers to colleagues involved getting a printed copy to them. It was not more than logical to use the services of publishers to take care of the logistics and naturally they were in it for the money. In addition the publisher needed copyright in order to be allowed to print.

    Nowadays there is an alternative means of getting the scientific content distributed: the internet. Many scientists have already discovered the internet as a means of distributing and obtaining papers. I can't remember the last time I actually had to go to a library to look up a paper. The internet totally eliminates the need for a publisher and could potentially greatly reduce the cost involved with publishing articles without affecting the level of quality of peer review in any way. In addition the internet provides additional possibilities in the form of for example moderated forums, mailinglists etc.

    Unfortunately the publishers have built up an enormous power and are very reluctant to release it. Scientific journals are very profitable since they require a minimum of investment on their site and they have a small but loyal audience who are willing to pay relatively large amounts for journals. However over the past few years there has been a pressure to move to an internet based distribution of papers and journals. Despite this publishers still receive enormous amounts of subscription fees. At our university department, the library sucks up obscene amounts of our budget for online subscriptions and regular subscriptions. All this money (mostly coming from our government) flows to the publishers who add little or no value to the scientific product since they completely rely on external input (voluntary peer review, editing and academic authorship).

    Most journals of significance in my field are either associated with ACM or IEEE, both of which are non profit organizations, both of which are charging significant amounts of money for membership and access to papers. A step forward would be if these two organization would abandon the publishing process and focus on internet publishing only. If those two organizations set the necessary steps, the rest would have to follow. As an author who has contributed to several IEEE conferences and who has even been a IEEE member (I have resigned because of the outrageous lack of value added by a membership) I would very much like to see this happen. After all they are supposed to represent our interests rather than work against us.

    Basically I would like to see two things:
    - Authors should retain copyright over their articles. The arrangement proposed for the ML journal seems reasonable, perhaps some GNU like legal document could be created to formalize it.
    - Papers should be available and searchable at no cost. Currently I have to pay to be able to be able to download my own articles from the IEEE. I find that offensive (luckily I have copies on my homepage :-).

    In addition I would also like to see some innovations:
    - XML based structure for papers to enhance searching.
    - Addition of the before mentioned forums.
    - distributed storage of content ala freenet.

    If these requirements are met (even minus the innovations), I'll gladly renew my IEEE subscription and sign up for the ACM as well. I'm fully confident that with the logistics of the physical publishing process eliminated the membership fees can be reduced significantly. Alternatively this money can be used to set up more conferences and finance promising researchers.

    However, currently I feel that neither of these organizations are working in my interests.

  • To be fair (Score:3, Interesting)

    by big.ears ( 136789 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @10:44AM (#2406193) Homepage
    To be fair, although there is a lot to academic publishing that is from a different era, and the copyright assignment issues really anger me, there is also a lot of infrastructure that a professionally published journal provides. I often wonder how some of the more poorly-subscribed-to journals can afford to make any money, given the costs involved. For instance, there are a lot of menial costs, such as postage. An editor who receives even 50 articles a year will have to mail out hundreds of manuscripts, accept/reject letters, etc. This is often done by administrative assistants or secretaries whose salary is supplemented by the journal. Of course, a lot of these costs could be reduced by dealing totally with electronic copies, but a reviewer likes to hold a paper in hand, and so the burden of printing would be moved from the author to the reviewer--who is volunteering.

    Then, once everything has made it through the review process, the costs have just begun. Have you ever looked at a copy-edited manuscript? Even a very meticulous author will have their manuscript returned with red marks everywhere. This is an incredibly boring job that requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of time--one that you can't get people to volunteer for. A do-it-yourself for-free journal will consequently suffer from misspellings, grammatical errors, incoherent styles, etc. Then there are legal issues. For example, every time you publish a figure or data that was published elsewhere, you need to get permission in written form. Publishing companies allow this to happen, but they pay lawyers and others to make sure everything is legal and kosher.

    So, if you grant me that there are costs incurred, then you have to have accountants and bookkeepers--trained and trustworthy ones who won't abscond with the funds or "lose" them, as often happens in volunteer organizations who handle their own money. And someone to coordinate sales (to libraries and individuals). There are a lot of important, detailed things the publishers do, which can not be easily replaced by volunteers.

    I have a feeling that anyone who decides to create a high-quality refereed journal will soon find that they are doing many of the same things a publishing company does, which in the long run is bad for academics, because the scientests/authors are wasting their time on administration instead of extending knowledge. The APA [apa.org] publishes their own journals, and they are no better (and in many ways worse) than the for-profit publishing companies. They won't even publish .pdfs of articles--everything is in crappy .html

  • no cost reduction yet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Tuesday October 09, 2001 @10:55AM (#2406283)
    I have been involved with e-publishing efforts of several professional societies. The result is so far is e-journals cost almost as much as their paper counterparts because it is not cheap to properly maintain web servers, both hardware and labor costs. In fact, the cost increase if one tries to maintain a dual web & print presence. Some societies are dividing the chores- heavy duty papers in print and lightweight news and proceedings abstracts in electrons.

    If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost. For examples, journal subscriptions for $10 a year instead of $100s; low-cost web meetings instead of thousand dollar conventions. But we've seen little of this. Its not like the entire science world is in the chains of an evil publishing conspiracy. Almost everyone would like to see the cost of science cut, so they could focus on doing science.

    A positive aspect of electronic communications seems to speed up the time it takes to get to print, dropping many of the former snailmail stages. Also, e-publishing has broadened the audience somewhat to students and third world scientists who wouldn't have as easy access otherwise.
    • If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost.

      Several mathematics journals, such as 'Annals of Mathematics' and 'Geometry & Topology' are now 'overlays' of the ArXiv preprints archive -- which means that all of their articles are freely available over the internet.

      'Geometry & Topology' is a member of SPARC [arl.org] - the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. As their website says, "SPARC influences the marketplace positively by encouraging publishers to enter areas where the prices are highest and competition is needed most -- primarily in the science, technical, and medical (STM) fields"... in other words, it is an initiative to replace the old for-profit journals.

      So there are the beginnings of a decently sized movement rebelling against conglomerates like Elsevier.
  • It's nice to see a few people within the structure bowing out of it and giving clear, rant-less reasons why. It will be great if this sort of thing is someday remembered as a step toward the kind of change the Internet was supposed to be about.

    In the early days of the web, the publishing industry was supposed to become moribund because anyone could now publish. The web was going to be the great social equalizer. But when the teeming masses got on the web that picture changed. Pioneers may shun established structures, but the general public seeks them out and instinctively supports them. The RIAA and others can write regulations for the electronics industry. No problem. Geeks can go to jail for explaining math to other geeks. No problem.

    If the web actually does change the way the publishing system operates, rather than the other way around, it will be a visible piece of evidence that people don't really need their gods. That would be a genuine cultural revolution.

  • We've had this argument before on slashdot. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Linuxathome ( 242573 ) on Wednesday October 10, 2001 @12:10PM (#2411387) Homepage Journal
    As a graduate student in biomed science, here's my perspective: current publishing schemes and costs to access online journals are stifling my ability to learn. Instead of spending the time reading and learning as I should, I would have to say I spend a good 50% of my study time just tracking down whether or not my library has the journal I need (literally tracking down, as in having to travel to the library and walking up and down multiple flights of stairs)--this does not include the time I take to do the literature search (which is part of the learning process). I know full well that most, if not all, the journals to which I would like to have access, are available online.

    As a student, how is it affordable for me to pay $100-200 per year per journal for online access? That's $1200-2400 per year I'd have to pay for the journals I'd like to have access to. For a yearly salary of $17,000 (pre-tax), I don't think I'd be able to spend that. Moreover, the library cannot provide full online access for a few journals because, I know for a fact, that the library pays more per person to provide online access than if the person went out himself/herself and subscribed. How is this possible? Wouldn't one think that "buying in bulk" would save the library money?

    What I find even more annoying is that because publishers find that this business is so lucrative, each and everyone of them are enacting their own standard of distribution and dissemination online--e.g. Elsevier Science, BioMedNet, CatchWord, Lippincott (just to name a few of the large ones). Instead of agreeing on one good standard of dissemination (i.e. PubMedCentral), they're all broken up and if I wanted access to each publisher's site, that's an entirely different login name and password. Additionally, some publishers are notorious for not providing access to individual journals--access can only be provided via the university library at outrageous costs. Either way I'm SOL, because for certain journals, my library cannot provide access, really just because of the cost.

    So from my perspective as a graduate student trying to learn as much as possible, how does the current publishing system benefit science? This is how I see the current University earning and spending cycle: the huge budget that our library carries comes from the university; the university generates a large proportion of its revenue via licenses of its intellectual property (some only comes from the state, even though it's a state university); the intellectual property (IP) of the University comes from it's staff of scientists which do go all the way down the hierarchy to and includes their slaves, the graduate students; IP can only be generated and formulated by the scientist via a fusion of past knowledge and literature provided by the library. Imagine cutting the time in this cycle by provided faster, more consistent, cheaper access to the literature.

    The current publishing system is stifling my progress, when it needs not to be. Publishers cannot be dinosaurs of the past, the privatization of their dissemination model is not a good example of how useful they can be, especially when one takes into account the efficiency of training new scientists.

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