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Science

Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals 215

Posted by michael from the DIY dept.
Declan Butler writes "I thought I'd let you know that the journal Nature is currently running an online special on the debate over access to the electronic scientific literature. It will be updated with two to three new articles each week, and will run until around mid-May. 'The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. This ongoing web focus will explore current trends and future possibilities.' Best, Declan Butler, European correspondent, Nature"
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Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals More

Nature Debate on Open Scientific Journals

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  • a good start (Score:5, Insightful)

    by untermensch ( 227534 ) * on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:35PM (#8749931)
    I'm glad to see that Nature is at least taking an interest in Open Science, since right now the high profile journals like Nature are the most difficult to get access to. The university I attend has a subscription of course, but only for the dead-tree version. I've asked the librarians about getting online access and they say it is simply prohibitively expensive.

    I think that Scientific journals should take a cue for the mistakes of the music industry and embrace the abilities of new technology. By moving from paper magazines to web-published journals they can cut distribution costs enormously, hopefully to the levels where they can survive on ads (or other non-subscription means) alone. Also, unlike the music industry there's none of this controversy over file-sharing and authors not getting paid.
    • Are you sure of this? The last two institutions I've been at have had Nature online for anyone to access... it's the journal "Science" that seems quite a bit more restricted online. Maybe it's a dig at them?

      • Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)

        by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:45PM (#8750040) Homepage Journal
        My University had subscriptions available online for anyone with a valid University acct. So our entire school population could read the online journals for "free." It still cost the school a ton of money each year to keep the subscription. Is that what you mean by "online for anyone to access?"

        I'm not sure I like the idea of having authors pay to have their work accepted. Underfunded studies/authors may not be able to afford submissions. That would lead to less exposure, and increasing obscurity. Of course, this is me not knowing the exact details of how much it would cost for a submission, but I guess it would have to be substantial in order to foot the bill for their journal in the first place.

        • Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)

          by snarkh ( 118018 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:57PM (#8750185)
          Author pays is an awfule model. People from poor countries, graduate students and researchers without grants are unlikely to pay $1500/paper.

          What I don't understand is why journals charge so much for subscriptions. After all the reviewers do their work for free, so their only expense is the editorial stuff and printing. These are expensive but not expensive enough to justify the exorbitatn subscription charges.

          • It depends on the journal, really. Most scientific journals have a very low readership level, at least compared with a magazine. It costs the same amount of money to print a magazine, no matter the size of the readership. So you get an economy of scale. If you have only 2000 readers, you're going to have to charge a lot from each reader to cover the costs.
            • If you have only 2000 readers, you're going to have to charge a lot from each reader to cover the costs.

              Actually that is not quite right. They did a study in math journals and found out that top quality journals with similar readership (e.g. Inventiones and the Annals) charge wildly different subscriptions.

              • You are correct. Different journals charge different amounts. It really depends on the publisher and how much they want to milk out of the readership. There are some not for profit publishers, often scientific societies who are much more likely to be fair than big publishing conglomerates like Elsevier, who are more concerned with the bottom line.

          • Re:a good start (Score:2, Informative)

            by shelleymonster ( 606787 )
            Reviewers do their work for free, but editors and editors-in-chief are paid. And, even relatively small journals have a good size administrative staff (10-12 people) on hand to manage author submissions, distributing papers for peer review, subscriptions, and all sorts of other stuff. Software to manage papers is expensive because it's to specialized, and many journals still fed-ex papers around the world to get copies to reviewers. So, you're looking at running an entire business based off of subscripti
          • You list the costs associated with "mainstream" magazines (i.e. Time, Sports Illustrated). However, there is another cost that Scientific Journals have that those don't--archiving.

            Scientific Journals are expected to keep archives of their works for hundreds of years, and put a lot of effort into making sure there is no way that past issues will be lost. Commercial magazines certainly prefer to have records of old issues, but it is not as devastating to them if archiving fails.

            Because government money go
          • I really, really don't understand the objection to author-pay at all. $1500 sounds like a lot, but it is really trivial compared to the cost of the research. I can't see anyone saying -- "Well, we just spent $300,000 doing this study, I guess we aren't going to spend the $1500 to publish it:".

            What isn't trivial, as you bring up, is the cost of journals -- a decent university library will literally spend a million dollars or more a year to subscribe to all the journals they need. The simple fact is author-p
            • The objection is that not all studies and papers come from adequately funded projects! Imagine one lone professor who doesn't get the grant he wants, who travels to far-flung corners of the Earth on his own money gathering data for his unconventional work. Making him pay lots of money to get published is just one more way non-mainstream ideas could be marginalized.

              Although this type of scenario illustrates how the price of author-pays publication might discourage non-mainstream research more, this is no

            • I think the open access ideals are well worth pursuing, but there is a serious flaw with the "author pays" model.

              I now work in a University and have easy access to all the information I could possibly want. I should have no problem publishing work under an author pays model either, although I haven't tried yet.

              However, before I started working here, I worked in industry. Getting access to scientific journals was harder than catching moonbeams. The best data we could get came from google and citeseer. Even

        • Re:a good start (Score:5, Insightful)

          by kisielk ( 467327 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:57PM (#8750186)
          Don't most authors already have to pay to have their papers published in a scientific journal? Except that in a paper copy the authors and the readers both have to pay because of the cost of print.

          • That is not the case for most journals, as far as I know. However authors often have to pay for color illustrations.

            • Re:a good start (Score:5, Informative)

              by V_M_Smith ( 186361 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:10PM (#8750327)
              I don't know what field you're in, but in my area of research, almost all journals have significant page charges.

              Example:
              Electronic manuscripts: $120.00 per page
              Paper manuscripts: $150 per page
              Color figures: $600.00 for first figure, $150.00 for each additional color figure

              You're looking at ~$1000 minimum for a typical paper.

              • Interesting. Are you in biology? In CS people typically don't have to pay.

                • Re:a good start (Score:2, Informative)

                  by Chucklz ( 695313 )
                  As a biologist, I can share that most biology journals have page charges. It's just something you accept and live with. A couple hundred dollars on a publication is nothing, considering how important pubs are to your career. Frankly, I can spend upwards of a thousand dollars in an afternoon in reagents and supplies, so in the grand scheme of things, paying for publications doesnt really seem that bad at all.

              • Re:a good start (Score:4, Interesting)

                by eaolson ( 153849 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:29PM (#8750563)
                I don't know what field you're in, but in my area of research, almost all journals have significant page charges.

                I'm in materials science, and most of the journals I've published in, that page charges are optional. They request it, and many scientific grants have a line item for it, but whether or not you pay does not affect publication. The notable exception to this, however, is for color figures in the paper version, where the charges appear to be mandatory.

                And this is as it should be. Science should be about the objective and rational search for truth. Cold-hearted, even. When you start bringing money into that equation, you're just going to mess it up.

                Which is why I don't think open-source journals are ever going to work. If they can keep the page charges optional, and still make enough money to keep afloat, then it might.

                A large portion of the reason why is that the people that actually *use* these journals (researchers, students, etc.), at least in the academic world, are insulated from their cost. A journal might be free, or it might cost a bundle and I would never know. I'll use the best journals I have access to for my research, and I'll publish in the best one's I can, cost of the journal be dammned.

        • Anybody know who 'owns' the article? I would guess the journal does. But on the homepages of some researchers they have the PDF files available for download. I wonder if that's technically legal or not.

          Also, AFAIK, it still costs money for the author to publish in many journals. But the subject matter is not subsequently free for all to read. But in the old days the authors would usually get a stack of preprints, and send these to various colleagues upon request.

          • Re:a good start (Score:3, Informative)

            by flossie ( 135232 )
            The rules vary between different journals, but many of the papers seen on researchers' web pages are pre-prints. It is often the case that journals allow pre-prints to be distributed, but retain all rights to the post-prints which have been through the editorial process.

    • Re:a good start (Score:5, Informative)

      by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:58PM (#8750195) Journal
      Are you sure you want ads subsidising the publication of scientific research, especially in medicine?

      This paper entitled, "Viagra causes withered genitals," is brought to you by the makers of Cialis.

      Better yet, there were two separate instances at the University of Toronto where two separate researchers were pressured into suppressing their research when it was unfavorable to one of the university's sponsors. The investigator in one case was Dr. Nancy Olivieri [www.caut.ca], who faced a possible lawsuit and discipline when she spoke out against Apotex; the other one involved Dr. David Healey [eye.net], who had a job offer rescinded when he spoke against Prozac.

      So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.
    • I am a science buff with a subscription to Nature, amongst other journals. I know many people (well, like four) who are intrigued by science due to popularizers such as Shermer [skeptic.com] and Sagan, but never take the next step and read the journals due to the subscription fees. Nature, being the premeire science journal, really needs to step up and do some popularizing now that Sagan is gone, and what better way than making the content free?

    • Re:a good start (Score:3, Informative)

      by rocket_d00d ( 744666 )
      Today, the scientist/the author has to pay the journal to have his/her works published (plus, you cannot publish without handing over the copyright and your firstborn to the journal). Then the readers must pay for access to the journals, be it on paper or electronically. Plus, one has to pay for access to science index databases like ISI to search the scientific literature effectively. To participate in the "scientific debate" in the journals, you really must be able to afford all three, which becomes ve
    • This issue is actually getting some high level attention. The British Royal Society told [scidev.net] the House of Commons that open publishing was " ... a threat to the vitality of the country's scientific community."

      Open access publishers quickly rebutted [scidev.net] the claim.

  • academic library (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SoupGuru ( 723634 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:40PM (#8749986)
    How does the 'free' model differ from the one already in place? Most peer reviewed journals are read by academics and other people that have a vested interest in the materials. These people typically have access to university libraries where they can research and read these journals for free anyway. And by "free" I mean no added cost for specifically viewing the journal. I think it's been proven that scientific literature is hard to sell or maintain rights over. It's a prime example of the 'information wants to be free' principle. News items decribing the lastest scientific finding give me all the details I really want anyway.

    • Re:academic library (Score:5, Informative)

      by fshalor ( 133678 ) <fshalor AT comcast DOT net> on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:53PM (#8750132) Homepage Journal
      As a person who works at a research instutite with publicications in JFM, AMS, Nature, etc... And one of the best COMPLETE JFM collections (Journal of Fluid Mechanics) in the country, this is a big deal.

      It goes down to the "communication" pillar of the Scientific Method.

      Take our 400+ publications, for example. The're searchable online, but are in a database. Which means they don't show up on google.

      Most of them are old, but in this field (fluid mechanics) a "recent" article may be in the mid 80's. I worked on one this morning which has sources from 1911 fluid mechanics work. Most of the cutting edge stuff just happened back in the mid 80's, and now, a few other groups are starting up again with this area.

      Now, unless you either:
      1. have an ip address at a school with a subscription
      2. have a subsctiption yourself
      3. have a catalouge, or a print out of all the journals AND have lots of time...

      You will have a hard time getting at the bulk of the information availble in these types of fields. Take Chemical Engineering for example. Other than major applications and some computer simulations, little has changes since like the 70's. This means that you have to go to old print journals to get comparitively cutting edge stuff in some cases.

      This article is right up there with making the descision of "profit or communication, or both."

      By the way, we'll have all out publications indices up where google will be able to find them soon. And we have a policy for passing out reprints upon request, if we can.

      • Most of the cutting edge stuff just happened back in the mid 80's, and now, a few other groups are starting up again with this area.

        I thought fluids was still a relatively fresh field with the recent research of 'complex fluids'. I've even seen several colloquiums and lectures in the condensed matter group of the physics department here at JHU on such fluids.

    • Re:academic library (Score:5, Interesting)

      by stuph ( 664902 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:53PM (#8750138)
      I'm one example of a person who would love to read these journals but no longer can as I'm not attached to any university or institution. In my undergrad and graduate research I was involved in a very new area of chemistry/materials science and like to see new developments in the field. Since I dropped out of grad school and am working in a completely different field these days, I'm not able to freely read the articles like I could back then.

      I realize I'm a minority, but there are plenty of high school kids who are interested in science that would love to have access to this type of stuff.

    • Re:academic library (Score:3, Interesting)

      by datababe72 ( 244918 )
      The other answers in this thread are all good examples of some reasons why your comment isn't really correct, but there are a few things they miss:

      1. Someone is paying for these subscriptions, even if it is not the individual researcher. This is the university or research institute. This money comes from: overhead on grants (your tax dollars), student fees (your tuition), and perhaps some general donations fund (money that could otherwise fund more research or improve facilities). Free to you doesn't reall

    • Re:academic library (Score:4, Informative)

      by mrogers ( 85392 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:39PM (#8750690)
      Just because it's free at the point of use doesn't mean it's free. The universities have to get their money somewhere - either from tuition fees or from taxes - and that money ends up in the pockets of publishers like Elsevier [elsevier.com], who in many cases don't pay a penny to the authors or editors of the journals! Instead, the authors and editors have their salaries paid by universities, who once again get their money from tuition fees and taxes.

      This is starting to change in computer science, although other fields are a long way behind. I'm studying for a PhD at the moment, and most of the papers I need are available online, either on the authors' websites or on Citeseer [psu.edu]. Even in CS, older papers are less likely to be available, but most of the work in my area was published in the last four years or is still awaiting publication. That's the other advantage of publishing online - the process of getting a paper reviewed and published can take years, so in fast-moving fields the journals are really an archive of significant work rather than a news medium. To keep up with recent work you have to look online.

      Of course, the problem with self-publication is lack of peer review. However, Citeseer does a pretty good job of finding significant papers based on the number of citations (think Pagerank), and the database of citations also helps you to find papers that might contradict or reinforce the conclusions of the paper you've just read. This makes it less important to have editors filtering out biased or unreproducible results.

      I hope that authors in other fields will start to embrace online self-publication. Unfortunately, many institutions see publication count as a good measure of an academic's standing, partly because the peer review process tends to ensure that a frequently-published author is well respected in his or her field. If insitutions started to pay attention to citation count instead, self-publication would become a viable alternative to journal publication, saving students and taxpayers an awful lot of money.

    • "I think it's been proven that scientific literature is hard to sell or maintain rights over. It's a prime example of the 'information wants to be free' principle."

      I never violate copyright by putting journal articles on the web. On the other hand, I am elated when I find that some article I need has been put up on the web illegally by someone else, thereby saving mea trip to a library with a bag of quarters for the copier.

  • New business models? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Boss, Pointy Haired ( 537010 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:40PM (#8749989)
    So instead of peer review, we have peer-to-peer review! :)

  • Might cause information overload (Score:4, Insightful)

    by steelerguy ( 172075 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:41PM (#8750000) Homepage
    My only concern about this is that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing, even if it is just online. It is getting harder and harder to find pertinate information because it is so easy to to just put up a page or article regardless of the facts or fallacies it may contain. Having to submit your research to a journal that has production costs means they don't want to just print everything they get.

    Unfortunately, I think they would still need a subscription service to pay for the bandwidth, storage, and personnel to maintain an 'open' site.

    The debate should definately be interesting and full of both great and harebrained ideas.

    • Re:Might cause information overload (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:51PM (#8750116) Homepage Journal

      that there would still need to be peer-review before publishing,

      Absolutely.

      For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.

      So what's the equivalent?

      Papers get digitally signed by their authors.

      Then, as an author accumulates a good reputation because of his published work, other authors will seek to have him review and put his stamp of approval onto their papers. [This is a lot like getting well known scientists to become editors of a dead-tree journal].

      To put in /. terms, it would be a more refined moderation system, so that you could see where the mod points came from (a +3 from some new friends of gnaa or goatse posters would not be as valuable as a +1 moderation from the real Bruce Perens or Alan Cox, for example.)

      • For people new to a field, it really helps if the articles they see published have undergone scrutiny by experts before being released.

        In any decent journal, ALL articles have been reviewed by experts in the field, the experts have commented and suggested changes, and the authors changed their papers accordingly. This is the peer-review system, and it's basically the whole reason scientific journals exist. The actual paper (or online, these days) publication is probably about only half the work.

        Then,


        • The last thing the scientific process needs is karma whoring.

          The horse has already left the barn on this one. Tenure processes in many academic departments essentially dictate a heavy publishing record, which is not necessarily synonymous with publishing quality.

          I appreciate that some reviewers would feel hesitant to give a brutally honest assessment of an article if they weren't guaranteed anonymity (let's just assume competitors abusing anonymity to pan articles of colleagues that compete for the sa

  • Public grants = free publication (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:42PM (#8750017) Homepage
    If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

    If you don't want everyone to read your article, don't accept government funds. If you don't want to give your journal away for free, don't publish publicly-funded research.

    Now, let's imagine a world in which corporate tax breaks were considered public funding...

    • Re:Public grants = free publication (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GileadGreene ( 539584 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:52PM (#8750130) Homepage
      If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

      Unless the research is classified...

    • If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

      You've totally missed the distinction between making research freely accessible to the taxpayer, and publishing the research in a paid-subscription journal. All of my taxpayer-funded research papers are available from my website; however, in order to ensure that my research is widely disseminated, I also choose to hav

    • I think you are making the point that the scientists are making. Most of us publish our work to share with other scientist, and to justify funding. Once published a journal is now holding our information away from those without the cash for a subscription.

      We don't care who has access to our information, but we do care that the journals are preventing access to information we released to the world.

      A large group of scientist believe that all researchers should have access, at least in electronic form, to a

    • If the research is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL research results must be published and made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.

      I just recently came across an example of a paper written by a government agency, but can't find it at the moment. At the bottom of the title page, it had a disclaimer that read, "Work done by the US government. Work is in the public domain," or something to that effect.

      I agree that work done BY THE GOVERNMENT s

    • If the farm is funded in whole or in part by the taxpayers, then ALL food produced must be made freely available to ALL taxpayers. I can see no room for argument there.
  • Perhaps I misunderstood something about this, but why would any writer pay to have their work published? I know it happens -- usually by con artists -- but is this a realistic measure? How does the writer then support him or herself? I saw a mention to this in one of the articles in the set, but it did not give enough specifications to really make any firm judgements on.

    From what I've read of several of the articles, readers would pay for the value of the content. In one case, and only for not-for-profit,

    • Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by stuph ( 664902 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:49PM (#8750086)
      Actually, in scientific publications, writers never really get paid for their publications, at least I never did. You do however pad your publications list, which helps you get better jobs, more respect in the community, more speaking engagements, etc...

    • Re:Authors Pay, Readers for Free? (Score:4, Informative)

      by utopyr ( 621354 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:53PM (#8750142)
      In the standard scientific/mathematical/biomedical publishing deal, for the more high-impact journals (that is, those whose articles are most frequently cited), the authors do pay--to cover, they say, typesetting, images, etc.

      The universities have usually paid three times for an article in a journal to which they subscribe, with salary, grants, and subscriptions.
    • One would imagine that the writer has a vested interest in having his submission published. A truly unique idea can generate quite a bit of money, much more than it would cost to publish such an idea.

      One must also remember that these journals are the prevailing vehicle for viable discourse for the scientific community. A move towards Open Access would benefit the community; the idea is to increase access to the information, not lower the cost of submission.

      Besides, doctors can afford to pay for publis
    • If you look at the small print inside eg. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences it says something along the lines of "this paper is an advertisement".

      A portion of every scientific grant is reserved to pay the publishing fees. For journals like Science, Nature, PNAS this is about $600 per article and color illustrations up the cost.

      So, scientists already pay to publish their work. Similarly in the humanities a large number of PhD theses are published by what are effectively "vanity presses", s

  • Money talks? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by insecuritiez ( 606865 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:44PM (#8750030)
    If the author has to pay for the paper to be published who is speaking? The ground breaking work they have done or their money? I have a feeling that having the author pay will greatly reduce the quality of scientific journals while skewing the research to fields with money in them.
    • Not really. There's some comments above about this. Publishing a paper in any journal runs about $600-$1500 as it is, and you don't retain copyright, you have to pay for reprints, other people have to pay for access to your work, etc. This is a much more interesting model, IMHO.

  • They are open and believe me, the scientist pays (Score:5, Informative)

    by Neil Blender ( 555885 ) <neilblender@gmail.com> on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:45PM (#8750037)
    Anyone can go to any public university library and make copies of articles from journals. Articles which the scientist has paid a good amount to get published in terms of research not to mention paying the journal to publish it (even if a journal accepts your article, you still have to pay the costs of the layout, figures, reprints, etc.) I worked in life sciences research at the University of Washington for 10 years and I have seen this personally.
    • "Anyone can go to any public university library and make copies of articles from journals."

      Really? Do *you* know any universities with a library near West Plains, Missouri?

    • You obviously haven't worked at a university recently, 'cuz things have changed:

      It is becoming more and more common for university libraries to avoid paying for the increasingly expensive and increasingly numerous journals by opting for electronic only access to the journals.

      These electronic licenses usually come with strict requirements by the journal companies that only university members can access the journal content. ie, if you don't have a student/employee ID and a computer account, you can't rea

  • Publishing in Journals (Score:4, Insightful)

    by stuph ( 664902 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:47PM (#8750060)
    Opening access to scientific journals to a more general population is a good idea. However, having the author pay for publication is a terrible one.

    The best thing about scientific journals is that within each discipline, there are journals that carry more weight than others. These are journals that are harder to get published in. By limiting the amount of information they publish, they're telling the reader that, "this information was important enough that we, a high-profile journal, felt it was worth publishing." If these journals switched to an author-pays method of publishing, my fear is that this filter would be turned off, as money tends to do.

    "Here's $50,000, publish my article, even though it's based on bad data and is in fact a near-copy of something published years ago."

    The best journals require peer reviewing of any submitted articles before they are accepted, and these peers are generally people working in not only the same field but in the same area as the submitter. These are the people most likely to know if the data presented makes sense, could happen, has been published before, etc.

    I guess my fear is just that allowing authors to pay for articles to get published opens up a new area of question in terms of an article's weight. No longer will you have to only look at the journal to know if the material is worth reading, but you'll have to check and see if (and how much) the author paid to have it published.

    Having published a couple of articles on chemistry in the past, I would much rather see some other type of method in which information would be free. I just have great doubts about allowing people to buy their way into having more things published (and increasing their publication list)
    • Opening access to scientific journals to a more general population is a good idea. However, having the author pay for publication is a terrible one.

      Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page. See here:

      http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/pcharges_te xt .html

      • Authors already do pay to publish in scientific journals. In my own field the biggest journal (Astrophysical Journal, or as we called it ApJ) can cost up to $165 a page.

        ...which is why I almost-universally publish in Monthly Notices [blackwellpublishing.com]. They don't have page charges, unless a paper needs colour; and even in that case, the expense is pretty low (400 pounds sterling for the whole paper). The fact that both ApJ and A&A have page charges is a major offputting factor for me.

    • Re:Publishing in Journals (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr. GeneMachine ( 720233 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:01PM (#8750237)
      There are already publishing fees in various journals. Some charge you for colour figures only, some take a fee per site and accordingly mark each article as "advertising" (PNAS does so, if I'm not mistaken). The business model of scientific journals is deeply and disturbingly flawed in my opinion - take work stemming from publicly funded projects, charge the authors and sell it back to the public for ridiculous prices.

      Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have cancelled their online access as protest. Great working conditions, I can tell you..

      Open scientific literature is a great idea, but it has to be done consequently. Cut out the publishing houses completely, organize peer review as a network of individual scientists. The big journals have long overdone their ripping of of the public.

      • Nature and Science are amongst the worst, charging prices for their online access that are so high, that most german university libraries have canceled their online access as protest.

        Are you sure? I don't have the latest numbers at my fingertips, but Nature and Science are pretty cheap. In 2002, Nature was $US845/year, and Science was US$390/year for the institutional rates, which are among the lowest in the industry.
        • Citing the Nature homepage:

          For an academic institution the price for Nature is based on the full FTE figure for all staff, students and researchers. Please provide details to your sales representative.

          Which would, according to our librarians, amount to about 20.000 Euro/year for our university. A sum we simply cannot afford - mostly due to the horrible research funding in Germany. But don't get me started on this topic...

    • Totally agree. It's bad enough that there are already journals with poor peer review that accept mostly anything (meaning stuff found not rigorous enough for specialized journals) - like ...umm ... Nature? I know at least one case where Nature published an article rejected by Phys. Rev. Letters peer review as based on a flawed assumption and then, later, Nature rejected a refutation by another researcher from the same field as 'too technical to fit our profile'. This will only make things worse.

      Besides, th

    • Re:PLoS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dokebi ( 624663 )
      I don't know if the poster is intentionally spewing FUD or maybe just not knowledgeable. I'll give the benefit of the doubt.

      The idea of Open Access is not about publishing whatever you want for a fee. It is about having access to the journals that are already published. Both PLoS (Public Library of Science) and Nature are peer reviewed by respected scientists of their field. Both charge fees to author to submit/layout their papers. But the difference is that access to PLoS is free and unrestricted, wher

  • wired article (Score:3, Informative)

    by enrico_suave ( 179651 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:50PM (#8750103) Homepage
    from the dead tree edition a few months ago

    open source in other arenas (than software) [wired.com] scroll to bottom to see beginning paragraph on the section about 'open source' scientific journals.

    *shrug*

    e.

  • The preprint archive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by manobes ( 541867 ) <manobes@sfu.ca> on Friday April 02, 2004 @04:56PM (#8750167) Homepage
    Virtually every paper published in the last ten years in high energy physics is online at the preprint arxiv [arxiv.org]. People still publish in peer reviewed journals, but very few people I know read them anymore. It's faster, and more current, on the arxiv. More and more physics papers in other fields are showing up there as well. The debate about open access in physics appears to have been settled already.
    • The problem with arXiv.org is that as it gets more popular, the signal-to-noise goes way down (a la slashdot), as anyone with a pet theory can throw it onto the preprint server. It can take a lot of energy to sift through papers to decide which ones contain crackpot ideas, and which ones are simply ahead of the curve.

    • Re:The preprint archive (Score:3, Insightful)

      by wass ( 72082 )
      The high-energy theorists I know here at JHU still publish in other journals. In fact, several physicists here publish something in the arxiv first, to 'get it out first', and then work to get it in a journal. But some journals, (Nature, IIRC) don't let you do this.

      But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessi

      • But anyway, as someone else said, there's ALOT to be said for the peer review model. You can see this even at some conferences, where anybody can attend if they pay the registration fee. You basically see science trolls at some of the sessions, just shouting down the speaker with false claims, or saying the talk is obvious (when it's not), etc. It's kind of weird to see 'professionals' trolling.

        I suppose the important thing is that the speakers themselves are screened. (At least in most cases, and at all

    • Just remember to take what you find on arXiv with a grain of salt. It is a preprint service, which means the papers are not peer reviewed.

    • Re:The preprint archive (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Arxiv is great (it's certainly NOT just high-energy physics; it includes everything from high-energy physics to general relativity to biophysics), and there's another preprint server called SPIRES which is also very good.

      The philosophy behind these preprint servers actually closely mirrors the open source philosophy. When I want to publish something, I post it for everyone to see on arxiv. Then over the course of a few weeks, I get tremendous feedback. It tends to be constructive, since it's obvious who

  • Good for everyone (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jgercken ( 314042 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:03PM (#8750259)
    I would love to subscribe to a number of scientific jornals but at >$200/year there's no way I could justify it. I understand these are small distribution publications that don't have the economy of scale that say newspapers enjoy. Although the material they print is donated (correct me if I'm wrong on this), publication & distribution is expensive with little commercial space to offset the cost. By using electronic distribution maybe the prices can come down to the level at which your average Joe could afford them.

  • Journals Need To Open (Score:5, Informative)

    by LabRat007 ( 765435 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:03PM (#8750260) Homepage
    I am research scientist who has worked in big Pharma (Pfizer, Pharmacia & Upjohn) and I am currently working in a small startup biotech company. While working in big pharma we constantly had problems with our service that made all the journals available online (intranet). It was always a pain in the ass to hunt down that 'last paper' but we "People" who could take care of it for us. This is, by the way, how big Pharma handles most problems; throw ridiculous amounts of money at the problem unti it goes away. At the time I rather enjoyed that power - but I always felt a bit uneasy about it.

    Now that I'm in a small Biotech the issues are very apparent. Many scientific journals, that we absolutely need, cost more then $1000 each for a years subscription. If you only new how many different journals we need. With start up monies of less then $500k and insane prices on lab equipment and supplies we need every break we can get. If we didn't already have an "alternate"(in other words shady) method of literature acquisition we would be screwed.

    While it is true you can find just about any journal in some library - good f-ing luck finding one with everything you need. I hope that a solution can be worked out. Many researchers could benefit from an environment were the data/methods/protocols they need are just a few clicks away - instead of a 4 hour drive or expensive contract away.
    • If you only new[sic] how many different journals we need.

      Indeed. To maintain a well-stocked library at a modern comprehensive university requires literally tens of thousands of subscriptions. The University of Toronto has the second-largest library collection in North America, after Harvard University. In April 2002, their library system received 33409 print serials, and subscribed to 19385 electronic serials. I can only assume that the number of journal subscriptions has increased since then. Incre

  • Page charges (Score:2, Insightful)

    by darby_smeed ( 704402 )
    Lots of people are saying it's bad if the scientist has to pay to have the work published.

    This is not something new. It describes the current situation.

    Do a Google search for "page charges" and your favorite discipline. If you want reprints it's even more.

  • Vanity press and career advancement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:11PM (#8750335)
    Isn't the number of articles you get published a big part of career advancement in science? Wouldn't what amounts to the emergence of a vanity press undermine that measure of one's worth?
    • Wouldn't what amounts to the emergence of a vanity press undermine that measure of one's worth?

      Nope. This isn't a vanity press; your work still needs to be peer-reviewed to be published. If a journal gained a reputation for being soft on authors, its prestige would fall. Scientists publishing in it would receive little professional respect or acknowledgement.

      Scientists already rank existing journals both formally and informally based upon the quality of work that they publish. If I apply for a facul

  • I think having rreely available scientific journals should make more knowledge available to a wider cross-section of people. People would be able to look up accurate technical information online, and students would probably benefit too: it would be easier for them to do research. Making this kind of information more freely available will lead us to a more enlightened, informed, knowledgeable society.

  • Scientific publishing and copyright (Score:5, Informative)

    by kels ( 9845 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:26PM (#8750531)
    Scientific publishing is a standout example of how skewed the incentives can be in copyright law. Typically, the scientist(s) publishing a paper signs over the copyright to a journal (which may be for- or non-profit), which often charges a fee to the author for the priviledge (and especially for extras like color figures). Thereafter, the interests of the author to have the paper as widely distributed as possible is in direct conflict with the journal's interests in earning fees for access to the content. Regardless of how many people read the paper, the author receives no royalties on it. Many journals now give the author permission to redistribute electronic & paper copies of the article (gee, thanks!), but since these are not linkable by standard databases or the journal's own web page, they have limited value. You can search for them on Google, maybe you'll get lucky. Scientists sign over their rights (and often pay a fee) to have paper published under a prestiguous journal name, and to have the paper peer reviewed (NB: the peer reviewers are not paid either).

    It is so obviously in the interests of scientists to have truly open journal access, it is amazing it is taking so long. Especially since many of the top journal publishers are professional scientific societies, ostensibly representing the interests of the scientists.
    • Many major publishers (including Nature) now grant copyright to the authors of the paper. This wasn't the case in the past, but many publishers are making compromises that authors want. Another compromise is making articles freely available after a set time. Most journals do either 6 months, or a year. Anything older than that is freely available on the web. It's not a perfect system, but it's a step in the right direction. I think there's some hesitance, because you have a system in place that essent

      • As for societies that run journals, remember that the journals are probably the major fund raisers for those societies. Take away their ability to make money from journals, and you take away the existence of the society. Which is not a good thing for scientists.

        The other big money-maker is often meetings. These can be expensive, but they seem to get the incentives right. You pay a (fairly large) fee to attend the meeting, and that gives you free access to all the content of the meeting. You pay a (som

  • Short Circuiting Journals (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:31PM (#8750588)
    Back in the 80's and 90's I used to work in High Temperature Superconductivity research. It was very interesting; the field of superconductivity had been a rather quiet backwater kind of place until Bednorz and Mueller blew the whole thing up in 1986 with their dicovery of the (ceramic) high temperature superconductors. There was a physics meeting soon thereafter which more or less turned into a high temperature (or High Tc as it is called) meeting, later known as the Woodstock of Physics.

    B and M got a Nobel Prize the following year and the field turned into a fevered frenzy in making new discoveries. Once you cracked the concept it was easy to get started which meant that an entire world started at more or less the same starting point.

    At this insane tempo nobody had the time to wait for Nature, Science, PhysRevB or the like to run the entire peer review process and (this is the first point I am building up to): much of the publication process was basically short circuited.

    People realised that the Berkeley-Stanford environment had an advantage in circulating preprints but it was soon realised it amounted to an unfair advantage. And here is my second point: it was the Physics community that deciced it was unfair and also did something with it.

    The result was a zine called High Tc Update [iastate.edu] that listed title and authors of upcoming publications as well as highlights of some submissions. And it was amazingly effective, cutting lead time with months, allowing for an even higher tempo.

    So it has been done and can be done and I applaud Nature for staying ahead of the curverather than waiting to be outdated like the music industry.

  • Profit before truth.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by robbo ( 4388 ) <slashdot&simra,net> on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:39PM (#8750699)
    New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user.
    (insert tongue firmly in cheek)
    It comes as a great relief to me that scientific truth will soon rest firmly in the hands of the people with the deepest pockets. I can't imagine that special interest groups would *ever* try to take advantage of that kind of system.

  • publish or perish (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rkowen ( 135560 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:40PM (#8750712) Homepage
    There's an interesting opinion piece in the Mar'2004 Physics Today by Mohamed Gad-el-Hak http://physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-3/p61.html [physicstoday.org] concerning the glut of papers and journals that litter the scientific research landscape.

    The problem he addresses is that generally the research and university bureacracy has promoted a ``publish or perish'' mentality, where it's not the quality of work (or how often a work is cited) but how many papers are published that earns a researcher respect (or more earnings, grants, etc.). He illustrates a engineering dean that published on average a paper per week for a one year period. Admittedly, I suspect that most of the papers were actually written by graduate students or post-docs, but it does highlight that how much of that prolific output was new or novel, much less interesting!

    Perhaps, going to a author-pays system may have some beneficial side-effects of reducing the amount of cruft that passes for a research paper nowadays. An author would have to balance his need to publish with his resources. Is the content worth it?

    I no longer do physics (I'm a software developer now) because I could see the trend that it didn't matter what you wrote, but that you wrote a lot of it. I still toy with the idea of going back and doing some novel research. However, if I do, I intend to publish it on my own website, since I have no need to pad my resume' with a long list of publications, I would just want to get the results out there and indexed by google or other search engines, so anyone who cares and is looking could get instant access to it.

    For those who are concerned about this concept of author-pays limiting the exposure of unknown or young researchers, they would have this option available to them also of posting their own work and letting their pool of peers discover them. If their work is truly unique and well done, then their standing will increase.

    • Re:publish or perish (Score:3, Informative)

      by wass ( 72082 )
      I no longer do physics (I'm a software developer now) because I could see the trend that it didn't matter what you wrote, but that you wrote a lot of it. I still toy with the idea of going back and doing some novel research. However, if I do, I intend to publish it on my own website, since I have no need to pad my resume' with a long list of publications, I would just want to get the results out there and indexed by google or other search engines, so anyone who cares and is looking could get instant access

  • The body of human knowledge (Score:4, Interesting)

    by AxelTorvalds ( 544851 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @05:46PM (#8750772)
    I'm a math guy, I like to keep up on what's going on. I've got a degree but I'm not of the cablibre of a professional mathematician. One thing I've struggled with over the years since university is that I simply cannot get access to good information. I know that various things have been proven but unless I'm part of the AMS or I recieve various obscure math journals I simply cannot get access to those proofs. Even good libraries don't carry them.

    There is a balance to achieve. Every one part of me would love to have a set of DVDs for purchase (cheap, hopefully) from a web tome of math. It would contain every proof known. At the same time, as a former student I know the value of proving things on your own and the value that comes from that creativity.

    What's more scarry though is that a lot of this information simply isn't distributed to enough places. Try to find a copy of the Erdos Selzberg elementry proof of the prime number theorem. It seems like it wouldn't take that much for that knowledge to be lost. More importantly, I think it creates a bad scientific culture. I've never read the elementry proof of the prime number theorem, I know it exists, I believe it has been proven but I can't verify it for myself. You know and this is just math. I think we're getting to the point where all scientific knowledge should be public. Public journals and stuff like that make the most sense and a large internet based repository would be ideal, with some kind of controls, I'd pay a fee for access to it if it was nominal. We're not talking about Hollywood movies and crap like that, we're talking about real knowledge.

    As we start to issue policy from science, like the Kyoto treaty, we need to have a real open review process to measure the data, to examine that science actually took place. Not everybody is capable of reading through that kind of data and drawing logical conclusions but an effort has to be made, we've already seen high stakes scientific fraud over the last few years; things that got very public before they were caught and there were only a handful of people that could do the review.

  • It seems like a "post for free" electronic only system would be good for research distribution and collaboration. The authors could post (and edit with change logs) their works without having to pay anything. All of the posters/researchers should be verifiably registered of course to prevent random people from screwing with scientific research.

    The "weeding out" part could be done by researchers who are interested in the latest reports... and if they find the paper is bunk, they can report it, and if they

  • The problem with scientific journals (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ill dillettante ( 658149 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @06:12PM (#8751040) Homepage
    The basic problem with scientific journals is that they are acting as a very inefficient quality filter. The scientist wants (needs?) to publish in the most "prestigious" journal that s/he can get the work into (or else they won't have job next year). This is because the quality of the publication can't be easily assessed without reading the paper. Where a paper is published is used to determine the quality of the work and hence the scientist. From a publishers perspective once you have been able to create (or buy) a prestigious journal then you can basically charge what ever they want to publish in it. What is needed is means to easily determine the quality of individual papers, preferably in a single number (making it easy for your promotion committee to score). If this were to happen then journals would cease to exist as scientist would just post their papers on a central server and other scientist could use the quality score to filter good from bad. The problem is coming up with a non-corruptible means of easily scoring individual papers.
  • As a software engineer outside of academic channels the publication of computer science papers online has been invalueable to someone myself. Previously if I wanted to lookup work done on a particular subject I would have to try and get access to the university libraries to find the publication I was intrested in.

    As more and more journals are appearing online and via searchable databases using a web interface this has allowed me to find the required papers I need for my work much easier.

    The result is that

  • Why is Nature only digitally available for Windows (Score:3, Informative)

    by crush ( 19364 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @07:06PM (#8751622)
    Nature is currently promo'ing a digital version available through "Newsstand". I was extremely disappointed to find out that I was supposed to download a Windows only "viewer" to try out this "digital" subscription [nature.com]

  • British Medical Journal discussed this 10 year ago (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JacobKreutzfeld ( 614589 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @07:50PM (#8751917)
    I was fortunate enough to work with some smart researchers about 10 years ago, showing them the then-very-new web. They were excited about using it as a research publishing mechanism but the journals didn't get it: they thought it couldn't be serious research without peer review, etc. Of course, peer review is quite possible on the net, in fact, facilitated by it. So they wrote a paper about it and surprisingly, BMJ published it:

    http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm

    I love the opening:

    The musky scent of aging paper in our medical libraries still evokes an atmosphere of scholarship. But the cloistered peace of the stacks is increasingly punctured by the faint sounds of the coming revolution: the clicks, beeps, and whirrs of computers linked to the internet.

  • Another proposal (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. GeneMachine ( 720233 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @07:58PM (#8751988)
    In addition to the vivid discussion on open publication that already ensued, I'd like to propose another concept: publication of failed experiments. Scientist all over the world conduct experiments on a daily basis that don't yield results. There is practically no chance at the moment to get such results or non-result published - though they would be of enormous value to other researchers, simply by pointing out paths of research not to take.

  • Misconceptions about "Author Pays" Model (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Michael Eisen ( 634874 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @09:25PM (#8752558)

    It's clear from comments in multiple threads that misconceptions abound about open access and the "author pays" model for funding scientific publication. As a founder of Public Library of Science [plos.org], a SF-based non-profit open access publisher, I would like to respond to these collective comments.

    The biggest misconception is that the shift to open access is about a shift from "reader pays" to "author pays". While it may be easy to explain the difference between the two systems that way, the reality is that in either system, the money comes from the same place - the funding agenencies, universities and other research institutions that sponsor scientific research. In the current system they pay indirectly by providing acquisition funds to libraries, covering personal subscriptions in grants, and paying page charges for many journals. Under open access they would pay directly.

    So the real question is not WHO pays, but rather how should these organizations pay publishers for the valuable services they provide? Should they use an outdated system in which an invaluable public resource - the published scientific and medical literature - becomes the exclusive private property of publishers and in which huge numbers of people are needlessly denied access to the latest scientific and medical knowledge? Or should they use a system that pays publishers a fair price for the services they provide, but where the finished product is freely available to all?

    Evoking images of starving graduate students reaching into their own wallets to pay a greedy publisher for the right to publish the results of their many years labors misses the point completely, because these students will benefit tremendously from open access - not only because they will have something very few of them have today - comprehensive access to the literature that impinges upon their work - but also because the information will be far more useful once it is freed from the artificial barriers that make it difficult to search (very little of this literature is currently indexed in google) or use in other ways.

    We obviously have to make sure that authors who do not have access to funds to cover publication costs are still able to publish their work. But this is not that difficult. Consider a scientist at a poor university in a developing country for whom a $1,500 publication charge would be a true hardship. If they publish their work in a fee-for-access journal - e.g. Nature - the global scientific community subsidizes this publication through their subscriptions to Nature. They do this willingly, because they want to read what this scientist has to say. This desire and willingness to subsidize their publication costs won't go away with a switch to open access. Open access journals like PLoS Biology already waive publication costs for authors who can not afford them, and we fully expect to be able to do this in perpetuity.

    What's more, most of the scientists who can not afford to pay the costs of publishing in open access journals work at institutions that can not afford subscriptions to very many journals. Today, such authors end up in the absurd position of publishing in journals that they can not read! Those concerned about the lack of egalitarianism in publishing should be far more concerned about the tremendous and worsening imbalance in access to the published literature. Open access fixes this immediately!

    Finally, some have expressed the concern that open access will degrade the quality of scientific journals by providing publishers with an economic incentive to lower their standards and publish papers simply to collect a publication fee. While there may indeed be journals that adopt such a strategy, potential authors will quickly realize this, and will be reluctant to publish their work in a journal with such a reputation. Any journal with an interest in attracting the best papers has to maintain an appropriately high standard no matter what their econonmic model.

    Michael Eisen [lbl.gov], Ph.D.
    Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
    University of California Berkeley

    Co-Founder, Public Library of Science [plos.org]

  • To clear up some misconceptions in the posts... (Score:4, Informative)

    by rhowson ( 731201 ) on Friday April 02, 2004 @09:47PM (#8752675)

    I work for the Public Library of Science [plos.org], an organization dedicated to Open Access publishing, and just wanted to clarify a few issues.

    I've only briefly scanned the posts, but wanted to clear up a few things, at least about how we go about open access publishing:

    1) ALL of our papers are peer-reviewed to very stringent standards. In fact, many of our editorial board members have worked with high profile for-profit journals (Nature, Science, Cell, etc.). This is not simply a 'pay to publish' system.

    2) Our publication costs are not necessarily prohibitive. We grant waivers to those unable to afford these costs. Incidentally, our publication charge does not currently cover even our own costs.

    Currently, for-profit journals are taking advantage of a free labor pool (scientists who donate their time to perform peer review), and turning around and profiting from it. As several readers have mentioned, much of the research published in these journals is funded by taxpayers; the fact that these taxpayers, and even the scientists themselves, have to pay for access to this research is something which needs to be remedied.

    Please refer to our website [plos.org] for more information.

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