Science Journal Publishers Wary of Free Information 293
Billosaur writes "Nature.com is reporting that the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes the companies that publish scientific journals, is becoming concerned with the free-information movement. A meeting was arranged with PR professional Eric Dezenhall to discuss the problem. Dezenhall's firm has worked with the likes of ExxonMobil 'to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace', among other campaigns. The publishers are worried that the free exchange of scientific information may be bad for the bottom line, as it might cause the money from subscriptions to their journals to dry up. Among the recommendations: 'The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.' The AAP is trying to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information, or the National Institutes of Health's (NIH's) PubMed Central."
Oh yes, (Score:2, Interesting)
Now seriously, come on! those "scientific" papers, I didn't know they made MILLIONS a year out of subscriptions (that's what research costs, millions if not billions). Maybe I'm in the wrong business?
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Money is a promise from society to do something for the person that holds it.
If someone learns or discovers something that saves lives, I say they deserve more than just "hey, thanks" back from society.
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Re:Oh yes, (Score:5, Informative)
In scientific journals?
Paid?
Man, I wish I lived in that magical world.
Re:Oh yes, (Score:5, Informative)
There is no monetary payment whatsover. The costs associated with publishing are typically paid for by advertising, and some journals with lower circulations may charge page costs as well. The authors never get payed royalties or anything for journal articles. It's an amazing thing really -- putting all your work out there for review (essentially before AND after publication), for the simple satisfaction that you have made a contribution to the knowledgebase. If your conclusions are erroneous, the community will figure it out eventually, and if your contributions are right on, you will be remembered as someone who had a positive impact on the field (you may even get rewarded). Scientists in academia are generally not the richest people in the world.
Paying your dues (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, let's be honest here. The reason we do it is not merely for that "simple satisfaction" (although there is some of that). If you're possibly going to be looking for a job in the near future, you need to be published - often and recently. If you're trying to get tenure, you need to be published. If you've got tenure, then, well, you don't need to be published, but it certainly helps your bargaining position if you're looking for pay increases, etc.
Still, it's a racket.Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We don't get paid jack when we get published.
In fact, for many journals, we have to pay them a substantial per-page fee if we include graphics beyond a fixed (low) limit, or exceed the page count. Even for peer-reviewed books, we don't receive payment for the chapters we contribute. Also, we have to pay for reprints of the article. Oh, and we also have to sign copyright assignment forms that transfer the copyright on our work to the publisher.
Becaus
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Now tell me which one of them saved peoples lives with whatever they made their money on.
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You bet (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm telling you, the quicker the entire Intellectual Property system goes topsy-turvy, the better. There was a watershed moment, sometime in the last few decades, when copyright, patents, the whole schmear, started working against it's initial purpose - to encourage innovation and creativity. Now, you write a good song and you hope it gets used in a movie and a commercial and you're set for life. How does that make you more creative?
I made my living from the IP system until some years ago, when I noticed the first time I lost revenue because of the copying and sharing of my work without my permission. After an initial few hours of outrage, the part of me that got into this whole business to be creative started to realize "Of COURSE people want to share it and copy it. It's entire value is in it's dissemination. It's what's SUPPOSED to happen."
Then, I went to work to reevaluate how I charged for my ideas and to come up with a way that's not based on commoditizing or objectifying my creativity, but just the opposite: Embracing the fact that these things are ephemeral. They are MEANT to be shared, copied, live a life and then go into an archive, maybe to be found again and maybe not. I don't need to collect a toll every time someone uses what I make, and I don't need to squeeze every last cent.
The final piece of the puzzle for me is figuring out a way to identify my work as my own, not to prevent copying, but to prevent someone else saying they made it. Unless that's part of the deal, that is. Digital Watermarking is still too expensive for a small-market individual like me and there are still some questions about signatures. I read an article about how The Aphex Twin hid his own face in a graphical display of his music. That fascinated me and I'm always bugging the math folk in my little world about these things. An answer will come. I just hope it's Open Source, or at least reasonable.
Reasonableness. I guess that's the solution, no?
Re:You bet (Score:5, Informative)
You're kidding, right? The scientists who do the research and write the papers receive no financial compensation from the journals whatsoever. Often, those scientists pay part of the cost of publication in the form of page or colour charges. The scientists who peer review the work work for free as well. It's seen as something that they owe to the rest of the community.
The journal publishers are the ones who make the money. They charge libraries and scientists for subscriptions, and they charge the authors to publish. Granted, they provide services; typesetting and layout and editing and distribution aren't free. But don't mistake money-grubbing publishing companies for money-grubbing scientists. A money-grubbing scientist would want to distribute their work as widely as possible as cheaply as possible. Scientists make money (grants, tenure, collaboration opportunities) on the basis of their reputations--reputations which are built on their work being widely known.
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If you replace the word "scientists" with "publishers", your whole post itself becomes much more reasonable. We are not paid for publishing, and many of us (myself included) find it wrong that our freely-given research is held ransom by people who had nothing to do with its creation, yet we would still like it, and by extension ourselves, to become well-known. I personally upload copies of my research to my website to circumvent this, even if this is technically a violation of a contract with many journals.
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But people who do science, my wife and many friends among them, work too hard for too little to be doing it for the money.
I'm lost. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Public access equals government censorship"
I've been parsing that for a few minutes and it doesn't make sense. How would open access equate to some sort of closed access?
Pay attention! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Pay attention! (Score:5, Funny)
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As the only context in which this minor distinction makes sense is that of stem-cell reseaerch, I'd say it is obvious you are trying to troll people who support stem cell research. There's nothing wrong with a good troll, but your post isn't that good.
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True, but still:
1) Neither makes sense.
2) My comparison involves things which are *more* similar.
As the only context in which this minor distinction makes sense is that of stem-cell reseaerch, I'd say it is obvious you are trying to troll people who support stem
Most major scientific advances come from govt. (Score:3, Insightful)
Until that point, thankfully, freeloaders are forced to help pay for all the benefits they accrue (Such as the use of the Internet) through gover
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Would you like to admit your error, or simply pontificate on the separate matter you just brought up?
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Re:I'm lost. (Score:5, Informative)
Superb (Score:3, Insightful)
When America was "god fearing", black people were lynched, homosexuals could be murdered without reprisal, spousal abuse was accepted as a matter of course, innocent people were burned as witches, slavery was tolerated, there was a civil war, women who were raped and became pregnant as a result were ostra
Re: Here we go again..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nor a Santa Claus or Easter Bunny.
Are we to quit teaching the truth because it does not support someone's traditional beliefs?
If so, who gets to decide which beliefs are sacrosanct and which are dismissable?
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You seem confused. How are they similar?
Many people are opposed to government spending any money, since they take that money (by threat of force -- consider what happens if you don't pay taxes) from the citizenry. Most of those people have no problem with science per se, especially if private individuals (or corporations) are spending their own money (or money freely given to them) to do it. Science
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Re:I'm lost. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're trying to insinuate that public access means a thing must be funded by the government, and thus subject to state control. This is a silly false dichotomy of course, but such is the nature of propaganda.
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Failing to adapt (Score:3, Interesting)
Furthermore, they could alter their business model by charging a flat fee
Re:I'm lost. (Score:4, Funny)
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If the government mandates that you have to publish in something like PubMed, and the paid journals end up going out of business (because they can't compete with "free"), then the government ends up with a lot more power of the purse
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What? Last time I heard, you had to PAY to have your paper included in a journal, the opposite of what you describe.
Sounds to me more like the AAP is worried that a bunch of the publishers will go out of business in a world in which they have become irrelevant.
No great loss in my book. You shouldn't have to pay to publish science.
Re:I'm lost. (Score:5, Informative)
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The scientific publishing industry is almost like a cartel, and just like the entertainment industry they are flailing wildly to try and keep a dying business model alive with FUD. My PI has de
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If the government mandates that you have to publish in something like PubMed, and the paid journals end up going out of business (because they can't compete with "free"), then the government ends up with a lot more power of the purse over what research gets done.
How would that be an imposition? "Okay, I'll put it i
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I guess it depends on who is providing "public" access. Often, the word "public" implies that it's run by some sort of government. Like public parks, public transportation. If you are, in fact, relying on the government to disseminate information (or regulate the dissemination of information), then the government is in a position to meddle with what information gets disseminated. Therefore, they are in a position to censor, possibly without giving anyone the ability to complain, since they can censor th
Awww, c'mon! (Score:3, Funny)
while(!$goodthink)
{
print "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH\n";
print "WAR IS PEACE \n";
print "LOVE IS HATE\n";
print "Public access equals government censorship\n";
checkGoodthink();
}
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Even if this was the implied message, I fail to see how this would be a bad thing.
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Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the AAP executive chair, [says]..."When any government or funding agency houses and disseminates for public consumption only the work it itself funds, that constitutes a form of selection and self-promotion of that entity's interests."
The problem with this argument, of course, is that PubMed is not actively suppressing any materials whatsoeve
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Can anyone point out (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anyway, the issue here isn`t* for-profit versus non-profit, it`s whether open access is economically sustainable for either of them.
* Any idea why Firefox has suddenly decided that the single-quote key should take me to search instead of typing the character?
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Google the Firefox apostrophe bug. You must be using an older version of Firefox, I haven't had that happen to me in at least half a year.
Also, it seemed to happen to me more with two FF windows open.
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I often have the same bug, only much worse - it happens with all keys. To fix it you can go to advanced options and disable "search for text when I start typing".
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Yeah... I actually thought it was kind of funny that the parent article we're all discussing right now is from Nature.
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Re:Can anyone point out (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole of scientific publishing is a big racket. If you stay away from dead trees, publishing a journal is shockingly inexpensive. Peer review is customarily done for free. When journals are printed up, they are sold at prices that almost guarantee a fat profit for the printer and publisher. If ever you pony up $10 or whatever ludicrous price a publisher asks for some 10 page journal article, know that the authors get precisely 0% of that money. As if that isn't bad enough, organizers hold a conference somewhere like at a ski resort which gives them a cut rate but socks it to the attendees, among whom are pretty much all the authors whose work was accepted. The attendees can almost always pass those costs on their patrons, but for those who don't have such support....
Authors get very little. All the authors get directly is bragging rights. The indirect compensation, only given out to "the best", is of course the tenured university teaching and research position, which is also the gateway to grant money. Sucks for researchers who haven't managed to get into that system. Also sucks for those researchers whom their patron (usually the government) cuts, especially when it's not for good reasons like their research is of poor quality but for political reasons. Someone even suggested that authors should _pay_ to have their work published! Well, scientists who aren't backed by a patron do have to pay. The RIAA cries about starving artists, but starving scientists, especially if their work is not what grant givers want to hear or believe, get treatment as bad or worse as the worst ever dished out to artists.
Re:Can anyone point out (Score:5, Insightful)
an example of a prestigious journal published by a for-profit company?
Well, you might start here [elsevier.com] for a start on one publisher. Quite a number of them are the "prestige" journals in their field, and are in those cases at least, stringently peer-reviewed.
What you not know is that these articles are subject to a publication fee. So, it's actually a multi-profit system for them. They get money from the researchers, and they get money from subscriptions.
What this is, is simply a new variation on the theme we've been through with RIAA, MPAA, and others. "OMG!!! Our profits are in danger from this Internet thing! We must DO something!" From a researcher's standpoint, it actually is a better thing if they don't have to deal with the for-profit publishers. They get their work out to the community, and they don't have to pay "reprint charges," etc. It works for other researchers and libraries, since they're not shelling out several hundred dollars each for subscriptions, and the works are easily searchable. So, of course the publishers are panicking! Their gravy train is threatened! It's FUD time!
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Nevermind science! Say it enough times and make sure people can hear it and it will at the bare minimum exert influence on the debate. The propaganda keeps the facts in check for as long as possible. Americans rush to invade Iraq by actually weighing the dis-jointed propaganda that was spoonfed to them is living proof of this.
Free is a very serious issue for text book companies too. In both cases, there is so much money to
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First you need a bunch of smart people to do the peer review. But if this typically done free as another poster mentioned, then no cost there. Then you need to get it to the people.
Maybe I'm naive, but gone are the days when printing a book required a few thousand bucks to order a bunch of copies (journal should be cheaper than books). There are on demand prinitng companies in fact, which take the order from end customers, print the book, keep the printing costs, and send you whatever
Shocking! (Score:3, Insightful)
There is already 'free exchange' of scientific information. The publishers already contribute to it. What they're really worried about is that people will publish in other media, especially where they don't have to pay (or not as much). They're just looking out for themselves. Publishers have to pay the bills and put their kids through college, too.
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Although that is true, I'm not convinced that "free" publishing entities such as PLoS have demonstrated that they are archivable, which is a much bigger issue that free exchange of information (which we already have -- I can go to my local university library and read as much as I want).
A paper published today in a journal should continue to be available for as long as possible in the future, or the notion of a "journal" is meaningless. If nobody is paying the bills,
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AFAIK, you don't have to pay to publish in nature. You have to pay to get yourself a number of nature (and every university library in the world does just that).
That being said, the publishers of nature has had tremendous power. As one of the most well-known and established scientific journals in the world, they have been able to more or less define what passes as good m
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Scientific journal subscriptions tend to follow two paths. One, getting a subscription tends to cost a lot of money, but they're cheap to publish in. The other is the reverse: cheap to get a subscription, but it costs quite a bit to publish in. A subset of the second group (like Nature, and Science) also use ads to defray the costs. Which is why
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What they're really worried about is that people will publish in other media, especially where they don't have to pay (or not as much).
Aside from the fact that most journals don't charge you to publish, but do charge you to buy/download articles, the reason is control.
Look at their current situation: The researchers around the world do the writing for them, and send the articles to them (simple web form), they dole out the articles for peer review by researchers around the world (three clicks in a da
So work with it rather than fight it... (Score:5, Insightful)
A funded journal would still be the best way to get the relevant information all in one place; the problem with free information is that it can be difficult to sort through for specific information. Take all the information that is freely available, pick out the best of it, do some research of your own, and publish a work that goes above and beyond the free information.
That's what thousands of news organizations and non-science journals do every day.
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I'd gladly re-join the ACM (I let my membership lapse after I graduated from college) if they offered an electronic-only membership with access to their digital archives for something a little bit less outlandish than $200. Other publishers might sell more PDFs to me if they didn't charge obscene (and insulting) a la carte rates.
They could attract new members by creating some sort of free service where they get
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If only we had a powerful, easy to use engine that would make it easy to catalog and search content......
Hmmm, maybe if I Googled I could find something that fit the bill...
Peer review means little. (Score:2, Interesting)
Those researchers and academics who are most outspoken and sure they are correct end up being considered as such. As long as you consistently deny that you're wrong and insist that you're correct, many fellow researchers and academics will believe you, even if you're co
Re:Peer review means little. (Score:4, Informative)
Peer review is not in question here (Score:3, Insightful)
I was only in the academic world for a couple of years, and helped peer review a couple papers for a professor of mine. In my smallish field (transportation operations research) there was no market for "vanity" journals like there are in some fields.
Maybe some fields are more politically charged than others, mine was certainly not one subject to p
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Peer review mean a lot! (Score:3, Informative)
[ I have been in "academia" for two decades. ]
Re:Peer review means little. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't really judge research when it is done; this is why people tend to receive Nobel Prizes for research they did decades earlier. Your peers are also your competitors, and it's not in their interests to promote good research that produces different conclusions to their own. No paper, no matter how wrong it appears to its reviewers, should ever be denied publication now that publication online costs nothing. Instead, the journals should add value by highlighting the papers that represent the current views of the research community, and also those that were important in forming these views.
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I've heard that somebody did a study of whether chewing gum of different sorts produces a measurable effect on an EEG. The result was that no, it doesn't. That's what I think Feynman meant: they had a hypothesis, and very scientifically determined the experiment was a failure, but still should be published, if only to add to the information about what shows up on an EEG and what doesn't.
Now, in my understanding, peer review is to tell apart things that are well researched from
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The problem I see with scientific publication is a bit different. The problem is not that the scientific community comes to the wrong consensus. The problem is that the scientific community doesn't come to a consensus at all.
Rather than being due to the peer review process, this problem is due to the whole system of scientific publication. To look successful a scientist has to publish journal ar
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Those researchers and academics who are most outspoken and sure they are correct end up being considered as such. As
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Why stop there? (Score:2)
ha (Score:2)
kinda like this sig... Vista Help Forum [vistahelpforum.com]
Welcome to America 2.0... (Score:2)
Honestly, if the 'exclusive information' route of making a science organization doesn't allow them to be solvent, we as a society need to reconsider how we fund such organizations. Can they be funded by the government in a way that will allow them to act acceptably independent of government influence? Can they be community funded to an acceptable level of reliability? Subscriptions to exclusive information for libraries doesn't seem to
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They already are. For example, arXiv was hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratory until recently, and many state employees (i.e., university professors) devote time and energy to the proper functioning of free journals. (Most professors are required to devote a small portion of their time to "administration", which can include editorships of journals.)
They're crapping their pants, (Score:2)
When their subscriptions actually do dry up, or they change their business model to accomodate the movement, victory will be ours!
Pay for it thre times? (Score:2, Insightful)
Quality control of the information collection is done by peer reviewers (who really do it for free), not by publishers, who only exist because it was necessary in the past for someone to organize all the communi
Censorship v. Censorship. (Score:4, Interesting)
Publishing is fundamentally a service industry. What the publishers provide is some task (e.g. binding copies to dead-tree format) that is difficult. With the advent of the interweb many of these tasks (e.g. shipping copies around the world) have become much easier. There is still a market for publishers of science and music (e.g. Special editions, bound works, and stuff that is "better than free") but rather than chase those niches the publishers have chosen to attack their own readers and authors.
This is especially hilarious when you consider the difference. Odd as it may seem, compared to this group, at least the RIAA has some leg to stand on. The RIAA is trading stuff that is typically not shared wheras the entire process of science is based upon sharing things freely and widely. That is how everything works from peer review to the spurring of new developments. At least the RIAA hires their music editors and producers while most editors of scientific journals are paid by their home universities and do this task for free in order to spur the exchange of information. Similarly most musicians are paid by the music producers while most authors of scientific papers are not paid by the publishers in any way rather its the other way around because the authors have to pay for subscriptions to read their own work.
This excange starts to look less and less fair all the time. Especially since more and more people are seeking out papers online rather than in the dead-tree forms.
Viva XXX [lanl.gov] and PLOS [plos.org].
Harumph (Score:2)
In their faces (Score:4, Insightful)
sounds like children making noise (Score:2)
I understand publishers get money from subscribers and advertiser and pay out to their writers and in the case of research journals that might even sponsor some of the research.
But maybe this is the horse and cart being removed due to increased car usage.
Public access equates to government censorship????
It would be nice if the government was more inline with what the people want.
But even then it wouldn't be a "public access equates to government censo
Science journal publishers (Score:2, Insightful)
Shooting themselves in the foot.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of trying to trick people into thinking that free access to information is somehow "bad", maybe they should be emphasizing the things they do provide? I'm not expert on the scientific journals, but I thought one of the things they provided was seperating out the complete junk from legit research. A filter of sorts. Do they currently offer help in editing scientific papers? If not, maybe they should? The question the industry should be asking itself is "What do we provide beyond actually printing and sending out paper?" Previously they've been able to take advantage of controlling distribution, since printing and distribution of information was relatively difficult. Now it's obviously trivial and extremely inexpensive.
It seems to me that free access to scientific information is a reality. Both the people who create the information (the scientists) and the people who read it (mostly scientists) want it to be freely available. Trying to fight it rather than adapt to it is a path towards bankruptcy.
Re:Shooting themselves in the foot.. (Score:4, Interesting)
But first they would have to provide something of value.
What they offer is a panel of scientists to whom your article is sent before it appears in their journal. These people then get to review it prior to publishing. This is unnecessary today; you just publish your paper on the internet, and then people review it. People can easily find reviews of your paper with google, unlike in a dead-tree-only model, where without a review process as part of the journal submission process, you would have to search manually though paper publications to find reviews of the paper in question. Basically their business model has expired and they are looking for lies to tell to bolster it, because they can't think of any legislation they could afford to solve the problem for them.
It's not clear that there's a lot of adaptation to be done, although I think they could limp along for a while by providing free or nearly free websites that handle the review process, and then charged people for dead tree editions compiled from material on the website monthly. Some schmucks would buy it. Ultimately nothing short of getting into another business is going to save them because a site (or network of sites) similar to Wikipedia could replace all of those scientific journals.
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Newspeak (Score:2)
Freedom equals slavery.
Every "illegal" download euqals a lost sale.
Looks like another legacy industry lying to protect their outmoded business model. After all, if they're selling something of real value (e.g. peer reviewed articles) to the consumer then they have nothing to fear. However, if they've only controlled the flow to this information due to a high barrier of entry in the past that technology has mostly erased now, then let them go down -- and the f
heh (Score:2)
Open Access helps and wont kill journals (Score:5, Informative)
And where does Nature stand in that battle? (Score:4, Interesting)
Pleasantly surprised, but still it seems to me that there is an interesting story hidden there.
It's everywhere... (Score:3, Informative)
Simple sound bites are used because people respond. Most people don't want to take the effort to absorb anything more complicated. God knows we wouldn't want to have to think for ourselves.
And have you ever noticed that the sound bites don't even have to be true? "Public access equals government censorship." "The war in Iraq is a war on terrorism." "The jury is out on global warming."
I've also noted that if you dig deep enough you find that it's all about money and power.
756 quality controlled free access journals (Score:4, Informative)
Libraries cancelling subscriptions is main worry (Score:3, Informative)
The publishers' real problem is not free journals, but rather libraries trying to stop paying the publishers' vastly increased charges. "Free journals" is merely the latest library tactic.
Many librarians and researchers didn't start out caring about the principle of free journals. The publishers' greed forced it on them. Even major research libraries are cancelling subscriptions. The libraries are doing that because the journal prices have been increasing so fast. First the libraries tried switching from paper copies to online subscriptions. So the publishers raised the online prices. Further, the publishers bundled many journals together so that libraries could not cancel the least used titles. The libraries try to form consortia to share subscriptions, but the publishers' license terms stop that.
Even "free" journals cost someone money. PLOS is quite expensive to publish in. Their model is charging the author not the reader.
One factor driving rising journal prices is the increased concentration as big publishers like Elsevier buy their competitors. Some years ago, Elsevier stated their business model as, approximately, serving assistant profs trying to get tenure. In 2005, their profit was 655 million euros on income of 2097 million euros ( http://www.reed-elsevier.com/ [reed-elsevier.com] ) That's not a bad profit margin.
Journals are priced like drugs, at what the market is perceived to bear. That can be up to $2/page (w/o even any color) ( http://www.ams.org/membership/journal-survey.html [ams.org] )
Journals are obsolete. They're slow to publish, rarely have color, don't have videos, etc. We academics publish in them because administrators use them to judge us. However, when we need something, we search the web, not the libraries. I put my own research first on the web, so that people can find it. Later I write papers.
Finally, to respond to the comment that publicly funded work should be free: That would be nice, but there's a US law giving universities ownership in discoveries resulting from NSF-funded research. What do other countries do?