Free Global Virtual Scientific Library 113
Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.
And we'll call it... (Score:1, Funny)
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Re:And we'll call it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And we'll call it... (Score:4, Funny)
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Dont know in USA, but in Mexico, doctors use something called Pharmaceutics Speciality Dictionary (or something similar) and the Mexico's University has it available for free
Going on topic, The non availability of the research papers has always been frustrating for me. I am currently doing a PhD and fortunately my University has subscription to *lots* of journals and services like Scopus or eBrary.
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This is the whole idea behind the Public Library of Science [plos.org] which has really taken off in the last couple of years. It's peer reviewed, high quality research, and gives free online access to everyone.
"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."
Library purpose (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, the vast majority of papers are aimed at other experts in the field. How many non-experts have any chance of understanding even a well-written academic paper?
The reason the system has grown into the monstrosity that it is, is precisely because non-experts have no way of distinguishing what is a good paper from what is not.
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non-experts have no way of distinguishing what is a good paper from what is not.
The experts sometimes can't distinguish a well written paper either. The physicist Alan Sokol wrote a pomo paper that was deliberate nonsense, and it got puiblished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair [wikipedia.org]
I recommend reading the entire wiki; near the end is a reference to a computer-generated paper that got published.
And previously on slashdot, a scientist claims that most scientific papers are wrong: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/3 0/2048236 [slashdot.org]
And then there are the fakes, wh
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non-experts have no way of distinguishing what is a good paper from what is not.
The experts sometimes can't distinguish a well written paper either. The physicist Alan Sokol wrote a pomo paper that was deliberate nonsense, and it got puiblished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair [wikipedia.org]
Bad example: experts weren't consulted in the Sokal affair - Social Text didn't peer review the submission, so it was never evaluated by experts in the first place.
And previously on slashdot, a scientist claims that most scientific papers are wrong: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/3 0/2048236 [slashdot.org]
Thats the whole reason most of us science folk get involved in science: no theory is perfect, the interesting part is testing 'em out and fixing the parts that are broke. If most scientific papers were 100% correct, we wouldn't have anything to argue about, would we?
And then there are the fakes, which get published despite outrageous claims, like the one about a year ago by Hwang Woo Suk who claimed major advances in stem cell research. After it was debunked, his peers said that it was obviously BS and should have been recognized as such.
Again: no one said science was perfect, and neither is the peer review proces
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The experts sometimes can't distinguish a well written paper either. The physicist Alan Sokol wrote a pomo paper that was deliberate nonsense, and it got puiblished: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]
Bad example: experts weren't consulted in the Sokal affair - Social Text didn't peer review the submission, so it was never evaluated by experts in the first place.
And, additionally, they had asked for some revisions, as they say in their reply after the hoax was announced:
Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did ask him informally to revise the piece.[...] Judging from his response, it was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at all.
It was a bit of a trouble to find this article on the net, so here is the place [imsc.res.in] where one can find, apart from the Sokal's article, also the response of the editors of "Social Text" (neither wikipedia nor Sokal's home page nor many other sites covering this hoax have it).
Re: Not So. (Score:4, Insightful)
A much, much bigger problem is that the average Joe has no interest in reading ANY technical publications (on line or otherwise) and for many who try they really don't have a clue as to what it means. Just look at how the science of climate change is covered in the news and in print. The entire science is predicated largely on the solution of differential equations and numerical analysis. Just how many readers are really in a position to read and properly interpret such results? The percentage is extremely small.
I have published "obscure papers" myself. I would love it if they were more widely available, read, and appreciated, but regardless of whether people would find them "useless" or "valuable" it seems unlikely that these will be even read, except by a few experts.
Re:Library purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
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"I am special, I am special" - an apparently well sung song in daycares these days.
If citations determine truthiness, then Colbert is right.
Tenure Denied (Score:1)
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Journalists and political activists on the other hand might ("Why is the government funding evolutionary biology research!?").
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That said, libraries exist mainly as governmen
Shouldn't it already be this way? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't believe so.
If you publish to a journal, the journal takes over the copyright. Your university's library has to pay the journal to get access to the article you wrote. And, of course, the price of journals have been skyrocketing lately ...
Re:Shouldn't it already be this way? (Score:5, Informative)
Scientific Bootstrap Kit (Score:2)
Has anyone yet put together a physical artifact containing a few thousand key scientific papers, blueprints, engineers' memoirs, and raw data collections? Not that we have any real use for such a thing at the moment, but
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If most researchers are anything like me, the first thing they'll do after publishing is post the full text of their research on their own websites for dissemination, copyright infringement or no. We want research to be free; anyone truly devoted to advancing the state of human knowledge has a duty to make their research available.
Not to mention that a copyright infringement case on one's own work, whatever the outcome, would probably be the fastest way to accelerate and publicize the open research moveme
Re:Shouldn't it already be this way? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, there is a reason -- but not a good one. Very big publishing houses such as Elsevier have a huge financial interest in maintaining the status quo, whereby government-funded researchers donate their work for free to the publishers, who then make a large profit by printing and selling it. It is typical (though not universal) for the publishers also to take the copyright of the papers they publish. To add insult to injury, it's not ususual for the publishers to CHARGE THE AUTHORS for the privilege of donating their work -- usually a fixed amount per page above some predefined page limit.
The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are. Scott Aaronson has written a scathing analogy [scottaaronson.com] to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny).
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Copyright is an inalianable human right. You could not give it up if you wanted to, but you can give someone else copyright too. For a publisher to say that an author is not allowed to make copies and distribute them in parallel to the publisher's own distributions is a violation of human rights by the publisher.
Further, copyright is a HUMAN right. Companies are legal entities, but they are not huma
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Well, yes ... you are confused :-)
On an abstract ethical level, I more or less agree with you. But legally, you are dead wrong. Companies can, and do, take copyright from authors. Not just academic publishers, either. Many, perhaps most, publishers require you to sign an explicit disclaimer that transfers copyright to them. That's why, for example, my littl [miketaylor.org.uk]
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I don't know. That would be interesting: an author having sold his copyright to a publisher, then asserting his human right to the copyright anyway. I've not heard of such a case, and I have no idea how it would turn out. My money would be on the publisher, though :-P
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The whole academic publishing game is a racket of the most egregious kind, and the Open Access movement is a very badly needed antidote to the way things are.
In some cases this is definitely true, in some cases not so. That makes it a bit difficult to figure this this out.
Scott Aaronson has written a scathing analogy [scottaaronson.com] to the current situation which I strongly encourage everyone to read (not least because it's funny).
Very interesting link. Perhaps it's a scathing analogy, funny too, perhaps it is also a review of the book, with analogies, paradoxes and ironies, some "fair enough" things, but in any case has self-referential paradoxes that are at the core of the problem (maybe I'm being too academical?). Let me quote a bit:
This article is supposed to be a review of a book called The Access Principle by John Willinsky (MIT Press, 2006). So let me now turn to reviewing it. The Access Principle is a paradox: on the one hand, its stated goal is to make the case for open access to research and scholarship. Its thesis is that "a commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it" (p. xii). On the other hand, the book is printed in hardcover and sells for $34.95. Recognizing what he calls the "all-too-obvious irony," Willinsky explains that while much of the book's content is available for free online, he's chosen to collect it in book form, first, to reach a wider audience; second, because of his "admitted attachment to the book's becoming look and familiar feel"; and third, because "the book remains the medium that best serves the development of a wide-ranging and thoroughgoing treatment of an issue in a single sustained piece of writing" (p. xiv-xv). Fair enough -- in any case, my review copy was free.
Re:Shouldn't it already be this way? (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.
The Nature article being referenced [nature.com]
The Slashdot Story about the article [slashdot.org]
"[Dezenhall the consultant] hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review"
"Brian Crawford, a senior vice-president at the American Chemical Society and a member of the [Association of American Publishers] executive chair, says that Dezenhall's suggestions have been refined and that the publishers have not to his knowledge sought to work with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On the censorship message, he adds: "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""
I don't really think that logic makes sense, but these guys are feeling a bit desperate, considering that their profit margin/business model could be legislated into oblivion.
zCyl (14362) [slashdot.org]
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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specialized search programs,
print and online mags that filter the mass of papers down to the "good" bunch in any one particular scientific area,
initial publishing rights and subscriptions,
commentary about the papers,
etc, etc.
there's still enough "value add" they could do to make good money, even after the storage of papers becomes public.
Re:Shouldn't it already be this way? (Score:4, Informative)
Is there really any reason why government-funded research shouldn't be made available to the masses? After all, wasn't it the masses who paid for the research?
Yes, but they don't pay to publish it, which isn't free. Also, many of the non-profit professional societies use subscription money to do rather a lot of good for K-12 and undergraduate education, so there's an effect there too.
I'd like to see an open system too, but it's not as simple as it sounds, which is why it hasn't happened.
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It really is as simple as it sounds. It's called PLoS, and it's happening.
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Because information wants to be free? And with virtually nil distribution costs, there's no logical reason(but plenty of instinctive ones) to deny access.
The internet may destroy regional boundaries, but it hasn't destroyed financial ones.
More like the reverse is true, but either way the problem will be resolved soon, I hope. It's time to tear down ALL boundaries.
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on another note, should the government regulate what is worthy of publication and who is worthy.
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On the other side of the coin, I would think the journals provide some level of oversight as to what actually gets published. Meaning i wouldnt want any fool publishing his/her theories on the world. The government would have to compensate in this role and have specialists performing this function for every discipline.
on another note, should the government regulate what is worthy of publication and who is worthy.
Specialists already provide the oversight about what is actually published. That's precisely what "peer-review" means. Amazing as it may seem, the privately-controlled, for-profit publishers get experts in the field to review every article for free. The reason that most journals have a low crackpot ratio is more due to the peer-review than vigilant editorship IMO.
The editors/editorial boards do have a role, in that they make the initial decision about what is sent out for peer review (particularly for j
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Seeing as attempting suicide is a crime then I'd say that taxes are our only right.
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Those were American masses, who paid for the research. The talk is about making the information available to the masses world-wide.
The majority of them dislike America and Americans today (multi-polar world, et al.) — and some are actively hostile towards us. It may be nice of us to help them all out anyway, and it may even help improve our
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Free Access to information? (Score:2, Funny)
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It's just a thought, but (Score:2)
UFO Tech Fights Global Warming?! (Score:2)
Two words... (Score:2)
That's great! (Score:1)
I've heard how bad the situation is: Scientist publish their papers in scientific magazines without getting payed. Other scientist review those papers, without being paid either.. but buying those magazines is really expensive. Basically the magazines don't do anything useful for science... they just cost much...
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How long will it last? (Score:1)
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$5 says articles start vanishing as "certain" governments decide that previously unclassified materials are not secret ...
Uhhhh.. The idea is to take articles that are publicly available (albeit expensive) and make them publicly available (and free). This is a non-event on any security dimension.
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Democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Having grown fat on free bread, the people will now vote themselves free information.
Just saying.
Dumbassery (Score:5, Insightful)
The article talks about government funded research. Why shouldn't the people who paid for it have access to it? Why should publishing companies, who often require transfer of copyright and cash payments from authors in order to publish, continue to get fat off public money?
People who think that the public is not entitled to what it pays for, while some random company that adds nothing of value is, are dumbasses. Just saying.
This exaggerates the situation. (Score:2, Informative)
Publishing books can hardly be seen as not adding value. Could you imagine how combersome and unworkable a system there would be if everyone just printed out
or photocopied raw manuscripts? Plagarism would be rampant and citation would be next to impossible. Also publishing houses provide distribution, and often are the
only outlets for many obscure works and often manage storage of unpurched volumes yet to be sold.
Can web-based systems work? Ye
This is overdue (Score:5, Insightful)
I know what's suggested here wouldn't be quite that, but it'd be the second to last step before we arrive at a system where free application and publication, anonymous worldwide peer review and free access to all publications speed up research considerably.
However, the advantage of this would be greatest for backwater scientific communities in second- and third-world countries. I could see a couple of legislators not want the Russian anthropologists, Kenyan mathematicians or Peruvian veterinarians to catch up on the guys in "their" universities...
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If your Kalahari bushmen get this book,
are they going to read it in English, do you think?
An international knowledge bank needs an international language that works [esperanto.net].
Se via Kalaharaj vilaghanoj akirus tiun libron,
chu ili legos ghin Angla-lingve, vi pensas?
Internacia sciobanko postulas
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substituting a mangled romance language for english doesn't make it any more accessible. Not to mention maybe all those different approaches to communication actually contribute something to the creativity in constructing well-thought out experiments to properly phrased hypothesis...like how Asian languages predispose their speakers to character/pattern recognition, and German lends itself to compounding ideas, or English lends i
Long time coming (Score:5, Insightful)
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I live in a university town. I may not have web access (which isn't the be all of anything anyway), but I can walk down to the university and show my library card and gain access to the material. Also as you already pointed out, the general public isn't the ones paying for the material. Why should they get web access? Your argument could be applied to corporate libraries (some of which do allow public access).
Not everyone lives in a town with a well-stocked university library. Also, some of the libraries on this campus don't allow people without university ID's to enter (for security reasons presumably). Well, it's a public university funded by tax dollars, so actually the general public IS actually paying for the subscriptions, just like they paid for the government funding to perform the research in the first place. At any rate, my point is that no one should have to pay for it, not twice anyway. I didn't men
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Already in place for physics (Score:5, Informative)
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It is interesting that physics is a pioneer in this field. It may have something to do with their research culture, I have been told; not being a physicist, I can't say. Yet, closer to my field, there is also some positive movement. The closed-access "Journal of Machine Learning" gained competition by the name of the "Journal of Machine Learning Research", where the latter
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There is a downside however... it's not peer reviewed.
Although you can use the journals for that...
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Needless to say people post to [the arXiv system (www.arxiv.org)] for a reason: it works really effectively to get research results out to the public quickly and efficiently, and as mentioned before, it's totally free for everyone involved
Then let's say it: they post it for other reasons too, like to disseminate their findings to the scientific community. Now I suggest to you to pick pretty much any paper from the arXiv and read it: you'll soon realize that it refers to lots of other papers, from journals. This is where things get complicated for anyone interested in reading these articles, because he or she, be it layman or an expert, still cannot get full information. Now try to get other articles related to the subject of the article t
American Physical Society Free online access (Score:4, Informative)
The APS began its participation in PERI by offering access to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Now that this pilot program has operated successfully for one year, the APS is in the process of expanding access to other developing regions.
The APS also supports the electronic Journals Delivery Service (eJDS), which is administered by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), http://sdu.ictp.it/ep/ejds.html [sdu.ictp.it]. This service is aimed at providing access to scientists at institutions in developing countries that do not have access to sufficient bandwidth, thus, making it impossible or too difficult to download material from the Internet. Through eJDS, scientists receive individual mathematics and physics journal articles via e-mail.
In addition to the programs above, the APS is also one of many publishers that are partners in the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL), https://www.ivsl.org/ [ivsl.org]. IVSL provides free access to scientific journals to institutions in Iraq. The Society has also established multi-institutional agreements (consortia) in many countries to help broaden access to institutions that might otherwise be unable to afford or gain access.
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I am in rural America, an American, I can't get easy access to the "American Physical Society" or similar journals. No job, no longer college access, and local library are incompetent and callous.
I don't want an institution to manage access for me.
Anyone have links, pointers to access?
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Also, you can read almost all the "current" issues without a subscription. It depends on the journal though. What discipline are you interested in?
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Directory of Open Access Journals? (Score:5, Informative)
If only they could use this new initiative to pump up the number of journals and full-text index the whole thing, plus the physics/math/computer science index over at www.arxiv.org, you'd have a good start towards a single, comprehensive index.
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Obligatory nitpick with summary (Score:2, Funny)
("Free Global Science Virtual Library" might have been a better choice.)
Even to the enemies? (Score:2)
This is, probably, not enough to outweight the benefits, but is not anybody concerned about our sworn enemies using our scientific advances against us?
They already do that, but they want more [boston.com]...
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did i miss the point where TFA mentioned publishing classified information? nobody wants to publish the construction plans of the latest AntiWeapenOfMassDestructionWeaponOfMassDestructio
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Given the quality of papers, giving them access would really slow them down.
Seriously, I know you stay up late at night worrying about how some religious fanatics will suddenly figure out how to use Fibonacci numbers to solve the Riemann Hypothesis and thus build their Gizmatron that will destroy all, but somehow, it doesn't bother me.
And pray tell, who is this "our" in "our scientific advances"?
Another "DUH!" moment... (Score:1)
First, many conventional publishers actively oppose open access, fearful that it will cut into their profitability.
Pretty much sums it up.
Indeed, soon after the launch of the European petition, Nature reported that publishers were preparing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to counter open access support with a message that equates public access to government censorship.
Distortion and distraction. Can we expect anything else
Free Global Virtual Scientific (Score:3, Funny)
What about peer review? (Score:3, Insightful)
Moreover, my concern is that a Virtual Scientific Library will will not emphasise where (i.e. which journal) a paper was published and therefore the rigour of the review process. Instead we'll end up with average research on an equal footing with research that deserves maximum respect.
So, yes to a Virtual Scientific Library but can we have it based on Slashcode please but with moderation linked to expertise?
Good idea, but could be hard to implement (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody has yet mentioned the reason expensive journals persist in an era of cheap typesetting and distribution. It's because they provide two (inter-related) things to the science community:
I agree the current system is bad and needs to be changed. My point is that it isn't so simple a problem to solve as many Slashdotters might believe. We're talking here about one of the primary mechanisms influencing people's research careers (which jobs they get, whether they get grant funding, which awards they win). If the money gets sucked out of publishing and the peer review process that this funds goes away, something will need to take its place as a QC mechanism for science.
price has little to do with reliability (Score:4, Interesting)
Peer review has little to do with the price of the publications. Referees are not paid by the publisher of the journal (I know this because I've refereed a bunch of papers and never got anything more than a "thank you" note.)
There are enormous price differences between peer-reviewed journals. Some first-class journals in computer science, such as the Journal of the ACM, cost about 200 a year, while some other journals cost as much as 5000. The difference is that the former are published by nonprofits (scientific or technical societies) while the latter are published by for-profit entities, who charge universities through their nose.
A solution, yet unimplemented, would be to have editorial boards read and validate articles that are published on sites such as arXiv.org
Repeat: what's important is the editorial board, not the publisher.
(Shameless plug: the French research agency CNRS has a nice site for open publication: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/index.php?langue=
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1. Open access != no revenue. The emerging model is for scientists to pay a slightly higher page charge. But note that most pay-access journals have these charges anyway, and the odd $1000 to publish an article in PLoS is a rounding error in most annual research budgets,
2. Many editors at society journals work for free. These pos
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There are enormous price differences between peer-reviewed journals. Some first-class journals in computer science, such as the Journal of the ACM, cost about 200 a year, while some other journals cost as much as 5000. The difference is that the former are published by nonprofits (scientific or technical societies) while the latter are published by for-profit entities, who charge universities through their nose.
What is more, some first-class journals [mit.edu] and conference proceedings [roboticsproceedings.org] in CS are completely free and persistently available on-line. Some of these [jair.org] have been this way for more than a decade now!
A solution, yet unimplemented, would be to have editorial boards read and validate articles that are published on sites such as arXiv.org
Which is exactly why these free and open but reviewed and edited online sources are much better than arXiv.
And these editorial boards likewise aren't going to receive any kind of money from any source? Is there any particular reason slashdot believes that the world doesn't require money?
Yep, that is right, nobody pays the editorial boards, just as nobody pays the reviewers. We do it because we are saints. Also, you are right, slashdot is one big groupthink, which is why nobody ever disagree
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Citation and references would also offer a dizzying world of possibilities for moderating, ranking and following up on research. It would be trivial to automatically add to each article a list of articles that link ba
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An open, electronic journal could work with a moderation system not unlike Slashdot, or even better, Everything2. User could get registered, and acquire reputation by writing articles having good reviews. Moderation systems work well for comments and E2 nodes; why not for scientific articles?
Maybe a user-moderated system could work, but I'm skeptical that moderation done entirely by users will result in high overall quality. Then again maybe you don't care about maintaining high quality across all arti
A logical follow-up (Score:2)
Currently in the Netherlands almost all major universities have repositories for their papers, theses, et cetera. Typically runs software like DSpace (www.dspace.org) or others (Chesire3, et cetera).
See http://www.opendoar.org/ [opendoar.org] for open access repositories.