Scientists Organize Elsevier Boycott 206
An anonymous reader writes "The academic publisher Elsevier has attracted controversy for its high prices, the practice of bundling journals for sale to libraries and its support for legislation such as SOPA and the Research Works Act. Fields medal-winning mathematician Tim Gowers decided to go public with a blog post describing how he'll no longer have anything to do with Elsevier journals, and suggesting that a public website where mathematicians and scientists could register their support for an Elsevier boycott would further the cause. Such a website now exists, with hundreds of academics signing-up so far. John Baez has a nice write-up of the problem and possible solutions."
Will referee? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Some sort of backwards-ass sympathetic magic? You don't get picked to referee unless you're solid in your field, so there's an irrational fear that they'll stop being a big deal if they stop refereeing (even though refereeing is anonymous)?
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not likely. Being a reviewer is a PITA, and generally doesn't advance you in any way. I once applied for a grant that asked how many papers I'd reviewed in the past year, but they just wanted a number, completely unsubstantiated, so I doubt they put much weight on it.
Scientists do peer review because it's a duty. Not publishing with a journal you don't like is an easy choice. Refusing to participate in peer review with them just means they'll get someone else to do it, and poor papers may slip through.
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
...Refusing to participate in peer review with them just means they'll get someone else to do it, and poor papers may slip through.
Thus degrading the quality of the journal and after about 10 years people will learn to treat it as one of the trashier neighborhoods. The problem is the impact (factor and public) that the article will have in the transition period. Also, the editor will have to keep hitting up the scientists who don't refuse until they burn out. This can actually be a feedback loop where the reviewing scientist decides that they must get asked to review because they publish so often in that journal, so picking a journal with a lower review load may be worth looking into. Forgoing review is a nasty and dirty type of boycott which definitely flirts the line between dereliction of duty and the need to advance science by publishing in a public forum (which country-club nit-picky-HOA Elsevier is not). Most of those journals are good, and often the sale to Elsevier was to free up their editorial board and professional staff for the real work on the journal. This problem has been building for years and there's not much that will solve it outside of legislation and possibly international treaty. Even the US legislation which says papers written on research performed with public money should be free to access (perhaps with a 6 month delay) has too many loopholes for it to work well.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Thus degrading the quality of the journal and after about 10 years people will learn to treat it as one of the trashier neighborhoods. The problem is the impact (factor and public) that the article will have in the transition period."
Sure. If you want to ruin a journal over the long term and you don't care about the quality of the science that gets published in the meantime, it's a great way to go. Most scientists DO care about the quality of the science that gets published though.
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in the last couple of years, the NEJM has dropped in quality. I suspect for the same reasons.
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Because all the authors are scientists who want to do science, not run a (pro bono) publishing company or social media site.
The whole idea of enforcing algorithmic rules for referee and author reputation is very tricky. How do you treat new authors? How do you avoid whoever is in charge tweaking the algorithm for their benefit?
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Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a vague sense of duty. For any given potential paper, there is a limited number of suitible peer reviewers. I'm trying something so odd right now I can think of less than 8 people who are are knowledgable about the materials and spectrosopic method off the top of my head. The people still willing to be a referee possibly feel that their field as a whole shouldn't suffer with suboptimal peer reviewers simple because another scientist is trying to get published in an Elsevier journal.
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Refereeing allows you to scrutinze your competitors, preventing them from getting publications on subject you yourself are also working on, delaying them and/or at least making sure they acknowledge your own work. Even with double-blind reviews it is often clear to the reviewer who the author is and in many cases even vice versa, especially in small fields where this is even predicable.
Will referee? (Score:3, Insightful)
Referee != Scientist (Score:5, Insightful)
Being a referee is part of being a scientist.
Being a human being with integrity is ALSO part of being a scientist.
If one wants to think one being worthy to be known as a SCIENTIST one must at least have the integrity to know that keep on feeding leeches such as Elsevier does the scientific community a dis-service
Restricting the access to information is an antithesis to scientific principle.
Re:Referee != Scientist (Score:4, Insightful)
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[...] but one often has to take the bad with the good.
Only for as long as you choose to, and as long as everybody thinks like you the bad will just get worse.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't as much as refereeing for Elsevier journals, but to referee for well established and respected journals. Being invited to be a referee of one of those journals is seen as a sign of respect by the scientific community and a public acknowledgement of one's technical and scientific mastery. After all, if a community has to choose who will edit the scientific work done by their own community, they will choose the best in their field, not a snotty-nosed clueless newbie.
Then, the real problem is that Elsevier managed to control the publication and access to journals which are seen as humanity's forum for specific scientific areas. So, Elsevier manages to get that "magentic allure" by proxy, not for the company's own merit. As soon as journals are published elsewhere, Elsevier will lose any prestige they might have, and although scientific papers will continue to be published, the world will be a better place for not being forced to shelve 40 euros for individual papers or thousands of euros for a subscription. Let's hope this boycott represents the tipping point.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the process for choosing reviewers is a lot less about respect than you think. You can get picked for a review by just having published a bit in the same field, by being named by someone else who is too busy to do the review himself, or because the editor knows you personally and he asks you to do the review as a favor.
Yes, picking leaders in the field is preferred, but they are often unavailable! Reviews take time.
--PM
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Will referee? (Score:5, Informative)
Undoubtedly it is easy to start a new journal. The hard part is to turn it into a credible one, and the hardest part is to turn it into the "go to" forum for scientific and technical discussion of a specific subject.
This call by Tim Gowers isn't intended to fix the problem of starting a new journal. This problem has been fixed for decades now, with the inception of the internet as the main platform for knowledge access and distribution, cheap computers and cheaper software. What Tim Gowers intends to achieve is the hard part of the problem: how to turn freshly created or obscure foruns into the main forum for scientific discourse of every scientific and technical field, and destitute the current midlemen to those forums who are restricting access to those journals as old fashion trolls.
This is why Tim Gowers is appealing to the community to stop helping Elsevier out, and instead redirect their efforts to create or contribute to open access journals. Elsevier's power is in manipulating a flock of sheep to not only give them their work for free but also pay them hansomely to access that which they did themselves. Once Elsevier loses the ability to manipulate them to do their bidding, the scientific community, and therefore humanity, wins in multiple ways. So, it is a social problem, not a technical one, and to fix this problem then that specifc segment of society must change. This is what Tim Gowers (and others, too) ultimately intends to achieve.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Replacing an abandoned journal is rather different from trying to displace a journal by force. Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one. Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review. If you aren't open access and aren't affiliated with one of the big publishers (see below) you will have a hard time getting people to read your papers.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software (we do pay for some more specialised software out of our own budgets but windows, office, matlab, endnote and so on are all covered centrally). Those things are paid for centrally as part of block subscriptions. If academics actually had to pay the prices that are shown to the general public I suspect there would be a very quick move towards open access journals.
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Setting up the website is easy, even finding reviewers is probablly not that hard. The difficult bit is convinving people to chose your journal over the established one
That's why you need buy-in from a few established name. In most fields there are a dozen or so people that almost all of the community respects. If these people are the board for your new journal, then it is instantly credible. In the case of JOT, having Bertrand Meyer as the editor does this, and if you look at the board you'll see a list of names of people at the top of the field.
Oh and someone has to pay for your new journal (afaict reviewers do get paid even if it's only a nominal ammount) so if you are open access you will probablly have to charge authours to cover the cost of peer review
Reviewers are sometimes paid, but most of the time, for academics, this money just goes into their grant fund or, in some cases, into a general department fund. It's not really a motivating factor. I've never received money for reviews I've done for journals. Again, using JOT as an example, they don't pay reviewers, nor do they charge authors.
It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software
That depends. If the journal is in one of the bundles that your institution subscribes to, then it is 'free' to the end user. If it isn't, then you pay $30 or so, and this comes out of your grant, which means filling in extra paperwork. I've been in exactly the situation that I outlined in another post: papers that I wanted to read were in an Elsevier journal and my institution only had the subscription for the latest few issues - if I wanted older papers I had to pay. As a PhD student, doing this meant getting approval from my supervisor, filling in a form, getting him to sign it, and so on. As a lazy PhD student, this meant just reading papers that cited the one I was interested in that were published in open access journals, and citing them instead...
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It's important to realise that individual academics and students within instituations don't directly pay for access to most papers from our budgets just like we don't directly pay for "core" software (we do pay for some more specialised software out of our own budgets but windows, office, matlab, endnote and so on are all covered centrally). Those things are paid for centrally as part of block subscriptions. If academics actually had to pay the prices that are shown to the general public I suspect there would be a very quick move towards open access journals.
That's part of the 40-44% Facilities and Administrative costs (F&A) [unr.edu] that comes out of your grant.
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Future employment at a college often depends upon how many papers and grants you produce. It's more of a fear of losing their jobs.
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This makes as much sense as claiming that the only reason athletes accept an invitation to play in the all-star game is that "in general have such low esteem of themselves that they crave for the respect of their own peers in order to survive".
And this would also apply to prizes such as the fields medal and nobel prize.
To put it simply, there is a
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And don't forget to watch the NHL All-Star Game this weekend!! Sunday, 4PM eastern!
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A bit dishonest I know, but a rejection with the comment "not appropriate for this journal, try x or y" isn't too damaging to science...
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Possibly that is because of various special volumes of journals. Sometimes, there will be special issue of some journal for a conference or in memory of some notable researcher who just retired/died/was celebrated, and for those people are generally more willing to referee. So perhaps some of those people don't want a blanket refusal because they still would be willing to referee articles for a special issue. That's just a guess. But I hope this agreement pushes the choice of journals for such special v
Re:Will referee? (Score:4, Interesting)
what is the magnetic allure of refereeing for Elsevier journals?
Refereeing is a complicated thing. As much as you might hope that all scientists and scientific papers are honest and accurate, this is not always the case. I've refereed for several low-quality journals, not because I took any pride in the act, but because people were submitting low quality papers directly based on my work. If I don't serve as a reviewer for these kinds of papers, then I don't have an opportunity to make sure they did things correctly. And whether or not it's correct, a pile of misinformed papers can still gain traction in the larger community. This is becoming more and more the case, particularly since graduate students (in general) are becoming less and less inclined to do very deep and detailed literature reviews. Reviewing is not about supporting a journal. It's an important duty to prevent the spread of misinformation, and also to make sure that the existing work is described in a proper context. Promising to abstain from reviewing certain journals would be a great disservice to your own work and to your scientific field.
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The Lancet (an Elsevier journal) does actually pay some reviewers, this could be the issue.
Finally (Score:2)
404! (Score:5, Funny)
Please take the pledge not to do business with Elsevier. 404 scientists have done it so far:"
Just got me thinking...
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Have at it, boys! [elsevier.com]
What's the point of journals? (Score:5, Interesting)
They seem unnecessary in the internet age. Set up some sort of social networking system for scientists.
Also keep getting disturbing reports of journals censoring works for political reasons or because they're afraid that certain factions within the science community will boycott them.
The whole thing is anti science. Create a forum where all scientists can share information freely without fear of being censored or favoritism. If other scientists don't find your work compelling then they don't have to listen to it.
It will also make disclosing all the information about a given study easier since hopefully more of the work will be within the system.
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I'm sure a lot of that is done for the same reason that medical conferences always seem to take place on sunny, tropical islands.
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of journals is the value of their reputation. A well respected scientific journal is useful because they've repeatedly put their name on the line publishing scientific papers, and when the vast majority of those papers are valid and well reviewed, you can have some hope of trusting an as yet unread paper. "Censorship" in the form of verification and peer review, is one of the driving mechanisms of science, because not all ideas are made equal.
It's not the dead trees that make journals valued, but the credibility they help maintain. Having well-respected scientists be widely opposed to your journal is a deadly circumstance, as trust is all you have.
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How is that even remotely scientific?
That's ad verecundiam. What should matter is the science.
Now if you're worried about having some kind of filtration mechanism so scientists aren't bombarded by bad science then there are many ways of doing that without appealing to an opaque editor that has everyone's trust but has no transparency.
Remember Bernie Madoff. Prior to the scandal he was an extremely well respected man in the finance world. Everyone trusted the guy. He was a legend. But no one audited his work
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The editor usually IS one of your peers. He's generally someone with an established, excellent track record in a field. He wades through the crap that comes in (think Firehose), then passes on the stuff that isn't wildly inappropriate or unintelligible to other reviewers. He's triage.
If there was only one journal, a bad editor could theoretically do some damage. But that's not the situation. First, most journals have multiple editors, and there are multiple journals. If a journal starts rejecting good
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If there were a public record of everything that was rejected, when, by who, and why... then I would be fine with it.
There is no transparency. Not only can such people do damage there is no doubt that there are people doing damage all the time.
Come on... Murphy's law. If it can happen it will happen.
I'm okay with keeping the journal system if it can be made more transparent. But frankly there are some credibility issues cropping up that do require some sort of reform at the very least.
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Yes, the review process does need some tweaking. Reviewers' comments should be made public, with their names attached, after the review process is over. I'd also like to see options for a more interactive (but still anonymous while it's happening) review process, so reviewers can ask questions and have them answered more quickly. Journals, including the big ones, are experimenting with these things. Nature has been introducing several new review options along these lines over the last few years.
Journals
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While I do not want to defend the journals I think your comparison with Bernie Madoff does not work here.
While he might have been well respected, he had an incentive to cheat and abuse the trust by putting the money in his own pocket. Why should any journal profit from suppressing or pushing a certain kind of research? It is more the other way around: as an editor I would be looking for breakthroughs and unusual findings as they increase the influence of the journal.
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Oh you don't know the Bernie Madoff story then. He didn't need the money. I thought everyone knew that.
it was worse then that... he did it because he could do it. It was all fueled by contempt. Bernie was a very wealthy guy before he started his Ponzi scheme. He was very well respected for doing REAL work. I mean, he ACTUALLY earned that respect for really good work in the finance industry. Look the man up PRIOR to the ponzi scheme and you'll see he was a very big wheel.
Why did he do it then? He didn't need
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Spoken like someone who has never actually done scientific research. Here's what happens:
1) You learn about a subject by listening to people who have done research in the past. At that point, the science you're learning about is pretty well hashed out and non-controversial.
2) You gain some knowledge, and start to poke around the edges of the commonly accepted knowledge in your field.
3) You have some open questions where your professor or PI either told you "that isn't settled", or you're hearing two differe
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No.
Bernie Madoff was a sacred cow prior to the scandal. Think of a scientist that is/was so well respected that no one would even think to question his work. There are people that if they told you 1+1=3 you'd assume YOU made the math error because these people are never wrong.
Bernie also was cited by some people repeatedly for fraud. Some traders did the research. They calculated his returns and then looked at charts and tried to figure out how he could have possibly gotten those results. They reported Bern
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I am not a scientist.
But I am a human being. I know how humans work. Scientists can't escape their own humanity or the inherent weaknesses of human social structures.
I'll ignore for a second the fallacy that belonging to a group means you automatically know how it works. But, the sentiment is largely correct. But if you make suggestions for improvement, please make sure you understand the field you're commenting on.
Keep a log of all rejected papers, who, what, when, and why... and another record for accepted papers listing the same criteria... and I am content. You could do it with a spread sheet or a ledger. I don't need anything fancy here. Just a record open to all.
Please read what you wrote again. And then compare it to your own record keeping. And then note your requirement "
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If I'm sounding arrogant, then I apologize. Despite whatever impression I might be projecting I am well aware of my own ignorance.
I humbly accept counter proposals. The only thing I won't accept is that opaque unaccountable entities be trusted simply because they're "respectable."
I am human. I know they're human. I know what that means. Whatever else I don't know, I know that much. And with and by that little bit I do know... I know that can't be trusted.
So there has to be transparency and record keeping as
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Thank you for acknowledging your limitations. It's rare, and it means I now need to hold up my end of the bargain. I'll keep it brief, and high-level.
What we have right now isn't perfect, but it is consisting of small steps in the right direction. Journals are providing a certain amount of vetting that allows researchers to spend more time doing novel research, instead of poring over bad research others are doing. It has problems, in that journals are essentially extracting rents from their monopoly on repu
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WIkipedia only costs about 10 million to run a year and they're a much higher traffic system then what we're talking about.
If you spread the cost amongst the universities we're talking about such a small amount of money it could be funded outright with an endowment and then perhaps an extremely nominal fee is charged from the universities for the privilege of POSTING or submitting articles. I think reading the system should be free and open to everyone especially laymen. The cost won't matter though. It wil
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Its not.
In theory, you are right. In practice, it hasn't been able for any person to keep up with all the purported science in any but the narrowest of fields for centuries, and that problem is just getting worse. The peer review process used by journals is intended to serve as a first-cut proxy for review by the larger community, and individual readers review of the work that actually appears in particular journals drives the order and
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:5, Informative)
There are several points to journals. The first is to have a fixed, published and immutable, snapshot of some research that people can refer to in the future. At the very least, this has to be hosted by someone other than the author (for obvious reasons), and it generally needs a DOI assigned so that it can be easily referenced and uniquely identified in the future.
The second, obviously, is peer review. Anyone can, for example, put a bit of research on their blog or on arxive.org. They can then get feedback immediately, which is useful for them, but people wanting to read about a subject want to have a filter - a set of papers that they can read that the community agrees are up to a certain standard.
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As to referencing it... again that won't be a problem. We can do that some sort of social networking system. The design is open to interpretation. Possibly some sort of personalized wikipedia type thing. It doesn't really matter. Let scientists put whatever they want online. When they press "publish" it's published. They can't take it down after that. Let anyone see it.
As to peer review, any registered scientist can comment. Obviously you don't want just anyone commenting. But probably no harm in letting ev
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Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:4, Informative)
The thing is that journals are actually a decent solution to these issues. They curate content on your behalf, and you decide which journals are more reputable than others. By doing some of the leg-work for you, they handle scalability and make the format relatively open to all comers. They also have the advantage of already existing: scientists already know which journals are better than others, understand the process of submitting to journals, and so on...
My point is that while you could entirely ditch the journals, and build a whole new system... this would be inefficient. It would seem simpler to take the current journal system, and just fix the things that are wrong with it (in particular, the exorbitant costs and the lack of open access). On the one hand, you may say it's hopelessly idealistic of me to expect for-profit journals to willingly move towards a more open format. On the other hand, there are already highly successful open-access journal ventures (e.g. PLoS [plos.org]), which are indeed pushing the journal system towards open access. So there is hope that we can reform the journal system.
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Well, as to signal to noise, the issue I have is that I don't trust the journals as a filtration mechanism. It's not transparent. They don't report which articles they reject or why. That's a big problem. "just trust us" is not something I'm willing to accept from anyone at this point. It's also not scientific. It's ad verecundiam.
As to journals solving the problem... there have been some very bad science published in the Lancet in the last few years for example... and that's supposed to be a very well resp
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course there could be ways to do anonymous peer-review in an open forum system (e.g. using trusted editor-like intermediaries, or using verifiable keys that can establish trust without disclosing who posted the review). It could be done; in fact nothing prevents all of this from happening right now (even now, authors could individually post their rejected articles, including all peer-review and editor comments, to their institutional websites; this at least partially happens through arXiv [arxiv.org]).
My point about efficiency was that for a given final state X, we can either tweak our current journal model until it reaches X, or we can start from scratch building a new initially inefficient system A, and then tweak that until we reach X. Both will have serious growing pains, but it seems to me that it will be easier (in particular, easier to get scientists on-board with the changes) by smoothly transitioning from the current system to the final desired state of X. Doing it smoothly means no downtime; each adjustment can be tested and the community can decide whether they like the change. So, again, I agree that there are many things about the journal system that could be fixed, and which modern Internet technology can help fix (open access, transparency, better logging of opinions/comments/etc., allowing any scientists to comment on any article, creating a space for public debates/discussions, etc.). I just think that the most kinetically favorable path to that new state is a series of changes from the current journal system (for all it's faults, the community is doing a lot of great science these days!).
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As to transitions... of course. I wouldn't suggest we just shut the journals off cold turkey. In fact, I'm certain that the old guard will stick with them until they retire. The point is to get the next generation using this system. In part they might find it liberating to be peer reviewed by their ACTUAL peers and not their soon to be predecessors.
And that said, if you can actually fix the journal system then GREAT! Fantastic. That would be wonderful. I have no confidence in anyone being able to do that. I
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The problem with a free forum is signal to noise. It would have to have some kind of reputation system, such as scientists rating/flagging each other's contributions. That way, you could add some respected scientists to your 'trusted' list, and things that they trust would be highlighted/promoted to you. Essentially a web of trust model. This has obvious downsides, such as scalability and the inherent formation of cliques and the like.
Those who do not understand the Slashdot moderation system are doomed to reinvent it.
Re:What's the point of journals? (Score:4, Insightful)
Journals are a filter. They're supposed to prevent some things from getting published - the low quality, scientifically dubious and shoddily done research. It's hard enough keeping up with the reviewed, edited and published work, never mind some kind of free for all "scientific" networking site that would probably be 90% drug and equipment supplier spam within a week and the other 10% long papers espousing crackpot theories.
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Well, we would be restricting it to scientists so the spam should be limited.
Furthermore there are a lot of easy methods for filtering work out. Come on... we've all used about a million social networking sites at this point. There are WAYS to filter content in an unbiased way.
Another issue here is scientific group think. This is something science has been prone to for centuries. Most scientists believe something is impossible or that the world works a given way. A few people on the side protest and are ign
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"Well, we would be restricting it to scientists so the spam should be limited."
How? How do you define a scientist?
"Furthermore there are a lot of easy methods for filtering work out. Come on... we've all used about a million social networking sites at this point. There are WAYS to filter content in an unbiased way."
I'm not sure social networking sites are what you want to use as an example. Facebook is unbiased? Slashdot? Even Google has been investigated for bias in search rankings.
"Another issue here
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I can think of two big ones(there are lots of other, smaller ones):
1) The sheer volume of science being done. I don't think you appreciate just how much research is published, and how long it takes to fully read a paper. I cannot possibly read all the papers that I would like to as is, an I certainly find it beneficial to have a few of my peers perform basic checks for quality, coherence, relevance and correctness before I decide to invest my time in it.
2) The system provides an organized way for tracking
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"Set up some sort of social networking system for scientists."
"ScienceBook"? (runs)
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So, registered scientists, field experts, are vetted, have their credentials on the line are allowed to comment/review/critique. No ACs allowed.
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The system would be closed to all but people with PhD's or people in graduate programs. And the two groups should be distinguished in the system.
Furthermore, the system should be sensitive to the field of each degree. If you're a computer science major commenting on a biology paper then that should at least be visible to people. I don't think anyone should be restricted from making comments after they're already in the system. BUT their field of expertise should be prominently displayed somewhere just so pe
Impact Factor is the point, not publishing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Publishing articles nowadays is terribly easy and does not cost a thing (arxiv); filtering and getting good referees however is not.
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
If a well known professor therefore signs your work, others will catch up to it. A 'good' paper will gain in publicity quickly due to being sent around a lot. One would also need to include a system of diminishing returns, as to avoid groups signing only their own papers. Ironing out these points of abuse will be the hardest part of this system.
The specification above only consists of four to five sentences and yet I would call it more robust than the currently arbitrarily chosen journals.
Re:Impact Factor is the point, not publishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds kinda like digg for scientific research.
Which quite honestly scares me...
Re:Impact Factor is the point, not publishing. (Score:5, Insightful)
My solution for this would be a public network of papers, where everybody can publish, read and 'sign' those papers. If you agree with a paper, you put your signature under it and the worth of this paper goes up. As your 'worth' goes up your signature also gains in weight, when signing other papers. Every paper gets a comment section, where reviews can be written and errors pointed out.
The problem with that is that you have to persuade other people — tenured professors, associate professors, funding agencies, etc. — that it's worth buying into your system. Once they buy in, it will work fine (modulo teething problems, of course). But if people don't believe that it counts towards your academic career, it most certainly doesn't count. Maybe that doesn't matter so much for someone with a Fields Medal or Nobel Prize as they've already shown that they merit tenure (or equivalent) anywhere in the world, but for someone earlier in their career it matters hugely.
People want to publish in top rank journals because that's how they show they are doing top ranked work. Competition is ferocious (if usually polite).
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> Publishing articles nowadays is terribly easy and does not cost a thing (arxiv)
Note that this is no longer accurate: Arxiv is now asking universities worldwide for donations. It isn't a mandatory license fee and it only amounts to a handful of commercial journal subscriptions, but it is no longer "not a thing".
PLoS (Score:3)
I think that's part of why the Public Library of Science [plos.org] went with their model -- authors pay to submit their article (which *does* get peer reviewed, but on technical merits, not if it's "interesting" to the edior). And then it's free to read forever.
ArXiv has shown their value to the community, but they currently rely on support from organizations [arxiv.org]. Many people who use the site don't even know the issues -- it's not like they're running banner ads asking for donations like Wikipedia.
Now, with the pay-up-
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like an interesting idea for a new type of open access journal. There's a considerable advantage to having lots of competing journals, run by lots of different people. Systematic abuse requires a large conspiracy. Your proposal requires some kind of central reputation tracker, with rules. Kind of like Google does with search. Except Google biases their search results.
Bad translations and religion (Score:2)
Trade associations. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is about time (Score:5, Interesting)
A nuclear reactor has a problem and you want to know what engineers found out about the likely consequences or progression of the accident, or what people in this country and other countries did about mitigation? It's right there. BUT:
$30.00 for reading a paper (which more likely than not will not contain what you are looking for) just makes it impossible to research anything at all - unless you are at least a millionaire. Just having access to one research paper per day will cost you $11000 a year. That has nothing to do with copyrights or protecting intellectual property or anything else.
It is all about extortion - thank you for trying to stop it.
Re: (Score:3)
You COULD go to a library and get it for free.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Because the food in the fridge and the electricity or gas your stove uses is free, right?
Re: (Score:2)
He have a point (the GP that is). We have the most advanced technology and the most easiest access to information since ever for the common people, but we are using this awesome technology not to make access to knowledge and research more easier but to watch porn and funny cats on youtube.
It's like someone finally invented the locomotive but laws are put in place to prevent anyone to ride the train without some horrible expensive fee, that only the top richest could afford.
I would love to read physics pap
Re: (Score:3)
"I would love to read physics papers"
Go for it. [arxiv.org]
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But that would be socialism.
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This only works for ... (Score:2)
recent publications. Good luck trying to find and email an author from a 1980ies paper.
Science publications in NL (Score:2)
IEEE do some of the same (Score:5, Interesting)
Last year I sent an email to IEEE saying that I would leave the organization if they continued holding research papers hostage behind pay walls.
I.e. authors were told that in order to get published they would have to assign their copyrights to IEEE and would have to remove any freely available copies on their own personal web page.
See also http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/2027226/ieee-supports-software-patents-in-wake-of-bilski [slashdot.org] and http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/15/177217/ieee-working-group-considers-kinder-gentler-drm [slashdot.org] about locking research behind DRM gates.
With very little visible change to their attitudes, I decided to leave.
Terje
Re: (Score:3)
Huh. I left because of the volume of insurance spam I was getting through them. That and the organization itself being almost completely useless to me.
Easy enough to sign... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy enough to sign up, and to say you hate Elsevier (so do I). But if you're in a research group at a university, and you're the PhD student, you're probably not doing yourself a favor by signing this. Your name will show up in search results, so people may know you signed (if you used your own name and institute).
In order to get your PhD, you will need to publish somewhere, and your prof will want you to get the highest "impact factor", because that's good for the whole group. You're in a way just an employee, so you better listen to the boss.
By effectively saying "screw you" to the whole system of publications, and going online to a really open system, you gamble. Better make sure the prof agrees.
But I applaud you, if you do.
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And let's not forget: They endangered millions. (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's not forget, that Elsevier created two dozen completely fake magazines full of completely fake "articles", which were ads for pharma industry products disguised as medical studies. They then planted those in doctors' offices for doctors to read.
Doctors based their trust on that, assuming it was factually correct, and prescribed millions of pointless drugs to patients, often endangering their health.
All for the profit of the pharma industry. Which is clearly bordering on... how do you call that in English? Mass felony mayhem? Mass battery? (I mean "Massen-Körperverletzung")
Nobody will argue that that wasn't a huge crime, and that Elsevier should not be closed down and its management put in PMITA prison.
academic publishers are scum (Score:3)
Publishers take advantage of the fact that a researcher needs to make their work available in (what is considered) a reputable publisher.
So, what happens:
- You work your ass off for months, if not years.
- Research done. You write a paper and submit that to congress X which will/may publish the approved ones in the Y journal.
- You must format your paper precisely according to the publisher's standards. The publisher gets the whole thing ready for print.
- You have to sign a COPYRIGHT TRANSFER document provided by the publisher. That's right, the publisher OWNS your paper. It's not yours anymore.
You submit your paper.
- The paper is peer-reviewed. And that is voluntary and unpaid, the publisher does not have such expense either.
IF your paper is accepted...
- You/your university/employer/whoever will have to pay a reasonable sum for congress expenses + whatever_they_claim_it_is_for.
- Naturally, you will have to present your paper. So add travel/hotel expenses here.
After all that...
- Your paper is available to anyone... anyone willing and able to pay the absurd per-paper free, or the subscription, in order to download that.
So, basically: the researcher provides print-ready material, gives away his/her copyright and pays the publisher ; the reader pays the publisher ; the reviewers work for free ; and the publisher laughs at everyone.
So I guess that (Score:2)
They will now publish Elsevere.
(ducks)
Elsevier shoud learn (Score:2)
from what happened to Pythagoras when he tried to keep everything a secret.
Re:For a second there... (Score:5, Funny)
Market pull [Re:academia is highly competitive] (Score:2)
The core problem is that scientists and academics get recognition,raises, and tenure based on publishing papers in journals, and thus there is a demand which Elsevier is feeding, proliferating journals to create places for academics to publish. Worse, drug companies gain credibility in the minds of doctors by publishing studies about their drugs, thus creating a very high dollar value market demand for a journal that will publish these studies.
Re:Market pull [Re:academia is highly competitive] (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Market pull [Re:academia is highly competitive] (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Elsevier tries very hard to extract subscription fees from their journals while keeping the cost invisiable to individual academics. Unless you or your institution buy a subscription to a load of them together you are likely to end up paying $10-30 or more for each paper that you might want to read. Most people, when they encounter this kind of paywall will just go elsewhere and read someone else's related work but other academics most likely won't run into that paywall and will keep citing your work.
FTFY
This gives the big publishers like Elsevier and the IEEE a huge advantage over either small closed access journals (which charge readers directly because they can't get the big institutional subs) and the open acces journals (which charge submitters since they can't get any money from readers).
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