As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can."
New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.
We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price.
I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).
SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them.
Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might be submitted. If we go to publishing everything on the web, someone needs to perform this function or it will be even more difficult to sort through the flood of stuff that is written.
That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.
No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free.
The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough.
Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers.
The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark:
http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied).
Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age.
I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory righttherewithit.
There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.
People propose that plan all the time. Here's why it can't work:
While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...)
There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process).
EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles.
One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
It's true that arxiv works well. Do remember, though, that even arXiv does not allow posting by anyone. If you're not affiliated with a major research institution, you need to be vouched for by current members.
IANA Physicist, but I can't imagine any physics journals feel threatened by arxiv. When someone wins a Nobel prize for work that was published exclusively through arxiv, then you might have a point.
I Am A Physicist, and researchers do use Arxiv quite often: pre-publication papers, or something that is written up and can iterated (unlike journals, Arxiv can store multiple version of the same paper). It is not peer reviewed but good for having feedback on things you are doing.
Of course, publications from the "big guns" go straight to the big journals, and their peer review is more like rubber-stamp if you have the name on your author list.
So the only difference is for the bureaucrats, who want you to show them "proper" papers to be able to move forward, the people doing the actual research only care whether your experiment and explanation is solid or not, can be published anywhere.
(And I'm totally for open journals, even more, use CC-BY on it...)
Actually, I didn't mean using the OSS world as a model for the original research, but for the gatekeeping aspect. That is to say, conducting all work in a public and open manner, and letting the community of interest sort out the quality of the results.
There are not actually relatively few OSS projects -- like with papers, there are just relatively few that are interesting or important. For example, Github alone claimed to be hosting 2 million repositories. I don't know what fraction of those are private, but . . . if you go looking for OSS projects, there are a lot of them out there.
Most of them -- like most papers -- are not of much interest to anyone (possibly not even the author), and very few are of interest to everyone. I am able to navigate the landscape, though, by observing which projects attract the interest of others, whether through contributions or communities of interest such as this one.
I guess what I am saying is, I like the community acting as a gatekeeper. I think it's more reliable, and it has more brainpower to spend on the job, than a small number of dedicated editors. It's my read that this is the way research works anyways -- when I was in grad school for mathematics, a paper wasn't a proof until most of us had read it, discussed it, and critiqued it among ourselves. My community, not the journal, was the gatekeeper. I think things would be healthier if that were more open and obvious.
I think that an issue with that method is the barrier to entry. To make a change to an OSS project, you need as little as a text editor. Code something up, try a few things, commit (and add your name to the list!).
To make a change to someone else's article, all you can do is question their methods, and question them again more sternly. It's not trivial to repeat experiments with scientific rigor, but it is (generally) trivial to test out a code change or two.
Another issue is experience - it takes a lot of education to get someone to the point of being able to apply scientific rigor; there's a lot of seductive pitfalls along the way. It's not really something you can be 'amateur' about. That's not really the case with a lot of OSS, where you can successfully contribute without understanding important but subtle issues.
Well, I certainly don't agree with your description of what software development entails. You need a text editor, but you also need to be familiar with a whole ecosystem of tools, libraries, platforms, procedures, and general technical knowhow. You need to commit your changes; you also need the project owner to think what you've done is worth merging into the main branch. The suggestion that it's something you can "be amateur about" is making me giggle.
If anything, it's the development behind closed doors that you can "be amateur about". Work done in public is too embarrassing and too unlikely to attract any interest to do a bad job on.
But that's kind of beside the point. Even if the expertise is rarer on research, I don't understand why that matters. Wouldn't that be an argument for pooling the resources you do have? I mean, if there are only four people working in a field, wouldn't it be better if they all could critique a new work, and if they were able to watch it progress and influence its direction (maybe stopping mistakes early!), and if the judgement of a new work came with their written opinions on its worthiness attached?
turns out my original response was eaten by the daft HN 'unknown or expired link' thing.
but in short: It seems you misunderstand me. They both require understanding, but it is easier to effect changes on an OSS project than it is to make an author go back and rewrite or retest their article.
Then you're simply increasing granularity...instead of judging papers by what journals considered them worthy, judge by what individuals considered them worthy...and if you don't know the individuals involved, the reputation system is there to help you.
It'd have to be something similar to pagerank, not a simple vote-count method. High-reputation individuals should be able to contribute more to the reputation of other individuals.
Another idea would be to apply pagerank to article citations, though this would only be useful for older papers.
Pagerank patent expires in 2018. There are some other interesting reputation system out there, too.
For programming reputation has a point, but for science articles, each should be judged on their own merit. Ideally you shouldn't know whose article it is that you're reviewing, or you run the risk of preferential treatment.
I wasn't thinking of judging articles by the reputation of the authors. Instead, I was thinking of judging the value of reviews by the reputation of the reviewers.
I think that's actually pretty similar to what we're doing now. Articles accepted by journals of high reputation get a high reputation, and the journals select high-reputation individuals to do reviews. A good distributed reputation algorithm could perform essentially the same function. Leaving review open to anyone could help preserve net objectivity even if some individual reviewers are biased.
But anonymity could be accomplished by releasing articles initially with a timestamp and a digital signature by a new public key. After review, the authors could reveal that they have the matching private key.
While there's a lot of overlap, there's a fundamental difference between the two, and methods to pursue pragmatism are not necessarily the right methods to pursue truth
I absolutely don't think that the current system means that the contents of journals are absolute truth -- I've been a referee and seen what happens to rejected articles (they show up a month later in another journal).
The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).
If "We don't need them anymore", why are you "really pissed of each time I found an article.../internet does that better than they could ever do it"?
"Your failed business model is not my problem." <- Yes, people should work effectively for free so I don't have to pay for my professional development tools! Collection, reviewing, editing, and distribution of articles on cutting edge topics, consumed by a tiny audience is not cheap.
It's not cheap, and it's done for free by academic professionals in the corresponding fields. Please understand, the publishing houses like Springer or IEEE provide no added value except for their printing and administrative services.
Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.
It's a bit disingenuous to include "collection, reviewing, and editing" in that list because it's not these companies that are responsible for the majority of those tasks, especially the reviewing part, which is by far the most time consuming and requires the expertise that is the most in short supply.
Distribution in this case amounts to little more than a file server. Nothing tremendously unique there from a technology perspective.
I guess I was railing more against "your failed business model", when both a) clearly it's working for them; and b) that slogan is the mantra of folks who want everything for free or peanuts.
Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.
So in your country does everybody get a taxpayer-sponsored university VPN for life? Or are you speaking from the highly privileged position of "current university student in a well-funded school?"
In any case, it shows a tremendous impoverishment of imagination to claim that Google Scholar is equivalent to an actual free market in research. I want the footnotes in publication A to be directly hyperlinked to the relevant sections of their associated references. Otherwise we remain in the position where random TV shows on Wikipedia have better public documentation than our taxpayer-funded research.
I'll put your 95% assertion to the test and report back.
Result: no free link on Scholar. I can buy a copy for $29, or there's a new service called "Deepdyve" that will "rent" me a 24-hour glimpse at the paper for $2, no printing allowed.
Papers 2 to 20ish: works by the late Judah Folkman, field: cancer research
Here we have better luck; maybe 50% of the (very well-known) works on the first two pages of this search have free PDFs:
You don't see a problem because you actually have a subscription to these journals -- via your university. During the school year most of the time I have the same experience -- all articles are freely available when I sit in a library or in my room in students' dormitory. Then the summer holidays come, and bam, my head hits the paywall. It annoys me like hell.
The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.
Not being associated with a university anymore, Google Scholar saves me about ~70% of the time too. However, many of those links aren't legitimate (i.e., licensed) you see a lot of links like http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf .
Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.
I'm lowly author four on a paper published in an Elsevier journal (American Journal of Human Genetics). I submitted a request to redistribute it on my personal site. It took less than a week for them to grant it.
Easy to do, but I shouldn't have had to ask in the first place.
I can also access some of them via my school. But for instance for SpringerLink and ACM we only have access to recent material and I sometimes want to read stuff I don't have access to even through my school.
Anyway, schools and universities really have a lot of better stuff to do with their money than paying thieves.
Often those are draft copies that are usually very good but occasionally you'll hit one where there's an error corrected in the final version but still in there. Or figures are missing. Etc.
As a researcher myself, I completely agree that taxpayers should not be subsidizing for-profit publishers. The government is wrong to fund the production of research papers with taxpayer money and allow the owner of some privately owned pay wall to collect a toll for access to them. Great work if you can get it.
It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a consumer.
Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you?
Answer: a taxpayer.
That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the copyright, and collects their toll.
There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for years, and we're all over the political spectrum.
Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you controlled the information.
Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours.
Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased informational availability and transparency.
All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold benefits.
If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.
In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount.
The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].
All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it.
> The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].
I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving".
[1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).
It's not too clear to me why PLoS journals cost so much to publish in. In computer science, the open-access journals are typically free to publish in, supported by relatively modest funds from a hosting institution. For example, this is probably the top machine-learning journal, and I don't think it even has a budget or employees, just some donated bandwidth: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/
Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?
They should be if they are payed for by public funds the same applies to software. Of course that doesn't apply to defense or otherwise potentially dangerous software but the general rule should be to opensource government contracted development because if they don't have a good reason for not doing so they are probably doing it wrong.
Off-topic but boo on slate for detecting that I'm browsing on an iPad, after which they redirect me to an 'iPad-optimized' front page, but not to the article I wanted to read..
It's not mostly about the price (you can always find a paper from friends etc if you're determined). It's about the availability of vast amounts of text to analysis and mining. Who knows how many new insights we have already lost (mainly in the life sciences) from this absurd system that everyone seems to hate yet nobody is willing to change.
As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can."
New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.
We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price.
I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).
SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them.
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