A number of people have brought this recent article in the Economist to my attention. Some excerpts:
There is a widespread feeling that the journal publishers who have mediated this exchange for the past century or more are becoming an impediment to it. One of the latest converts is the British government. On July 16th it announced that, from 2013, the results of taxpayer-financed research would be available, free and online, for anyone to read and redistribute.
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Criticism of journal publishers usually boils down to two things. One is that their processes take months, when the internet could allow them to take days. The other is that because each paper is like a mini-monopoly, which workers in the field have to read if they are to advance their own research, there is no incentive to keep the price down. The publishers thus have scientists—or, more accurately, their universities, which pay the subscriptions—in an armlock. That, combined with the fact that the raw material (manuscripts of papers) is free, leads to generous returns. In 2011 Elsevier, a large Dutch publisher, made a profit of £768m on revenues of £2.06 billion—a margin of 37%. Indeed, Elsevier’s profits are thought so egregious by many people that 12,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of the company’s journals.
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Support has been swelling for open-access scientific publishing: doing it online, in a way that allows anyone to read papers free of charge. The movement started among scientists themselves, but governments are now, as Britain’s announcement makes clear, paying attention and asking whether they, too, might benefit from the change.
Read the entire article here
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The recent backlash and boycott associated with Elsevier and their outrageous policies and pricing certainly became a spark that fanned flames across many venue of science. International Business Times wrote then:
Timothy Gowers, a mathematician from Cambridge University, called for the boycott on his blog in January over Elsevier’s high subscription price, high profit margins and subscription bundles.
“I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly,” Gowers said in his post. “I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes.”
I can tell you this, I’m aware of movements on several fronts along these lines, it is not a matter of if, but when. It seems inevitable to me that traditional journals will eventually go the way of the dodo.
Perhaps indirectly, this looks like the first fruit of the Climategate scandal. No more can scientists refuse to archive their material properly, in complete and accessible form, and no longer can they illegally refuse FOIA requests for their data.
so every poorly written paper will be published w/o review or will the authors round up some buddies to “review” it for them. Can’t say it is much different from current science journals…but seriously how would the truly unscientific get filtered?
Try an internet search cancer, normal search brings up every charlatan. Where as google science filters for only published papers. Or will only govt funded science be considered legit?
curious as to how others see this developing.
There is a bit of hyperbole here.
In the olden days, university libraries subscribed to journals and anyone could visit the library and read whatever. Most university libraries restricted borrowing to academics, but anyone was welcome to the reading rooms. Indeed, academics could not borrow journals either.
Now that journals have moved online, free (at the margin) access is limited to academics. The vast majority of journal articles is only ever read by academics.
Although free access to all is laudable in principle, it is not a big change in practice.
The crucial change is that, in the old system, the readers paid — and they stopped paying for journals that only publish rubbish. In the new system, the writers pay — and there will always rubbish researchers with too much money.
We need journals as we want peer review. Blogs/ forums/wiki have a role too, but they in general are not up to peer review. Climate is an exception, as intelligent people capable of seeing the hype and BS did not get a straight answer to a straight question and smelt a rat. The journal contrived not not having the data or serious review as that suited their product suppliers and most of thier client base went along.
We want the arguements in the journals to be superior to the internet and we are prepared to pay. But if they do not much better than the internet, why pay?
So, essentially, publishers like Elsevier also feed on the government trough. They too have a big interest in the continuing of all the global warming research and publishing. Scary, actually, since free press and free publishers are a guard to protect us from wannabee dictators to succeed.
“but governments are now, as Britain’s announcement makes clear, paying attention and asking whether they, too, might benefit from the change.”
How could they NOT benefit, when their public financed scientists won’t have to pay anymore for public financed research? Just do the math. But governments nowadays have no economic principles, just tax-maximalisation and people-minimalisation (which goes hand in hand btw)
The green inmates are running the asylum.
And what has government to do with science in the first place?
One solution only:
Stop public funding of science and adjourn the scientific-governmental AGW death-spiral.
The Journals should face a De-Radical Shakeup.
Too often, the agendas of Radical Leftists who have overtaken journals, have misrepresented information, promoted false information or taken anti-science actions outside of the Scientific Method.
It’s Time to Remove the Radicals and Restore the Scientific Method to Scientific Journals.
Wonderful news! This will shake up the fraudulent parties! Heck, we might even get some TRUTH out of them. Honest scientists everywhere will applaud this. 🙂
It is 40 years since I last attended University, but this month I returned to the hallowed halls of academia to advance my post graduate qualifications. 40 years ago, most papers were available within the university library, now i have to request most of them and the library will source them from the respective journals. The main difference is that instead of the library holding a physical journal that I could read, they now receive a pdf copy of the paper I request and that in turn is emailed to me.
So if the journals deliver the required papers electronically, I receive and read it electronically what is the reason for the papers being so expensive? Obviously publishing on the internet, with an open review, would make for faster and better spread of scientific information.
>In the new system, the writers pay — and there will always rubbish researchers with too much money.
Amazon’s rating system does a good job of pointing out worthwhile books. Something similar would work for scientific papers too.
This development may be a lot more important than any of us realise.
This should mean the end of Team-style ‘climate reseach’, where the original data is usually hidden, eaten by the dog, lost or considered proprietory, and therefore confidential by the researcher,
It may also herald the beginning of the end of climate ‘research’, where the results are already pre-determined, (i.e. scary enough) to generate sufficient grants for the researchers to continue with their comfortable lifestyles.
Why this has not been done before beggars belief. If the release of all government (or quasi-government) funded data on climate had been made mandatory 20 years ago, then I doubt if any of us would have ever heard of Mann, Hansen, Jones and their ilk. Not only that, but there would never have been a Hockey Stick.
No mention of WUWT or CA or the rest – but it is still implied since a large number of the readership here are indeed scientists whether trained or no. After all, it is the pursuit of scientific method that defines a real scientist, not qualifications. A point we understand here but, it seems, warmist supporters do not.
I was tickled pink to hear Rob Honeycutt (Skeptical Science), criticizing Robert Tamaki over at Amazon (Tamaki gave Mann’s book a one-star rating). Rob Honeycutt complains that Andrew Montford is not a scientist. But Rob declares himself to be no scientist.
So, yes, the movement started among scientists.
The vast majority of journal articles is only ever read by academics.
Actually, the vast majority of journal articles are barely read at all. A couple of other people in the same field, then they gather moss.
There post focuses on science, but there is no need to. Other disciplines with more general readership face the same restrictions. Lots of history articles, for example, would have large readerships if they were available.
All publicly funded research should be available for minimal charge, not just science.
I live six blocks from Columbia’s library system for which I have an alumni reading access card. I still put off reading 80% of the pay wall articles I come across. Even a slight hassle changes behavior when it amounts to an hour trip instead of the five minutes it would take to figure out what the article is really about. The professors and students there working in labs of course have a password to be able to use Columbia’s full computer access system to all of the pay wall material, so they can read the literature after midnight whenever they want.
Finally.
This is what the World Wide Web was invented for—to give scientists a way to publicize
their work so their peers (and anyone else interested) could have ready, easy and early
access to it.
Tim Berners-Lee’s original intention is bearing fruit at long last.
Some have said that the change to open research publication would allow inferior research to be available to all. That is already true, as Climategate supplies evidence. It will still be up to the reader, as best he can, to distinguish good from bad. There has always been both good science and junk science in published material; the fact that it will now be free and open for inspection can only be an improvement. Peer review can and will still occur, and should also be available for inspection. Those who know the science will be able to benefit from quicker, easier, and cheaper access to new works from others, which can advance their own research.
It would be good to know that our hard earned money is spent on worthwhile research instead of some of the rubbish now making its way to Nature, New Scientist et al.
Peter Miller says:
July 25, 2012 at 12:55 am
This development may be a lot more important than any of us realise.
This should mean the end of Team-style ‘climate reseach’, where the original data is usually hidden, eaten by the dog, lost or considered proprietory, and therefore confidential by the researcher… [etc.]
*
I think we all realize this, Peter. It’s certainly what I’m celebrating for. Your whole post nailed it. 🙂
@Sean
Publishers will tell you that you pay for the value added by their professional editorial, publishing, and database management skills.
Others might tell you that researchers want to publish in the most prestigious journals, that journal space is in short supply, and that publishers extract a monopoly rent.
A quick look at the profit margins of major publishers suggest that the latter is closer to the truth.
There might come a time when, to be considered a credible, proper scientist, you have to publish your (tax-payer funded) scientific research so it’s publicly available and all paywall-published, pal-reviewed scientists’ articles will be frowned upon. Make it so.
They should be published online and peer reviewed online so that anybody can view and contribute to the process in real time. There should be a mechanism for people who register to comment to have their field of study and qualifications, checked and displayed below their name. Anyone should be able to go and view the comments and be able to filter them e.g.
Show me comments by assigned peer reviewers only
Show me comments only by people with a PhD
Show me comments by everybody
Show me comments by people with PhDs in Astrophysics, tenured to U.S. universities who are less than 40 years old.
People should be able to rate comments and the rating would be weighted by the qualifications of the raters (i.e. like Google PageRank).
This would make it more likely that a bright idea (or pertinent question) by someone unqualified gets noticed by the people qualified enough to judge whether the idea has any merit.
The experts can reply to comments or questions by the general public. Others can read these. So the whole thing becomes a teaching resource. A cutting-edge online university where the lessons are based on papers in the process of entering the literature.
Who reviews the peers?. I won’t believe anything these days unless it has been cleared by the Ponds Institute.
This trend will also eventually extend to scholarly texts and books. Anyone who has purchased either university texts or secondary school books know that the profit margin for these companies is huge. The costs associated just don’t support the pricing. Talk about price-gouging of the Eviil oil companies – these Pulishers are Professionals!
In my opinion – it is indeed a mini-monopoly, where there is an unbalanced transaction – where the ‘public / government’ entity has no power / incentive to say ‘no’ to the pricing policy of the publisher. The student at University has only a couple of options:
1) purchasing used books (even that market is becoming organized), or
2) reading the reserved book in Libraries (not so convienient)).
In addition, Secondary school systems aren’t very adept (or interested) at negotiating for reduced prices because they are not spending their own money anyway. The cost of Education (and HealthCare) have risen faster than inflation for years – leaving one to ask why: degree of open competition? degree to which the government is a poor steward of taxpayer dollars?
In my experience (over 150 scientific papers) commercial and society publishers do a good job. I do not begrudge them a margin (=profit) on their contribution. That’s just the Market in operation. Open Access is still a doubtful proposition in my opinion because (1) many of the “journals” popping up to service this market are just “vanity publishers” that take the authors’ money and put up a weakly reviewed e-paper, (2) Open Access shifts the burden of payment in many cases to the authors, and the costs can actually be quite steep!
The huge and winning advantage the science blogosphere has over those dinosaur science journals is money. They can make it, we can’t, and paradoxically, that’s precisely what is killing them.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/the-decline-of-popular-science-journals/
Pointman
The PLoS journals (Public Library of Science) have already been at the forefront of online open access for a decade.
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
Everyone who has any influence with friends, colleagues, peers who publish scientific articles should already be urging this option on others — it does not have to wait for these changes from govt and national research bodies, which will still take years to take effect even with the best of will and effort (often lacking).
Please consider circulating the link below (I have no connection, it’s simply something I’ve been aware of and applauding for awhile):
http://www.plosone.org
I think that PLoS One is a broad-based journal that aims to be a kind of online “Nature” for all scientific fields (but wide open rather than restrictive).
There are several other PLoS journals so far, mostly oriented toward biomedical fields. Maybe with a boost of interest there will be PLoS journals for every field, or perhaps PLoS One is intended to fill that role for all scientific fields, I’m not sure.