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.
I believe this is one of the main reasons why the education system is slow to incorporate important research findings into daily educational practice in the classroom. It is written into federal and state law that we must use research-based instruction (from curriculum to teaching strategies), yet we do not have ready and open access to the very research we are supposed to be basing our practice in the classroom on. Yes we can read the abstracts, but as we all know here, abstracts are written to hide many inconvenient caveats found in the body of the paper we cannot read unless we fork over coinage.
Untie our hands legislatures.
Excellent news. However, might this endanger the furture of joint private and government funded research. Perhaps this will be protected.
The idea that the results of publically funded research should be freely available to the public that paid for it is certainly a legitimate one. That would only be one component of what a publishing system should provide, however. The current system of peer review and publish for profit performs some necessary functions. Whatever would replace it needs to provide all of those services at least as well as they are performed now – preferably with some enhancements to cut down on the cliquishness and corruption. Designing such a model is not a trivial exercise.
Sean said:
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.
I follow one other pursuit of science besides CAGW and that’s diet and nutrition and I can assure you that the conventional wisdom due to scientific efforts over the past 50 years are just as bad (if not worse) in that discipline as it is in CAGW. We have a world full of unhealthy people costing health care trillions due to the unacceptable science that cholesterol and fat being dangerous. And just as with CAGW, it’s been interested outsiders willing to go against the majority who publish on blogs who are finally changing things. The paths taken by CAGW and diet are so similar it makes me wonder just how many other branches of science are FUBAR.
I agree with William Sears that free market forces usually make products and services better and government operations tend to have no incentive to get better. However, the options under discussion do not have to include government funded on-line journals. The current open access journals are businesses that obviously have an interest in profit but also in competing and improving services. When I publish in PlosOne, I have to pay about $1,700 for each paper accepted. Although this isn’t a trivial amount, in comparison to other costs of research, it isn’t prohibitive unless perhaps one publishes exclusively in open access journals. I cannot distinguish much difference in peer review for the traditional journals and the open access journals. The only difference worth noting is that PlosOne asks reviewers not to worry about the “importance or impact” of the paper but only whether the studies were done properly and the results and interpretation are plausible. This is a very good move, because it is impossible to accurately determine importance or impact until after the paper is published and the results replicated and incorporated by others.
What the average taxpayer dislikes about taxpayer funded ‘science’ is that it’s not science.
It’s cash paid out to donors, supporters and political propagandists.
OH! Hey-let’s start a NEW taxpayer funded agency to oversee the taxpayers money. Yeah. We can populate it w/ hand-picked Presidential appointees. That’ll fix the problem.
It is important to focus on eaxctly what problem you’re trying to solve. To me the important things are (a) research which is cited in support of proposed public policy and (b) publicly funded research in general. The first if by far the most important. Here’s my go at it:
1) No legislative or regulatory body may use, consider, or be influenced by a research study which is not freely available together with all supporting data and code.
2) Any publicly funded research which results in publication anywhere must be freely available together with all supporting data and code no more than 90 days after first appearance in any professional journal. [This preserves the role of current professional journals. Note that research so published cannot be used under rule (1) until it is made available under this rule]
3) The Library of Congress shall provide a repository to meet the requirements of (1) and (2) for an at-cost charge. All federally funded research grant proposals must include a line item for this charge.
That’s my modest proposal — I’m not trying to fix all the real or perceived defects in the current system, just trying to protect public policy making from junk science. If some scientists want to work in a sandbox only interacting with other scientists, and if they can find funding sources willing to support their research knowing it can never be used to affect public policy, and if there are journals which will publish their papers knowing only other sandbox scientists will ever read them, that’s fine.
One hopes that a wider distribution and examination of research publications will have a feedback effect on the granting agencies so really sloppy research is penalized at the funding source, but that may be hoping for too much. If we can just stop or reduce the pollution of bad science into policy debates, that would be a major acheivement.
Journal publishers should not be profiting from taxpayer funded grants and then in addition, require even more taxpayer money in order to read the articles the taxpayer has already paid for. This seems so very simple. That this attempt at pick pocketing continues speaks volumes about those who could outlaw it. Elected law-making entities cannot pass the buck on this one. Wonder what the backstory is on the end of the buck passing trail. Legislatures? Care to comment?
Smokey says:
July 25, 2012 at 4:43 am
“Most peer reviewed papers are wrong.”
I think this opening up is all well and good, but in my experience the scientific literature is swamped with dross:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing
“with estimates suggesting that around 50 million journal articles[3] have been published since the first appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”
“Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work. The list of important scientific papers that were initially rejected by peer-reviewed journals goes back at least as far as the editor of Philosophical Transaction’s 1796 rejection of Edward Jenner’s report of the first vaccination against smallpox.”.
50×10^6 scientific papers says it all. The quality of researcher and research has decliined with the lowering of standards for entry into Universities because of the funding of the institution directly based on head counts. Quality has also been impacted by an appalling broad-based decline in morality in western societies (no links, just having lived the history). The system of obtaining research grants makes Universities into financial institutions rather than centres of excellence in research. I haven’t seen a graph of the number of papers published over time but it is probably a logarithmic plot with a doubling every generation from the 1700s when it began. How many of these technicians (modern scientists) will grace our history books of the future. There has only been a few dozen in the last couple of hundred years that have made real discoveries, I suggest they should enjoy a separate category from the technicians, There are a lot more violin players than composers,
OK we have the prospect of open access, what do we do about the tonnage of dross to wade through. Can we develop a way to weight the papers so that the gold can be tapped out from under the slag.,
@Sean July 24, 2012 at 11:52 pm:
“We want the arguements [sic] 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?”
If they only charged $3-$5 an article, I don’t think we would be having this discussion. But paying more for ONE article than for a year’s subscription to most magazines or news sites – that is just rape.
Steve Garcia
Deja vu all over again. I suspect that the effect of the internet on civilization wiil be faster and bigger than the invention moveable type and the printing press. Gutenberg’s press wiped out the scribes and the monopoly the Catholic Church had on written material. The spread of knowledge produced by the printing press transformed the Western World. I also suspect the Internet will transform the world that is connected to it. I expect there will be a lot of road kill on the information highway in the form of traditional news hacks and monopolistic book publishers.
Pointman says:
July 25, 2012 at 3:20 am
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….
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I am afraid I disagree.
Up until about ten years ago I got several periodicals in three different fields. However the useful information to propaganda ratio got so bad I finally chucked all of them. It just wasn’t worth the several hundred a year. If you have read WUWT over time the disgust with the propaganda in scientific journals is very evident and I am not the only one who has chucked their science rag subscriptions for that reason.
If the journals were worth the money and had stuck to science instead of pushing propaganda (and money making) I think they would have lasted a lot longer. I LIKE books, I LIKE to be able to put my hands on the information instead of finding out my bookmarked link is dead. However I am not going to pay for my own brain washing. Therefore I think the death of journals is due to a combination of factors and to put it bluntly “They asked for it.”
David Ross says:
July 25, 2012 at 3:40 am
Related News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/18962349
Last February, a reviewer of German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s doctoral dissertation discovered and documented some plagiarised passages….
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My husband some times edits Doctoral thesis that are written by foreign students in English. He has found whole sections plagiarized from WIKI and other sources.
And then there is this
Perhaps this would be a good time to remind people about this Climategate Report, and to read the section beginning at page 126.
http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf
It would seem to fit in nicely as a complement to the ideas raised here.
APPENDIX 5: PEER REVIEW
UNDERSTANDING UNCERTAINTY: A BRIEF HISTORY
OF PEER REVIEW
By Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet
Amid the public and scientific furore over alleged events at the University of East Anglia‘s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), peer review has emerged as a central issue in the dispute. In the Times Higher Education, for example, Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (1), argued that events at the CRU had far-reaching implications for the world of scientific publishing (2). His charge sheet was extensive – undermining the peer-review process, threatening editors who published work contrary to orthodox scientific opinion, organising mass resignations from editorial boards, and persuading colleagues to stop submitting papers to allegedly offending journals. Montford suggests that ―as many as four different journals may have had their normal procedures interfered with‖. He
continues,“
fwiw…
Highly recommended.
Bob Johnston says: @ur momisugly July 25, 2012 at 7:56 am
…I follow one other pursuit of science besides CAGW and that’s diet and nutrition and I can assure you that the conventional wisdom due to scientific efforts over the past 50 years are just as bad…
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I will certainly agree with you there. Big Pharma can’t make money on a change of diet so the research is geared toward pushing pills. Healthy humans are not big money makers so treatments not cures are the focus. My Doctor ran afoul of the FDA on a cure for rheumatoid arthritis back in the late 1960’s. She was proof it worked – haven’t heard of it have you….
Lest one get the impression that the only driver for publication costs is corporate profit, here are the top salaries for the American Chemical Society, a non-profit publisher.
http://www.idontcare.com/acs/
One of these guys is the editor of the house magazine, C&E News, where he routinely spouts liberal pablum from the editorial page…except when it comes to open access. While one could arguably say open access is a cause that would naturally belong to the left. In this case, he purports to be on the side of “free enterprise”.
John M says:
July 25, 2012 at 4:28 pm
Lest one get the impression that the only driver for publication costs is corporate profit, here are the top salaries for the American Chemical Society, a non-profit publisher….
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And the dues for ACS were darn high too to support him. In junior year as a Chem/Chem Eng major you got roped into ACS by your prof. – large hints on how important membership was to your career, you needed two people to recommend you etc etc – the student rate was low because they hoped to grab you before you left college and milk you for the rest of your working life.
Gail,
Good point. My advice to any youngsters who fall for the ploy…don’t sign up for any of the Society bennies like life insurance, retirement annuities, favorable bank rates etc, since if you get fed up enough to resign your membership, you’ll have to scramble to find alternatives.
Open access is a must for any paper or study if it is publicly-funded or if it is for public policy purposes. But there is a downside.
The problem isn’t the open access, but the method used to fund it, namely, the author pays the journal to publish it. This is OK if the author is funded by the state (or whoever) or is independently wealthy but, for ordinary people, paying $1,350–the cost of publishing in PLoS One, for example–is a lot of moolah (although I believe some journals may waive that under unspecified circumstances). I find this to be a disincentive to even submit a paper to such publications.
There is an excellent letter to Nature on this, Open access: Hard on lone authors by a Christopher Smith at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v487/n7408/full/487432e.html :
Results aren’t the problem. We need to see the data, methods, code, everything used to ACHIEVE those results. Without those, results are meaningless.
Jeff Alberts,
Yes, that is a classic case of misdirection.
I assume you mean Google Scholar which does not filter only published papers – this is an Internet urban legend,
What do you include in Google Scholar? (Google Scholar Help)
“Google Scholar includes journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic books, pre-prints, abstracts, technical reports and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. …Shorter articles, such as book reviews, news sections, editorials, announcements and letters, may …be included.”
You can find over 100,000 results from the New York Times,
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=&as_publication=new+york+times
…and over 25,000 from The Guardian,
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=&as_publication=guardian
Hardly sources of published papers.
sophocles says:
July 25, 2012 at 1:55 am
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.
>>>>>>>
BINGO
I might go back in history and demonstrate the principle of universities in the first place was to provide a venue for the free transmission of ideas.
(Wikipedia) “Academic freedom is the belief that the freedom of inquiry by students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy, and that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.”
The internet is just an extension of that idea. Whether or not you agree with a specific idea, the concept of Academic Freedom should stop you from preventing that idea being communicated.
What about the gigantic ripoff from regular textbooks? Talk about a dodo. Wonder why traditional copyright is under siege? Look no further.
For a moderate fee ($100-300) many peer-reviewed journals now publish individual articles as open access. For example, in Limnology and Oceanography, about 50% of articles are open access supported by fees from authors. I chose this option when possible. It wouldn’t take so much to provide funding from Federal agencies for open access for research that they fund. Grants often have items for publication costs, such as the page charges made by some journals, especially the lower cost, nonprofit organizations. Many journals only accept a small (<20%) of submitted articles. Not sure how this would work with open, online reviews. Generally, authors want their papers reviewed by people who are fimiliar with the literature in the field. For example, if a manuscript cites 50 papers, an editor would try to get reviews who are familiar with a good proportion of the cited papers. Almost all manuscripts need to be revised in response to comments by reviewers.