Interesting discussion in Salon, provoked by a brief blog review
of an article in Nature:
The free information movement is really coming of age, if one is to judge by the enemies it’s making. Nature has a doozy of an article out this week reporting that a group of scientific publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society, have hired a notorious public relations gunslinger to fight back against those kooks who think scientific information should be freely accessible to all.
Science publishers get stupid, Andrew Leonard, How the World Works, Salon, 25 Jan 2007
Open access is an interesting issue. Sure, there needs to be a way to support science, and also peer review, but speed and wide distribution are also important. I have to wonder whether if the Indian vulture dieoff problem described in the current Smithsonian had been handled more through an open process whether someone would have thought to check what was in the carcasses the vultures were eating before 95% of them were dead. And as one of the commenters points out, peer review is not paid for by journals: scientific peers of the paper author review it for free. Many open access journals do peer review; that’s not a distinctive feature of traditional for-pay paper journals.
It seems book publishers don’t always do much review, either, judging by the recent stings in which grossly badly written and books were submitted and accepted.
We’ve been through all this before.In the early 1990s publishers of technical standards dragged their feet about making standards available through the Internet, because that might cut into their fees for paper publications. The state of California tried to charge for access to texts of bills (we need the income, they said), nevermind that tax money already paid for producing it in the first place. The U.S. Patent Office resisted making patents available through the Internet, claiming it was too hard, until someone found a way to just do it. One of the commenters brings up Accuweather trying to prevent the National Weather Service from publishing weather information. Even further along that direction of proprietary intellectual property rights, the vulture article mentions that Americans a few decades ago patented basmati rice and other Indian foods, causing India to retaliate by prohibiting export of biological samples. Somehow I doubt that those who patented those foods actually invented them. Scientific publications are different, of course. But there are common features with issues in other fields.
One of the commenters says that this isn’t the time to be pushing open access, because open access costs money, too (editing, web sites, etc.) and what with government science funding decreasing we could lose the editorial process. Be that as it may, King Canute couldn’t hold back the tides, and nobody is going to be able to stop people publishing through the web. Those who are concerned would find better use of their time lobbying government to provide funding for such a process, or even better working up a business model for online publication, indexing, and archiving at a reasonable rate.
I’m not so sure the editorial process (as distinct from peer review) adds all that much value anyway. A problem I’ve had more than once with paper journals, including a very prestigious computer science one, is "copy editing" by some English major who doesn’t understand the subject but has carte blanche to do whatever they think makes the paper fit their journal’s style, while actually editing it to fit their personal prejudices as to writing style and changing the technical meaning of the paper in the process.
Oh, I see one of the commenters already went on about that:
I had to spend my time submitting corrections to each of the sentences that their editors messed up, and return everything back to the way I had written it. So they contributed nothing, and made more work for me."
My experience with Elsevier, John Neumann, 27 Jan 2007
Another comment says that Nature is part of the problem, since it isn’t particularly open. I can attest that as recently as a year ago Nature was clueless about online access to their own material. I signed up, provided a credit card number, and then the parameters they sent me to log in didn’t work. Nine months it took them to admit there was a problem. Meanwhile they charged me more after I told them to cancel my account. Eventually they said they couldn’t refund my money; they could only give me six months of access. It seems to me that any organization that actually wanted to make content available through the Internet could do better than that.
Anyway, sure we need to continue to pay people who produce, review, disseminate, index, and archive scientific information. But I don’t see why, given the Internet, that the methods have to be the same as in the age of Martin Luther, who used the newfangled printing technology to define his version of the German language (because he could, because he controled the publication process of the German Bible), or of Newton and Leibniz, in which paper journals were the fastest way to distribute and archive scientific information. Pretending that publication methods that evolved to fit one set of technological communication media should be applied to a different set of media isn’t good risk management. Not good for the old journals themselves, who will lose in the end if they can’t adapt and augment themselves. Not good for the rest of us, who won’t get as much good science. Probably not even good risk management for Indian vultures.
-jsq
PS: Thanks, Willie.
Mr. Quarterman, the Atlanta Nights and Crack of Doom sting operations weren’t aimed at any real publishing houses. They were intended as demonstrations that their actual target, Publish America, is a vanity operation.
PA regularly claims to be a “traditional publisher.” They also claim to be picky about what they publish. Neither claim is true. PA doesn’t select, edit, market, distribute, or support their books. They’ll publish anything that’s longer than a pamphlet, is not in journal format, hasn’t already been published elsewhere, and isn’t obviously deranged gibberish. And every year, they suck thousands of would-be authors into exploitive publishing arrangements that have no hope of success.
After years of patiently explaining these facts to newbie writers, mostly in the forums on Absolute Write, a group of writers loosely affiliated with Writer Beware and SFWA decided a more vivid demonstration was in order. Thus was born Atlanta Nights (“A bad book written by experts”), and later Crack of Doom. Both books were promptly offered contracts by Publish America.
In short, while the two projects accomplished exactly what they set out to do, neither had anything to do with the real publishing industry. It would be an error to see them as evidence of its current state.
Hello?
Thanks, Teresa.
So apparently many people can’t tell the difference between the vanity publishers and real publishers.
Meanwhile, many people seem to think that all open access scientific publications are similar to vanity presses.
Plenty of confusion to go around.
-jsq
The traditional academic market behaves a similar way, with obsessive attention to citings, resulting in the arisal of cabals running conferences, and eventually conferences that just run so anyone can get published, thus bypassing the inwards-looking gatekeeping and keeping expenses lower.
The fact that these mechanisms do nothing to improve the actual content doesn’t seem to enter into it.
fristlty i wanna say that the scientist will never get confused and as they fight agaist those cooks who want that sceince should be daily news paper.