6 ms·

Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?

32 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

mahmud 17y ago
OT: I need people to help me mirror CiteSeer. I have a feeling it's going to go away RSN.
pbh 17y ago
A more direct way of saying it is that academics at research universities are mostly motivated to publish frequently in reputable places by grants and tenure, and nothing has forced either the way grants or tenure are given out to change from what they were pre-Internet. (That said, innovations that allow people to write more papers or get cited more have been taken up very rapidly.)
- nagrom 17y ago
  Absolutely!!! What's more, in the past 15 years or so, it has become more and more essential for a research scientist to have an excellent publication record in order to have any chance of a permanent job. This has had the pernicious effect of increasing politics and popularity costs in, at least, the physical sciences. I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not even read. If you can solve the problem of requiring scientists to amass a large publication set by any possible means then you'll definitely change scientific publishing. No-one really wants their papers to go unread due to an access fee. That's why www.arXiv.org was invented. However, the only solution I can think of is to separate science into management and technical (this already happens to a certain extent in High Energy Physics) and allow the heads of group more freedom in choosing who to hire, and how. This requires a bit more trust in the scientists and reduces jobs in the administration, so I fear that it will never happen, alas! Furthermore, you'd need to make both streams formally equal in order to remove the suspicion that scientists become managers because they don't have sufficient technical skills. Both these hurdles can only be cleared with social solutions though; technical solutions can only go so far.
  - chris11 17y ago
    "I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not even read." Now I am not completely familiar with academia, so I was wondering if you could provide some context. Is is blatant plagiarism of other scientist's work? And if so, is this something that most scientists can reasonably expect to get away with if they tried. Or is it something where the scientist has some link to the work, such as heading a lab or working with the main author, but just has not done much work on the paper?
    - nagrom 17y ago
      The way it works is that one is a member of a collaboration. That collaboration publishes a paper, with 200 people on the author's list - technically, all the member of the collab. have been working at the experiment at some point. Of course, if an academic is a member of three or four of these collaborations, and each collab. publishes 10-20 papers a year, there's no way for the academic to fully understand the papers and do anything else on top of that...
- zbyszek 17y ago
  Yes. It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research. I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful. These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.
akamaka 17y ago
I don't think it needs to be disrupted. While the philosophy behind reforming is noble, my own discussions with researchers have convinced me that this doesn't matter to them. They know there are flaws, but they also believe that good research will still float to the top, and so they spend their energies on what is important, which is doing good research.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  My discussions with researchers and my own reading of scientific work have convinced me that the main problem is how much researchers have to publish in order to be ranked highly. It leads to a huge number of rehashed, low quality papers. Some of the issues on the publishing side could be solved simply by reducing the amount of rubish that hits the system. And the second problem I see is not a technology issue either. It's that, at least in europe, academic research is funded by the public. In spite of that, the work of scientists is given away to publishers who hold the entire system hostage. Publishers are in effect running an elaborate scheme to blackmail the tax payer into paying twice for the same work without adding any value themselves. The peer reviewers are funded by the tax payer as well. If universities did what other employers do, which is to take ownership of what their employees produce and manage it properly, access to scientific work could be much improved.
- Tichy 17y ago
  Once they are in the system, maybe they have a good time. But it seems likely to me that if the general public were to be let in, more good science could result from it - because more people would have a chance to learn and contribute. That said, from university days I remember that the newest papers were often passed on between interested parties directly, not by publishing them.
  - akamaka 17y ago
    What you say sounds true and good, but I'll ultimately listen to what the people around me have to say, rather than theorize about what's good for them.
Mongoose 17y ago
Daniel Lemire of UQAM has a number of good blog posts on new forms of scientific publishing: http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simplified-open-publishing-manifesto/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simp... http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author-centric/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author... http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-secret-behind-radical-innovation/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-se...
korch 17y ago
As a non-academic who regularly reads papers in math, physics and economics, I can't wait for the day when all the rent-seeking academic journal publishing houses are forced out of the market and are prevented from further ruining academia by fanning the artificial flames of "publish or perish". My biggest frustration is that it's impossible to access these journals if you're not affiliated with a university. The corporate journal monopolists like Springer and Elsevier absolutely gouge the universities to sell back to the schools what the schools essentially produced themselves. Have you ever checked out the fees they charge? It's on their websites, just try to sign up. It's $50k+ for an annual license, and that's on the cheap end for access to just a handful of journals—prices go way higher for full packages! This is a real scandal, especially with university budgets being bled nation wide due to the economic depression, and unavoidable, severe cuts not seen in generations! For a recent analysis of publishers sweetheart deals entitling them to profit margins above 25%, see: http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguig.... How many kids can you keep in college for one year if the schools were keeping that 25% profit margin? So universities are forced to restrict access by their contract, and the publishers have no incentive to even sell to consumers—why should they when they can make astronomically more selling only to schools? Granted, all the publishers do sell individual papers to consumers, but not at a price that clears the market. Expect to be charged $20 for a 30 year old 5 page paper covering an obscure Thermodynamics topic. It could be argued that the publishers own the rights(or not: authors being forced to sign away all rights in order to even be published is another scandal), so they can make up any price they want. However, what is a fair price to charge when the author of the paper themselves are giving their paper away for free to download from their personal .edu site! Ultimately, access to information and research becomes highly restricted when everyone plays this strategy. Isn't this consequence the exact opposite of the intent of the Internet? Call me an idealist, but scholarly writings ought to be made as widely available as possible, especially for the general public, for little to no profit. I used to think one optimal solution was for a quasi-benevolent org, such as Google, to just buy all academic papers and publication rights and put all of it on the web, like with Google Print. Google could care less about manipulating and creating an artificial journal market, no, they have a much bigger objective: collect as much free content as possible in order to draw in more eyeballs to show them more ads to increase the CPC. Google Scholar started with the right idea, but they never did anything with the product. I've been happy to see Arxiv gaining more traction in the past few years. It's also been encouraging to see the recent federal laws mandating that any research funded with federal money be made freely available, so the paywalls can't touch those papers(unfortunately this seems to be contained mostly to NIH medical publications). One interesting recent trend I've noticed is the effect of academics being much more web savy compared to ten years ago—now you can pretty much find any paper published within the past decade for free on the author's own .edu site. That is, if you know exactly what you're looking for, and don't mind spending a few minutes sifting Google, and don't mind discovering many papers are not freely accessible. It's a less than ideal search experience, but it works well enough. Unfortunately all the pre-web papers are still locked behind paywalls. I'm also giddy to see the upcoming Mac tablet's impact on the journals vis a vis its rumored plans to disrupt the college textbook market.
dagw 17y ago
For the vast majority of the primary target audience of scientific publications they are effectively free. It's a cost their employer eats and they never see. So there is no big reason for them to fight it. What would a researcher gain by going out of his way to disrupt the current model. He can easily access all the papers he needs and just about everyone in his target audience can read his published papers for free as well. I'm not supporting the system or saying that I wouldn't love to see it changed, but I really cannot see much reason for pressure to change it.
b-man 17y ago
2 great videos that are pertinent IMO http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534
- elblanco 17y ago
  Great finds.

32 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

OT: I need people to help me mirror CiteSeer. I have a feeling it's going to go away RSN.

pbh 17y ago

A more direct way of saying it is that academics at research universities are mostly motivated to publish frequently in reputable places by grants and tenure, and nothing has forced either the way grants or tenure are given out to change from what they were pre-Internet. (That said, innovations that allow people to write more papers or get cited more have been taken up very rapidly.)

nagrom 17y ago
Absolutely!!! What's more, in the past 15 years or so, it has become more and more essential for a research scientist to have an excellent publication record in order to have any chance of a permanent job. This has had the pernicious effect of increasing politics and popularity costs in, at least, the physical sciences. I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not even read. If you can solve the problem of requiring scientists to amass a large publication set by any possible means then you'll definitely change scientific publishing. No-one really wants their papers to go unread due to an access fee. That's why www.arXiv.org was invented. However, the only solution I can think of is to separate science into management and technical (this already happens to a certain extent in High Energy Physics) and allow the heads of group more freedom in choosing who to hire, and how. This requires a bit more trust in the scientists and reduces jobs in the administration, so I fear that it will never happen, alas! Furthermore, you'd need to make both streams formally equal in order to remove the suspicion that scientists become managers because they don't have sufficient technical skills. Both these hurdles can only be cleared with social solutions though; technical solutions can only go so far.
- chris11 17y ago
  "I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not even read." Now I am not completely familiar with academia, so I was wondering if you could provide some context. Is is blatant plagiarism of other scientist's work? And if so, is this something that most scientists can reasonably expect to get away with if they tried. Or is it something where the scientist has some link to the work, such as heading a lab or working with the main author, but just has not done much work on the paper?
  - nagrom 17y ago
    The way it works is that one is a member of a collaboration. That collaboration publishes a paper, with 200 people on the author's list - technically, all the member of the collab. have been working at the experiment at some point. Of course, if an academic is a member of three or four of these collaborations, and each collab. publishes 10-20 papers a year, there's no way for the academic to fully understand the papers and do anything else on top of that...
zbyszek 17y ago
Yes. It is the link between funding and publication records that matters here, not how useful journals are for doing research. I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful. These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.

akamaka 17y ago

I don't think it needs to be disrupted. While the philosophy behind reforming is noble, my own discussions with researchers have convinced me that this doesn't matter to them. They know there are flaws, but they also believe that good research will still float to the top, and so they spend their energies on what is important, which is doing good research.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago
My discussions with researchers and my own reading of scientific work have convinced me that the main problem is how much researchers have to publish in order to be ranked highly. It leads to a huge number of rehashed, low quality papers. Some of the issues on the publishing side could be solved simply by reducing the amount of rubish that hits the system. And the second problem I see is not a technology issue either. It's that, at least in europe, academic research is funded by the public. In spite of that, the work of scientists is given away to publishers who hold the entire system hostage. Publishers are in effect running an elaborate scheme to blackmail the tax payer into paying twice for the same work without adding any value themselves. The peer reviewers are funded by the tax payer as well. If universities did what other employers do, which is to take ownership of what their employees produce and manage it properly, access to scientific work could be much improved.
Tichy 17y ago
Once they are in the system, maybe they have a good time. But it seems likely to me that if the general public were to be let in, more good science could result from it - because more people would have a chance to learn and contribute. That said, from university days I remember that the newest papers were often passed on between interested parties directly, not by publishing them.
- akamaka 17y ago
  What you say sounds true and good, but I'll ultimately listen to what the people around me have to say, rather than theorize about what's good for them.

Mongoose 17y ago

Daniel Lemire of UQAM has a number of good blog posts on new forms of scientific publishing: http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simplified-open-publishing-manifesto/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simp... http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author-centric/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author... http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-secret-behind-radical-innovation/ http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-se...

korch 17y ago

As a non-academic who regularly reads papers in math, physics and economics, I can't wait for the day when all the rent-seeking academic journal publishing houses are forced out of the market and are prevented from further ruining academia by fanning the artificial flames of "publish or perish". My biggest frustration is that it's impossible to access these journals if you're not affiliated with a university. The corporate journal monopolists like Springer and Elsevier absolutely gouge the universities to sell back to the schools what the schools essentially produced themselves. Have you ever checked out the fees they charge? It's on their websites, just try to sign up. It's $50k+ for an annual license, and that's on the cheap end for access to just a handful of journals—prices go way higher for full packages! This is a real scandal, especially with university budgets being bled nation wide due to the economic depression, and unavoidable, severe cuts not seen in generations! For a recent analysis of publishers sweetheart deals entitling them to profit margins above 25%, see: http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguig.... How many kids can you keep in college for one year if the schools were keeping that 25% profit margin? So universities are forced to restrict access by their contract, and the publishers have no incentive to even sell to consumers—why should they when they can make astronomically more selling only to schools? Granted, all the publishers do sell individual papers to consumers, but not at a price that clears the market. Expect to be charged $20 for a 30 year old 5 page paper covering an obscure Thermodynamics topic. It could be argued that the publishers own the rights(or not: authors being forced to sign away all rights in order to even be published is another scandal), so they can make up any price they want. However, what is a fair price to charge when the author of the paper themselves are giving their paper away for free to download from their personal .edu site! Ultimately, access to information and research becomes highly restricted when everyone plays this strategy. Isn't this consequence the exact opposite of the intent of the Internet? Call me an idealist, but scholarly writings ought to be made as widely available as possible, especially for the general public, for little to no profit. I used to think one optimal solution was for a quasi-benevolent org, such as Google, to just buy all academic papers and publication rights and put all of it on the web, like with Google Print. Google could care less about manipulating and creating an artificial journal market, no, they have a much bigger objective: collect as much free content as possible in order to draw in more eyeballs to show them more ads to increase the CPC. Google Scholar started with the right idea, but they never did anything with the product. I've been happy to see Arxiv gaining more traction in the past few years. It's also been encouraging to see the recent federal laws mandating that any research funded with federal money be made freely available, so the paywalls can't touch those papers(unfortunately this seems to be contained mostly to NIH medical publications). One interesting recent trend I've noticed is the effect of academics being much more web savy compared to ten years ago—now you can pretty much find any paper published within the past decade for free on the author's own .edu site. That is, if you know exactly what you're looking for, and don't mind spending a few minutes sifting Google, and don't mind discovering many papers are not freely accessible. It's a less than ideal search experience, but it works well enough. Unfortunately all the pre-web papers are still locked behind paywalls. I'm also giddy to see the upcoming Mac tablet's impact on the journals vis a vis its rumored plans to disrupt the college textbook market.

dagw 17y ago

For the vast majority of the primary target audience of scientific publications they are effectively free. It's a cost their employer eats and they never see. So there is no big reason for them to fight it. What would a researcher gain by going out of his way to disrupt the current model. He can easily access all the papers he needs and just about everyone in his target audience can read his published papers for free as well. I'm not supporting the system or saying that I wouldn't love to see it changed, but I really cannot see much reason for pressure to change it.

b-man 17y ago

2 great videos that are pertinent IMO http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534

elblanco 17y ago
Great finds.