8 ms·

I always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to _su

by nacc 10y ago

I always wonder why some disciplines are more open than others [0]. As someone in biology: the state of publication is very sad. We have to pay thousands to _submit_ a manuscript, and then: - get rejected right away, or - the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or - we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or - The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall. I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing. Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate. Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for others to watch. [0]: http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-models-fund-open-access-journals/ http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-...

devoply 10y ago
The whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet no one quite knows why.
- rspeer 10y ago
  It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them. The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor". However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
  - a3_nm 10y ago
    Note that putting your paywalled papers on arXiv or on your website is very often perfectly legal, because, as a result of open access lobbying, many non-open-access publishers allow exemptions for this in their copyright transfer agreements (sometimes under some conditions). You should check with your publisher for details (or look at the specific details of the copyright agreement), and there is a database of publisher policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fI... (For anyone wondering, the reason why publishers routinely accept this is because they derive their revenue from university subscriptions, and the availability of even a large percentage of non-official article versions online apparently does not suffice to encourage libraries to unsubscribe.)
- taneq 10y ago
  I forget the exact wording of the quote I want, but it was something along the lines of "It is almost impossible to get someone to notice something if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it."
  - winter_blue 10y ago
    > if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it A lot of these reviewers review for these journals for free, maybe because being known as a reviewer for a prestigious journal is beneficial. But their livelihood certainly doesn't depend on it. A lot of these major journals pocket all the profits from paywalls, and don't pay the scientists who do the hard work reviewing a dime. If there were a collective revolt, and all these scientists switched en masse to an open publishing system/platform, this scam would end then and there.
  - adrienne 10y ago
    It's Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
    - taneq 10y ago
      That's the one, thanks!
- midgetjones 10y ago
  I'd call it a racket.
matheusmoreira 10y ago
I keep wondering why submitting papers to these journals is necessary. Does the research not stand on its own? > I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family I feel the same way. ArXiv accepts submissions from any registered researcher¹ and it seems so much easier. ¹ https://arxiv.org/help/submit https://arxiv.org/help/submit
- impendia 10y ago
  > Does the research not stand on its own? Academic mathematician here. It does, sort of, but ..... Say a mathematics postdoc is applying for a job, and she works in underwater basketweaving. The two underwater basketweavers in her dream department read her application and can see that she's brilliant. She's developed a new methodology for weaving rattan under 100 feet of ocean without even getting it wet. She has letters from the most preeminent underwater basketweavers in her field. She should be a shoo-in to get the job. One problem though. A majority of the hiring committee works in different areas of research. One thinks that underwater basketweaving is overhyped. Another thinks that great work was done in the eighties, but all the interesting questions have been solved already. And these people don't put much stock in the letter writers: they have a reputation for writing glowing letters even for mediocre candidates. And, so far, the hiring meeting is deadlocked until the basketweavers pipe in: Our candidate has published in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik and Inventiones Mathematicae and Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS. And now, all of a sudden, that postdoc is getting the interview, because her competitors have only published in Mathematische Annalen and Indagationes Mathematicae. (These are all real names of math journals.) That was a bit long winded, and please forgive me if it's a bit silly, but the point is that we need mechanisms to compare researchers working in different subdisciplines, for researchers to "prove" to the community at large that they're doing good work. I wish we could eschew these games, and I certainly wish we could ditch the commercial publishing industry, but we compete with each other for jobs, for grant funding, and for fame, and we need to establish some kind of metric for evaluating researchers which is as fair as possible. It is not perfect; certainly it is not completely fair. But I believe it works reasonably well.
  - brians 10y ago
VodkaHaze 10y ago
Holy crap this is depressing. I'm happy that the state of the art in economics, currently, is to post working papers and preprints online. This has the side effects of papers being cited before being published, and turning out to be bad, but is certainly a huge net positive overall. It's rare to not be able to find a free pdf preprint of an economics paper written in the last 6-7 years, which is great.
08-15 10y ago
Don't review for free. Seriously. Every time you review for a journal and don't ask for a reasonable (say, $150/h) fee, you are enabling their predatory practices. Stop doing it. Come to think about it, why not copy their pricing scheme? Sure, I'll review for this particular journal for $3000/h---or I agree to review for any of your journals, for a flat rate of $3000/week, even if there is nothing interesting to review... But really, at the very least, stop doing it for free. > otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing. No, you don't, because that's impossible. You might risk infringing the journal's copyright---but the journal only has a copyright on the final article, not on the words you submitted. Maybe that's what differentiates Biology from Physics: you guys thinks self-plagiarization (sp?) is a thing.
- impendia 10y ago
  >Don't review for free. As an academic (who hates Elsevier as much as OP, and who has also signed the boycott), I can't agree. If we accept payment from publishers then we tie ourselves into their ecosystem even more. I personally think of academic mathematics like a giant, collaborative, open source project. Research wants to be free, and there is no reason it shouldn't be. Fortunately (for now at least; researchers are being replaced by adjuncts in too many places) the open source model is sustainable. Universities hire us (at somewhat modest salaries) to teach classes and to write TPS reports from time to time, and to actively maintain a presence in the research community. And grant-making agencies such as the NSF are delighted to have the results of their funding disseminated as widely and as openly as possible. It's not perfect, but to a large extent (at least outside the laboratory sciences) we have the luxury of simply contributing to knowledge without worrying too much about where our next paycheck will come from. That is one of the reasons why we're willing to work for half the salary that we might get in industry. For a good model I recommend Discrete Analysis [1], a mathematics journal started by Tim Gowers. It is an arXiv overlay journal, meaning they do not publish articles (even electronically). They have a top-notch editorial board that handles peer review and lends their imprimatur to papers which are hosted elsewhere (on the arXiv, a free preprint server). It's everything that academics could want from a journal, with none of the cruft. If I ever do any research in the area of the journal then I am definitely submitting here. And I will dream of it getting accepted. [1] http://discreteanalysisjournal.com http://discreteanalysisjournal.com
apathy 10y ago
Post your galleys to http://biorxiv.org/submit-a-manuscript http://biorxiv.org/submit-a-manuscript when you send the MS out for review. Simple as that. Oh, and respond to RFI/RFCs from NIH asking whether interim research products should count in grant reviews (yes). You will note that there are now clinical trials on biorXiv, and I've been pushing (as a coauthor) for more of them (NEJM & Blood are the only journals worth noting that won't accept submissions that are archived as preprints). Elsevier is at least as bad as Blood or NEJM, but seemingly lacks the editorial standards of either. They can suck their 35% profit margins out of someone else, TYVM.
logicallee 10y ago
BECAUSE YOU LIKE IT THAT WAY. Or can't you get a single person to endorse you for a paper in http://biorxiv.org/ http://biorxiv.org/ ? Seriously. It's your choice where to publish. you are literally saying "boohoo why can't we have what computer science/physics has" while you reject it. I have as much sympathy for you as I do for men/women who will never go on a second date with anyone, regardless of how the first went, and then complain about being single. It's your choice, guys and girls. It is YOUR CHOICE whether to have open biology research. You (personally you, OP) are choosing "no". ---- EDIT: I obviously got downvoted for my tone, but I am keeping it because I think it's "tough love" that will move OP and others to submit to open bio servers.
_lpa_ 10y ago
We just had a paper accepted after 11 months. There is no good reason for it taking this long. I wish biology would adopt the publishing practices of physics or machine learning.
torrent-of-ions 10y ago
Biologists love to quantify things. Even when it makes no sense. Your value as a biologist is your publication record. That is, number of papers in "high impact" journals. Nothing to do with the quality of your output at all. A tremendous amount of lip service is given to the virtues of publishing in open access journals. Or to using modern technology (like the WWW!) instead of paper. But when it comes to it, do you think those very people advocating change will put their research out there and lose a Nature/Science paper? It requires entire institutions or governments to step up and determine how their research will be made available. Individuals will not do it. They will not stop climate change. They will not stop old fashioned publishing.

by nacc 10y ago

devoply 10y ago

The whole publication industry seems like a conspiracy that's hiding in plain sight for anyone to see. Yet it seems to be difficult to get rid of... and yet no one quite knows why.

rspeer 10y ago
It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them. The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor". However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
- a3_nm 10y ago
  Note that putting your paywalled papers on arXiv or on your website is very often perfectly legal, because, as a result of open access lobbying, many non-open-access publishers allow exemptions for this in their copyright transfer agreements (sometimes under some conditions). You should check with your publisher for details (or look at the specific details of the copyright agreement), and there is a database of publisher policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fI... (For anyone wondering, the reason why publishers routinely accept this is because they derive their revenue from university subscriptions, and the availability of even a large percentage of non-official article versions online apparently does not suffice to encourage libraries to unsubscribe.)
taneq 10y ago
I forget the exact wording of the quote I want, but it was something along the lines of "It is almost impossible to get someone to notice something if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it."
- winter_blue 10y ago
  > if their continued employment depends on them not noticing it A lot of these reviewers review for these journals for free, maybe because being known as a reviewer for a prestigious journal is beneficial. But their livelihood certainly doesn't depend on it. A lot of these major journals pocket all the profits from paywalls, and don't pay the scientists who do the hard work reviewing a dime. If there were a collective revolt, and all these scientists switched en masse to an open publishing system/platform, this scam would end then and there.
- adrienne 10y ago
  It's Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
  - taneq 10y ago
    That's the one, thanks!
midgetjones 10y ago
I'd call it a racket.

matheusmoreira 10y ago

I keep wondering why submitting papers to these journals is necessary. Does the research not stand on its own? > I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family I feel the same way. ArXiv accepts submissions from any registered researcher¹ and it seems so much easier. ¹ https://arxiv.org/help/submit https://arxiv.org/help/submit

impendia 10y ago
> Does the research not stand on its own? Academic mathematician here. It does, sort of, but ..... Say a mathematics postdoc is applying for a job, and she works in underwater basketweaving. The two underwater basketweavers in her dream department read her application and can see that she's brilliant. She's developed a new methodology for weaving rattan under 100 feet of ocean without even getting it wet. She has letters from the most preeminent underwater basketweavers in her field. She should be a shoo-in to get the job. One problem though. A majority of the hiring committee works in different areas of research. One thinks that underwater basketweaving is overhyped. Another thinks that great work was done in the eighties, but all the interesting questions have been solved already. And these people don't put much stock in the letter writers: they have a reputation for writing glowing letters even for mediocre candidates. And, so far, the hiring meeting is deadlocked until the basketweavers pipe in: Our candidate has published in Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik and Inventiones Mathematicae and Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS. And now, all of a sudden, that postdoc is getting the interview, because her competitors have only published in Mathematische Annalen and Indagationes Mathematicae. (These are all real names of math journals.) That was a bit long winded, and please forgive me if it's a bit silly, but the point is that we need mechanisms to compare researchers working in different subdisciplines, for researchers to "prove" to the community at large that they're doing good work. I wish we could eschew these games, and I certainly wish we could ditch the commercial publishing industry, but we compete with each other for jobs, for grant funding, and for fame, and we need to establish some kind of metric for evaluating researchers which is as fair as possible. It is not perfect; certainly it is not completely fair. But I believe it works reasonably well.
- brians 10y ago

VodkaHaze 10y ago

Holy crap this is depressing. I'm happy that the state of the art in economics, currently, is to post working papers and preprints online. This has the side effects of papers being cited before being published, and turning out to be bad, but is certainly a huge net positive overall. It's rare to not be able to find a free pdf preprint of an economics paper written in the last 6-7 years, which is great.

08-15 10y ago

Don't review for free. Seriously. Every time you review for a journal and don't ask for a reasonable (say, $150/h) fee, you are enabling their predatory practices. Stop doing it. Come to think about it, why not copy their pricing scheme? Sure, I'll review for this particular journal for $3000/h---or I agree to review for any of your journals, for a flat rate of $3000/week, even if there is nothing interesting to review... But really, at the very least, stop doing it for free. > otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing. No, you don't, because that's impossible. You might risk infringing the journal's copyright---but the journal only has a copyright on the final article, not on the words you submitted. Maybe that's what differentiates Biology from Physics: you guys thinks self-plagiarization (sp?) is a thing.

impendia 10y ago
>Don't review for free. As an academic (who hates Elsevier as much as OP, and who has also signed the boycott), I can't agree. If we accept payment from publishers then we tie ourselves into their ecosystem even more. I personally think of academic mathematics like a giant, collaborative, open source project. Research wants to be free, and there is no reason it shouldn't be. Fortunately (for now at least; researchers are being replaced by adjuncts in too many places) the open source model is sustainable. Universities hire us (at somewhat modest salaries) to teach classes and to write TPS reports from time to time, and to actively maintain a presence in the research community. And grant-making agencies such as the NSF are delighted to have the results of their funding disseminated as widely and as openly as possible. It's not perfect, but to a large extent (at least outside the laboratory sciences) we have the luxury of simply contributing to knowledge without worrying too much about where our next paycheck will come from. That is one of the reasons why we're willing to work for half the salary that we might get in industry. For a good model I recommend Discrete Analysis [1], a mathematics journal started by Tim Gowers. It is an arXiv overlay journal, meaning they do not publish articles (even electronically). They have a top-notch editorial board that handles peer review and lends their imprimatur to papers which are hosted elsewhere (on the arXiv, a free preprint server). It's everything that academics could want from a journal, with none of the cruft. If I ever do any research in the area of the journal then I am definitely submitting here. And I will dream of it getting accepted. [1] http://discreteanalysisjournal.com http://discreteanalysisjournal.com

apathy 10y ago

Post your galleys to http://biorxiv.org/submit-a-manuscript http://biorxiv.org/submit-a-manuscript when you send the MS out for review. Simple as that. Oh, and respond to RFI/RFCs from NIH asking whether interim research products should count in grant reviews (yes). You will note that there are now clinical trials on biorXiv, and I've been pushing (as a coauthor) for more of them (NEJM & Blood are the only journals worth noting that won't accept submissions that are archived as preprints). Elsevier is at least as bad as Blood or NEJM, but seemingly lacks the editorial standards of either. They can suck their 35% profit margins out of someone else, TYVM.

logicallee 10y ago

BECAUSE YOU LIKE IT THAT WAY. Or can't you get a single person to endorse you for a paper in http://biorxiv.org/ http://biorxiv.org/ ? Seriously. It's your choice where to publish. you are literally saying "boohoo why can't we have what computer science/physics has" while you reject it. I have as much sympathy for you as I do for men/women who will never go on a second date with anyone, regardless of how the first went, and then complain about being single. It's your choice, guys and girls. It is YOUR CHOICE whether to have open biology research. You (personally you, OP) are choosing "no". ---- EDIT: I obviously got downvoted for my tone, but I am keeping it because I think it's "tough love" that will move OP and others to submit to open bio servers.

_lpa_ 10y ago

We just had a paper accepted after 11 months. There is no good reason for it taking this long. I wish biology would adopt the publishing practices of physics or machine learning.

torrent-of-ions 10y ago

Biologists love to quantify things. Even when it makes no sense. Your value as a biologist is your publication record. That is, number of papers in "high impact" journals. Nothing to do with the quality of your output at all. A tremendous amount of lip service is given to the virtues of publishing in open access journals. Or to using modern technology (like the WWW!) instead of paper. But when it comes to it, do you think those very people advocating change will put their research out there and lose a Nature/Science paper? It requires entire institutions or governments to step up and determine how their research will be made available. Individuals will not do it. They will not stop climate change. They will not stop old fashioned publishing.