9 ms·

Academics should stop doing free peer-review for non-open-access journals.

551 points by MikeTaylor 15y ago

CJefferson 15y ago
I really like this idea. It has a major strength as a boycott -- it just involves me refusing to do work which I would not have been paid to do anyway. It was never going to be possible to convince people to boycott submitting papers to top journals, as that would damage their career and standing. I also think journals as they currently stand serve an important purpose, of quality control. They are not perfect, but I have nightmares where the future of publication is just arXiv, or worse a wikipedia-style "the research anyone can edit". I'm not saying these don't have an important place, but I also want a way for the best papers to get exposure, and I think our current system is about the best way of doing that.
- MikeTaylor 15y ago
  [Note: I am the author of the original article, so I have a horse in this race.] I agree that the journal system provides a valuable filter. My beef is not with journal, but with locking up publicly funded research. Open-access journals are an unequivocal good. But I am not convinced that all journals filter on the right things. I like the approach of PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/ http://www.plosone.org/), which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science, and ignores subjective notions of "impact" or "importance". The result is that everything they publish is good -- as reliable as articles published in any other journal -- but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take. Anyway, that's a side-issue. The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them.
  - incremental 15y ago
    Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they are less selective than the top tier journals? Seems an extraordinary claim to make.
    - jbri 15y ago
      No, everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they reject everything that isn't good. The "less selective" bit manifests itself as a reduced average "impact"/"importance", rather than as a reduced average quality.
      - MikeTaylor 15y ago
        Exactly. Paradoxically, this policy has resulted in its getting a rather good impact factor for such a new journal (4.411 for 2010), which happily attracts more high-profile submissions in a virtuous circle. The moral seems clear: other things being equal, freely accessible papers tend to get cited more often than paywalled ones. (Who would have guessed?)
    - MikeTaylor 15y ago
      Perhaps I wasn't clear. Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good not because they are less selective, but although they are less selective. The reason their acceptance criteria don't adversely affect the quality of their published articles is because they do select on quality -- if it's not good, it doesn't go in. But they don't select on impact.
      - incremental 15y ago
        Ah, my mistake, I see what you're claiming. However, let me ask a more substantive question. You end by stating:"The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them." The OA model largely involves shifting the cost from the user to the author. This will be paid out of the authors grant money, which in many cases is publicly funded as well. It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim. Reminds me a bit of how Google uses "open" as a competitive weapon to push Android. I wonder if OA publishers are not doing the same to push their business model...
        jules 15y ago
        What exactly are those costs? Reviewers work for free. The only other thing that's needed is a web application and some hosting. These costs are negligible compared to the tax that closed journals are imposing on the scientific world.
  - xtracto 15y ago
    >but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take I think the main issue of "traditional" journals is that they are artificially constrained to publish 10 to 15 articles per month (or issue), whereas electronic publication can get rid of this constrain (as long as they have enough peer reviewers).
  - jpdoctor 15y ago
    >which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science Mike, 1. Thank you for taking up the cause. 2. Trust me: Boycotting reviews is easy in my case. Unfortunately, this means no change because I stopped doing them -- it was just taking too much time for no reward. 3. wrt the above quote: I note that there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. (Yes things get missed, but S/N is much higher than if I had to do it from scratch. Good luck.
    - streptomycin 15y ago
      > there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. We don't need journals for that. They could be replaced by services like http://f1000.com/ http://f1000.com/
      - jpdoctor 15y ago
        I was more envisioning a reddit/HN segmented by science/engineering disciplines. In the current journal system, editor-votes have absolute veto power, and reviewer votes have large upvote power. This has led to much progress, but it is unclear that it is the best system possible. Then there is the whole segmentation question, which is a big tradeoff between S/N and coverage of the space. An example: Physical Review A, B, C, D & E used to be one journal -- Physical Review. Phys Rev had a green binder, and people would keep these dead-tree objects on shelves for reference. Well, the publication volume kept growing: Some wag calculated that rate of growth of the volumes on the shelf would cause their edge to exceed the speed of light. (He also pointed out that no information would be exchanged, so there was no violation of physics.)
        MikeTaylor 15y ago
        Interesting idea to use something like a subreddit as a place to communally filter ("post-publication peer-review") published papers. The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote. You'd want established professionals in the field to have a greater upvote/downvote weight than J. Random Ligger. You could imagine a sort of pagerankish scheme where people whose own publications have been upvoted get more more voting power as a result.
- electrichead 15y ago
  There is a problem in that it would encourage people to provide reviews as a service, and you then have a problem of filtering out who would be a good reviewer, which might be interpreted as bias. I agree that something needs to be done though. I've been thinking of the similarities between publications and web pages a la page-rank. There are a lot of parallels, not just in content but also with respect to who has contributed and who has helped to review the paper. I've often wondered why Google Scholar doesn't take advantage of this. I do suppose though that there's no money in it. Who wants to see ads in/around their article? There's a viable non-profit model here maybe.
- Homunculiheaded 15y ago
  The arXiv and wikipedia are not the only alternatives to paid, publisher controlled journals. There are a growing number of open access journals which have the same quality standards as any publisher controlled journals. Additionally many publishers have gotten into the habit of mass producing really poor quality journals to include in packages that libraries are forced to purchase to get other big name titles. All of the quality of a journal comes from the academics who almost always but the editing, peer review and writing in for free (or technically university time). The only real service publishers ever offered was the ability to create print journals, but that is not longer necessary (or even desirable).
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    What you and several other people are missing is Journals don't spam reviewers with random studies. They put some effort into finding an appropriate group of people to review the research which both reduces the reviewer workload and prevents inappropriate people from reviewing things. Also reviewers gain an early look at research appropriate to their field of study, which granted is still mostly junk but far better than random. I don't think this is going to be hard to replicate, but it's still reasonably expensive to do well for a for a large number of articles, so I suspect open access would require at a minimum a few hundred dollars per submitted article worth of work which can’t exactly be add supported.
    - Homunculiheaded 15y ago
      The thing is there are already millions of dollar per university library going into paying for serials. Publishers make a huge profit. So the real issue is finding a model where universities can more effectively redirect that money towards open access. However I'll be the first to admit that getting universities cooperate even if it's in their collective interest is no simple task.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
brador 15y ago
I love how this all came about because of a criminal action. No amount of protesting or discussion was succesful. Would it ever have been succesful? Possibly, but unlikely. However, the second we see some illegal activity (the guy from MIT who downloaded the JSTOR articles from that server), suddenly Pandoras box has opened and we see real change, real disruption and fast. Does this justify his actions? Is the only way to disrupt entranched business to conduct borderline actions? Effectively pushing boundaries to the very limits of legality?. Either way, this is the concept of "tipping point" in action folks.
- fragsworth 15y ago
  What exactly is the cause/effect relationship between the JSTOR breach and this article? I don't quite see it.
  - brador 15y ago
    The JSTOR incident shone a light on the practices of JSTOR and journal publishers in general and highlighted just how restricted access is for the general public to research we have all either fully or partly paid for and we fully expect to be in the public domain. Further, it created a martyr for the movement of open-sourcing articles and to be quite frank about it, the journal owners are now very afraid of their monopolies crumbling to this movement. They knew this day would come, but the speed with which this is gathering pace is terrifying.
    - raphman 15y ago
      I disagree. There is no single incident that caused everyone to love Open Access. Instead, over the last years librarians and activists have been slowly but steadily been making progress in this regard - without breaking the law or contracts.
      - brador 15y ago
        No doubt their slow steady pace laid the foundations, but let's give credit where it's due. That MIT guy broke the dam and now it's a torrent.
kia 15y ago
This is kind of chicken-and-egg problem. Today most established journals with high impact factors (= prestigious) are non-open-access. Publishing in or being a reviewer of a high impact factor non-open-access journal looks much better in a resume of a scientist than publishing in non-prestigious open-access journal. For an open-access journal to become prestigious it needs high quality contributions. But at the same time an author of some important discovery will more likely to publish it in some high prestigious non-open-access journal. Of course for tenured faculty members it is not such a big problem because they have a secured position. But for their apprentices not having high impact publications may become a problem in their future career. And while tenured adviser may force a postdoc to publish in an open-access journal most of them will not likely do this because they understand that this puts members of his/her lab in a bad position compared to competing scientists. I think that well known scientists should make the first move here and to start publishing in open-access journals. Their work has a lot of traction and will not suffer from being published in some not-so-well-known open-access journal. On the other hand this will help open-access journals to start building reputation.
- smackay 15y ago
  That would certainly work for relatively small or close-knit groups where it is easier to collectively decide to move. I would expect that impact factor has a significant amount of gravity associated with it so even if the leaders in a field decided to move to open-access journals unless the (up and coming) majority also made the same move then the impact-factors of both journals may not change much.
- MikeTaylor 15y ago
  Don't forget there are plenty of open-access journals with very healthy impact factors (for those who have to be ruled by that exceptionally stupid measure). For example, the top-ranked journal in the Biology category in the 2009 Journal Citation Reports was PLoS Biology, with 12.916.
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    This is the exception, rather than the rule. Also, remember that the question isn't "is there a open-access journal with a healthy enough impact factor/prestige?" (as if there was a threshold), it's "will I have take a noticeable hit in impact factor/prestige to publish open access?" It's hard to ask young researchers to do that latter.
shaggyfrog 15y ago
One of the reasons academics do peer review is to put it on their CV/evaluations that universities do to evaluate the amount of academic work they do. Voluntarily declining offers to do peer review would therefore have a negative effect on that person's ability to retain their job. (I'm talking about those without tenure, mainly.) One solution would be for universities taking stands like this is to somehow "give credit" to their academics who are asked to do peer review for non-open-access journals.
- MikeTaylor 15y ago
  It is certainly true that academic advancement is affected by publication in high-impact venues, and that some of those (incuding the ubiquitous Science and Nature) are not open-access. I can see why someone might feel obliged to submit to these journals. But I have never seen anyone's career affected by which journals they review for. It might happen, but if it does then it's news to me. (BTW., for academics who feel they must publish in one of the tabloids, Science is much sounder than Nature because all their papers become freely accessible one year after publication, which is much better than nothing.)
  - shaggyfrog 15y ago
    I used to be an editorial assistant at a small journal. When I asked what motivates researches to volunteer their free time to do peer reviews, that was one of the answers I got. It's a small benefit.
  - pbiggar 15y ago
    > But I have never seen anyone's career affected by which journals they review for. It might happen, but if it does then it's news to me. Oh they absolutely are. Academic CVs are full of listings of which program committees you're on. You start being a member of a committee for a smallish conference (in programming language research, something like VEE or PLaS), then try to move up to a few medium size ones (CC, perhaps), and finally you make it to being on the program committees of the top top journals (PLDI or POPL). I decided not to go down the academic career path after doing my PhD, but it was pretty plain even to a PhD student that being on good program committees is part of your career progression.
guelo 15y ago
It seems like it should be governments who fund the publishing and peer review services, they are already funding most of the research. Having private corporations as middle-men just doesn't make sense, even if they are non-profits.
alttag 15y ago
Although I'm in favor of open access journals for a handful of reasons, I think there are a couple of things working against the idea: First, handling fees. As someone starting out in the field, there are a great number of journals that advertise (read:spam), and have handling fees. It feels very much like a scam, or a system were "success" can be bought. Second, as one commenter on the article suggests, with a handling fee, the publisher is incentivized to print more. (There's an undercurrent of complain in my field that there isn't enough quality publication space, so this is two-sided, but is the cost of more outlets a lowering in quality?) However, with a subscription model, the quality must remain high to keep subscribers. (One might also argue that "closed" publishers want to print as much as possible to give more authors' schools reason to subscribe, but I don't know the level of this effect.) Third, on a more personal level, living as a doctoral student—more particularly, with the budget of a doctoral student—even nominal costs can seem overwhelming. I don't see my institution covering "handling fees" in the near future, particularly with the amount of cost-cutting going on. The fees are less onerous for faculty, but present a slightly higher barrier for student entrants.
- kolinko 15y ago
  you're assuming, that open access journals need a handling fee distribution costs are marginal, it is possible for an open access journal that wouldn't take handling fees. it could be a non-profit organisation, or it could have other monetisation methods.
  - alttag 15y ago
    Yes, I'm making that 'assumption' because the article says, "... open-access journals, such as PLoS ONE, which charge authors a handling fee to cover their operating costs ..." EDIT: Link from comment above shows fees for the PLoS family of journals start at $1350 per article and go up rapidly from there. http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php
    - stfu 15y ago
      I absolutely agree. The pay-for-publishing model is heavily disadvantaging towards smaller research institutions, independent researchers or young researchers.
eeeerrrr 15y ago
So why is the idea that science publishing should be free attributed more intellectual weight than the idea that music should be free, or movies, or software? I mean, we get it, everybody loves free stuff.
- jbri 15y ago
  Because science research is funded by public interests, not private ones.
  - urbanjunkie 15y ago
    Not really true anymore. A significant proportion of science research is funded by non-governmental organisations - for example the Gates Foundation. Furthermore, most universities will charge the researchers who receive grants a cost known as 'overhead' that can often be 100% of the grant. Typically, the funding agencies pay for this separately.
    - greeneggs 15y ago
      When it comes to basic science, this is not true at all. Gleaning numbers from Wikipedia, the Gates Foundation seems to spend roughly $300 million a year on research. HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) spends $450 million a year. In contrast, the NIH spend $31 billion a year. Biology and medicine are the fields with the highest proportion of private funding, and even in these fields the government is dominant. Overhead does not seem relevant to this point.
      - urbanjunkie 15y ago
        You need to provide a reference. This page from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science) suggests that over 63% of research is funded by private sources. Overhead is relevant as it shows that even at 'public' universities, the funding agency must pay for the research to be carried out, countering arguments about the public paying for research.
jedbrown 15y ago
A lot of conventional journals have an open access option available to the author for a fee (usually for about $3000). What about offering a no-cost upgrade after reviewing some number of papers for the journal?
- jessriedel 15y ago
  Journal generally won't do this so long as researchers continue to do it for free. In addition, even if researcher's followed the OP's advice and the journals adopted this strategy, it get us where (most people think) we should be: all research article available free to everyone.
Uchikoma 15y ago
I let you in on a secret: In many research institutions the people that "do" peer-review don't do the review, they delegate the reviews to their underlings who are not in a position to refuse.
- kragen 15y ago
  I've even been delegated a review by a researcher at a different research institution. (He didn't feel like he knew enough to properly review the paper.) But it seems like the guy the journal editor is talking to is still in a position to boycott, even if he's going to delegate the actual reviewing.
  - Uchikoma 15y ago
    The guy the journal editor talks to has sometimes a different agenda. As he does not have interest in reviewing the papers, he isn't interested in the topics. He's often interested in advancing his career and building his network, and a move to do that is "review" papers for journals. Otherwise he would review the papers on his own. Boycotting would run counter to his own goals (while the guy who got the task of actually reviewing the paper has interest in the topic and would like to boycott journals but is not in the position to do so).
    - kragen 15y ago
      The guy the journal editor talks to still has limited minion resources at his disposal, and he still has the option of caring about the future of academic publishing even if he isn't interested in the topics of the papers.
FranklinVallen 15y ago
This is a lovely idea but I'm afraid it's a pipe dream. Boycotts don't change profitable practices. (And there is little enough profit in academic publishing to begin with!) The author's heart is in the right place but his head is in the clouds. Too bad.
jkic47 15y ago
Since most reviewers are probably from Universities or Companies, it is likely that their employment contract prohibits them from doing professional work not associated with their current job. It should be fairly simple for these Universities and Companies to start enforcing this and take away the supply of qualified reviewers from Journals that lock up knowledge.
- kragen 15y ago
  No. Researchers at universities invariably do academic work for conferences, for journals, and for other universities — giving talks, for example. Often they get paid directly for these. This is a fundamental part of how academia works, and has been (in various forms) for centuries. I worked in Silicon Valley as a sysadmin and programmer in 1996-97 and 2000-2006, at a total of seven different companies. I've also worked professionally at a professional services company, a defense contractor, and freelance for various clients (primarily in the US). I don't think I've ever seen an employment contract that purported to prohibit me from "doing professional work not associated with [my] current job". In some cases I have proposed modifications to confidentiality agreements with the explicit purpose of ensuring that I could moonlight safely (for previous clients, normally). The modifications were accepted.
  - jkic47 15y ago
    Having an academic and industrial background myself, I understand that researchers currently do academic work for conferences, journals and so on The point I was making was that employers could enforce the parts of the contract that allow them to control whom their employees work for. That would, at the very least, not be contributing brainpower to an industry that charges the very same companies / universities enormous sums for access to journals. While you may not have seen such restrictions in sysadmin/programmer type positions, they certainly exist in several scientific and medical-related disciplines (though I agree that can be waived in certain circumstances).
regehr 15y ago
I'm a CS professor and for the last several years have refused almost every review request from a non-ACM/IEEE journal. I'm also an associate editor of an ACM journal and often have a very hard time getting people to review submissions. My sense is that a lot of my peers have simply stopped doing (most) journal reviews at all. A person can be totally overloaded just doing conference reviews, which are a lot more fun anyway. The papers are shorter and (at a good conference) the papers are a lot better than journal submissions.

551 points by MikeTaylor 15y ago

I really like this idea. It has a major strength as a boycott -- it just involves me refusing to do work which I would not have been paid to do anyway. It was never going to be possible to convince people to boycott submitting papers to top journals, as that would damage their career and standing. I also think journals as they currently stand serve an important purpose, of quality control. They are not perfect, but I have nightmares where the future of publication is just arXiv, or worse a wikipedia-style "the research anyone can edit". I'm not saying these don't have an important place, but I also want a way for the best papers to get exposure, and I think our current system is about the best way of doing that.

MikeTaylor 15y ago
[Note: I am the author of the original article, so I have a horse in this race.] I agree that the journal system provides a valuable filter. My beef is not with journal, but with locking up publicly funded research. Open-access journals are an unequivocal good. But I am not convinced that all journals filter on the right things. I like the approach of PLoS ONE (http://www.plosone.org/ http://www.plosone.org/), which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science, and ignores subjective notions of "impact" or "importance". The result is that everything they publish is good -- as reliable as articles published in any other journal -- but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take. Anyway, that's a side-issue. The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them.
- incremental 15y ago
  Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they are less selective than the top tier journals? Seems an extraordinary claim to make.
  - jbri 15y ago
    No, everything PLoS ONE publishes is good because they reject everything that isn't good. The "less selective" bit manifests itself as a reduced average "impact"/"importance", rather than as a reduced average quality.
    - MikeTaylor 15y ago
      Exactly. Paradoxically, this policy has resulted in its getting a rather good impact factor for such a new journal (4.411 for 2010), which happily attracts more high-profile submissions in a virtuous circle. The moral seems clear: other things being equal, freely accessible papers tend to get cited more often than paywalled ones. (Who would have guessed?)
  - MikeTaylor 15y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear. Everything PLoS ONE publishes is good not because they are less selective, but although they are less selective. The reason their acceptance criteria don't adversely affect the quality of their published articles is because they do select on quality -- if it's not good, it doesn't go in. But they don't select on impact.
    - incremental 15y ago
      Ah, my mistake, I see what you're claiming. However, let me ask a more substantive question. You end by stating:"The real issue is that, whatever selection criteria a journal uses, it should make the resulting papers freely available to the citizens who funded them." The OA model largely involves shifting the cost from the user to the author. This will be paid out of the authors grant money, which in many cases is publicly funded as well. It's not at all clear to me that the end effect is as different as the proponents claim. Reminds me a bit of how Google uses "open" as a competitive weapon to push Android. I wonder if OA publishers are not doing the same to push their business model...
      - jules 15y ago
        What exactly are those costs? Reviewers work for free. The only other thing that's needed is a web application and some hosting. These costs are negligible compared to the tax that closed journals are imposing on the scientific world.
- xtracto 15y ago
  >but it includes articles that would never get into, say, Science or Nature due to the self-consciously super-selective approach those journals take I think the main issue of "traditional" journals is that they are artificially constrained to publish 10 to 15 articles per month (or issue), whereas electronic publication can get rid of this constrain (as long as they have enough peer reviewers).
- jpdoctor 15y ago
  >which assesses papers purely on the quality of the science Mike, 1. Thank you for taking up the cause. 2. Trust me: Boycotting reviews is easy in my case. Unfortunately, this means no change because I stopped doing them -- it was just taking too much time for no reward. 3. wrt the above quote: I note that there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. (Yes things get missed, but S/N is much higher than if I had to do it from scratch. Good luck.
  - streptomycin 15y ago
    > there is a market for selective journals. Much like reddit and HN, it is useful to have a crowd-source selection of interesting/important items. We don't need journals for that. They could be replaced by services like http://f1000.com/ http://f1000.com/
    - jpdoctor 15y ago
      I was more envisioning a reddit/HN segmented by science/engineering disciplines. In the current journal system, editor-votes have absolute veto power, and reviewer votes have large upvote power. This has led to much progress, but it is unclear that it is the best system possible. Then there is the whole segmentation question, which is a big tradeoff between S/N and coverage of the space. An example: Physical Review A, B, C, D & E used to be one journal -- Physical Review. Phys Rev had a green binder, and people would keep these dead-tree objects on shelves for reference. Well, the publication volume kept growing: Some wag calculated that rate of growth of the volumes on the shelf would cause their edge to exceed the speed of light. (He also pointed out that no information would be exchanged, so there was no violation of physics.)
      - MikeTaylor 15y ago
        Interesting idea to use something like a subreddit as a place to communally filter ("post-publication peer-review") published papers. The problem is, you wouldn't want one-man-one-vote. You'd want established professionals in the field to have a greater upvote/downvote weight than J. Random Ligger. You could imagine a sort of pagerankish scheme where people whose own publications have been upvoted get more more voting power as a result.
electrichead 15y ago
There is a problem in that it would encourage people to provide reviews as a service, and you then have a problem of filtering out who would be a good reviewer, which might be interpreted as bias. I agree that something needs to be done though. I've been thinking of the similarities between publications and web pages a la page-rank. There are a lot of parallels, not just in content but also with respect to who has contributed and who has helped to review the paper. I've often wondered why Google Scholar doesn't take advantage of this. I do suppose though that there's no money in it. Who wants to see ads in/around their article? There's a viable non-profit model here maybe.
Homunculiheaded 15y ago
The arXiv and wikipedia are not the only alternatives to paid, publisher controlled journals. There are a growing number of open access journals which have the same quality standards as any publisher controlled journals. Additionally many publishers have gotten into the habit of mass producing really poor quality journals to include in packages that libraries are forced to purchase to get other big name titles. All of the quality of a journal comes from the academics who almost always but the editing, peer review and writing in for free (or technically university time). The only real service publishers ever offered was the ability to create print journals, but that is not longer necessary (or even desirable).
- onemoreact 15y ago
  What you and several other people are missing is Journals don't spam reviewers with random studies. They put some effort into finding an appropriate group of people to review the research which both reduces the reviewer workload and prevents inappropriate people from reviewing things. Also reviewers gain an early look at research appropriate to their field of study, which granted is still mostly junk but far better than random. I don't think this is going to be hard to replicate, but it's still reasonably expensive to do well for a for a large number of articles, so I suspect open access would require at a minimum a few hundred dollars per submitted article worth of work which can’t exactly be add supported.
  - Homunculiheaded 15y ago
    The thing is there are already millions of dollar per university library going into paying for serials. Publishers make a huge profit. So the real issue is finding a model where universities can more effectively redirect that money towards open access. However I'll be the first to admit that getting universities cooperate even if it's in their collective interest is no simple task.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

brador 15y ago

I love how this all came about because of a criminal action. No amount of protesting or discussion was succesful. Would it ever have been succesful? Possibly, but unlikely. However, the second we see some illegal activity (the guy from MIT who downloaded the JSTOR articles from that server), suddenly Pandoras box has opened and we see real change, real disruption and fast. Does this justify his actions? Is the only way to disrupt entranched business to conduct borderline actions? Effectively pushing boundaries to the very limits of legality?. Either way, this is the concept of "tipping point" in action folks.

fragsworth 15y ago
What exactly is the cause/effect relationship between the JSTOR breach and this article? I don't quite see it.
- brador 15y ago
  The JSTOR incident shone a light on the practices of JSTOR and journal publishers in general and highlighted just how restricted access is for the general public to research we have all either fully or partly paid for and we fully expect to be in the public domain. Further, it created a martyr for the movement of open-sourcing articles and to be quite frank about it, the journal owners are now very afraid of their monopolies crumbling to this movement. They knew this day would come, but the speed with which this is gathering pace is terrifying.
  - raphman 15y ago
    I disagree. There is no single incident that caused everyone to love Open Access. Instead, over the last years librarians and activists have been slowly but steadily been making progress in this regard - without breaking the law or contracts.
    - brador 15y ago
      No doubt their slow steady pace laid the foundations, but let's give credit where it's due. That MIT guy broke the dam and now it's a torrent.

kia 15y ago

This is kind of chicken-and-egg problem. Today most established journals with high impact factors (= prestigious) are non-open-access. Publishing in or being a reviewer of a high impact factor non-open-access journal looks much better in a resume of a scientist than publishing in non-prestigious open-access journal. For an open-access journal to become prestigious it needs high quality contributions. But at the same time an author of some important discovery will more likely to publish it in some high prestigious non-open-access journal. Of course for tenured faculty members it is not such a big problem because they have a secured position. But for their apprentices not having high impact publications may become a problem in their future career. And while tenured adviser may force a postdoc to publish in an open-access journal most of them will not likely do this because they understand that this puts members of his/her lab in a bad position compared to competing scientists. I think that well known scientists should make the first move here and to start publishing in open-access journals. Their work has a lot of traction and will not suffer from being published in some not-so-well-known open-access journal. On the other hand this will help open-access journals to start building reputation.

smackay 15y ago
That would certainly work for relatively small or close-knit groups where it is easier to collectively decide to move. I would expect that impact factor has a significant amount of gravity associated with it so even if the leaders in a field decided to move to open-access journals unless the (up and coming) majority also made the same move then the impact-factors of both journals may not change much.
MikeTaylor 15y ago
Don't forget there are plenty of open-access journals with very healthy impact factors (for those who have to be ruled by that exceptionally stupid measure). For example, the top-ranked journal in the Biology category in the 2009 Journal Citation Reports was PLoS Biology, with 12.916.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  This is the exception, rather than the rule. Also, remember that the question isn't "is there a open-access journal with a healthy enough impact factor/prestige?" (as if there was a threshold), it's "will I have take a noticeable hit in impact factor/prestige to publish open access?" It's hard to ask young researchers to do that latter.

shaggyfrog 15y ago

One of the reasons academics do peer review is to put it on their CV/evaluations that universities do to evaluate the amount of academic work they do. Voluntarily declining offers to do peer review would therefore have a negative effect on that person's ability to retain their job. (I'm talking about those without tenure, mainly.) One solution would be for universities taking stands like this is to somehow "give credit" to their academics who are asked to do peer review for non-open-access journals.

MikeTaylor 15y ago
It is certainly true that academic advancement is affected by publication in high-impact venues, and that some of those (incuding the ubiquitous Science and Nature) are not open-access. I can see why someone might feel obliged to submit to these journals. But I have never seen anyone's career affected by which journals they review for. It might happen, but if it does then it's news to me. (BTW., for academics who feel they must publish in one of the tabloids, Science is much sounder than Nature because all their papers become freely accessible one year after publication, which is much better than nothing.)
- shaggyfrog 15y ago
  I used to be an editorial assistant at a small journal. When I asked what motivates researches to volunteer their free time to do peer reviews, that was one of the answers I got. It's a small benefit.
- pbiggar 15y ago
  > But I have never seen anyone's career affected by which journals they review for. It might happen, but if it does then it's news to me. Oh they absolutely are. Academic CVs are full of listings of which program committees you're on. You start being a member of a committee for a smallish conference (in programming language research, something like VEE or PLaS), then try to move up to a few medium size ones (CC, perhaps), and finally you make it to being on the program committees of the top top journals (PLDI or POPL). I decided not to go down the academic career path after doing my PhD, but it was pretty plain even to a PhD student that being on good program committees is part of your career progression.

guelo 15y ago

It seems like it should be governments who fund the publishing and peer review services, they are already funding most of the research. Having private corporations as middle-men just doesn't make sense, even if they are non-profits.

alttag 15y ago

Although I'm in favor of open access journals for a handful of reasons, I think there are a couple of things working against the idea: First, handling fees. As someone starting out in the field, there are a great number of journals that advertise (read:spam), and have handling fees. It feels very much like a scam, or a system were "success" can be bought. Second, as one commenter on the article suggests, with a handling fee, the publisher is incentivized to print more. (There's an undercurrent of complain in my field that there isn't enough quality publication space, so this is two-sided, but is the cost of more outlets a lowering in quality?) However, with a subscription model, the quality must remain high to keep subscribers. (One might also argue that "closed" publishers want to print as much as possible to give more authors' schools reason to subscribe, but I don't know the level of this effect.) Third, on a more personal level, living as a doctoral student—more particularly, with the budget of a doctoral student—even nominal costs can seem overwhelming. I don't see my institution covering "handling fees" in the near future, particularly with the amount of cost-cutting going on. The fees are less onerous for faculty, but present a slightly higher barrier for student entrants.

kolinko 15y ago
you're assuming, that open access journals need a handling fee distribution costs are marginal, it is possible for an open access journal that wouldn't take handling fees. it could be a non-profit organisation, or it could have other monetisation methods.
- alttag 15y ago
  Yes, I'm making that 'assumption' because the article says, "... open-access journals, such as PLoS ONE, which charge authors a handling fee to cover their operating costs ..." EDIT: Link from comment above shows fees for the PLoS family of journals start at $1350 per article and go up rapidly from there. http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php
  - stfu 15y ago
    I absolutely agree. The pay-for-publishing model is heavily disadvantaging towards smaller research institutions, independent researchers or young researchers.

eeeerrrr 15y ago

So why is the idea that science publishing should be free attributed more intellectual weight than the idea that music should be free, or movies, or software? I mean, we get it, everybody loves free stuff.

jbri 15y ago
Because science research is funded by public interests, not private ones.
- urbanjunkie 15y ago
  Not really true anymore. A significant proportion of science research is funded by non-governmental organisations - for example the Gates Foundation. Furthermore, most universities will charge the researchers who receive grants a cost known as 'overhead' that can often be 100% of the grant. Typically, the funding agencies pay for this separately.
  - greeneggs 15y ago
    When it comes to basic science, this is not true at all. Gleaning numbers from Wikipedia, the Gates Foundation seems to spend roughly $300 million a year on research. HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) spends $450 million a year. In contrast, the NIH spend $31 billion a year. Biology and medicine are the fields with the highest proportion of private funding, and even in these fields the government is dominant. Overhead does not seem relevant to this point.
    - urbanjunkie 15y ago
      You need to provide a reference. This page from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science) suggests that over 63% of research is funded by private sources. Overhead is relevant as it shows that even at 'public' universities, the funding agency must pay for the research to be carried out, countering arguments about the public paying for research.

jedbrown 15y ago

A lot of conventional journals have an open access option available to the author for a fee (usually for about $3000). What about offering a no-cost upgrade after reviewing some number of papers for the journal?

jessriedel 15y ago
Journal generally won't do this so long as researchers continue to do it for free. In addition, even if researcher's followed the OP's advice and the journals adopted this strategy, it get us where (most people think) we should be: all research article available free to everyone.

Uchikoma 15y ago

I let you in on a secret: In many research institutions the people that "do" peer-review don't do the review, they delegate the reviews to their underlings who are not in a position to refuse.

kragen 15y ago
I've even been delegated a review by a researcher at a different research institution. (He didn't feel like he knew enough to properly review the paper.) But it seems like the guy the journal editor is talking to is still in a position to boycott, even if he's going to delegate the actual reviewing.
- Uchikoma 15y ago
  The guy the journal editor talks to has sometimes a different agenda. As he does not have interest in reviewing the papers, he isn't interested in the topics. He's often interested in advancing his career and building his network, and a move to do that is "review" papers for journals. Otherwise he would review the papers on his own. Boycotting would run counter to his own goals (while the guy who got the task of actually reviewing the paper has interest in the topic and would like to boycott journals but is not in the position to do so).
  - kragen 15y ago
    The guy the journal editor talks to still has limited minion resources at his disposal, and he still has the option of caring about the future of academic publishing even if he isn't interested in the topics of the papers.

FranklinVallen 15y ago

This is a lovely idea but I'm afraid it's a pipe dream. Boycotts don't change profitable practices. (And there is little enough profit in academic publishing to begin with!) The author's heart is in the right place but his head is in the clouds. Too bad.

jkic47 15y ago

Since most reviewers are probably from Universities or Companies, it is likely that their employment contract prohibits them from doing professional work not associated with their current job. It should be fairly simple for these Universities and Companies to start enforcing this and take away the supply of qualified reviewers from Journals that lock up knowledge.

kragen 15y ago
No. Researchers at universities invariably do academic work for conferences, for journals, and for other universities — giving talks, for example. Often they get paid directly for these. This is a fundamental part of how academia works, and has been (in various forms) for centuries. I worked in Silicon Valley as a sysadmin and programmer in 1996-97 and 2000-2006, at a total of seven different companies. I've also worked professionally at a professional services company, a defense contractor, and freelance for various clients (primarily in the US). I don't think I've ever seen an employment contract that purported to prohibit me from "doing professional work not associated with [my] current job". In some cases I have proposed modifications to confidentiality agreements with the explicit purpose of ensuring that I could moonlight safely (for previous clients, normally). The modifications were accepted.
- jkic47 15y ago
  Having an academic and industrial background myself, I understand that researchers currently do academic work for conferences, journals and so on The point I was making was that employers could enforce the parts of the contract that allow them to control whom their employees work for. That would, at the very least, not be contributing brainpower to an industry that charges the very same companies / universities enormous sums for access to journals. While you may not have seen such restrictions in sysadmin/programmer type positions, they certainly exist in several scientific and medical-related disciplines (though I agree that can be waived in certain circumstances).

regehr 15y ago

I'm a CS professor and for the last several years have refused almost every review request from a non-ACM/IEEE journal. I'm also an associate editor of an ACM journal and often have a very hard time getting people to review submissions. My sense is that a lot of my peers have simply stopped doing (most) journal reviews at all. A person can be totally overloaded just doing conference reviews, which are a lot more fun anyway. The papers are shorter and (at a good conference) the papers are a lot better than journal submissions.