6 ms·

Academic journals face a radical shake-up

100 points by CaptainZapp 14y ago

i_mulvany 14y ago
Hi, I'm head of technology for eLife, the journal mentioned in economist article. We have a remit from Wellcome, and the other funders, to build products that go beyond academic journals. I'll be putting together a small team over the next few months, based in Cambridge UK, to work on ideas. It will most be a factory for prototyping ideas about harnessing attention to researchers work. If you might be interested drop me a line @ianmulvany on twitter, or i.mulvany@elifesciences.org.
jasonhoyt 14y ago
Like Ian and eLife, I am putting together a tech team for PeerJ [1], a new Open Access publisher with venture backing from Tim O'Reilly [2,3]. If you are in London and want to work on a problem that truly affects all of us then give me shout at jason@peerj.com. Looking for both dev ops backend and front-end/ux. 1. http://peerj.com/careers/ http://peerj.com/careers/ 2. http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/12/peerj-raises-950k-from-tim-oreillys-ventures-to-make-biomedical-research-accessible-to-all/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/12/peerj-raises-950k-from-tim-... 3. http://www.nature.com/news/journal-offers-flat-fee-for-all-you-can-publish-1.10811 http://www.nature.com/news/journal-offers-flat-fee-for-all-y...
spanktheuser 14y ago
With all respect to PeerJ and eLife, I'm hoping that we can do a bit better than replacing monolithic, closed-access publishers with monolithic open-access publishers. Personally, I'm hoping that something akin to the Wordpress model takes off - supply powerful journal publishing tools free/cheap and let a thousand journals bloom. Scholastica [1] is the only one taking this approach that I'm aware of (disclosure: friends). It started about a year ago by several University of Chicago students and seems to be getting some nice traction, starting with law journals. [1] https://scholasticahq.com/ https://scholasticahq.com/
- Doches 14y ago
  I disagree -- an explosion of micro- and self-publishing would make it exponentially harder to stay abreast of new work. I can stay more-or-less up to speed on my field by attending two or three conferences and reading two journals (OK, so it's kind of a small field). If everyone who previously published in those four locations suddenly decided to self-publish I'd have to follow a couple hundred blogs/microjournals. Keeping up with all of those resources would be a non-trivial amount of work, not to mention the drastic drop in peer review quality that would likely result.
  - smackay 14y ago
    Step forward the new Publishers re-purposed as curated search engines. There is a real possibility that all you would end up with is an on-line version of the current crop of dead-tree publishers. In addition to simply democratising publishing there needs to be some thought applied to the subject of the publisher as an institution. Learned societies and universities fit this approach so tools that made publishing easier for these group to manage would be a step forward. However any concentration of power or influence results in some of the current set of problems quickly resurfacing. Perhaps it is simply a facet of any enterprise where humans are involved and a revolution every so often is needed to shake things up a little.
  - wisty 14y ago
    Then you could follow those blogs, pick out the best articles, and link to the good ones. You could even offer constructive critisism (i.e. "I'll link to you if you expand a bit on how you did step 3"). Kind of like a journal.
    - Doches 14y ago
      I could indeed. Only under the current system there's someone else, probably more qualified than me, already doing it for me. That's part of what's so great about peer review -- other people do it for you almost all of the time.
      - 14y ago
yummyfajitas 14y ago
The article makes a bit of an error. Publishers do provide a service. They organise peer review, in which papers are criticised anonymously by experts (though those experts, like the authors of papers, are rarely paid for what they do). It's actually the minimally paid editors who do this. All the journal does is provide a crappy web app to organize the process.
- mrstew 14y ago
  I'm not a publisher but have worked at publishers in the past. > All the journal does is provide a crappy web app > to organize the process. I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog). Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable. But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No. (Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    I'm only familiar with math publishing, but I've never heard of a math journal that did anything other than provide a web form for the editor to request a review (and similarly, for the reviewer to submit with). Typesetting is usually done (correctly) by latex, and then possibly screwed up by some human the publisher outsourced to. Automated typesetting is a solved problem, and there is no need for humans. As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year (though admittedly, Donald Knuth does the typesetting). As for your "darknet", are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles to 3-4 amazon regions plus rackspace files? I'm sure the darknet costs at least 10x as much, but that isn't the issue. Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market is again not the issue. If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article. The only reason the publishers haven't already died is because tenure committees want to see Journal of Computational Physics rather than the Upstart Computational Physics Journal.
jessriedel 14y ago
> Here, manuscripts are subject to a ruthless process of open peer review, rather than the secret sort traditional publishers employ. I don't know what this means. If the arXiv has some sort of open but centralized peer review, I haven't seen it. Maybe the economist just means that, once posted on the arXiv, a paper can be reviewed by anyone who wants and they can post on their blog. But this would be true of self-published papers, and no one would call that meaningful peer review. > An arXived paper may end up in a traditional journal, but that is merely to provide an imprimatur for the research team who wrote it. Its actual publication, and its value to other scientists, dates from its original arrival online. This isn't quite true. Depending on how lazy the journal referees are feeling, they can provide valuable feedback. Papers can change substantially during the review process (although this doesn't happen more often than it does). Typically, physicists update the arXiv version to reflect these changes.
Doches 14y ago
More open-access publication could enable some really fascinating meta research. There's a really active set of researchers in computational linguistics who study the structure and language of scientific papers, but we tend to focus on AI and similar domains -- partly because those are the most familiar to us, but presumably also due to ease of access (bless the ACM archive...). Meta-research on different dialects of science could be insanely interesting. ...hmm...

100 points by CaptainZapp 14y ago

Hi, I'm head of technology for eLife, the journal mentioned in economist article. We have a remit from Wellcome, and the other funders, to build products that go beyond academic journals. I'll be putting together a small team over the next few months, based in Cambridge UK, to work on ideas. It will most be a factory for prototyping ideas about harnessing attention to researchers work. If you might be interested drop me a line @ianmulvany on twitter, or i.mulvany@elifesciences.org.

jasonhoyt 14y ago

Like Ian and eLife, I am putting together a tech team for PeerJ [1], a new Open Access publisher with venture backing from Tim O'Reilly [2,3]. If you are in London and want to work on a problem that truly affects all of us then give me shout at jason@peerj.com. Looking for both dev ops backend and front-end/ux. 1. http://peerj.com/careers/ http://peerj.com/careers/ 2. http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/12/peerj-raises-950k-from-tim-oreillys-ventures-to-make-biomedical-research-accessible-to-all/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/12/peerj-raises-950k-from-tim-... 3. http://www.nature.com/news/journal-offers-flat-fee-for-all-you-can-publish-1.10811 http://www.nature.com/news/journal-offers-flat-fee-for-all-y...

spanktheuser 14y ago

With all respect to PeerJ and eLife, I'm hoping that we can do a bit better than replacing monolithic, closed-access publishers with monolithic open-access publishers. Personally, I'm hoping that something akin to the Wordpress model takes off - supply powerful journal publishing tools free/cheap and let a thousand journals bloom. Scholastica [1] is the only one taking this approach that I'm aware of (disclosure: friends). It started about a year ago by several University of Chicago students and seems to be getting some nice traction, starting with law journals. [1] https://scholasticahq.com/ https://scholasticahq.com/

Doches 14y ago
I disagree -- an explosion of micro- and self-publishing would make it exponentially harder to stay abreast of new work. I can stay more-or-less up to speed on my field by attending two or three conferences and reading two journals (OK, so it's kind of a small field). If everyone who previously published in those four locations suddenly decided to self-publish I'd have to follow a couple hundred blogs/microjournals. Keeping up with all of those resources would be a non-trivial amount of work, not to mention the drastic drop in peer review quality that would likely result.
- smackay 14y ago
  Step forward the new Publishers re-purposed as curated search engines. There is a real possibility that all you would end up with is an on-line version of the current crop of dead-tree publishers. In addition to simply democratising publishing there needs to be some thought applied to the subject of the publisher as an institution. Learned societies and universities fit this approach so tools that made publishing easier for these group to manage would be a step forward. However any concentration of power or influence results in some of the current set of problems quickly resurfacing. Perhaps it is simply a facet of any enterprise where humans are involved and a revolution every so often is needed to shake things up a little.
- wisty 14y ago
  Then you could follow those blogs, pick out the best articles, and link to the good ones. You could even offer constructive critisism (i.e. "I'll link to you if you expand a bit on how you did step 3"). Kind of like a journal.
  - Doches 14y ago
    I could indeed. Only under the current system there's someone else, probably more qualified than me, already doing it for me. That's part of what's so great about peer review -- other people do it for you almost all of the time.
    - 14y ago

yummyfajitas 14y ago

The article makes a bit of an error. Publishers do provide a service. They organise peer review, in which papers are criticised anonymously by experts (though those experts, like the authors of papers, are rarely paid for what they do). It's actually the minimally paid editors who do this. All the journal does is provide a crappy web app to organize the process.

mrstew 14y ago
I'm not a publisher but have worked at publishers in the past. > All the journal does is provide a crappy web app > to organize the process. I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog). Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable. But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No. (Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  I'm only familiar with math publishing, but I've never heard of a math journal that did anything other than provide a web form for the editor to request a review (and similarly, for the reviewer to submit with). Typesetting is usually done (correctly) by latex, and then possibly screwed up by some human the publisher outsourced to. Automated typesetting is a solved problem, and there is no need for humans. As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year (though admittedly, Donald Knuth does the typesetting). As for your "darknet", are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles to 3-4 amazon regions plus rackspace files? I'm sure the darknet costs at least 10x as much, but that isn't the issue. Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market is again not the issue. If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article. The only reason the publishers haven't already died is because tenure committees want to see Journal of Computational Physics rather than the Upstart Computational Physics Journal.

jessriedel 14y ago

> Here, manuscripts are subject to a ruthless process of open peer review, rather than the secret sort traditional publishers employ. I don't know what this means. If the arXiv has some sort of open but centralized peer review, I haven't seen it. Maybe the economist just means that, once posted on the arXiv, a paper can be reviewed by anyone who wants and they can post on their blog. But this would be true of self-published papers, and no one would call that meaningful peer review. > An arXived paper may end up in a traditional journal, but that is merely to provide an imprimatur for the research team who wrote it. Its actual publication, and its value to other scientists, dates from its original arrival online. This isn't quite true. Depending on how lazy the journal referees are feeling, they can provide valuable feedback. Papers can change substantially during the review process (although this doesn't happen more often than it does). Typically, physicists update the arXiv version to reflect these changes.

Doches 14y ago

More open-access publication could enable some really fascinating meta research. There's a really active set of researchers in computational linguistics who study the structure and language of scientific papers, but we tend to focus on AI and similar domains -- partly because those are the most familiar to us, but presumably also due to ease of access (bless the ACM archive...). Meta-research on different dialects of science could be insanely interesting. ...hmm...