

Entire field of particle physics is to switch to open-access publishing - ananyob
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-deal-for-particle-physics-1.11468

======
Steuard
The SCOAP^3 consortium's news announcement about this can be found at
<http://scoap3.org/news/news95.html>

Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with
essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have
already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them
more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see,
ten years from now, whether this model continues to be viable or whether the
field will have adopted some entirely different mechanism for peer review.

It appears that the articles will be published under CC-BY licenses. The
definition of the affected articles is quite broad, too: "SCOAP^3 Articles are
defined as either all articles appearing in journals mostly carrying High-
Energy Physics content, or articles appearing in “broad band” journals which
have been submitted by researchers to arXiv.org under the corresponding
categories."

The close integration with arXiv.org is pretty much essential for this to
work, but I was still a bit surprised to see that arXiv categories are used as
_the_ defining feature of "particle physics content". (For those in the know,
those categories are hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, and hep-lat.)

~~~
Loic
If the openness is increasing the number of citations of the articles in open
journals it will affect the impact factors of the other journals and may force
them to switch to open access later. I am really interested in the results as
I have strictly now ideas in which way it will go. Are the non open high
impact journals going to stay at the top?

------
pav3l
Why, in this day and age, is there still _publicly funded_ research that is
_not_ open access? Also I could rant for hours on the need to make your data
available for any peer reviewed publication.

~~~
apawloski
Because academic journals are products of inelastic demand. Researchers _need_
to publish to keep their jobs[1]. Thus there is absolutely no incentive for
the channels through which this publishing occurs to offer free access.

[1]By the way, being able to publish is especially necessary to receive public
funding in the first place.

~~~
blots
> By the way, being able to publish is especially necessary to receive public
> funding in the first place.

Being published in Nature gives you bonus points when it comes to funding.
Which I don't quite understand, cause Nature is like the last journal where
I'd look for newest information on my subject.

~~~
pav3l
Publication in Nature is not so much for newest information on your specific
and somewhat narrow subject, but for more or less breakthroughs of various
degrees.

From guidelines[1]:

\- report original scientific research (the main results and conclusions must
not have been published or submitted elsewhere)

\- are of outstanding scientific importance

\- reach a conclusion of interest to an interdisciplinary readership.

[1]<http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/get_published/#a1>

------
SeanDav
It seems to be a really good step towards breaking away from the current
journal publishing monopoly which makes access to cutting edge research so
expensive. I hope other branches of science adopt this as well.

~~~
pwaring
Not just science, it would be good to see open-access across all fields.

------
nkurz
_Physical Review D, the journal that publishes most papers in the field,
negotiated a fee of US$1,900 per article “on the principle that we should
maintain our revenue”, says Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the
American Physical Society, which owns the journal._

The "principle that we should maintain our revenue"? I like that principle.
Which box do I check to have that apply to me as well?

I don't understand why SCOAP3 isn't driving a harder bargain. They are
anticipating a $10MM budget --- wouldn't this be enough to hire some good
editors and publish online?

If the whole field is behind this, worries about "impact factor" should
disappear. Or is the problem that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to an
outside assessment of "impact"?

~~~
rflrob
I think the problem is that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to hazy,
individual, non-standard assessments of impact, of which the calculated
"Impact Factor" of journals that people publish in is one factor. My boss (and
Public Library of Science founder) has a blog post related to this,
<http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=911> . Essentially, hiring/tenure
committees don't explicitly sit down and plug in the impact factors of
journals that a candidate has published in, but most people have a hierarchy
of journals in their mind, with Science, Nature, and Cell (for biologists) at
the top.

~~~
001sky
_Essentially, hiring/tenure committees ... have a hierarchy of journals in
their mind_

\-- Penn State has a "middle of the road" law school

------
pbsurf
Almost all physics papers (not just particle physics papers) are posted on
arXiv. Papers on arXiv are usually updated to the final published version,
although the peer review process rarely produces significant changes.

It is unfortunate that university libraries will be continuing to send money
to publishers who add almost no value to the scientific process.

------
creat0
It's great to see Nature, itself a high-priced journal, running this story.

arXiv.org really makes downloading papers a breeze. If only it were so easy in
other discliplines. It's a lot easier than downloading articles from, say,
ScienceDirect. The latter is, despite its name, a lot less "direct" than
former. Just count the HTTP redirects and the number of domain names looked
up. And many journals seem to have their own idiosyncracies vis-a-vis
downloading. arXiv is by comparison beautifully simple and reliable. It has a
nice consistency about it.

------
tingletech
"Upfront payments from libraries will fund the access." Great, so the Library
still has to pay for it...

~~~
brazzy
Well, _someone_ has to. The alternative is having the authors pay, and that
creates the wrong kind of incentives.

~~~
jseliger
I wrote about this recently [1], and here's my best shot:

 _Contrary to what some readers have said in e-mails to me, or inferred from
what I’ve written, I’m actually not at all opposed to peer review or peer-
reviewed publications. But the important thing these days isn’t a medium for
publishing—pretty much anyone with an Internet connection can get that for
free—but the imprimatur of peer-review, which says, “This guy [or gal] knows
what he’s talking about.” A more intellectually honest way to go about peer-
review would be to have every academic have a blog / website. When he or she
has an article ready to go, he should post it, send a link to an editor, and
ask the editor to kick it out to a peer-reviewer. Their comments, whether
anonymous or not, should be appended to the article. If it’s accepted, it gets
a link and perhaps the full-text copied and put in the “journal’s” main page.
If it doesn’t, readers can judge its merits or lack thereof for themselves.

The sciences arguably already have this, because important papers appear on
arXiv.org before they’re officially “published.” But papers in the sciences
appear to be less status-based and more content-based than papers in the
humanities.

I think this change will happen in the humanities, very slowly, over time; it
won’t be fast because there’s no reason for it to be fast, and the
profession’s gatekeepers are entrenched and have zero incentive to change. If
anything, they have a strong incentive to maintain the system, because doing
that raises their own status and increases their own power within the
profession._

Given how cheaply one can find or buy a website / blog these days, I'm not
sure where all this money is going.

[1][https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-
of-w...](https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-
doing-and-the-meaning-of-real-work-reading-for-phd-comprehensive-exams/)

~~~
krichman
Researchers and scientists could have asymmetric keys and peer review in that
fashion. The authors could append cryptographic signatures to the article.
Then we don't need centralized journals, just a list of academics whose
scientific rigor is trusted.

~~~
spin
I have often thought about doing something similar to this. Basically, you
publish a signed version of your paper on your own website, and then other
scientists can sign it with notes. It would be kind of like a "Facebook like"
system. (By "sign", I mean a cryptographic signature.)

"82 PhD scientists have reviewed this paper, including 3 people in your close
network and 2 more people from your extended network." ...or something like
that.

You could do a network-graph search. Start with some professors that you
trust, and some keywords that you're interested in and start walking the graph
from there.

I don't know what the profit motive would be for someone to build this though.
Nor the motive for individual reviewers to carefully review someone's paper
and provide detailed useful feedback...

------
smoyer
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of
printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way
to properly do peer review in an open system?

I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction,
but could it be even more open?

~~~
anonymouz
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not
be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so
far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send
out submissions for peer review as usual.

Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus
and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees,
existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.

~~~
naa42
We already have model for future journals:
<http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/> SIGMA is just an overlay over arXiv with
added peer review. Also it has non-zero impact factor.

------
Tipzntrix
The hacker way extends beyond computing.

~~~
sampo
It's actually Computer Science that has most scattered and disorganized
publishing culture, and could use a lot more collective hacker attitude to
somehow fix things.

------
frozenport
We used to joke that if you were in the Tevatron (Fermi lab) parking lot you
were a co-author!

------
rbanffy
They should drop the "Consortium" from the name. It's cleaner.

