
Open access: The true cost of science publishing - georgecmu
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676
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merraksh
_As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the
speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers — and research
funders — want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story —
publishing 26,000 papers last year — it didn 't catalyse the industry to
change in the way that he had hoped. “I didn't expect publishers to give up
their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science
community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do
publishing,” he says._

Among the reasons that a scientist may have against embracing open access
publishing is perhaps being Editor in Chief or Associate Editor of a
prestigious journal. That is just a line in a scholar's CV, but sometimes it
counts. I would happily do without that line, but I'm sure many, young and
old, would not.

Building prestige in an open-access publication is slow, and the transition
might be slow by design.

~~~
trauco
Building prestige for any new publication, open-access or not, would be slow
now, given the number of incumbents.

~~~
merraksh
Agreed. Yet my field (Operations Research) has seen four or five new journals
born in the past 10 years, all of relatively high level. Most often they were
born as an initiative of one or more scholars in the field, who convinced a
publisher that the journal would receive submissions.

So there is room for new challengers. However, now these scholars treat this
journal as their precious pet project, would like everyone to submit articles
to it and are (understandably) unwilling to embark in another, open-access
initiative.

[edit: clarity]

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creamyhorror
The main obstacle to dethroning commercial journals, as I see it, is the
reputation they've built up over the decades. They're simply prestigious _by
default_ because of lock-in.

There are now ways of running an online reputational community, e.g.
StackExchange, but they rely on a willingness to do things a different way.
The more conservative members of the academic community aren't likely to shift
their approaches, especially when they don't already participate in forums or
academic blogging. They don't directly feel the pain of expensive
subscriptions, either. So the academic publishers - the old order - can
continue to rely on their deeply entrenched position as the arbiters of
research quality - even though this quality is created by the _unpaid
academics_ who sit on the editorial committees.

(In fact, the publishers even sell this as a value that their journals provide
- _reputation_ \- when it isn't an intrinsic value, but one that accrued to
them while there was no feasible alternative. That value has now lost its
underlying basis, but it persists because of inertia, and they're merely
_extracting rent_ from their ownership of the journals' brands, now.)

The solution, to my mind, has to be multifold:

1) Spread the dangerous idea that science should be accessible to all and free
from paywalls, such that in all polite circles it should be a matter of course
to believe so;

2) Build a very simple-to-use, cross-journal meta-database and community -
preferably open-source - that collects papers from all open journals and
aggregates upvotes, citations and prestige/rankings, and help it gain wide,
career-influencing acceptance like Github enjoys now (maybe the arXiv could be
evolved and adapted to fill this role?);

3) Get buy-in from senior decisionmakers and thought leaders in various
academic fields by offering them a chance to shape the system.

This won't happen without the joint efforts of leading academics (like Sir
Timothy Gowers), skilled technologists, UX designers, and government funders.
Most of us on HN know how we could build a technical solution that fills these
needs - we might even volunteer our time toward it - but we need marketers and
advocates who can sell this system to the people who matter (who currently
don't see the need to upset the current system). The reputational advantage
enjoyed by commercial publishers won't be overcome simply with engineering.

(If anyone knows of open-source projects to this end, or about the arXiv's
plans, please share them.)

~~~
scientist
Such a cross-journal database that allows scientists to share ratings and
reviews is Epistemio ([http://www.epistemio.com/](http://www.epistemio.com/)).

~~~
niels_olson
probably more subversive to drop arXiv''s existing content into an instance of
GitHub and conform the user interface to the existing arXiv U/I. Or, actually,
just keep the colors and stick with Github's UI.

~~~
yeukhon
Github UI? Before forcing everything to look like github, please, please,
remember the term "user experience research". Github UI has major issues and
they keep improving. If every open website has a github UI, that's gon to be
like seeing every website running default bootstrap interface. No.

------
return0
Why does science have to be published in articles in the first place? Isn't it
more fruitful to have a peer-reviewed, citable, machine-readable database of
scientific findings? We are no longer in the 1700s and there is too much
redundant information in published papers anyway.

~~~
bnegreve
Science is still a very creative (i.e. non systematic) process. To create new
"scientific findings" you need new insights. These insights typically come
from publications/conferences/discussions with other researchers rather than
big machine readable datasets.

~~~
return0
Most research articles I read can be boiled down to a paragraph of substance,
with the rest of the space filled with introductions and things we already
know. Agree about conferences etc. but I don't see how articles create
discussion, since most journals do not even have comment sections, and even
those that do, rarely have any comments. Articles are an arcane notion used to
gauge researcher's output, until something new and more efficient comes along.

Ps.
[http://www.cell.com/neuron/retrieve/pii/S089662731300648X](http://www.cell.com/neuron/retrieve/pii/S089662731300648X)

~~~
mjn
Depends a bit on the area. You can machine-code results _if_ the field is
extremely static in its conceptual and epistemic framework, so it's just a
matter of slotting new things in place. Some "industrial-style" science does
work like that. But large areas don't.

Most of the articles I read have the majority of the actual research going on
in the text, not in whatever the "results" might nominally be. For example, a
programming language paper might prove a few theorems about type-soundness,
but it's rare that a new type-soundness theorem is really want you want out of
the paper; that's just supporting apparatus. What's more interesting is the
design discussion, motivation for why this feature was introduced and how it
relates to previous features, explanation of how it was implemented,
discussion of variants and future work, etc.

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kylebgorman
Nature should declare its conflict of interest...it requires article authors
to do so.

~~~
cowsandmilk
some conflicts of interest are viewed as obvious. If I publish a journal
article with my affiliation being Genentech, I don't have to state that my
work is owned by Genentech. If I am employed at UCSF and list my affiliation
there, but hold significant equity in a spin-off that is commercializing the
published technology, then that's when I declare a conflict.

Everyone knows Nature is not an open access journal. Putting a sentence that
states that at the end of a news article written by their staff is pointless.

~~~
kylebgorman
> some conflicts of interest are viewed as obvious. If I publish a journal
> article with my affiliation being Genentech, I don't have to state that my
> work is owned by Genentech.

That's simply NOT true...Nature's guidelines on declaring financial interests
([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6849/full/412751a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6849/full/412751a0.html))
say that these include "Employment", defined as "Recent (that is, while
engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any
organization that may gain or lose financially through publication of the
paper."

Nature is covering this for one reason only: they stand to gain.

~~~
judk
Did you read the article? It isn't anti-open-access at all.

