
The Dangerous "Research Works Act" - RichardPrice
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/15/the-dangerous-research-works-act/
======
rflrob
> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research
> institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay
> alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing
to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple
years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing
Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective)
boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].

[1] [http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-
Just/6582...](http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/)

~~~
SeanLuke
How was it effective?

~~~
etal
Apparently it brought NPG back to the negotiating table:

[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/08/nature_and_california_m...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/08/nature_and_california_make_nic_1.html)

Unclear on the details, but presumably UC got a somewhat better price. (Note
that UC was getting a better price than most libraries to begin with.)

~~~
SeanLuke
I've seen no article indicating anything actually came out of this. Ongoing?
Fizzled out? CA backed off?

------
imaginaryunit
Though the gov't might want research to be distributed, the underlying problem
here has more to do with the scientists themselves than anything else. We've
had ArXiV around for a long time and _yet_ I ask who's adopted it other than
mathematicians and (many, but not all) physicists? Why hasn't it been adopted
by NIH-funded life scientists?

The fact that years ago, life scientists easily could have adopted an ArXiV-
like model for publishing, and _chose_ not to, is quite telling. It suggests a
far deeper problem with incentives in (general) academic culture to publish
and that article availability is not going to affect that at all. As someone
who spent >6 years Ph.D./PostDoc (bioinformatics, stats and CS), I can say
that the vast majority of researchers have no genuine incentive to take
action. Protesting against Elsevier online in the comfort of your office is
one thing, but having to publish X>10 papers/yr to get tenure/brownie points
within your department is another.

~~~
RichardPrice
You're absolutely right that academics are torn between two things that they
want:

1\. open access for their research (both for altruistic reasons, because they
want to spread knowledge as widely as possible, and for selfish reasons,
because greater access to their research means more citations of their
research, which helps them with career advancement)

2\. publishing in the most prestigious journals they can, because that helps
with career advancement.

The NIH, which funds all research into biology and medicine in the US, just
cares about 1. above. They just care about maximizing distribution for
taxpayer-funded research, as long as the distribution is done so in an
economically sustainable way.

The NIH drove the open access mandate in 2008. My sense is that in the short
term, driven mainly by the demands of funding agencies, all journals will move
to 'open access models', where publishers pay to publish their research in the
journals, and for readers, it's free to access. This satisfies both 1. and 2.
above: academics get both open access and the validation of being published in
prestigious journals.

Longer term, I think alternative credit metrics will replace the credit metric
that's governed research for hundreds of years, i.e. the brand value of the
journal you were published in.

I think when that happens, the power of journals will disappear altogether.
Right now, the journals' role in driving the discovery of research has been
disrupted a lot. In the pre-web days, people used to walk down to their
libraries, and check out what had been published in the journals recently. In
those days, the journals used to drive a lot of research discovery.

Nowadays, pretty much all research discovery happens online, and it's driven
by things like search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed), and social
platforms (Twitter, arXiv, Academia.edu; general communication technologies
like email and IM are also used a lot).

The journals still have a strangle-hold on the validation of research. Which
journal you were published in is still incredibly important, as far as the
validation of your paper is concerned.

Other credit metrics are emerging, however. Citation counts are one metric,
and that has a big role in driving research discovery on search engines like
Google Scholar. Hiring committees are starting to look at the kinds of credit
metrics that apply to general web content, e.g. page views.

As alternative credit metrics emerge, there will come a point when they do a
good enough job at the validation of research that academics feel they no
longer need to submit their papers to journals.

I wrote up some further thoughts on this here
<http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/the-future-of-peer-review/>

~~~
etal
If pre-publication peer review goes out of fashion, then another possibility
if that the brand of major journals becomes _more_ important. We still need a
quick gauge of the quality of an article, other than its Google rank or number
of page views. Nature can retract popular articles that are later proven
flawed; I don't think Google would attempt to wield that kind of authority.

Relevant example: You published these two posts in TechCrunch to get a wide
audience. (And I'm glad you did!) I read them partly because they appeared in
TechCrunch.

------
OllieJones
What about the page charge? Some of these journals charge the author (or her
institution) by the page for papers they accept. They get ya coming and going.
Nice racket. Check it out.

[http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...](http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tps-
page-charges)

~~~
RichardPrice
Yes, that's right. Some journals charge on both ends: they charge academics to
submit papers, and they charge academics to read papers.

------
DannoHung
Does anyone have a good form letter for telling your representative that
you're prepared to start walking around the voting district stopping people on
the street and explaining that Carolyn Maloney is trying to restrict access to
publicly funded research?

Carolyn Maloney is my Congresswoman and I don't give a shit that the
alternative is a conservative, this is ridiculous.

~~~
duncanj
An important first step is to call her office and tell them how this
personally affects you as her constituent. Then, organize professors from the
universities in the district to call her and tell her how this personally
affects them.

If you want to organize people on the street, I would recommend asking people
on the street whether they support their tax dollars going to pay overpriced
publishers whose tax base is in Europe when the articles could be published at
low cost, on the web, in the US, while universities get to save more of their
money for education.

------
pg_bot
"The way the research process works is like this:

1.) An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant. 2.)
The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal. 3.) The
journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and
secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.

The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at
step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the
journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the
world."

Why don't the researchers just format the papers themselves and publish their
work independently online? It seems like a trivial amount of work compared to
the actual research that they are doing. I understand that many people believe
that they shouldn't have to do this, but after reading the article I see
nothing stopping them from distributing their work to the public.

~~~
mbreese
They forgot that part of #3 is peer review, which is managed by the journal,
but actually performed by academics for free. Oh, and the researcher usually
has to pay a fee to get the paper published once the journal accepts their
paper. So, most of the hard work in #3 is free, and the academic still has to
pay the journal (usually from a government grant).

~~~
pg_bot
Obviously for your work to be validated it must go through the process of peer
review. However, I am suggesting that even after they become published in a
scientific journal that the researchers should go about publishing their
articles online themselves or through a third party site. I just don't see how
the data can be easily locked away behind a pay wall if researchers can do
whatever they please with their work. If they want to make their work
available to the public there are many ways to do so.

~~~
ufo
When publishing at one of the paid journals the researchers must give away
their copyright to the journal too. This means they cannot republish the paper
on a different place (sometimes there is an exception for the personal website
though).

You might not believe this at first but _yes, its really that stupid_.

------
impendia
This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to
describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)

~~~
RichardPrice
good point - that part of the post was written yesterday, and since then the
boycott numbers have gone over 6,000!

------
amurmann
"In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research
institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait
12 months to get the research for free."

So? That would be a sign that the value the journal adds by selecting what
get's published is apparently not worth the price they are charging. In fact,
why wait 12 months? If that leads to journals going out of business, there
work wasn't worth the money. Of course there will be a need to organzie
journal access, but I am sure that will be figured out super fast and the
result will be cheaper and better, than what the Journals are doing right now.
After all it's a problem we are solving on the Internet all the time.

------
zupreme
I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund
consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds
even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US
government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could
bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In
this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more
important is going on.

~~~
RichardPrice
It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They
want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically
relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that
dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they
could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their
open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are
trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they
haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the
publishers.

~~~
zupreme
I understand where you are coming from and I see your point. However, I'm not
saying it would be "easy" just "relatively easy", as compared to the work and
cost involved in legislation, investigation, and enforcement of the act which
has been proposed.

Setting up a new system would not be without hurdles, of course, however if
the initiative is properly funded and is pushed from the cabinet-level (i.e.
US DOE) down and the use of the new system is tied to federal funding for
universities, then it will gain traction and prestige.

It might take a generation for the old guard to fall away but eventually we'd
have a better, more transparent, fairer system.

