

Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already? - mbrubeck
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/01/04/why-hasnt-scientific-publishing-been-disrupted-already/

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dagw
For the vast majority of the primary target audience of scientific
publications they are effectively free. It's a cost their employer eats and
they never see. So there is no big reason for them to fight it. What would a
researcher gain by going out of his way to disrupt the current model. He can
easily access all the papers he needs and just about everyone in his target
audience can read his published papers for free as well.

I'm not supporting the system or saying that I wouldn't love to see it
changed, but I really cannot see much reason for pressure to change it.

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Mongoose
Daniel Lemire of UQAM has a number of good blog posts on new forms of
scientific publishing:

[http://www.daniel-
lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simp...](http://www.daniel-
lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simplified-open-publishing-manifesto/)

[http://www.daniel-
lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author...](http://www.daniel-
lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author-centric/)

[http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-
se...](http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-secret-
behind-radical-innovation/)

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pbh
A more direct way of saying it is that academics at research universities are
mostly motivated to publish frequently in reputable places by grants and
tenure, and nothing has forced either the way grants or tenure are given out
to change from what they were pre-Internet.

(That said, innovations that allow people to write more papers or get cited
more have been taken up very rapidly.)

~~~
nagrom
Absolutely!!! What's more, in the past 15 years or so, it has become more and
more essential for a research scientist to have an excellent publication
record in order to have any chance of a permanent job.

This has had the pernicious effect of increasing politics and popularity costs
in, at least, the physical sciences. I know several research scientists with
several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not
even read.

If you can solve the problem of requiring scientists to amass a large
publication set by any possible means then you'll definitely change scientific
publishing. No-one really wants their papers to go unread due to an access
fee. That's why www.arXiv.org was invented. However, the only solution I can
think of is to separate science into management and technical (this already
happens to a certain extent in High Energy Physics) and allow the heads of
group more freedom in choosing who to hire, and how.

This requires a bit more trust in the scientists and reduces jobs in the
administration, so I fear that it will never happen, alas! Furthermore, you'd
need to make both streams formally equal in order to remove the suspicion that
scientists become managers because they don't have sufficient technical
skills.

Both these hurdles can only be cleared with social solutions though; technical
solutions can only go so far.

~~~
chris11
"I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their
names which these 'authors' have not even read."

Now I am not completely familiar with academia, so I was wondering if you
could provide some context. Is is blatant plagiarism of other scientist's
work? And if so, is this something that most scientists can reasonably expect
to get away with if they tried. Or is it something where the scientist has
some link to the work, such as heading a lab or working with the main author,
but just has not done much work on the paper?

~~~
nagrom
The way it works is that one is a member of a collaboration. That
collaboration publishes a paper, with 200 people on the author's list -
technically, all the member of the collab. have been working at the experiment
at some point. Of course, if an academic is a member of three or four of these
collaborations, and each collab. publishes 10-20 papers a year, there's no way
for the academic to fully understand the papers and do anything else on top of
that...

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b-man
2 great videos that are pertinent IMO

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/270>

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/534>

~~~
elblanco
Great finds.

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akamaka
I don't think it needs to be disrupted. While the philosophy behind reforming
is noble, my own discussions with researchers have convinced me that this
doesn't matter to them.

They know there are flaws, but they also believe that good research will still
float to the top, and so they spend their energies on what is important, which
is doing good research.

~~~
Tichy
Once they are in the system, maybe they have a good time. But it seems likely
to me that if the general public were to be let in, more good science could
result from it - because more people would have a chance to learn and
contribute.

That said, from university days I remember that the newest papers were often
passed on between interested parties directly, not by publishing them.

~~~
akamaka
What you say sounds true and good, but I'll ultimately listen to what the
people around me have to say, rather than theorize about what's good for them.

------
mahmud
OT: I need people to help me mirror CiteSeer. I have a feeling it's going to
go away RSN.

------
korch
As a non-academic who regularly reads papers in math, physics and economics, I
can't wait for the day when all the rent-seeking academic journal publishing
houses are forced out of the market and are prevented from further ruining
academia by fanning the artificial flames of "publish or perish".

My biggest frustration is that it's impossible to access these journals if
you're not affiliated with a university. The corporate journal monopolists
like Springer and Elsevier absolutely gouge the universities to sell back to
the schools what the schools essentially produced themselves. Have you ever
checked out the fees they charge? It's on their websites, just try to sign up.
It's $50k+ for an annual license, and that's on the cheap end for access to
just a handful of journals—prices go way higher for full packages! This is a
real scandal, especially with university budgets being bled nation wide due to
the economic depression, and unavoidable, severe cuts not seen in generations!
For a recent analysis of publishers sweetheart deals entitling them to profit
margins above 25%, see:
[http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguig...](http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html).
How many kids can you keep in college for one year if the schools were keeping
that 25% profit margin?

So universities are forced to restrict access by their contract, and the
publishers have no incentive to even sell to consumers—why should they when
they can make astronomically more selling only to schools? Granted, all the
publishers do sell individual papers to consumers, but not at a price that
clears the market. Expect to be charged $20 for a 30 year old 5 page paper
covering an obscure Thermodynamics topic. It could be argued that the
publishers own the rights(or not: authors being forced to sign away all rights
in order to even be published is another scandal), so they can make up any
price they want. However, what is a fair price to charge when the author of
the paper themselves are giving their paper away for free to download from
their personal .edu site!

Ultimately, access to information and research becomes highly restricted when
everyone plays this strategy. Isn't this consequence the exact opposite of the
intent of the Internet? Call me an idealist, but scholarly writings ought to
be made as widely available as possible, especially for the general public,
for little to no profit.

I used to think one optimal solution was for a quasi-benevolent org, such as
Google, to just buy all academic papers and publication rights and put all of
it on the web, like with Google Print. Google could care less about
manipulating and creating an artificial journal market, no, they have a much
bigger objective: collect as much free content as possible in order to draw in
more eyeballs to show them more ads to increase the CPC. Google Scholar
started with the right idea, but they never did anything with the product.

I've been happy to see Arxiv gaining more traction in the past few years. It's
also been encouraging to see the recent federal laws mandating that any
research funded with federal money be made freely available, so the paywalls
can't touch those papers(unfortunately this seems to be contained mostly to
NIH medical publications).

One interesting recent trend I've noticed is the effect of academics being
much more web savy compared to ten years ago—now you can pretty much find any
paper published within the past decade for free on the author's own .edu site.
That is, if you know exactly what you're looking for, and don't mind spending
a few minutes sifting Google, and don't mind discovering many papers are not
freely accessible. It's a less than ideal search experience, but it works well
enough. Unfortunately all the pre-web papers are still locked behind paywalls.
I'm also giddy to see the upcoming Mac tablet's impact on the journals vis a
vis its rumored plans to disrupt the college textbook market.

~~~
hyperbovine
Tip: If you are really hurting for some JStor (or what have you) access,
simply saunter over to your nearest large research university and put up a
flyer offering somebody $500 a semester in exchange for access to their
library proxy credentials. If your inbox does not have 20 responses within a
day, I'll eat my hat. (Actually you could get by for way less than that, but
the high dollar figure makes it seem less sketchy. After all, they're probably
also giving up access to their grades, course registration, etc.)

Also, be kind to publish-or-perish. It and tenure go hand in hand; when you
have lifetime employment at 35, some sort of incentive is required to make the
work happen :-)

Lastly, the reason more authors don't post web copies of their publications is
that you are expressly disallowed from doing this when you sign over the
copyright to the publisher. You can post a late revision, but the simple act
of downloading a copy of your own published article and putting it up, is a
no-no.
([http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyrig...](http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/copyright#pdf))
Pretty incredible huh.

