
How to bring science publishing into the 21st century - dban
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-to-bring-science-publishing-into-the-21st-century/?WT.mc_id=SA_TW_ARTC_BLOG
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sevenless
1\. Get rid of the publishers.

Considering the WWW was _created for the purpose of sharing physics papers_ ,
the rest will take care of itself. The problem isn't technology, it's
oligopoly.

~~~
wolfgke
> The problem isn't technology, it's oligopoly.

The problem isn't technology, it's copyright laws.

~~~
astazangasta
The problem isn't technology, it's intellectual property.

Really any sort of property is just a way to concentrate power. We are just
making the calculation that the result of this accrual will produce benefits
for all. Often this calculation is off by a few orders of magnitude.

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rxm
The mechanics of creating a manuscript are not the big problem. Meaningful and
honest peer review, assignment of credit among authors and from future
developments, better matching between manuscripts and readers are some of the
things that I would rank higher.

~~~
apathy
Sure, but a lot of those are tied up in the current single-blind
extraordinarily-slow editorial-thumb-on-the-scales system that primarily
benefits for-profit publishers.

Platforms like Authorea and Overleaf combined with preprint servers can help
society journals compete with glamour journals without going broke.
Essentially the society journal is destined to become an "overlay" journal
where the editor suggests what preprints to look at while they're under
review. This should, in principle, encourage actual review. Open review offers
another type of incentive. Of course the actual society journal editors can be
dinosaurs (and I say this after speaking directly with some of them), but
eventually most of them get with the program.

I don't know what to do about the glamour journal fetish. Many of my papers in
non-glamour journals have dozens of citations, which I think is great, because
the glam journal papers (which, granted, have thousands of cites) are mostly
cited by people who barely read them. So perhaps you say, well obviously that
means the glamour journals have higher impact. Maybe. But I look at similar
papers to ours in similarly glamorous journals and they have, say, 2
citations. Or 34 citations. Or whatever, after fighting through review for
months. Meanwhile I have preprints and software manuals with more citations
than that. But those aren't "for credit" because... shit, I don't even know
why not. It's just an administrative quirk. Or something.

STAP and #arseniclife and the recent "MS gene" paper in Neuron provide endless
examples of the fallacy that "peer reviewed" is necessarily better ("peer
review is boosting with three weak learners"). But maybe that isn't the point.
As has been said previously, Deans may not know how to read but at least most
of them can count. :-/

~~~
JohnHammersley
Thanks for mentioning Overleaf[1] - we started it to help solve a problem we
were having collaborating on LaTeX documents with co-authors based in
different timezones - it helped avoid the 'multiple copies of the same doc in
multiple email threads' issue, amongst other things.

Since we've grown (now at half a million users worldwide), we're now also
working to help solve and streamline the submission & publishing process, for
many of the same reasons discussed in this article.

Feels like change is finally happening, which as a scientist myself is great
to see!

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

~~~
apathy
Yes, Overleaf is awesome. I feel bad but I stopped paying for the Premium
version with git-to-Dropbox syncing because the "stock" version is already so
good. We put up a paper on biorXiv recently with Overleaf and two days later
sent it off to a journal with minor reformatting. I only use Word for clinical
collaborators these days, Overleaf is so, so good.

I still wish you'd support Markdown so that I could ditch Word completely. I
hate that fucking program so much. I'd pay for Premium again just to use
Markdown. :-)

~~~
JohnHammersley
Native markdown support is planned -- in the meantime you might like this
tweet :)

[https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763395560682364928](https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763395560682364928)

and for something more light-hearted, here's a D&D template in LaTeX!

[https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763524947339800576](https://twitter.com/overleaf/status/763524947339800576)

~~~
apathy
I saw the D&D template earlier. That was hysterical.

I had not seen the markdown Beamer proof-of-concept. Very cool. Overleaf is
the single best thing that has ever happened to my collaborative authorship
skills, partly because Google Docs doesn't have a decent equation editor ;-)

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untilHellbanned
Science publishing needs to be coordinated by the major funding agencies.
Those who give the money are the rightful ones to say how the output gets
disseminated. If they want to make their own journals and stipulate that I
publish there to keep my funding I'm totally cool with it.

The funding agency and general population gets its research, I get my tenure,
and the university gets its money and prestige. It's a win-win all around.

~~~
merraksh
_Science publishing needs to be coordinated by the major funding agencies.
Those who give the money are the rightful ones to say how the output gets
disseminated._

I could not disagree more. Even if funding agencies were unbiased, they should
be independent of where and how the results of research are disseminated.
Funding agencies don't own that money, they only re-distribute tax-payer
money. So it's tax-payers who have the final say (through elected officials).

 _If they want to make their own journals and stipulate that I publish there
to keep my funding I 'm totally cool with it._

This might create dangerous isolation and conflict of interests. The editors
must be independent of the funding agencies to ensure quality of the research

 _The funding agency and general population gets its research, I get my
tenure, and the university gets its money and prestige. It 's a win-win all
around._

The general population would get the research that was steered by a small
group of people from funding agencies (DARPA, NSF), so possibly biased by the
people on the agencies' committees and the government. I get my tenure if the
tenure committee is aligned with the funding agency's guidelines; the
university lowers prestige as the results appear lower-quality in an
international settings. It's a lose-lose-lose, humankind's knowledge losing
the most.

I don't even want to think about private funding agencies commissioning an
article on their own journals to further their own economical interests,
especially if said journals become the state of the art because other, better
journals who would deserve to get the research published on them end up
without submissions.

Sorry, but I don't see any scenario worse than this.

~~~
untilHellbanned
> So it's tax-payers who have the final say (through elected officials).

And currently, that taxpayer money is going to for-profit companies. What I
propose is better.

> The editors must be independent of the funding agencies to ensure quality of
> the research

While often well-meaning, editors have almost no role in quality control. That
is in hands of academics who review the work. So the review process is already
independent of the funding agencies.

> The general population would get the research that was steered by a small
> group of people from funding agencies

Again, publishing is already steered by a small group of people who are
independent of the funding agencies, the reviewers.

> I don't even want to think about private funding agencies commissioning an
> article to further their own economical interests

What? The vast majority of funding agencies are non-profits who genuinely want
to help the world. They are motivated to produce research towards AIDS,
alternative energy, etc. They are economically motivated? Relative to the for-
profits who currently control the academic publishing world?

~~~
merraksh
_And currently, that taxpayer money is going to for-profit companies. What I
propose is better._

No, research money is going to researchers, publishers get (other) money for
different reasons. The cost of maintaining journals would have to be paid as
well, so journal subscription money would only go to different for-profit
organizations. What you propose does not solve the problem of paywalls, it
just moves them.

 _While often well-meaning, editors have almost no role in quality control._

Editors choose the reviewers, and actually do a pre-filtering of the submitted
papers. The final decision (reject/revise/accept) on a paper is theirs, and
sometimes can be different from the sum of the referee reports. So they do
have a strong role in quality control, both in theory and in practice.

 _That is in hands of academics who review the work. So the review process is
already independent of the funding agencies._

As it should be.

 _Again, publishing is already steered by a small group of people who are
independent of the funding agencies, the reviewers._

Most academicians are reviewers, so they are no small group. And they do not
steer publication, they just decide whether a paper should be
rejected/revised/accepted. There's quite a difference.

 _What? The vast majority of funding agencies are non-profits who genuinely
want to help the world._

You assume funding agencies are genuinely trying to help the world, but
everybody else (editors/academicians/reviewers) are not. I think there's good
and bad in both sides

 _They are motivated to produce research towards AIDS, alternative energy,
etc._

I agree, but they depend on their employer, i.e., whoever is in power.

 _They are economically motivated? Relative to the for-profits who currently
control the academic publishing world?_

Not as greedy, that's out of question, but giving them all controls on who
publishes would be dangerous. I do _not_ defend publishers, I do strongly
believe the current system is bad. I just think your solution is wrong, and
that there are ways to make research really public without giving it in the
hands of any of the players in the arena, especially those that might
influence what is published and where. Paywalls are bad, but what you're
proposing would lead to self-censorship.

~~~
jhbadger
University libraries are supported in part by taxpayer money. Which largely
goes to pay for journal subscriptions (whose costs are rising far faster than
inflation). So the taxpayer-money->private publisher conduit is a very real
thing in our current system.

~~~
merraksh
I know money is money, but _that_ tax-payer money I was mentioning is the
research funds themselves, not the money used to pay subscription.

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hyperion2010
Met one of the founders at a conference last spring. Great guy and dedicated
to improving how papers are written. While Authorea can help with interchange
formats and publication formats, by itself it cannot begin to rite the ship of
science publishing.

~~~
apathy
Well, you can't apply a technical solution to a social problem and expect it
to stick, but the former can make the latter easier to fix by removing (some)
inertia.

The GitHub approach (free for open, pay for private) seems sensible. I worry
sometimes whether that is sustainable for GitHub, but given the competition
out there (e.g. Overleaf, which I use quite regularly), I'm hopeful it will
work out.

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sethish
Does this feel like creating a new gate keeper to anyone else? What happens
when the start up closes?

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denzil_correa
Please do not get acquired by one of the publishers.

