Talk:Open science
Contents
The New Your Times: Cracking open the scientific process -- Jouni 08:09, 21 January 2012 (EET)
Cracking Open the Scientific Process[1]
- A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members.
- By THOMAS LIN
- Published: January 16, 2012
The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.
For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.
The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”
Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.
Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.
On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.
Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”
Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”
On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”
Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”
Facebook for Scientists?
“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.
Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.
A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.
The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.
Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.
ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.
In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.
Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.” Enlarge This Image Mike Peel
- EVOLUTION Michael Nielsen, a quantum physicist, says that as online tools slowly catch on, open science is coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”
Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”
The Paper Trade
Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”
Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.
“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)
Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”
Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.
The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.
In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”
In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”
Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”
Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”
Science 2.0
Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”
Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”
Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.
“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”
Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.
“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.
Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.
“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”
- A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cracking Open the Scientific Process.
Online discussion: All coomments (144)
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JenofNJ NJ Flag I don't want to see this degenerate into peer-review-bashing. While it certainly has its problems, peer review is crucial to the process of publishing. It insures that the papers are carefully read, criticized, rewritten and edited. As a healthcare provider, I absolutely cannot practice based on "the latest thing" or what a bunch of people "like". I need evidence-based articles that are peer-reviewed, so that I can make informed decisions that will impact my patients' health. This article did not address the world of medical publishing, unfortunately. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:50 p.m. Recommended34 Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter PQuincy California Nature and Science are large, expensive, but non-profit organizations. In contrast, aggressive for-profit corporate publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Cell Press do similar work, but also spin of very substantial profits for their owners. They are also known for their aggressive tactics towards university libraries, one of their main clients, doing their best to pick them off, keeping prices secret and unequal, and so forth. Given that non-profit publishing still produces the top science journals, and many of the others (though non-profit professional associations increasingly hope that their journals can subsidize their other operations), what is the justification of the for-profits' costs? Their sanctimonious comments about "private sector information products" -- that is, scientific research largely paid for with public funds, by scientists on public or non-profit institution payrolls, with free peer review provided by other publicly-supported scientists, and then sold (very profitably) to public and non-profit institutions -- is both unpersuasive and ugly. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:24 a.m. Recommended31 galwegian NY Not addressed in this article is the parallel need to maintain high-quality peer review. The main reason people read and trust published manuscripts is because they have been subjected to the intensive scrutiny of colleagues before their being accepted for publication. This process can occasionally fail, but this is the notable exception to the rule. A Facebook-like approach that assumes that 'the community' will pitch in and review the work of others is not grounded in reality, as peer-review is, frankly, very onerous. Many people clicking 'like' for a manuscript will not replace the several hours of scrutiny required for a stringent review that looks for everything from experimental errors to fraud. Journal publication costs are unbelievably expensive these days, even for online-only publications, something has to change, but a social media or wiki-based model that ignores the critical role of detailed and focused peer-review is highly likely to fail, as it is their quality of peer-review, not publication mechanism, that confers status on the contents of these journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:09 p.m. Recommended28 Mark San Francisco Unless open science sites act responsibility to provide peer review and other safeguards against bias and fraud they run the risk of being little more than a lowest-common-denominator repository like Wikipedia. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:51 a.m. Recommended27 Jessie Henshaw way uptown NYT Pick What's missing from the social network idea of promoting science is what's going to prevent the networks from dividing into cells of shared belief, like social networks naturally do with everything. The deep problem, that "knowledge is a social construct" and prone to dividing into silos of thinking, somewhat ignorant of each other, taking unexamined questions on faith, would get worse. That's even a problem for the slow traditional process of advancing papers through careful reading by critical reviewers, of course. Still, I personally find the open networks for fundamental research I've long been involved in to be rather socially exclusive, each with their own unexamined rules of exclusion. The social network becomes a filter for what ideas are welcome or not. Criticism then gets based on whether the authors seem to be "team players" playing along with the crowd, just like in business. Speeding that up will only make the problem worse I think. There's just a huge spectrum of scientists who don't want to discuss facts that contradict their theories, as they have lots better things to do it seems. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:39 p.m. Recommended21 Steve Labadie, MO The "science lite" nature of this article was a disappointment. In any discussion of a new paradigm for scientific publishing, the topic of peer review is going to have to take front-and-center. This is the quality control mechanism that strengthens the edifice of scientific knowledge. And if you dislike scientific fraud you're going to deplore what happens when there are no controls at all. It's not even clear who would benefit from this new model. Most scientists currently have access to the primary literature through their institutions, whether academic or industrial, so what is the gripe? The lay public? Get real. Not one in a hundred non-scientists will be able to understand in depth a modern scientific publication, and for the summary conclusions there are secondary publications appropriate to that audience. As a scientist myself, I find page fees and the high cost of document retrieval truly unfortunate, at at times inconvenient, but I also recognize the value of review and curation. Requesting a .pdf directly from the author is great ... as long as I have contact info, and the author is still alive, and the author is willing and able to locate the proper computer file and send it to me. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:03 p.m. Recommended17 MW Baltimore As a parent I’ve had a pediatrician show me an article or a medical book with a description of my child’s ailment. I’m not sure how I would feel, especially given my understanding of how unreliable information on the web can be, if the pediatrician said “I saw this cool procedure on a blog and I’d like to try it on your child.” The article is romantic but unrealistic. I think the two (traditional journals and online groups like ResearchGate) can co-exist but in no way will blogs and like buttons replace peer review. If they do, shame on us. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:44 p.m. Recommended17 JK Indiana You don't have to scrap peer-review to have open access (or something like it). Peer-review is a great way to ensure quality (probably the only way), but it doesn't necessitate a bloated, for-profit publishing infrastructure. The actual reviewers aren't getting paid anyway, for the most part. So let's not confuse the important but distinct issues of peer review and journal access. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended16 Anony Mouse Richmond VA I work in a (very) small biotechnology research company. Elsevier's policies are a continuous problem to people not connected with a university library. Whereas most publishers have put their old archives free online, Elsevier continues to ask outrageous charges ($30 per article) for research papers that may or not be relevant when you actually get into the full text (many papers refer to other papers for the methods they use). The Research Works Act clearly goes against the good of science and scientists and the public interest. As a citizen, I feel that any work that is publicly funded by NIH, NSF, USDA, DOE or any other federal agencies should be free to access after a few months, which still gives the journals time to make their profits, as libraries and specialists will still subscribe. I would like to see all scientists boycott Elsevier and other publishers who don't make their articles available after a maximum of a year's time. Peer review is still important to maintain research quality, but we are now at a time when scientific publishing could all be accomplished online and for free (peer reviewers have never been paid). It is just a matter of establishing online journals with similar reputations to the print journals. Elsevier - you time is limited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:54 p.m. Recommended15 Kenarmy Columbia, MO I recently had occasion to read a PLoS article for my research project. It was truly dreadful. The data did not address the hypothesis or the conclusions. A good editor would have rejected the manuscript without review. Good reviewers would have rejected the manuscript, and complained to the editor that he/she was wasting their time. On-line journals are going to have to get their "game" up to a reasonable level is they want to compete with the "old guard" journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:17 a.m. Recommended15 RW Boston, MA It's important in these discussions to understand that high-profile journals have a very different model from normal journals. In a normal Elsevier journal you might expect the ratio of submitted papers to accepted papers to be around 2:1. For PLoS One, it's probably somewhere in the region of 1.5:1. At Nature and Science it's at least 10:1, and even accepted papers usually go through multiple rounds of review. Why the low acceptance rate? Because these journals aim to pick the very best papers. (Whether they do a perfect job of this is another matter.) If they do their job well, lots of people will want to read what they pick. That's why it makes sense for these journals to use a reader-pays model. If they shift to author-pays, the price per paper published will be prohibitive, unless they charge for submission, not acceptance. Do we want a world in which only rich labs can submit to the top journals? In the PLoS model, the more selective journals (e.g. PLoS Biology) are subsidized by the highly unselective journal (PLoS One). If authors cooperate, papers are passed down from the more selective journals to the less selective ones, so PLoS can capture some income from most of the papers submitted to them. PLoS has burned through a lot of grants and subsidies since it started up, it'll be interesting to see if it eventually stabilizes. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:46 p.m. Recommended14 BG Athens, GA The main benefits of journals are 1) Articles are peer-reviewed, and 2) They are useful for promotion and tenure: an article published in a very selective journal gives some assurance that the author has done something significant. Journals used to have an additional function, that of disseminating information, but that is much less significant now. In the past, it was difficult for scientists to produce and distribute their own journals, but this is no longer the case. The best approach is not to get rid of journals, but to get rid of the commercial publishers, who no longer add any value. In mathematics, this has happened a couple of times: the journal Compositio Mathematica severed itself from its commercial publisher, and most of the editors of the journal Topology resigned to start a new and less expensive competing journal. We need more of this. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. Recommended14 Noeze Chicago NYT Pick The cost of accessing articles published in the medical literature is so outrageously high that many healthcare providers simply cannot afford to read them. As Dr. Gavin Yamey has written (http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2009/07/oped1-0907.html), it costs $30 - $50 to read but a single article in a typical medical journal, such as The New England Journal of Medicine. A subscription for online access to a single journal costs individual subscribers $150 - $200 per year. Conducting a review of the literature on a single subject requires being able to read many articles in multiple journals, potentially costing any reader who does not have privileges at a university medical library or other large institutional library hundreds of dollars. For many healthcare workers, particularly outside wealthy countries such as the US, these high prices completely exclude access to potentially life-saving knowledge. Most subscription-based medical journals also prohibit readers, under traditional restrictive copyright licenses, from making multiple copies, translations, or derivative works of journal articles - so a reader cannot share an article he or she has found with colleagues unless each of them individually pays for access. Success of the open access movement in the dissemination of medical knowledge has the potential to improve the quality of health care provided to countless millions. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:41 p.m. Recommended11 Jeff Wang San Francisco, California NYT Pick As a businessperson, I have often been confused by the lack of proper incentives for efficient and effective scientific research. There is tremendous redundancy in the "industry" by having multiple specialists studying the same thing with little to no collaboration, trying to scoop each other. This redundancy is largely driven by the rewards system in science, where researchers compete in vying for high-impact-factor publications. It's a zero-sum-game, and it's wasteful. Opening up the process to more collaboration and sharing would likely benefit science and society in the long run. But in the meantime, I can't imagine large populations of researchers opting for the open-source route, since they are essentially punished professionally for sharing their data. Open source science cannot coexist with the current publication process, since sharing essentially invites others to scoop your work. For things to really change, universities and institutes need to change the way they hire and promote researchers, decoupling professional development from publication records and impact factors. The would need to develop a new currency that measures a researcher's value in an open-source world. The "reputation points" example in this article may be a prototype for such a currency. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:43 p.m. Recommended10 Yiannis Minneapolis Why do we need to continue moving away from deliberate, careful processes in favor of speed and immediacy? In time, all published material may become publicly accessible. For example all research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be publicly available withing months of publication, even by commercial publishers. So why is there a need for non-specialists to read the newest article in Cell as soon as it is published? And speaking about profit, isn't there money involved in these new Facebook-like endeavors? I would rather have Science and Nature editors decide on scientific truth than venture capitalists. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:33 p.m. Recommended10 LanceSmith USA Precisely - I agree completely. This "rush to change" seems analogous to the "rush to change" everyone made in the 90's towards New Business Models...New Business Rules...etc. What did we witness? The very real fact that business is still business, and you can't build companies that never expect to turn a profit. In many ways, we are still in the throes of this rush to change even today. The analogy is striking, but instead of a wall street crash like we saw at the turn of the century, we'll see a crash in our ability to do good science. Science is and must be rigorous. That rule is fundamental. Without rigor all we are left with is opinion. I see nothing about these changes that help increase rigor. I am great with open-journals (like PLoS, etc), but those journals still require a real peer review process to end up with a final paper. The rest of the collaborative stuff noted in the article is great for helping people stay connected, but that's a separate issue. Papers (even those in open-journals) are still needed to maintain the rigor...unless someone can tell me how a glorified Facebook is going to increase rigor in the community. If anything, I see it as just the opposite. It reminds me of folks that want to use Wikipedia as primary literature. Wikipedia is a great resource, but it isn't primary literature....nor will it ever be (if we are ever to hope to maintain rigor in the field). In reply to Yiannis Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:55 p.m. Recommended8 JB Maryland This article meanders through its topic with no clear point. On one hand it seems to suggest that the old scientific model, as represented by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is undergoing an evolution. The article seems to suggest, and here I am gleaning, that there are two essential components to NEJM model: (1) work was done privately and (2) results were published in peer-reviewed journals. With regards to the first point, for at least 50 years now, experiments in the world of high energy physics, for example, have consisted of huge collaborations. All sorts of social networking has been going on for years. And in other areas, whether biology or chemistry, there are conferences and regular meetings of professional organizations. So OK, the Internet is used nowadays, but I see no break with the so-called NEJM model. Seems like that model i's only a straw dog. So let's turn to the publication of results. Scientists have essentially two ways to publish: (1) in peer reviewed journals and (2) in non-peer reviwed conference proceedings. And they can present unpublished results at meetings. This article is not clear at all on whether the scientific community is moving away from this. One scientist is quoted that he no longer does peer reviews because he feels uncompensated by large publishing houses. He doesn't have a problem with the peer review process per say. Perhaps these publishing houses should work on a not-for-profit basis, but that's a different issue. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:11 p.m. Recommended8 MN Michigan NYT Pick There is hierarchy of journal quality that functions to direct attention (and credit) to work that can withstand very critical review. Human judgement is the only tool we have for evaluating excellence. The two systems can co-exist, as they do now - and scientific readers can choose whether to read a relevant paper that passed the critical reviewers of NATURE or one that was accepted by PLoS One. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:35 p.m. Recommended8 WJH New York City What three embittered losers did you interview to get these attitudes? Anyone in science knows that although peer reviewed journals have their (many) problems, something not peer reviewed has a strong possibility of being unreliable. Moreover every discipline has websites on which all papers can be posted before they are peer reviewed so that we have virtually unlimited access to all kinds of work before it is published. The one in math and physics is called ArXiv and it is run out of Los Alamos. We all know that Elsevier and Springer are putting the squeeze on university libraries and that Elsevier books are outrageously expensive to the point that nearly no one buys the wretched things. But the idea that this is such a broken system as to be unworkable or that it really ties anyone in knots is just so silly. In my forty years in mathematics and through all of my articles in books and conference volumes I never once felt obstructed. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:15 p.m. Recommended8 Dick Turpin Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California It is true that "the system is hidebound, expensive and elitist," as are pretty much all systems governed by gatekeepers (i.e., editors and publishers). However, without those gatekeepers, the audience must become its own editor and sift through all the garbage to find the quality. Ask yourself, do you have the time and desire to do that? If you do, all the power to you - but I'm betting that you don't have the time because you have a day job, hobbies, a marriage, a family, etc. So while, on the one hand, the gatekeepers are in a privileged position to arbitrarily impose their own standards and views on content (as editors usually do), they also serve the purpose of conserving the audience's most precious commodity - time. That applies to science content as much as any other content out there. Mr. Dick Turpin Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:57 p.m. Recommended7 Partha Mitra New York I've published ~ 100 papers (physics, then neuroscience) in major journals (Nature, Science etc). At the same time I have put up my manuscripts on the free physics preprint archives (arxiv) prior to publication - including at least one manuscript which has been cited but which I never submitted to a journal. This particular manuscript had a small error - which was pointed out to me by someone who read it and emailed me a comment - following which I posted a revised, corrected version. Scientific publication should first and foremost be about communicating and sharing scientific results and findings. In the internet era, it makes no sense to hold this process hostage to a broken peer review system and large user fees that puts most science articles out of reach for most people (even in academic settings - libraries have limited resources). The alternative could be free access to the raw articles, but paid access to editorial selection, in a two step process: 1. Author driven publication without gatekeepers and fees (eg deposit a manuscript in arxiv - if Perelman could do that for his proof of the Poincare conjecture, I don't see why the rest of us can't - and I don't buy that biomedicine is exceptional). 2. A subsequent process of reviewing, revising, vetting - this second stage should have expert reviewers (paid for their efforts), editors, etc. and the results accessible through paid subscriptions. I doubt this can be accomplished by "liking" on a social network. Jan. 18, 2012 at 10:50 a.m. Recommended7 John Vermont My first scientific paper was published 40 years ago this November, in the traditional way, and in an excellent journal. But papers have value, and it has long astounded me that we scientists give them away and then pay significant sums to be able to read them! Would't it be nice to be able to submit a paper to a variety of journals, which can review it as each wishes and come back to me with its offer of what that journal is willing to pay me (if anything) to publish my paper. I would be happy to grant publication rights to the appropriate, if not always highest, bidder, taking into account the relative financial resources of a scientific society journal versus a truly commercial, for-profit journal. The proceeds would go to further my research, not to my or my co-authors' pockets. Let the market play a role - intellectual ideas and results have value, just as creative literature does. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:50 p.m. Recommended7 Paul F. Stewart, MD Belfast,Me. Just what we need , more junk science on the internet. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:23 p.m. Recommended7 Tom Midwest Trusted The key to the article is the focus on commercial journals as opposed to the vast majority of research being published in non profit journals with extensive peer review and other free sources on the the internet. In my own case, the publication process required a complete in house peer review, a review at a regional office, submission to a journal and another complete peer review process at that time. Added to that was a review by people you knew and trusted before even entering the process. Granted, even the non profit journals do have page charges but many waive them or reduce them and further, publication costs are frequently provided in the research budget. As to networks, that is developed by the scientist on their own through conferences and in today's environment, through the multitude of free sites, listservs and discussion groups on the internet. By the time I retired, my email address book was well north of 2000 contacts. I don't disagree that someone may want to make money off the process, but in my field of study, it rarely occurs. Further, to quote many of my professors as well as graduate advisers, if the literature cited has not been rigorously peer reviewed, don't bother to add books or on line sources in your own literature cited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:29 p.m. Recommended7 mike97 Seattle Let us draw an analogy with The New York Times Online. The New York Times Online just recently instituted a subscription service. Some may even complain that it's somewhat expense ( as opposed to free!). It justifies this subscription because it has an excelent Editorial staff - analogous to Peer Reviewers - and an excellent writers. Why not replace this "17th Century" structure with a social networked New York Times Online, with 1,000 randomly selected people picking and choosing articles for publication on a social media basis? Get rid of the Editors, and maybe some of the writers? Of course, then The New York Times would not be of the quality we expect nor need. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended6 RBS Little River, CA NYT Pick I have been an editor of a established scientific journal for 20 years. The time to publish under the current system is mentioned as a reason for alternative models for dispersing scientific findings. It has been my experience that this problem has its genesis in the responsiveness of reviewers and the workload of editors. Good reviewers are very often well established in their fields and receive many requests for review in addition to their own research and teaching obligations. However, it is only human nature that scientists would put reviewing the contributions of others further down the list of things to do than in producing and publishing papers of their own, especially when there are many such requests for review. From an editor's perspective this means that I usually have to invite 5-6 reviewers and it may take several weeks for answers and then I may have to ask additional potential reviewers if I do not get at least two acceptances. It is not unusual to have to send invitations to 10 or more reviewers. Then I rarely get the reviews within the requested time. Receiving 100 papers a year and having my real job as well to attend to one can see that the system can easily back up and the initial review process stretch into months. I must say that the implementation of an internet based submission and review process over the last 10 years has helped in many ways with both the time of review and my efficiency. Peer review is absolutely essential. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:51 p.m. Recommended4 Tim Smith NYT Pick As a professor at a major research university, I need to publish in for-profit journals for the time being because of their reputation. My internal and external evaluations (e.g., raises, grants) depend on the "quality" of the journals I publish in. Perhaps more importantly, the papers I co-author with my graduate students need to be in journals with a good reputation in order to help my students get started in their careers. Currently, open-access engineering journals are considered to be of lower quality than popular for-profit journals. As soon as open-access (engineering) journals reach a reputation on par with those I currently publish in, I plan to switch to open-access journals. I want to support open-access publishing, but not if it puts my career and the career of my students at risk. Jan. 18, 2012 at 2:25 a.m. Recommended
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