Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org
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.
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simp...
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author...
http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-se...
(That said, innovations that allow people to write more papers or get cited more have been taken up very rapidly.)
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.
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?
I was fortunate enough to work in an area of research for which the arXiv was originally established, and found that printed journals became increasingly irrelevant to me. Certainly, I would use them to find the dwindling number of papers not covered by the arXiv for reasons of age or subject matter, but for the day-to-day business of keeping up with the latest developments, the latency between submission to and publication in peer reviewed printed journals is far too great to be useful.
These preprints are not formally peer reviewed, but this mostly doesn't matter since they are always subject to an informal review by their readers -- if you are reasonably well-versed in a subject you can make up your own mind about whether or not a paper is any good, particularly after discussions with colleagues.
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.
It leads to a huge number of rehashed, low quality papers. Some of the issues on the publishing side could be solved simply by reducing the amount of rubish that hits the system.
And the second problem I see is not a technology issue either. It's that, at least in europe, academic research is funded by the public. In spite of that, the work of scientists is given away to publishers who hold the entire system hostage. Publishers are in effect running an elaborate scheme to blackmail the tax payer into paying twice for the same work without adding any value themselves. The peer reviewers are funded by the tax payer as well.
If universities did what other employers do, which is to take ownership of what their employees produce and manage it properly, access to scientific work could be much improved.
That said, from university days I remember that the newest papers were often passed on between interested parties directly, not by publishing them.
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.... 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.
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...) Pretty incredible huh.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
A major problem in replacing current scientific journals with something else is their use as reputation references for hiring and tenuring professors.
The Public Library of Science PLoS is an attempt at replacing the old journals. PLoS aims at keeping the price at cost, done by charging for publishing (once) and not for reading (unnumbered times) as is the current business model of the publishers. In short, we want the publishers to perish while keeping a reputation and least-abusable-as-possible system in place.