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Comment by Robin_Message | Hacker News Reader

I'm studying for a PhD at Cambridge, UK, and I'm seriously interested in fixing this. Well, maybe fixing the whole thing is too big, but I'd like to try :-)

Anyone know of anything worth getting involved with? Anyone want to work on an alternative to journals?

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One thing you really should at least do is retain the copyright of your own paper. Journals will allow you to retain copyright and almost all rights of your paper if you just ask for it.

Then you can always publish it on your homepage.

While this may be true in your field, my impression is that this isn't true in general. Can you offer specific evidence? Here's a page offering a different view: http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/jono/item/toc.html

Elsevier sends you a draconian form by default. If you tell them that you're a PhD student and want to retain copyright and later publish your article in your thesis, then they will send you a new form. That form lets you keep the copyright, keep the right to publish this on your homepage, keep the right to publish this later on paper, et cetera. It takes some courage, some pushing and patience, but you will get it.

This is one of my papers, note that it explicitly says on the webpage that I have the copyright: http://bit.ly/PBKqx

This might be a good place to start:

http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0

What field are you in?

Computer Science

What's particularly galling about computer science publishing, is that our papers are some of the hardest to reproduce. I read too many papers where the idea sounds cool but I have no idea how to reproduce it. What's senseless is, I shouldn't even need to work to reproduce their experiment. We have a perfect, unchanging laboratory (a computer) and the most advanced language for discussing our experiments (programming languages), and we shrink our argument to 15 slices of dead tree.

Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think. Results can come very fast, and one of the top journals can take 18+ months to review and publish an article.

By which time it is almost already obsolete.

Computer Science is one of the places where dead tree publication is going the way of the dodo pretty soon I think.

The flag day for this, as alluded to in another thread, will be when fund-raising and faculty appointments stop being closely tied with dead tree publications. There's been ample time for that transition to happen, but not all the interested parties seem so motivated to change things.

I did not exactly mean it like that. You see more and more magazines and journals offering their accepted publications online first. It will not be long before that will become the main mode of how people learn about these articles.

I heard a presentation by the Public Library Of Science (http://www.plos.org/), who apparently are attempting to correct some of the problems of journals. For example, all their articles are publicly available on the web and they allow comments to be posted on the web. They claimed to considered to have some of highest "impact" journals in their fields.

Of course, some of the problems cited by the author of this piece could have to do with disagreements among experts. He may think his comment and his point is compelling but other experts may simply not think what he's saying is relevant and not be interested in giving him a forum. A more transparent process might only change things to the point where the folks on top would be forced to be more upfront about saying who is right - even wikipedia has transparency of debate and right-to-reply issues.

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