11–20 of 33 posts
I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...
What about the page charge? Some of these journals charge the author (or her institution) by the page for papers they accept. They get ya coming and going. Nice racket. Check it out. http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...
> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up. While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing G…
The fact that years ago, life scientists easily could have adopted an ArXiV-like model for publishing, and chose not to, is quite telling. It suggests a far deeper problem with incentives in (general) academic culture to publish and that article availability is not going to affect that at all. As someone who spent >6 years Ph.D./PostDoc (bioinformatics, stats and CS), I can say that the vast majority of researchers have no genuine incentive to take action. Protesting against Elsevier online in the comfort of your office is one thing, but having to publish X>10 papers/yr to get tenure/brownie points within your department is another.
Though the gov't might want research to be distributed, the underlying problem here has more to do with the scientists themselves than anything else. We've had ArXiV around for a long time and yet I ask who's adopted it other than mathematicians and (many, but not all) physicists? Why hasn't it been adopted by NIH-funded life scientists? The fact that years ago, life scientists easily could have adopted an ArXiV-like…
1. open access for their research (both for altruistic reasons, because they want to spread knowledge as widely as possible, and for selfish reasons, because greater access to their research means more citations of their research, which helps them with career advancement)
2. publishing in the most prestigious journals they can, because that helps with career advancement.
The NIH, which funds all research into biology and medicine in the US, just cares about 1. above. They just care about maximizing distribution for taxpayer-funded research, as long as the distribution is done so in an economically sustainable way.
The NIH drove the open access mandate in 2008. My sense is that in the short term, driven mainly by the demands of funding agencies, all journals will move to 'open access models', where publishers pay to publish their research in the journals, and for readers, it's free to access. This satisfies both 1. and 2. above: academics get both open access and the validation of being published in prestigious journals.
Longer term, I think alternative credit metrics will replace the credit metric that's governed research for hundreds of years, i.e. the brand value of the journal you were published in.
I think when that happens, the power of journals will disappear altogether. Right now, the journals' role in driving the discovery of research has been disrupted a lot. In the pre-web days, people used to walk down to their libraries, and check out what had been published in the journals recently. In those days, the journals used to drive a lot of research discovery.
Nowadays, pretty much all research discovery happens online, and it's driven by things like search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed), and social platforms (Twitter, arXiv, Academia.edu; general communication technologies like email and IM are also used a lot).
The journals still have a strangle-hold on the validation of research. Which journal you were published in is still incredibly important, as far as the validation of your paper is concerned.
Other credit metrics are emerging, however. Citation counts are one metric, and that has a big role in driving research discovery on search engines like Google Scholar. Hiring committees are starting to look at the kinds of credit metrics that apply to general web content, e.g. page views.
As alternative credit metrics emerge, there will come a point when they do a good enough job at the validation of research that academics feel they no longer need to submit their papers to journals.
I wrote up some further thoughts on this here http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/the-future-of-peer-review/
I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall…
The universities and government are looking to ditch the journals, and the journals know it. But it's a slow process.
So? That would be a sign that the value the journal adds by selecting what get's published is apparently not worth the price they are charging. In fact, why wait 12 months? If that leads to journals going out of business, there work wasn't worth the money. Of course there will be a need to organzie journal access, but I am sure that will be figured out super fast and the result will be cheaper and better, than what the Journals are doing right now. After all it's a problem we are solving on the Internet all the time.
> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up. While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing G…
How was it effective?
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/08/nature_and_california_m...
Unclear on the details, but presumably UC got a somewhat better price. (Note that UC was getting a better price than most libraries to begin with.)