As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
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Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#12"It is not unthinkable that if I would submit a love letter, it would be published sooner than an intelligent scholarly article by a young researcher."
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#13As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#14Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that could be disrupted?
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#15I'm currently co-authoring a paper that will be submitted to an Elsevier journal because it is a good fit for our work. All of my time and that of one other co-author is funded by an NIH grant which of course is funded by US tax dollars. I'm fairly certain the Elsevier agreement stipulates that I cannot share my paper without their permission – assuming the paper is accepted. If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access.
[EDIT] There are some conditions under which sharing is permitted: http://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/sharing-and-...
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#16It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value. That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish…
Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense.
If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of scientists across all the fields in which they disburse grants; those jobs would be sinecures and from the point of view of the grant applicant it would still be about 'who you know,' just a referee at a grant-issuing agency instead of an editor/reviewer at a journal.
I don't disagree with you about the problem, but I'm not clear on how you would address it. Making the journals less profitable by refusing to pay silly subscription prices to read publicly-funded research would be a good thing for universities, and maybe for scientific publishing, but it's not going to fix the disconnect between people who control the public purse strings and which scientists will get the grants they want.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#17Anyone else think that this (academia/research) sounds like an industry that could be disrupted?
Every industry can be disrupted.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#18As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.
Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation.
I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence.
The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as useful.
Maybe someone should do a PhD on it. :)
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#19As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.
I would really like a more comprehensive answer from somebody close to the source; you more or less say "it does not have it because it has not happened yet".
Note that arXiv has features that many previous repositories did not have, such as easy access to the original TeX files.
Plus, a comment system for a repository of preprints sounds very useful to me -- you can have early birds (such as PhDs or very active scientists) comment on your paper even before you submit to a conference/journal, thus getting good advice for free.
Re: Dutch universities start their Elsevier boycott plan
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.
Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation. I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence. The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as usefu…
Maybe it can work as follows: Support a concept of "reviewer group" that can be created by anyone but can only be joined on invitation. When you post a review, the groups you belong to are shown; you can also filter articles that are approved by a certain group. Eventually, some groups will gain reputation by producing quality reviews on certain fields and people will treat papers approved by them as high-quality.
Heck, you can even create groups like "former reviewers of XXX journal" and as soon as you convince other people, gain reputation very quickly.