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PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature)
Here's an article in Nature on how the scientific publishing industry is reacting to the open access movement. It seems they have hired Eric Dezenhall, a media consultant known for his attack-oriented tactics. "In an enthusiastic e-mail sent to colleagues after the meeting, Susan Spilka, Wiley's director of corporate communications, said Dezenhall explained that publishers had acted too defensively on the free-information issue and worried too much about making precise statements. Dezenhall noted that if the other side is on the defensive, it doesn't matter if they can discredit your statements, she added: 'Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate'."
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PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 16:38 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship"Ah. Blatant and crudely obvious lies, then? I'm sure that'll fool the target audience (i.e., scientists).
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 16:50 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] The target audience is the governments (i.e., politicians) who fund the research, not the scientists, who generally do whatever their funders do. So, yes, it might work.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 17:04 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Well, not *that* message. An awful lot of politicians don't seem to see anything wrong with censorship... :/
(how can making things *more* available be censorship? It doesn't make the least amount of sense.)
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 16:58 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] Karl Rove has a lot to answer for.
The journals better watch out. Scientists like myself prefer intellectual debate rather than "media messaging" or more correctly "propaganda". I have a choice where I submit papers and I will exercise it. Journals need good articles just as much as scientists need journals. In addition funding agencies such as NSF may just see open access journals as a way of saving money. Page charges at present take a big chunk out of grants.
Are you listening Wiley and Elsevier?
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 19:42 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] richo123,
At a recent annual society meeting I asked the chief editor of the
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 21:19 UTC (Wed) by modernjazz (subscriber, #4185) [Link] If it takes several thousand dollars per article, so be it. (Althoughmuch of the cost comes from the printed version, which is getting to be a bit of a dinosaur.) The point is that it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of the research itself (salaries, equipment, reagents, etc.). It's insane to have 98% of the publicly-funded cost locked up for the sake of the last 2%---no rational person would ever design such a system, it's this way only by historical accident.
If the OpenAccess journals are struggling financially (and indeed I
Incidently, suppose instead you look at how the OpenAccess journals have
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 22:28 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] So, it seems again to be a case of established business entities that havea small economic output but a huge amount of clout - kind of like the RIAA and MPAA, which being an infinitesimally small part of the US economy, were able to lobby the US administration for a clause in the US conditions to the Russia's acceptance into WTO that would bring the Russian laws in line with the US laws that protect XXAA's dinosaur business model. The established academic publishers are successfully able to stifle the development of the OpenAccess model by undercutting it. So, the change will have to come from the bottom and directly from the researchers to the policy makers like NIH. I think it is a natural fit that the people who care more about the change to OpenAccess are people of the type who care about having open/free OSes like you. So, grassroots lobbying is needed?
A part of the problem as far as I can tell is that all my colleagues whom
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 22:58 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link] > So, the change will have to come from the bottom and directly from the researchers
I recently spoke with an NIH scientist (not administrator) about Open Access biology journals. In her opinion, their quality was subpar - too many articles contained plagiarism and obvious errors. The signal-to-noise ratio was such that it wasn't worth her time to read them.
But hey, if third world universities can't afford American journals, Open Access might be better than nothing.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:29 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] Which is why I applaud NIH for their Open Access requirements to theirgrantees. The "closed" journals are not likely to start refusing high quality high impact articles because of the OpenAccess requirement, so if all the other funding agencies followed NIH then the problem would work itself out in the end.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Feb 1, 2007 3:03 UTC (Thu) by modernjazz (subscriber, #4185) [Link] Your NIH scientist has never read PLoS Biology, then. (PLoS = PublicLibrary of Science) It's now, what, 2 years old? And it has already established itself as one of the best journals in all of the life sciences. For reaching an all-round biological audience (i.e., not for a specific subfield), there are only a small handful of journals in its league.
I'm guessing here, but I'll wager that there has never been a journal
Several $1000s per article.... why? Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:22 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] One thing I've never understood is why I see regularly quoted such enormous costs - if anything Journal costs have gone down in recent years as advances in information technology have made publication and review easier. In my experience Journal articles are produced for free and reviewed for free - so the only cost is the administrative work in preparing the thing for publication. As an author I much prefer typesetting my own articles as the publishers seem to mess it up more often than they actually add value... So I remain mystified how producing a Journal ends up costing so much money!
Several $1000s per article.... why? Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:33 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] One argument is the expense they are going to while digitizing their backarchives. See the http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselec... for some good points.
Several $1000s per article.... why? Posted Feb 5, 2007 15:07 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] Then call up Google. I'm sure they'll be happy to work out some cheap, possibly free, deal where Google will process the journals quickly in exchange for some liberal distribution terms on Google Scholar and Google Books.
Several $1000s per article.... why? Posted Feb 1, 2007 0:23 UTC (Thu) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] In my experience Journal articles are produced for free and reviewed for free ...The several $K per article is indeed a very good question, as is the free reviewing. What do the reviewers get besides a "warm fuzzy feeling" that they've advanced science? These two options come to mind: As it takes a little while for an article to be published, in some cases they get an early insight into a new approach/method which allows them to be (slightly) ahead of the rest of the pack in their research. However, quite often (and I have experienced this first hand) the reviewer asks one of their articles to be added to the list of references. Granted, the reviewer is usually one of the co-authors on that article and hence one cannot be sure which of the authors is the reviewer, but the very idea of "blind" reviewing is becoming corrupted.
The Role of Reviewers Posted Feb 1, 2007 10:05 UTC (Thu) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] Well if you are an academic, reviewing is part of your job. Ideally it works as a community, you review articles for other people and they will review yours... Plus you can put it down as one of these extremely pathetic sounding esteem indicators that appear in various assessments of academic performance. As to requesting your own papers to be included in the reference list, this is a bit iffy! ....but you are very likely to be writing about something the reviewer has published on - so if you've missed it then pointing that out might be legitimate. I'd be extremely uncomfortable about doing that though...
Several $1000s per article.... why? Posted Feb 2, 2007 15:29 UTC (Fri) by dark (✭ supporter ✭, #8483) [Link] "Dezenhall estimated his fee for the campaign at $300,000-500,000."
So now you know where the money goes :)
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 17:38 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] so let's publicise the fact that the publishers of these scientific journals don't care about thr truth (and include the quote above about how it doesn't matter if they can be discredited as long as the other side is on the defensive)
put them on the defensive, and with the truth to boot :-)
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 19:11 UTC (Wed) by rafdz (guest, #41427) [Link] many times i needed some interesting articles but couldn't donwload them because i didn't have ieee, acm or springer subscription.I find it really unfortunate that some scientific knowledge is inaccessible. but this is not only the fault of scientific journals.they only own copyright on the text of the articles, not the actual knowledge that is inside it.if all scientisis publish on their website the contents of their own articles in another form, this would solve the partially the problem.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 19:40 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] That would appear to be a circumvention of copyright laws. Not likely that scientists will test the law in that way. The best approach is to force the journals to relax their copyright restrictions. This is a tough issue because many professional associations rely on journals subscriptions for part of their revenue stream. It would be preferable however if they raised revenue in another manner....
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 20:03 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] The question is why the hell journals think they should take the copyrightof something which is in its entirety not their work?
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 20:51 UTC (Wed) by tnoo (subscriber, #20427) [Link] Their workload is usually close to zero. The formatting has to be done bymyself, all figures have to exactly meet their standards... and my own LaTeX'd text usually looks as good or better than the final result.
The most disappointing aspect is that the review is done by volunteers
The only way out of this dilemma are the free access journals who
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 22:35 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] It could be true for mathematical journals where the workflow is stillLaTeX based, but in biology most journals have switched to Microsoft Word (TM), which requires them to keep staff to expend a lot of time on formatting the articles being sent in. They are also trying to squeeze the maximum profit out of their journals, so they keep editors that cram an ungodly amount of text and figures into the smallest space possible, so they could print more articles and a slew of full-page ads. They use the above as one of the justification for requiring higher revenues.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 21:00 UTC (Wed) by imres (guest, #12) [Link] The real question is why scientist surrender their full copyrights to journals without retaining a right to distribute their own work on a non-commercial basis, as they wish?
My guess is that they, scientist (disclaimer: I am one of them), are not yet fully aware of the mechanisms and possibilities of uses of copyright. Neither are they aware of the consequences: theoretically, at least, they can't redistribute their own work any more without the consent of the new copyright holder.
Or maybe they are satisfied with the limited distribution of their work, the way it is now.
Why they do it... Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:06 UTC (Wed) by grantingram (guest, #18390) [Link] The short answer is that in many countries (such as the UK where my experience is) are under enormous pressure to produce measurable outputs, i.e. published papers. Since actually measuring the quality of an academics output is quite difficult, people tend to judge your work purely on the basis of which Journal you've got it into. The older (non-open) Journals tend to more prestigious than the newer (open-access) ones. Also things are changing. It is much more common now that you don't sign away copyright but give the Journal a license which allows you to make use of your own work.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 20:47 UTC (Wed) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] > That would appear to be a circumvention of copyright laws. Not likely that scientists will test the law in that way.
Sorry, but you must not know any scientists if that's what you think of us. When I started on the MIT faculty, and took the copyright-legal approach to my own articles (linking from my webpage to journal sites where people could download free or pay depending on their subscription status), advice from five senior faculty members was *uniformly*: "Oh, don't worry about copyright, put the PDFs on your website, the more people download them the better it is for you. After all, it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission." (Literally, those exact words from one of them.)
Scientists really don't give one whit about copyright law in the manner you describe. The overwhelming majority want more people to get our papers and consider us great, not less, which is part of why Open Access is so appealing to us and journals *advertise* their open access policies -- and we have nothing to lose from it. What we do care about is credit and attribution: copy someone's paragraph into your own without a citation and you'll have a fight on your hands. But that's not the same thing at all.
That said, I agree with the rest of your post.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 21:06 UTC (Wed) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] Well I am faculty at NYU and have 80 scientific papers on my cv and have been warned several times about copyright violations after I did exactly what you described.
You probably won't get hassled since it would be so much bad publicity for the publishers of the journals however my belief is that there is a (small but) non-zero risk. I am strongly in favour of eliminating this risk as I very strongly believe in the widest possible dessimination of scientific research.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 21:13 UTC (Wed) by imres (guest, #12) [Link] > Scientists really don't give one whit about copyright law in the manner you describe.
That's the problem and working to change that is where the solution should start in my opinion. Only by building a solid base, legally defensible, can we build free digital libraries open for whatever experimentation we wish to do. Just as it was done with free software.
Can you imagine where free software would be today if instead of being built on top of solid community-wide licences it was built on top of individual conveniences of the type you relate in your mail?
Authors can fight back Posted Feb 1, 2007 4:13 UTC (Thu) by sanjoy (subscriber, #5026) [Link] Can you imagine where free software would be today if instead of being built on top of solid community-wide licences it was built on top of individual conveniences of the type you relate in your mail? Very true. To that end, the (US) Association of Research Libraries has drafted an author addendum that you can submit with your copyright transfer or publication agreement. It includes many excellent clauses, including Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.and Publisher agrees to provide to Author within 14 days of first publication and at no charge an electronic copy of the published Article in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (.pdf). The Security Settings for such copy shall be set to No Security.
Authors can fight back Posted Feb 3, 2007 14:46 UTC (Sat) by imres (guest, #12) [Link] Yes, there are also the addenda of Science Commons, a branch of Creative Commons. Some authors use these addenda and publishers tend to accept them (but not always, though). Unfortunately, I do not have precise numbers but I would bet that only a negligible minority of authors use these addenda. Even fewer of them disseminate their work with a clearly stated licence such as Creative Commons by-noncommercial-sharealike, for instance.
And that is where the author's action should be in order to build a well founded and secure movement: try to disseminate the use of these addenda.
At the same time computer science types could show the incredible wealth of information resources one can build with the full text of articles. The best example I know of is citeseer, a Computer Science digital library of 700K+ papers where the user can navigate through citations, similarity of vocabulary, similarity of references, etc.
I believe that very few people imagine the gold mine we are missing by not having a great variety of thematic or disciplinary digital libraries in all kind of subjects, each of them *complete* in its area of expertise! I, for one, happen to think that this would be an absolutely indispensable research tool for every scientist, doctor or teacher.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Feb 1, 2007 23:21 UTC (Thu) by richardr (subscriber, #14799) [Link] Happily this is untrue, it is not a breach of copyright laws to release your own copies of papers if you're careful. Most journals I've published in allow for the dissemination of paper through a university website, and those which don't I have _always_ edited the copyright assignation form to add this clause. I have also added in a clause to allow me to do this through a personal website if I want to. No journal has _ever_ objected to this mutilation of their forms. I would strongly recommend it to anyone, as then Google Scholar can pick it up.
PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access (Nature) Posted Jan 31, 2007 21:14 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link] > if all scientisis publish on their website the contents of their own articles in another form, this would solve the partially the problem.
I have no idea how it is in other fields, but **every** mathematician I know has preprints of their articles, in pdf form, freely downloadable on their university website. Some even have freely downloadable versions of their books and lecture notes. Plus there is arXiv. The journals are not used so much for spreading information as for verifying (through peer review) and for separating interesting discoveries from the less interesting ones.
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Jan 31, 2007 22:59 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] Dear Prof. Weasel,
We see that you are on the editorial board of The Expensive Journal of Publicly-Funded Science, which costs our university library $10,000 per year. We're taking it out of your paycheck. Have a nice day.
Sincerely,
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:05 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] Right, and who is going to send that letter to dear professor Weasel oreven suggest it? It is a dream at this time. The OpenAccess coalition would do well to get public support of some Nobel Prize winners and a few universities that they could go to press to with then the tide would turn in a different direction.
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Feb 1, 2007 3:34 UTC (Thu) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] The Open Access movement already has wide support, including from universities and Nobel laureates. That's one of the reasons the for-profit publishers are seeking expensive PR in response.
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:12 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link] You think professors are ripping the universities off?
FYI, if you are a professor, much of your paycheck typically comes from a *grant*. Which comes from an outside organization (NSF, NIH, etc.) and which lasts 1-5 years. Out of that grant you hand over some fraction (say 30%) to your university, for the privilege of working in their buildings; the rest of the money you use to pay yourself, your postdocs and grad students, buy equipment and supplies for your experiments, etc.
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Jan 31, 2007 23:25 UTC (Wed) by malex (subscriber, #15692) [Link] This money is classified as "overhead". It usually equals to 50-60% of theawarded grant funding and is tucked on top of the grant, so it's not coming "out of the grant" per se, but the funding agency pays it to the university. I still think funding agencies must lead the way by requiring OpenAccess much as NIH did with their http://publicaccess.nih.gov/. They handle the money, so they can call the shots. The journals won't refuse high impact articles over this as they need the exposure.
Why do the universities put up with their professors helping to rip them off? Posted Feb 1, 2007 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] Yes, I do think the professors are ripping the universities off by working on proprietary journals. Whatever the source of the money (most professors get their own base pay and benefits from the regular budget) the university has to blow some money that it would otherwise have been able to spend on something useful -- because of the professor's decision to work on a restricted-access journal.The professor who serves on the editorial board of a restricted-access journal is also ripping off whoever provided the grants for the journals' authors' research. The grant givers want the research published -- NIH, for example wants public access. This is really an issue of taxpayers, university students, grant givers, libraries, and people who need the results of the research vs. a few highly profitable, obsolete companies -- with the researchers who write and edit the papers caught in the middle.
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