> 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 Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].
You're right, there are cases of boycotts like this.
Another interesting case was when the whole editorial body of the journal "Topology" resigned in 2006 because they thought that its owner, Elsevier, was charging too high a price for subscriptions. Those editors then set up a rival journal, called Journal of Topology.
It seems for me like this would be an great new market for Google: they know research and they know how to automate the process so the subscription price can be kept ridiculously low.
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 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.
You're absolutely right that academics are torn between two things that they want:
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.
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.
Does anyone have a good form letter for telling your representative that you're prepared to start walking around the voting district stopping people on the street and explaining that Carolyn Maloney is trying to restrict access to publicly funded research?
Carolyn Maloney is my Congresswoman and I don't give a shit that the alternative is a conservative, this is ridiculous.
An important first step is to call her office and tell them how this personally affects you as her constituent. Then, organize professors from the universities in the district to call her and tell her how this personally affects them.
If you want to organize people on the street, I would recommend asking people on the street whether they support their tax dollars going to pay overpriced publishers whose tax base is in Europe when the articles could be published at low cost, on the web, in the US, while universities get to save more of their money for education.
1.) An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant. 2.) The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal. 3.) The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.
The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world."
Why don't the researchers just format the papers themselves and publish their work independently online? It seems like a trivial amount of work compared to the actual research that they are doing. I understand that many people believe that they shouldn't have to do this, but after reading the article I see nothing stopping them from distributing their work to the public.
They forgot that part of #3 is peer review, which is managed by the journal, but actually performed by academics for free. Oh, and the researcher usually has to pay a fee to get the paper published once the journal accepts their paper. So, most of the hard work in #3 is free, and the academic still has to pay the journal (usually from a government grant).
"In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free."
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.
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 guys. Something much more important is going on.
It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the publishers.
So your argument is "there must be some deep conspiracy which I cannot explain yet I will suggest with ominous tones, so let's do nothing." Classic muddying the waters.
1 -- I don't see what you're trying to imply, could you come out and say it?
2 -- Actually, the publishers do have a lot of power. The universities are stuck in a bad equilibrium (in the game theory sense) -- if any of them individually deviates (by not subscribing to popular/restrictive journals and not publishing in them), that university is going to be the one to get hurt.
The only way out for universities is if they all cooperate and decide to ditch the restrictive journals. There are movements toward this right now (against Elsevier, for instance), but it's very difficult to gain traction. You can't just pick up the red phone to every university president and say, "hey guys, stop publishing in these journals, I set up a whole different process over here!" The journals have the prestige, so they have the power for now.
The major non-governmental funding agencies recently banded together to solve the problem roughly the way you suggest, by creating their own open-access journal which they will enourage their grantees to submit their work to. It will be called eLife:
It would probably be considered dubious/anti-competitive if NIH and NSF launched their own journals, but because of the Open Access Initiative (which RWA attempts to reverse), NIH is able to host articles that have already been released to the public via PubMed Central.
While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that is crucial to science as it is practiced today, and an even harder time getting scientists to accept whatever solution it comes up with, since publishing in high quality, peer-reviewed journals is key to job advancement in most of academia.
Online publishing has only recently (in terms of university and government policy) become viable. There's still no real killer platforms, though there are a few good niche ones.
The universities and government are looking to ditch the journals, and the journals know it. But it's a slow process.
[+] [-] rflrob|14 years ago|reply
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 Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].
[1] http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/6582...
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
Another interesting case was when the whole editorial body of the journal "Topology" resigned in 2006 because they thought that its owner, Elsevier, was charging too high a price for subscriptions. Those editors then set up a rival journal, called Journal of Topology.
There is an interesting letter here from the editors of the journal explaining their reasoning behind their mass resignation http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf
[+] [-] silvestrov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanLuke|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imaginaryunit|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] OllieJones|14 years ago|reply
http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DannoHung|14 years ago|reply
Carolyn Maloney is my Congresswoman and I don't give a shit that the alternative is a conservative, this is ridiculous.
[+] [-] duncanj|14 years ago|reply
If you want to organize people on the street, I would recommend asking people on the street whether they support their tax dollars going to pay overpriced publishers whose tax base is in Europe when the articles could be published at low cost, on the web, in the US, while universities get to save more of their money for education.
[+] [-] pg_bot|14 years ago|reply
1.) An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant. 2.) The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal. 3.) The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.
The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world."
Why don't the researchers just format the papers themselves and publish their work independently online? It seems like a trivial amount of work compared to the actual research that they are doing. I understand that many people believe that they shouldn't have to do this, but after reading the article I see nothing stopping them from distributing their work to the public.
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] impendia|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amurmann|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zupreme|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RichardPrice|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hristov|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bo1024|14 years ago|reply
2 -- Actually, the publishers do have a lot of power. The universities are stuck in a bad equilibrium (in the game theory sense) -- if any of them individually deviates (by not subscribing to popular/restrictive journals and not publishing in them), that university is going to be the one to get hurt.
The only way out for universities is if they all cooperate and decide to ditch the restrictive journals. There are movements toward this right now (against Elsevier, for instance), but it's very difficult to gain traction. You can't just pick up the red phone to every university president and say, "hey guys, stop publishing in these journals, I set up a whole different process over here!" The journals have the prestige, so they have the power for now.
[+] [-] etal|14 years ago|reply
http://www.hhmi.org/news/elife20111107.html
It would probably be considered dubious/anti-competitive if NIH and NSF launched their own journals, but because of the Open Access Initiative (which RWA attempts to reverse), NIH is able to host articles that have already been released to the public via PubMed Central.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rflrob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
The universities and government are looking to ditch the journals, and the journals know it. But it's a slow process.