Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see, ten years from now, whether this model continues to be viable or whether the field will have adopted some entirely different mechanism for peer review.
It appears that the articles will be published under CC-BY licenses. The definition of the affected articles is quite broad, too: "SCOAP^3 Articles are defined as either all articles appearing in journals mostly carrying High-Energy Physics content, or articles appearing in “broad band” journals which have been submitted by researchers to arXiv.org under the corresponding categories."
The close integration with arXiv.org is pretty much essential for this to work, but I was still a bit surprised to see that arXiv categories are used as the defining feature of "particle physics content". (For those in the know, those categories are hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, and hep-lat.)
If the openness is increasing the number of citations of the articles in open journals it will affect the impact factors of the other journals and may force them to switch to open access later. I am really interested in the results as I have strictly now ideas in which way it will go. Are the non open high impact journals going to stay at the top?
Why, in this day and age, is there still publicly funded research that is not open access? Also I could rant for hours on the need to make your data available for any peer reviewed publication.
Because academic journals are products of inelastic demand. Researchers need to publish to keep their jobs[1]. Thus there is absolutely no incentive for the channels through which this publishing occurs to offer free access.
[1]By the way, being able to publish is especially necessary to receive public funding in the first place.
My professor argued that keeping even publicly funded research and data behind paywalls will keep at least some of the people who have no idea about the scientific method from doing dangerous nonsense with it. I don't share this opinion.
It seems to be a really good step towards breaking away from the current journal publishing monopoly which makes access to cutting edge research so expensive. I hope other branches of science adopt this as well.
Physical Review D, the journal that publishes most papers in the field, negotiated a fee of US$1,900 per article “on the principle that we should maintain our revenue”, says Joe Serene, treasurer and publisher at the American Physical Society, which owns the journal.
The "principle that we should maintain our revenue"? I like that principle. Which box do I check to have that apply to me as well?
I don't understand why SCOAP3 isn't driving a harder bargain. They are anticipating a $10MM budget --- wouldn't this be enough to hire some good editors and publish online?
If the whole field is behind this, worries about "impact factor" should disappear. Or is the problem that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to an outside assessment of "impact"?
I think the problem is that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to hazy, individual, non-standard assessments of impact, of which the calculated "Impact Factor" of journals that people publish in is one factor. My boss (and Public Library of Science founder) has a blog post related to this, http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=911 . Essentially, hiring/tenure committees don't explicitly sit down and plug in the impact factors of journals that a candidate has published in, but most people have a hierarchy of journals in their mind, with Science, Nature, and Cell (for biologists) at the top.
Almost all physics papers (not just particle physics papers) are posted on arXiv. Papers on arXiv are usually updated to the final published version, although the peer review process rarely produces significant changes.
It is unfortunate that university libraries will be continuing to send money to publishers who add almost no value to the scientific process.
It's great to see Nature, itself a high-priced journal, running this story.
arXiv.org really makes downloading papers a breeze. If only it were so easy in other discliplines. It's a lot easier than downloading articles from, say, ScienceDirect. The latter is, despite its name, a lot less "direct" than former. Just count the HTTP redirects and the number of domain names looked up. And many journals seem to have their own idiosyncracies vis-a-vis downloading. arXiv is by comparison beautifully simple and reliable. It has a nice consistency about it.
I guess my question is whether we need the journals at all ... the process of printing the journal itself certainly isn't the hard part, but is there a way to properly do peer review in an open system?
I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
Peer review is done for free by the community in any case, so this would not be a major problem. Most suggestions for a post-journal system I have seen so far are about setting up electronic journals with editorial boards that send out submissions for peer review as usual.
Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees, existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.
The value in this sort of compromise is that it's relatively painless to existing systems. You won't need to explain a whole new peer review system to a tenure committee, you won't need to radically restructure your grant spending, libraries pay more or less the same costs, and the journals get more or less the same revenue. The only difference is that now, your results are free for everyone to read (and not just in preprint form).
We'll have to wait and see whether this model turns out to be the first step in a gradual transition or a stopgap solution until a radically different approach to peer review becomes accepted. I for one am excited to find out.
We need journals because without them we'd have the Android App Store. I know that seems like a stretch but the challenge is that there are lots and lots of papers (publish-or-die is a mantra remember) and so quantity is assured, but quality is more nuanced. And more importantly quality of the work. So what a journal does is builds a reputation for filtering for only very high quality papers, and then other systems feed off that. So if you publish in Science that is cooler or more impressive than publishing in a journal which has no standards, or worse your own self published journal. The Android App store has a similar situation except it doesn't (yet) have a good quality filter, there is no third party that has risen to prominence as the place to go for authoritative reviews or opinions on the quality of a particular application.
It's actually Computer Science that has most scattered and disorganized publishing culture, and could use a lot more collective hacker attitude to somehow fix things.
[+] [-] Steuard|13 years ago|reply
Something like this may have been inevitable in particle physics: with essentially all articles appearing freely on arXiv.org, the journals have already been starting to look less necessary. That reality may have made them more willing to agree to something like this. It will be interesting to see, ten years from now, whether this model continues to be viable or whether the field will have adopted some entirely different mechanism for peer review.
It appears that the articles will be published under CC-BY licenses. The definition of the affected articles is quite broad, too: "SCOAP^3 Articles are defined as either all articles appearing in journals mostly carrying High-Energy Physics content, or articles appearing in “broad band” journals which have been submitted by researchers to arXiv.org under the corresponding categories."
The close integration with arXiv.org is pretty much essential for this to work, but I was still a bit surprised to see that arXiv categories are used as the defining feature of "particle physics content". (For those in the know, those categories are hep-ex, hep-th, hep-ph, and hep-lat.)
[+] [-] Loic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pav3l|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apawloski|13 years ago|reply
[1]By the way, being able to publish is especially necessary to receive public funding in the first place.
[+] [-] blots|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SeanDav|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwaring|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkurz|13 years ago|reply
The "principle that we should maintain our revenue"? I like that principle. Which box do I check to have that apply to me as well?
I don't understand why SCOAP3 isn't driving a harder bargain. They are anticipating a $10MM budget --- wouldn't this be enough to hire some good editors and publish online?
If the whole field is behind this, worries about "impact factor" should disappear. Or is the problem that salary/tenure/promotion is tied to an outside assessment of "impact"?
[+] [-] rflrob|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbsurf|13 years ago|reply
It is unfortunate that university libraries will be continuing to send money to publishers who add almost no value to the scientific process.
[+] [-] creat0|13 years ago|reply
arXiv.org really makes downloading papers a breeze. If only it were so easy in other discliplines. It's a lot easier than downloading articles from, say, ScienceDirect. The latter is, despite its name, a lot less "direct" than former. Just count the HTTP redirects and the number of domain names looked up. And many journals seem to have their own idiosyncracies vis-a-vis downloading. arXiv is by comparison beautifully simple and reliable. It has a nice consistency about it.
[+] [-] tingletech|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|13 years ago|reply
I'm certainly happy to see this consortium has moved in the right direction, but could it be even more open?
[+] [-] anonymouz|13 years ago|reply
Moving away from journals seems to be largerly an issue of missing consensus and inertia. Also, where you publish is important for hiring committees, existing journals have a lot of credibility, newly sprung up ones not so much.
[+] [-] Steuard|13 years ago|reply
We'll have to wait and see whether this model turns out to be the first step in a gradual transition or a stopgap solution until a radically different approach to peer review becomes accepted. I for one am excited to find out.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tipzntrix|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frozenport|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|13 years ago|reply