Via Megite comes this rather provocatively titled article by Gregory M. Lamb of The Christian Science Monitor. The article entitled “Is this the end of the scholarly journal?” will be of interest to the readers of this blog and while I have my pulpit, let me share what I think about it.
First things first, I hate it when someone says “scientific advances sometimes come as lightning flashes of inspiration”. While “eureka” moments do occur, I think most of us will agree that science is successful because of patience and methodology, bundled in with ingenuity. Anyway, I digress. Mr. Lamb focuses his article on the internet. While it is not quite true that anyone can read a scientific paper, yet, since some of the bigger journals are protected by subscriptions (American Chemical Society anyone), he is quite right to note that access to scientific literature has changed a lot. Some of us, myself included, have maintained our libraries as electronic ones for a while now. It’s been a long time since I actually went to a library to get a paper. I still wish Connotea had been around when I was in graduate school. It would have been good to be free of Endnote. As I noted recently, and others have for a while, blogs add another layer of accessibility to scientific research.
So where is scientific publication going? Is peer review done? Those topics have been covered a lot lately, so I will not regurgitate that part. I would like to say this. Peer review is not dead, by no means. It’s place in science has changed a bit. With a journal like PLoS One, traditional peer review (although in a more modernized form) is supplemented/enhanced by the wisdom of crowds, except, these are crowds which have a fair bit of knowledge and an opinion to share. The challenge for science, and for open publishing to work, is for people to openly express their opinions and for the scientific community to accept a culture of differing opinions, as opposed to feeling threatened.
Lets add one more twist to the whole issue. Reputation and the “circle of trust”. Jon Udell has blogged about this extensively, we notice it every day in our lives, e.g. a customized Google Co-op search engine may only search through resources that the creator trusts and relies on. We are in a period of flux. We should all understand that transparent sharing of scientific knowledge is in our best interest. If we are good citizens about it, and help the movement grow by participating, it will only be in our best interest.
Further reading
The onslaught against scientific publication
An open scientific future
PLoS One – The implications
“Social” science
Biology, search and Udell
The scientific conversation – Culture wars
Technorati Tags: Open Science, Open Publishing, PLoS One, Peer Review
10 Comments
it is not quite true that anyone can read a scientific paper
It’s not even remotely close to true. Only about 10% of scholarly journals are OA, and the remaining 90% lock up at least some of their content behind tollgates.
To put that into perspective, take life sciences as an example: as of right now, PubMed contains 16,813,828 entries, but PubMed Central (the OA subset) contains 880,418 — so well over 94% of the content of the most widely-known biomed literature database is unavailable without payment to a publisher. That payment, for an individual, is typically around US$30 per article.
Very very true. I am still hoping that organizations like HHMI and the Wellcome Trust will encourage their fundees to embrace open publishing.
Very very true. I am still hoping that organizations like HHMI and the Wellcome Trust will encourage their fundees to embrace open publishing.
I access the journals through my university library, but I’m wondering if there are public libraries that offer access to the same research journals (either directly or through an interlibrary loan system).
Rather than putting the burden on the journals to stop requiring subscriptions, a better business model would be for libraries to open journal access to the public by charging a single low monthly or yearly fee. This could help libraries, which always seem to be struggling under demands to purchase more and more books and journals, by increasing the size of their paying customer base. Maybe smaller libraries couldn’t manage this, but perhaps a larger one, like the New York Public Library system could do it.
Deepak,
Google co-op is really a powerful tool to help us manage open information. I am doing a workshop at Drexel on Monday on using it for teaching and the response has been tremendous.
Deepak,
Google co-op is really a powerful tool to help us manage open information. I am doing a workshop at Drexel on Monday on using it for teaching and the response has been tremendous.
Jackie … to the best of my knowledge, no, but I could be wrong. Question is, why should we subscribe? Shouldn’t scientific information, much of it funded by tax dollars, be available in the public domain? That’s why I applaud HHMI and Wellcome Trust insisting that publications be made available via Pubmed Central, etc.
Jean-Claude … I completely agree. It is a wonderful resource
Jackie … to the best of my knowledge, no, but I could be wrong. Question is, why should we subscribe? Shouldn't scientific information, much of it funded by tax dollars, be available in the public domain? That's why I applaud HHMI and Wellcome Trust insisting that publications be made available via Pubmed Central, etc.
Jean-Claude … I completely agree. It is a wonderful resource
Rather than putting the burden on the journals to stop requiring subscriptions, a better business model would be for libraries to open journal access to the public by charging a single low monthly or yearly fee.
Very large public libraries do have some useful scientific subscriptions, and in fact you can often join them for a fee even if you do not live in their “jurisdiction” (see, e.g., this from Kevin Kelly). While academic libraries could follow suit, I do not think it would be a viable business model:
1. How many members of the public would pay the necessary fee for academic access? Put another way, what would that fee need to be, in order to cover costs, given the likely low level of uptake?
2. KK mentions JSTOR. I have access via work; the JSTOR database covers a total of 669 titles, with fewer than 100 in biological sciences. Considering that there are nearly 25,000 scholarly journals that leaves a pretty fair gap. This generalizes: NO library can afford complete coverage, and most cannot afford even decent coverage.
This is entirely separate from Deepak’s point, that public funding should generate public domain information. Further, machine readability relies on the absence of client-side access barriers like subscriptions, so even if costs did not change it would be better to pay them up-front.
Rather than putting the burden on the journals to stop requiring subscriptions, a better business model would be for libraries to open journal access to the public by charging a single low monthly or yearly fee.
Very large public libraries do have some useful scientific subscriptions, and in fact you can often join them for a fee even if you do not live in their “jurisdiction” (see, e.g., this from Kevin Kelly). While academic libraries could follow suit, I do not think it would be a viable business model:
1. How many members of the public would pay the necessary fee for academic access? Put another way, what would that fee need to be, in order to cover costs, given the likely low level of uptake?
2. KK mentions JSTOR. I have access via work; the JSTOR database covers a total of 669 titles, with fewer than 100 in biological sciences. Considering that there are nearly 25,000 scholarly journals that leaves a pretty fair gap. This generalizes: NO library can afford complete coverage, and most cannot afford even decent coverage.
This is entirely separate from Deepak's point, that public funding should generate public domain information. Further, machine readability relies on the absence of client-side access barriers like subscriptions, so even if costs did not change it would be better to pay them up-front.
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