journals

George Monbiot writes in the Guardian with some sobering statistics about academic publishing: "Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist"

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they "develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years". But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more.

All of this money has gone into creating a publishing system that isn't even usable or accessible to the volunteer laborers that create the content. People who have good journal access at research universities (and I'm fortunate to be one of these) still have to burn minutes every time we access an article to go through the ridiculous paywalls. Then there's the crazy rigmarole of linking online discussion to these paywall-ridden papers.

Could somebody please let Amazon take charge of this? They have a system that maintains content at varying levels of pay/free, recognizes its users across multiple devices, and presents text material in an easy-to-read format. Every research author can publish to the e-book format as easily as an export from a word processor. Let's suppose that editors charged for the service of managing peer review, at levels that vary with the prestige that they have earned. Some editors would charge a fee that enabled them to pay reviewers, some would be paid or subsidized by universities. Then authors could choose to pay for a prestigious editor, and recoup that cost by grants or charging per-access, again, possibly subsidized by libraries.

The solution to the collective action problem isn't complaining about the journals, it's providing a solution that works better.

UPDATE (2011-08-29): Noah Gray comments on Monbiot's article, sharing his perspective from inside Nature Publishing Group (but not speaking for the company). I thought he made a useful contribution, and contributed my own comment, including:

Most of the participants in this process are uncompensated, or are at best compensated only indirectly. The indirect compensation at present is tightly linked to prestige: publishing, editing and reviewing for the right journals. Secrecy and control have been routes to reinforce prestige, as are the traditional methods of advertising, sponsorship and signing "big names" by giving preferred treatment. These methods are design flaws from the perspective of promoting good science, as they exclude by institution, by nationality, and by arbitrary tastes.

David Dobbs writes about the structural barriers to more open science: "Free Science, One Paper at a Time". Summing up a large collaboration on Alzheimer's research, he writes:

The language used here — everything entering the public domain, the dismantling of silos, the parking of egos and IP padlocks — might have been lifted from an open-science manifesto. And even Big Science appreciated the outcome. To open-science advocates, this raises a good and somewhat obvious question: Why don’t we do science like this all the time?

Part of the answer, strangely, is the very thing at the center of science: the paper. Once science’s main conduit, the paper has become its choke point.

He discusses a number of new initiatives to assess researchers' activity in areas other than paper publishing, as well as strategies for post-publication review of research -- the kinds of incentives and technologies that might ease the paper publication bottleneck.

Dobbs doesn't explicitly mention the high pressure to cram significant results into a single high-profile publication. I find this pressure in paleoanthropology to be worse than most other factors. Researchers hold up results so that they will have enough to get that Science or Nature publication. And then, the results are reported in a highly obfuscated way, because they are tacked into a supplement without much editing or review. The paper itself is usually all conclusions and discussion, with no discussion of methods. This allows some research groups to claim that a Science or Nature publication isn't a "real" publication of their results, because a more detailed monograph is necessary to report them fully.

In other words, it's six different kinds of barrier to open science, all rolled up into one basic problem.

Last year I noted the publication of a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson, which claimed that kin selection is not a sufficient explanation for anything in biology. My post ("Inclusive fitness works") basically expressed my incredulity that Nature published the thing.

This week, Nature published several comments on the paper, including one signed by 137 evolutionary biologists. I think the best source to read is Jerry Coyne's post about the commentary ("Big dust-up about kin selection"):

If the Nowak et al. paper is so bad, why was it published? That’s obvious, and is an object lesson in the sociology of science. If Joe Schmo et al. from Buggerall State University had submitted such a misguided paper to Nature, it would have been rejected within an hour (yes, Nature sometimes does that with online submissions!). The only reason this paper was published is because it has two big-name authors, Nowak and Wilson, hailing from Mother Harvard. That, and the fact that such a contrarian paper, flying in the face of accepted evolutionary theory, was bound to cause controversy. Well, Nature got its controversy but lost its intellectual integrity, becoming something of a scientific National Enquirer. Oh, and boo to the Templeton Foundation, who funded the whole Nowak et al. mess and highlighted the paper on their website.

"Scientific National Enquirer"...wow, harsh words, but then the Weekly World News was unavailable for comment...

Oh, and Richard Dawkins shows up in Coyne's comments section, including the awesome response, "You are still wrecked among heathen dreams."

The Occasional Pamphlet reflects on the new megajournal trend in open access: "A ray of sunshine in the open-access future". PLoS ONE is being joined by SAGE Open and Scientific Reports from Nature Publishing Group.

The mega-journal trend means that strong traditional publishers with name recognition are entering open-access publishing in a big way. They’ll be hard pressed to trot out their hackneyed canards (vanity press, disenfranchisement). And these journals will provide coverage of a huge swathe of academic fields. Between SAGE Open, PLoS ONE, and Scientific Reports, essentially all of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences are covered. In addition, the breadth of these journals means that they will be competing for the same pool of articles. Authors will have a choice between submitting papers in genetics, say, to PLoS One or G3, in physics to AIP Advances or Scientific Reports, and so forth. Publishers will have to compete in order to attract authors, either on price or publisher services or both. They’ll have to market these journals to authors, using their intellectual capital to convince authors that OA journals (at least their OA journals) are a Good Thing. As authors and promotion committees get used to using the new article-level metrics (as they already increasingly are, with download counts and h-index), journal brand name — whether of these mega-journals or traditional journals — will become less important, and authors will feel freer to publish in these and other OA journals, again based on publisher services rather than journal brand name.

I find G3 very interesting. A journal devoted to "emphasis on data quality and utility, rather than detailed mechanistic insight or subjective assessment of immediate impact." It seems to me that the theme reflects the reality of a division in the field between data generators and data consumers. The advantage is that it enables recognition and citation for data generation without requiring long-term working relationships between groups. The drawback is obvious -- why the heck are we generating these data, if we're not going to seriously test hypotheses about mechanisms?