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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
While I agree that free information is a public good, and that the people should have access to the research they pay for, there is something else to consider here.
The strength of science publishing is the peer-review process. This anonymous and sometimes brutal process (in combination with solid editing) is responsible for the quality of the articles published in journals. It is also not free. If you remove that part of the process, you remove one of the major reasons why science, as a process, is so powerful. And you damage the quality of the science you do publish.
Science is not a democracy, where everyone is entitled to have their say. Your work has to earn the right to be heard by being good enough. Any "free" information process which doesn't have a peer-review and editing process will do far more damage to science that it will benefit science.
Open source journals needn't be profitless. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) has totally free access. Instead of the reader paying, the authors pay, and make their research available for free.
This works well for anyone publishing highly specialized research. If you want to make your work broadly available, publishing in a super-specialized subscription-only journal may bury your work in a journal that few libraries get. However, if your work is out there in a freely available journal, anyone with an internet connection can get it.
Elsevier is fighting a losing battle. As we scientists get used to the idea of having free access to published research, we're going to demand it from the fewer and fewer journals that don't provide it (many journals now provide their publications for free within 6 months of publishing - it's only the privately held journals that don't).
Andrew, Andrew --
The work I do as managing editor of a small science journal, and that of my staff, is only one cost of the journal. There's the cost of printing, of composition, of paper, of the web site, etc. etc. If readers can get this material for "free" all that means is someone else must pay. Who? Pretty soon, all science will be done with those with grants and deep pockets and poor scientists, smaller labs, etc. need not apply. Or all science will driven by profit.
Look, sweetie, there's a huge government subsisdy on sugar but we all still have to pay for at the grocery store.
Or try this: National Parks are a good thing. But you still pay to enter them, despite your taxes.
EVERYTHING costs money. Readers of science journals need to contribute -- and we need to be able to enforce that. Until some one comes up with a workable solution.
I've been studying and learning about this issue for several years now. You have done no work at all, just a "sounds snappy" sort of come back. This is a big big issue, this is a major change and a lot of us are just hoping to be able to keep making a living at something we thought was helping the world -- the dissemination of knowledge.
Rachel Russell
Managing Editor
American Mineralogist
Victorycabal said:
The strength of science publishing is the peer-review process. This anonymous and sometimes brutal process (in combination with solid editing) is responsible for the quality of the articles published in journals. It is also not free. If you remove that part of the process, you remove one of the major reasons why science, as a process, is so powerful. And you damage the quality of the science you do publish.
VC conflates peer review with editing. Peer review is actually done for free by the academic community. Authors submit their articles freely to publishers, sign over copyright to the publisher, then other academic researchers perform peer review freely. Different journal publishers then perform different levels of editing of the accepted article. As VC points out, peer review is vital to the quality of science, but the costs of peer review are minimal to the publishers.
Almost all Open Access journals have the peer review process in place. But scientific publishers know that "swift boating" works, even on PhDs.
Imagine if Ford charged the current price for their cars, but got all of its parts for free, the assemblers worked for free, and Ford's only costs were management salaries and delivery charges. That's the current scientific publishing system. The internet and Open Access changes that, and publishers are scared. Not because science might be harmed, but because their profits will be.
It is really rewarding to see so many viewpoints expressed here.
I'd just like to stress that my ire on this particular issue is not aimed at _all_ science publishers, but is focused on the big players, who have, among other things, been raising their fees to libraries at faster than the rate of inflation, even as costs are _dropping_, and who have the gall to hire a P.R. agent who is pushing "messages" as disingenuous as "public access equals government censorship."
People in the business of publishing scientific information ought to know better.
The problem is that science journals are run as for-profit companies, even as they exercise an effective monopoly over their markets. No matter how high the price goes, no academic library can possibly cut its subscription to a major scientific journal like Science or Nature. You don’t have to be an economist to anticipate the result: prices that bear no rational relation to the cost of production. For decades the soaring cost of science journals has been devouring the acquisitions budgets of academic libraries, forcing them to gut the rest of their collections to keep up. Social science and humanities journals, by contrast, are run as non-profits, and continue to charge very reasonable subscription rates even as they shoulder the costs of peer review and continue to publish first-rate scholarship.
For the sake of argument, let’s suppose there is some unknown reason why publicly funded science research has to be published by private for-profit companies. How then can we keep the companies honest and prevent price gouging? There are really only two options: either strict governmental regulation, or market competition.
New cheaper alternatives like PubMed Central and Public Library of Science should be congratulated for finally forcing long overdue innovation on a venal and fossilized industry. Throughout history monopolists have argued that, paradoxically, monopolies are actually good for society. And throughout history monopolists have been wrong, wrong, wrong.
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