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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
One other significant issue is, how will the journals be indexed and accessed in the future? Scientific journals aren't like magazines, where you read them once and then throw them out. They are used for decades. And there has to be a way find the information, among the hundreds of thousands of articles in the scientific literature.
I'm a chemist, and I can't just google to find the research I need for my work. I need a specialized search engine that allows me to search for chemical structures. A few weeks ago, I used a journal article from 1917 - the only reason I was able to find that article was because the structures of all the compounds referenced in the article were indexed and available for searching. If an article is published on someone's web site, it's unlikely that it will be indexed and made available in that way, either today or 10, 20 or 50 years from now, for future scientists.
There are some major disadvantages to the current system, but what works for the latest "press-friendly" research might not work so well for other types of scientific journals. And while it's important to have the information today, it's also crucially important that the information is available in the future - and in a format that can be searched and accessed.
Last I checked, hard disk sizes were still doubling every couple of years or so, and text search and retrieval systems use algorithms and technologies in the public domain. The cost of archiving electronic journals is utterly trivial compared to the cost of archiving dead tree books and magazines, like thousands of university libraries around the world already do. They already manage in the immensely more difficult task of preserving millions of rare paper books and journals; why wouldn't they be able to manage the immensely easier task of keeping a few servers with big drive arrays backed up, powered-up, and running decent indexing software?
And academic publishers are leeches. They do very little actual work; they just shuffle papers between submitters and reviewers, and put the end results on their servers. For this trivial service they charge like wounded bulls, and are free to continue to increase these charges into the never-never because IP laws give them the keys for many decades at a time.
I agree completely with Robert Merkel that the publishers are leeches. I was part of the academic community for a number of years, and have both been a contributer and reviewer. At this point in time, the publishers barely have to typeset anything, because of software like WORD and LaTeX. When I reviewed, the only thing I really recommended rejection for was bad, unclear writing. The research itself was honest, if not all that exciting. The peer-review process would effectively go on in an informal way even without the publishers, because in most fields, things are so specialized and sub-fields so small that everyone needs to be concerned about their reputations. If someone makes up research, it is either obvious to anyone familiar with the subject, or will be exposed soon enough. People's web pages will link to the research they find useful, if it is published on the web.
Sometimes the publishers don't even do any peer review. I was invited by Elsevier to submit a paper for publication because my abstract was accepted to a conference I was participating in. The real "peer-review" work (checking for relevance and rigor) was done by the conference committee who accepted the paper for the conference, not Elsevier. Elsevier's role in this case was simply to stick everything that the authors had written, and in most cases typeset themselves, into a "special volume" that they could charge for. Their attempt at "proof reading" was laughable. They sent me a list of corrections, six sentences which their editors had modified for grammar. The problem was, the editors clearly didn't speak English as a native language, as they inserted lots of articles that made no sense (e.g. "wavelengths of the interest"). So I had to spend my time submitting corrections to each of the sentences that their editors messed up, and return everything back to the way I had written it. So they contributed nothing, and made more work for me.
By the way one of my pet peeves is that when I search for terms in Google, abstract pages from the publishers pop up, though they don't have the papers available for free. I guess they use all the keywords from the paper (not just the words in the abstract) to draw you to their site. It really wastes my time. It would be nice if Google separated sites that make you pay to see the things you were searching for from the ones that take a more honest approach.
Let’s be real for a moment. The publishers may be driven by money, but scientific careerism isn’t – it’s about ideology, stability, influence and ultimately status. The currency is the publication, or citation, which is scaled in value (why journals advertise exposure ratings) and bartered and traded (through unearned multiple authorships).
The formal mechanism by which this currency is controlled is the peer review process, which is less about quality and intellectual honesty than about controlling the current value of types of currency (maintaining current orthodoxy).
There have been some histories of fraud in science over the years (all that fudging and cheating through undergrad and the learned prostitution to a committee through grad school – did you think that somehow stopped once the research positions were awarded?). I believe a review would reveal that in those rare cases when incompetence or counterfeiting is exposed, it’s not generally to the credit of the peer review process, but in spite of it.
But perhaps I’m unfair.
The issue is not peer review and the issue is not profit. One can be confident that the publishers will succeed or fail like any other company when confronted by the (relatively) free market. If the scientific, medical and technical communities perceive a benefit to a certain journal, then it will prosper. If they do not, no Orwellian PR firm or corporate welfare bonanza from vest pocket Senators will save them.
Peer review is just one example of building and conveying confidence in the fruits of research. There are other trust models, and more are evolving every day on the web. Amazon has user ratings. Ebay places a direct dollar value on the most obscure items. The most fundamental trust model pertaining to journals themselves is not peer review, but rather the citations from other works in a community's literature. Trust ultimately derives from the entire community, not from individual reviewers - these are the true peers. Peer review per se serves simply as the gatekeeper to ensure a minimal level of compliance with the norms of a particular field. Truly revolutionary research often overturns those norms, of course, and may have a hard time getting published.
The journals have been wrestling with the realities of electronic publication for ten or fifteen years now. Ultimately, the existence of ubiquitous computing, of the web and of cheap digital media will dominate future public policy questions regarding publishing. The final disposition of this issue will lie somewhere between completely open access and completely closed access. Few publishers will find that they have the clout to use the denial of access to their product as leverage to demand payment. Rather, the contravening demand inherent in most types of technical and scientific communities for open access will cause traditional publishers to find ways to provide at least semi-open access to their own publications (and not just to abstracts).
One suspects that the lobbyists and PR firms will be long gone before the journals reach a new accommodation with the communities they serve (not to mention with the public interest). It is the journals who are squandering their budgets rather than wrestling with the inherent facts of the situation who are suffering here.
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