Open Access and the Boycott of Elsevier! Let uns not stop here and take the digital revolution one step further!

Believing in open models and supporting ideas of copy left I am more than happy to see the current developement of scientists worldwide publicly making statements of not supporting Elsevier in the future which I will obviously join!
You can find the page where scientists make thos statements under: http://thecostofknowledge.com/
And you find much more resources on the whole discussion under http://michaelnielsen.org/polymath1/index.php?title=Journal_publishing_reform

Is this enough or do we need to go even further?

in my oppinion we need to take much more steps. Journals and publications where good institutions in times 50 years ago. Where it took mankind much efford to spread valuable information. But heaving the web and network technologies a scientific journal seems to be pointless in a certain way. The entire reviewing process of course gives some trend of what papers have good quality and what papers don’t. Afterall science is envolving at a faster and faster speed after all. 
But as we can see from open projects like wikipedia, linux, wordpress and many more those procedures also yield amazingly good results. They take less effort and are much faster in their deciession process. I have observed that open repositories like http://arxiv.org/ helped mathematicians a lot. But as I know from my good friend Dr. Heinrich Hartmann who is a postdoc at Oxford is that many advanced scientific research discussions among the younger generation already proceed on http://mathoverflow.net/ an “unscientific”, not citeable, not driving your citation count webservice. There people can ask questions and post answers. The best thing is they can rate the answers and receive “carma points” for providing good answers and receiving much feedback. 
We see this outside of academia envolving even faster. When I have a question about anything I type it into google search. Chances are high that someone asked the question on yahoo answers or some similar service where best answers are voted and crowed sourced! If the entire society has figured out the strength of this system, why not using it in academia as well?
Obviously these kind of communications and collective intelligence efforts are possible in todays world. So why do we still stick to our old fashoined “good” working methods despite the fact that everyone I talk too is complaining about the reviewing process? Never heard someone complaining about mathoverflows feedback mechanisms!

It is also much cheaper!

It is unbelievable that Elsevier is making a revenue of $3 bn / year. This money comes from our education system! This money could be invested to researches. Maintaining a reliabale citeable academic website compared to mathoverflow would cost us a fraction of this money. Making it possible to afford more researchers actually working on problems! 
But actually the best part is, we don’t even need to maintain such a site. Servieces exist. Maybe not designed specifically for academic research but we could still use them. Why do we need a conference or e journal. Every idea every solution can be made publicly and discussed with a broad audience. My first research paper about graphity is still in the reviewing process where some comitee decides weather the idea and results are good enough to be published. This is happening while the corresponding blogpost already received 1465 views on my blog and about twice as much on dzone and made quite some buzz already setting me in the discussion with some co’workers from linked in, yahoo and microsoft… proving that my research results are actually of interest to people. All this happens with me being a new fish in science having no precompiled trust or authority on any topic at all.
So everyone it is your descission how you act. Of course it is easy and probably efficient as well as time saving to rely on some authority to select high quality information sources for you. And I am not saying that the quality in top conferences and journals is not high. But – besides the money – you might pay a very high price in the sense that these authorities filter a lot of also good information for you. Why not using todays modern technologies and have the crowd decide which resources and ideas are worthwile spreading among people and which ones are not?

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3 Comments

  1. The comments above are very much mainstream today unfortunately they exhibit a lack of understanding of the publishing process and intertwine a whole set of issues that should be kept separate for a more insightful understanding:
    1. The one model fallacy: The first fallacy is about claiming that journals (or conference proceedings, books) do not have a future, because interactive systems perform so great, e.g. Wikipedia. Unfortunately, participation in Wikipedia is decreasing and it appears that Wikipedia does not work so great in the long tail where only small groups are interested. It is not uncommon that some research topics are only relevant for 30 people world-wide. If they do agree and share everything on Wikipedia – fine, reality is frequently closer to disagreement and this disagreement should be argumented in insightful articles that elaborate their findings at a length appropriate to the topic of discussion (btw: Nature, Science etc. journals used to be kind of abstract journals for the real thing. It is rather a failure that they are now claimed to be the real thing).
    I believe that you should use whatever model is best for your research – and frequently there will be several models;
    actually, with posters, workshop talks, conference talks, and journals the scientific community has practiced different
    types of publication models for a long time. I find it natural to extend such types to new platforms, and also to give
    academic rewards to new ways of communicating research results.
    2. The popularity fallacy: The second fallacy implicit in the above arguments is that what is cited more frequently is better in every sense. This is definitely wrong. A high number of citations may have many reasons: high quality, fashion, large
    funding for a topic, many professors still researching what they did when they were first hired, etc. A good journal
    will first look for a fit to the broad topic of the journal, second about quality (in particular methodological soundness),
    third about scholarship and only fourth (or even later) about popularity. By this way a journal (or a high-caliber conference)
    does not only serve as a publishing outlet, but also as a training outlet. Writers *must* learn how to do good
    research in order to publish it in good places.
    Social media are much more susceptible to fashions and hypes (even if common research comes with some fashions and hypes, too, it is much more dampened there!), hence being much more likely to value outsider research – which may be the foundation for the next big thing.
    3. The no cost-fallacy: This third fallacy presumes that publishing (and archiving!) comes for free. I have been publishing for 17 years and operating as an Editor-in-Chief for Elsevier’s Journal of Web Semantics for 3 years. Either you find some academic crazy enough to do everything in his/her spare time (then this is the person paying the prize) or you need administrative support for nagging reviewers, setting up a server, maintaining the server, etc. Even if the software is hosted in some other place for free, this comes with non-negligible cost and as I write this I am not aware
    which academic institution would be willing to carry this cost e.g. for the Journal of Web Semantics. What I have observed is
    that the up-time for the free pre-print server of the Journal of Web Semantics over the history of the journal has been rather low while it wandered through 4 different academic institutions (most of which failed in maintaining it for longer time). When compared to publishers’ archives (it’s their business!), it would not give me confidence in being around for archival purposes. There are very successful “free” models, e.g. http://www.jair.org/, this Journal of AI research, however, receives financial support by academic organizations which earn such money from conference fees paid by – academics. Eventually someone has to pay.
    While more issues would have to be discussed here (e.g. academic reward mechanisms, selection mechanisms, the broad history of failed and successful open publication models), I close here fore sheer lack of time.
    To sum up new models should be added to publishing and some publishers even drive this process with academic competitions (cf. e.g. Elsevier challenge http://www.websemanticsjournal.org/index.php/ps/issue/view/4), academic reward mechanisms must accomodate such novel types of communication. The objective of selecting high quality content from the large mass of lesser quality needs to remain preserved and this process is costly – even if academics put in their time for reviewing and editorship “for free” (it is not for free, but paid by the universities, too). Academics and politicians should
    negotiate the conditions under which they buy into a publishers’ archive. It has been common in every industry (car, computers, etc.) that price advantages achieved through innovation are at least partially given back to the customers. This has not happened yet to a sufficient extent in academic publishing, but this requires a more nuanced discussion than what is currently happening.

  2. […] I visited my friend Heinrich Hartmann in Oxford. We talked about various issues how research is done in these days and how the web could theoretically help to spread information faster and more efficiently connect […]

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