https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/open-access-and-the-boycott-of-elsevier-let-uns-not-stop-here-and-take-the-digital-revolution-one-step-further/ Extract knowledge from your data and be ahead of your competition Tue, 17 Jul 2018 11:07:57 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6 https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/open-access-and-the-boycott-of-elsevier-let-uns-not-stop-here-and-take-the-digital-revolution-one-step-further/#comment-28436 Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:33:30 +0000 http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/?p=1054#comment-28436 […] Open Access and bycott of Elsevier […]

]]> https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/open-access-and-the-boycott-of-elsevier-let-uns-not-stop-here-and-take-the-digital-revolution-one-step-further/#comment-28434 Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:27:22 +0000 http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/?p=1054#comment-28434 […] 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 […]

]]> https://www.rene-pickhardt.de/open-access-and-the-boycott-of-elsevier-let-uns-not-stop-here-and-take-the-digital-revolution-one-step-further/#comment-28431 Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:48:33 +0000 http://www.rene-pickhardt.de/?p=1054#comment-28431 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.

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