the algorithm of closed source publishing
As Ed Felten reported last week, the Journal of Algorithm's Editorial Board has quit en masse. Elsevier had raised its annual subscription price to a point the board thought prohibitive to the journal's mission, and the board thus resigned. This is another sign of the logic of the future of scientific publishing. Open access publishing (see, e.g., PLoS) makes expensive closed source publishing less and less acceptable.
Not -- as many seem to think -- because there's anything evil about publishers. Or about publishers making money. But because there is something evil about locking up knowledge unnecessarily. If there is another way to publish that doesn't result in knowledge being limited to the few, then science at least ought to pursue it.
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Comments (9)
I strongly agree.
I'm a scientist (astronomer) and on the science library advisory committe at my university. (It goes without saying that opinions are my own and do not represent Vanderbilt, etc.) Each year, the cost of maintaining journal subscriptions (including electronic submissios) has been going up by some huge factor-- around 10%, but this number is off of the top of my head, so don't quote me on it. Meanwhile, the library's budget goes up by less than that. (Especially right now, when college budgets tend to be lower.)
The difference in money has been equivalent to firing one staff member each year.
They've been able to cope so far by moving things about and making things more efficient, but that hits a wall after a while.
Clearly this is not a maintainable situation. On the other hand, if you want to be a first-class research institution, clearly you need access to the relevant literature.
Specfically in my field, as far as I'm concerned the journals only do one or two useful things. The crucial thing they do is refereeing. If your paper has been vetted by a referee, and has the "Astronomical Journal" stamp of approval, it tells the community that it is at least worth looking at. (It might still be wrong, but it's not completely half-cocked.) There *are* free preprint servers, but some nuts upload papers there, so you can't trust everything that's on there. The second useful thing they do is having editors, who figure out what goes in what issue, etc. This is of secondary importants.
All that typesetting, printing, distribution, etc., is irrelevant in today's age, in my opinion. OK, perhaps somewhere, perhaps in the third world, there are people who still really need paper copies. But most of us don't look at paper copies of journals at all any more. We look at electronic tables of cotents, we read online the articles that look interesting, we print out the ones that are really interesting. A lot of expense goes into production and distribution of paper copies that is irrelelvant.
Similarly, typesetting is no longer crucial. A glance at the preprint server shows that authors are perfectly capable of producing readable preprints that are absolutely as good as science needs. We don't need the journals to typeset any more.
In fact, we almost don't need the journals at all; all we *really* need are the editors and the referees. The former are paid astronomers, the latter are astronomers who work on (effectively) a volunteer basis, at the request of the editor.
It seems insane that so much money goes into them. Libraries pay for subscriptions. Astronomers page page charges (which comes ultimately from grants). Some of this is necessary-- to maintain servers, to pay editors-- but not all of it.
Fortunately, in astronomy, almost all papers accepted to the journals get uploaded to www.arxiv.org, so if you find something interesting on adsabs.harvard.edu which you is in a journal you don't have an electronic submission to, you can still get the text of the paper in a readable format.
Nonetheless, basic science, which not only has the stated goal of enriching human knowledge, but also is by and large funded by taxpayer money, should have it's results free and open to all.
I fantasize that once I have tenure, I will start publishing only in "open" journals. I will have to see first if I get tenure at all, and second what the world looks like then. Doubtless, I will be sacrficing a certain amount of recongition and stature by so doing, at least temporarily. If I'm lucky, PLoS will have an astronomy journal by then. We'll see. In the mean time, I'll just avoid publishing in journals that want to embargo results, and be happy that ApJ and AJ allow me to upload preprints without restrictions.
All of this was an off-the-top-of-my-head rant, and I reserve the right to fully change my position without notice :) After all, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
-Rob
Keep in mind that not only the publishers but
also scientists also lock up knowledge. The
scientists say that they want to open up the
knowledge but in reality, they still want to
have control over knowledge. How is this
possible? Simply, it is copyright. As
long as they want to claim copyright in
their writings, they are not any different
from the publishers. In fact, they would
have no objection if the copyright term
is indefinitely extended.
The news about people quitting editorial
board for the Journal of Algorithms is not
earthshaking, from the perspective of
copyright. It only shifts the control
from the publisher to whomever.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo@voicenet.com>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
Some scientists want to control their discoveries, yes, although generally that is in the form of patent rather than copyright.
But you are wrong to say that because the scientists keep the copyright to their works, they don't want to share it. Look at the Creeative Commons, for heavens sake! That's all about sharing, but there's a lot in there beyond the public domain. The original creators can keep the copyright to their work while sharing it freely.
The currence of science is credit for what you've done. As such, it's very reasonable to ask that whenever your work is used, you get cited for it. This fits very well with one of the CC licenses, even, and is fully open. What scientists object to is when others simply can't afford to get to the results of publicy funded work. It should be freely available for all, but pretty much everybody in the "free culture" movement agrees that there is more to freely available than just public domain.
-Rob
In response to Rob Knop's comment:
Your comment proves my point that the scientists
want to retain control over their works. They
want to be the ones to decide whether they want
to share their works with the world, not you or
me.
This is the reason why many scientists are
resistant against the House Bill 2613 which
would place the scientific works that are largely
supported by federal tax in the public domain.
Finally, the pubic domain is much more than what
the licenses as provided by Creative Commons can
do. But no, scientists want to retain control
over their works by telling us how we can use
their works, just much like the publishers.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo@voicenet.com>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
The world is not black and white! Read some of what Lessig has written about bit-head thinking! It sounds like you think that anything that is not public domain is total control, and excessive restriction. Hardly!
Saying that scientists who wish to be credited for their publications are "keeping control just like what the publishers want to do" is flatly false. If for no other reason simply because the publishers are squeezing the scientific endeavor by bankrupting libraries so as to enrich themselves, whereas the scientists want their work read and used by the maximum number of people.
I suspect that the only objection most of them would have to pure public domaining their pubications woud be the fact that they do want (or, really, need) to get credit for what they've done-- that in future scientific publications, they want a citation. Without that, it's difficut to measure how valuable any one scientist's contribution has been.
There's a world of difference between locking journals up behind a proprietary licence and allowing free copying with the requirement of attribution! This is why the latter is one of the CC licenses. Claiming that the two are "keeping control" in the same manner is just silly.
-Rob
Why do you think that putting a work in the
public domain will cause the author to lose
the credit? There are many scientific works
that are in the public domain and yet,
the scientists who wrote them routinely
get credit. There are scientists who
worked in the government that still
get credit for their works that are in the
public domain.
There may be some bad apples out in the world.
Unfortunately, the scientists are very afraid
of these bad apples that they rather want to
have all controls as granted by copyright.
By having all the controls, they are not
anything different from the publishers.
I am not bit-head. I can see the spectrum
of different degrees of permissions (not
controls) as illustrated in the Creative
Commons licenses. I am questioning your
position that scientists are somewhat better
than publishers, from the perspective of
copyright.
Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo@voicenet.com>
Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions
in this comment in the public domain.
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