In the new digital age, do scientific journals serve science researchers like they should?
Many research scientists I have spoken to have expressed frustration at several aspects of modern science journals; how they select their work to publish, their editorial policies, their policy of taking work for zero remuneration and then on-selling that same work for $25 and $30 per article, the lack of access to readers, especially undergraduate students, and other such things.
What is your opinion?
Leonard Green
Vladimir, it depends on the design. If for example there would be very motivating and easy for understanding information for population then the situation would be different. I have already mentioned that the general configuration of the system should be the following: Scientifc part - Filter - Public part with the feedback. And everything depends on the public interest and forms of information delivery. With such design the popularity of open-access systems would permanently grow and so money.
Comment protected
Join ResearchGate now to read this comment.Chris Wilkins
An announcement; Sheffield University science communication is starting to use a very new, incredibly cheap and exciting method for disseminating what they create. You can check it all out at http://jus.shef.ac.uk/sciencec
What is significant is that this body of work is being published here because NO journal whatsoever will take this work, even though it is really good. More commentary than primary research science, but still good enough that it should be put somewhere to give interested readers the chance to actually read it.
Cost them nothing to publish it, they did the editorial work themselves, and this way they don't need any publisher at all, never mind their "approval" as to what they "think" people would like to read or not.
Plus the decision as to whether it is good or not has been taken away from the publishers and put in the readers' hands. If you like, read. If you don't, click away to somewhere else. Simple.
Michael Kurtz
1) Scientific publishers are certainly not making obscene profits; that is a frequently repeated myth. Note that the price of Elsevier stock is where it was 15 years ago; adjusting for inflation Elsevier has lost almost half its value.
http://finance.yahoo.com/ech
2) The new communication technologies are more expensive, not less. Scholarly articles are actively used for decades; building and maintaining systems to, for example, show interactive data graphics or to enrich text with dense semantic annotation will be very expensive.
Anne Marie Talsky
Great discussion. I hope everyone will also pressure their congressional representatives to support passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 (FRPAA) in this session to insure future open access. http://www.publishersweekly.co
Leonard Green
Jess, Peer Review is the most important problem for the Information Systems development.
Let us say we have deal with the health science. Here we see thousands of suggestions for alternative methods of treatment . How to deliver such kind of information to the public? Your approach is interesting and I am going to work on the problem of the peer review also. I think all people involved into Information systems design would be interested in the theory of Peer Review work out.
Note: we do not want underesimate the Research Gate system design; it's great system and I think it's a step to the future generations of the Scientific Information Systems. First and most important feature of it is absense of pressure so people get motivated to work with the system. Here we are at the section of social science and for that science motivation is major factor. If, let us say, in the future such system would be able to deliver good health advice or any other useful advice to public, then that system would be in high demand.
So absense of pressure and systematics with orientation to the public development are major features of the future generations of the such systems. Also in the future the Information Systems would be used by almost all people of the world and this is not joke! Scientific world should be prepared for that.
Jess H. Brewer
I am of two minds about this... no, strike that; I am of numerous minds.
Mind #1 is delighted to see people putting real efforts into communicating the products of science to the people who pay for them; an electorate ignorant of science is as dangerous as an electorate ignorant of history, philosophy and law. Besides, they're missing all the fun!
Mind #2 reels under the onslaught of raw opinions devoid of rational justification, viz. Facebook, Twitter and to a large extent (sorry, folks) ResearchGate. What the reader yearns for in today's world is not more information, but some way of guessing which information is worth reading. The field I worked in for several decades, high temperature superconductivity, has produced roughly a quarter of a million publications in refereed scientific journals; to read and digest them all is literally impossible! So where does one start, assuming one is looking for more than entertainment?
Mind #3 just got home from the AAAS meeting, where it got excited over a discussion of Peer Review and generated the attached undisciplined but enthusiastic proposal for a new form of Open Peer Review assisted by computers.
Mind #4 is tired after all this and doesn't want to think about it any more for a while. :-)
Leonard Green
Thank you for references to the new very interesting sites. Here is my vision of the future development of the disseminating sites. The Worldwide Structured Scientific System with the Recognition of the Achievements
and Rights protection would consists of the three parts: Scientific part - Filter - Public. At the scientific part information should be classified by achievements importance. At the Filter the information should be reduced and simplified to be delivered to the public in the form which is useful for the public education and progressive ideology formation which is actually most important goal of the science. Public part should be organized to work with the feedback and be adaptive accordingly. (The whole System should be adaptive).
I mentioned just major features of the General Configuration of the System which should replace the journals in the future and be more oriented toward the World progress. Note: I extremely appreciate all scientific publications concerning social function of science.
Ana Isabel Paraguay
{I allow myself to post a concise and useful notice)
Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier publishers (by ealvaro)
*
"Scientific communication is (steadily) changing. Some alternatives to the traditional scholarly communication system are Open Access self-archiving servers like ArXiv, which has been successfully in place for more than twenty years; Open Access publishing, in which authors pay a fee to make their articles freely available to everyone; and Open Notebook Science, in which researchers make their notebooks and raw data public online so that everyone can see/contribute to their progress (for an example of ONS, see this piece of Nature News - http://www.nature.com/news/stu
Despite these changes, in many disciplines, such as chemistry, research is disseminated mainly via traditional scientific journals (see the Nature Chemistry comment “Communicating Chemistry” at http://www.nature.com/nchem/jo
Recently, the eminent mathematician and Fields medallist Tim Gowers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
* they charge excessively high prices for their journals;
* they bundle journals, which means that libraries have to buy a large set of journals to get the titles that they want; and
* they support SOPA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
This post of his has stirred the mathematics community, and many mathematicians and other scientists have signed a declaration of unwillingness to support Elsevier’s journals by publishing, refereeing, or doing editorial work. You may read more about the declaration here [http://gowers.wordpress.com/2
Source: https://blogs.libraries.iub.ed
Also see:
1) "Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics" (by Josh Fischman on January 30) at
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wi
2) The European Commission has published the results of its Online survey on scientific information in the digital age (by Val Skelton on Feb 2, 2012) at http://www.infotoday.eu/Articl
Graeme Smith
Re:http://www.scienceworksmaga
So let me get this right, you pay $20.00 approx for an article, and then you get reviewed by one guy, maybe twice, and then when they publish you get your articles worth of 70% of the cost to subscribers of the journal.
So the larger the journal is, and the fewer subscribers the less you get paid, per article?
This only works for me if there are enough subscribers generally to pay back the 20.00 invested after subscriptions are sold, and, I think one reviewer is a bit under-edited. Give me two science reviewers, allow me to make recommendations, etc. Part of the problem here is that a general magazine about science is not the same as a journal and expertise should be required to act as the science reviewer for a particular article in the journal. At least if you have the author suggest someone to review, you can ask them, what their qualifications are and test their review ability. Obviously this is going to start out as a junior journal and only gain acceptance once it can collect enough IP. Also, in any journal there are going to be good articles and bad articles, and the good articles won't be paid any more than the bad articles if the 70% rule is followed slavishly.
However while the author gets the lions share we are still paying for research results that were already paid for by someone else. The question is why would anyone want to subscribe if they can get the same article for free? I think this is way too attractive for content producers and way too little attractive to libraries, especially since it will probably be the only magazine/journal behind its specific paywall.
Libraries these days require multiple publications behind the same paywall, which is why Elsevier and Springer can sell their stable to science libraries without needing to beg.
Chris Wilkins
Here is something new. For those who are fed up with the current state of peer-reviewed journals and want to give something new a try; http://www.scienceworksmagazin
The online peer-reviewed journal, with many benefits and positive differences compared to the current system, Science Works Journal, gets underway.
The url www.scienceworksjournal.com will be activated soonish.
If you have a paper you want peer-reviewed and published, and get something back for your efforts, go there and email the editor.
Comment protected
Join ResearchGate now to read this comment.Leonard Green
Dear Graeme,
I am talking of the coming in the near future revolutionary development of the communications systems.
To design the project of the Worldwide Scientific Network some scientific organizations should combine their efforts. This is very serious scientific task itself. There are many technical problems but organizational problems - major. Do you know anything of such scientific research?
Graeme Smith
One thing I think that might be missing is the actual metaphor that they should aim for. Part of the problem is that there is no real integration of the home/office computer into the authoring system. Either you download an interface as a text box and upload the text to your site as a integrated part of the interface, or you do the work on your home system and upload the files separately. Wiki-like authoring systems are useful, but also work-flow systems should be integrated a bit like the systems used by Guttenberg, to flow OCR'ed text. What seems to be happening now, is every site has its own standards for workflow, but they only seem to go as far as adding PDF's, textboxes, or pictures.
At least with Guttenberg, volunteers check for spelling and technical words not already in the dictionary, and can, after review add words to the dictionary if they are jargon, or historical interpretations that predate the on-line dictionary.
I happen to know that I tend to capitalize things and put comma's in weird places, but without somebody flagging my stuff for readability, I am left wishing for the funds to hire my own translator to translate my stuff back into English.
In a workflow based system with volunteer proof reading etc, it might be possible for someone to read and flag statements that did not parse either because my sentences were too long, or simply, because I put a comma in the wrong place.
There is no reason why this couldn't be done in parallel with the insertion of pictures and drawings.
Leonard Green
Back to initial question.
It's weird that the Worldwide Structured Scientific computer system is not developing properly.
Google and other sites have some information but there is no place for special discussions, free articles placements, authors' rights protection, classification by topic and importance of the achievements. Research Gate is good start and it would be great if such sites would be developed and able in the future to replace journals to eliminate any pressure created by not proper publishers' motivation and skills. It's not so difficult to design a project of such system but I do not see the proper efforts.
Does anybody work in that direction?