Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing
Eric, To understand why what you say is fundamental for moving the World forward in these days, I suggest anyone to listen at the following speech. A long speech. Really inspiring. Eben Moglen keynote - Innovation under Austerity http://youtu.be/G2VHf5vpBy8 mic 2012/7/26 Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com: Some recent developments in academic publishing are encouraging. As people know, the UK is considering a bill that will require that journal articles reporting on government-funded research be provided to the public free of charge not long after they have been published. I think there are similar efforts underway in the US, and the National Institutes of Health and institutions such as Harvard University have already taken steps in this general direction. The Economist provides a nice report on the UK bill: http://www.economist.com/node/21559317?fsrc=scn/tw/te/mt/broughttobook In this context the arXiv preprint server is an interesting phenomenon. Some people are putting papers up on arXiv for general feedback and then submitting to journals afterwards for the imprimatur. It looks like phys.org is willing to go straight to arXiv for its coverage, as in the case of this paper on primordial black holes: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-theory-black-holes-predate-big.html That paper was eventually published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1104.3796C). The sequence of events -- whether phys.org went to arXiv or first or noticed that the paper was to appear in the journal -- isn't clear and probably not all that important. I suspect it's just a matter of time before self-publication on preprint servers becomes the de facto way of sharing experimental results and theoretical explorations. Perhaps in the age of blogs and the twenty-four hour news cycle, there are pressures on scientists to get something out quickly in order to establish priority. In my experience the papers on arXiv run the gamut of quality and conventionality. Some papers are very conventional and professionally done, and others are basically notes covering theories that are sure to be highly controversial. If arXiv has a quality control function, it appears to be quite permissive. As more and more people around the world come online, these preprints and the free courses made available by MIT and Stanford and other universities could become an important part of the tertiary education of a large number of people. This seems like another disruptive development whose consequences are hard to foresee. Eric
Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing
Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com wrote: Some recent developments in academic publishing are encouraging. As people know, the UK is considering a bill that will require that journal articles reporting on government-funded research be provided to the public free of charge not long after they have been published. This is excellent news. The Economist provides a nice report on the UK bill: http://www.economist.com/node/21559317?fsrc=scn/tw/te/mt/broughttobook Good article. This will eventually put LENR-CANR.org out of business, which is fine with me. I would be even more pleased if the entire mass media begins covering cold fusion and that puts me out of business. The librarians at U. Utah and various universities are campaigning for this. I have been in touch with the librarians at U. Utah. I had lunch with them and spent a day looking at their cold fusion collection. (One day is not enough to go through the whole collection.) I told them they should put the collection on line as a first step to encourage others to do this. They say they cannot, because of copyright restrictions. A large chunk of their papers came from Charles Beaudette. He donated many of the same books and proceedings that I have, such as the ICCF series and Fusion Facts. I subsequently persuaded Ikegami and others to let me put most of the proceedings on line. U. Utah also has many boxes of correspondence from people like Fritz Will. That is interesting for a historian, but it has little scientific value. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing
Eric, having an old friend who is/was editor of two respected scientific journals, I have always had my quibbles with her. That the peer-reviewing process is a thing of the past, and the profit journals make out of that, are just obscene. If You are an editor, and are paid some sum for it, it is difficult to question the whole edifice. Now the the leading publishers (Elsevier, Springer,...) seemed to overbid their hand. The counterprocess is very slow, with the matemathicians being in the lead, and eg the Max Planck society encouraging its scientists to publish elsewhere. Now we all know here, that something is rotten in the state of 'peer-reviewing'. But there currently is no established alternative. Science is an eminently hierarchical enterprise, with the reviewers and editors being some sort of grey eminence, which actually are not known by name.(The editors are, ofcourse, the reviewers not) It is basically the editor and the advisory board, which determine who is the competent decider (reviewer) wrt what is valuable in the field. In ordinary life on would call that incest. On the other hand, open access maybe a good thing, but adds confusion, and does not fit well with the established method of selecting the 'best', which is eminently hierarchical. Guenter Von: Eric Walker eric.wal...@gmail.com An: vortex-l@eskimo.com Gesendet: 9:04 Donnerstag, 26.Juli 2012 Betreff: [Vo]:future of academic publishing Some recent developments in academic publishing are encouraging. As people know, the UK is considering a bill that will require that journal articles reporting on government-funded research be provided to the public free of charge not long after they have been published. I think there are similar efforts underway in the US, and the National Institutes of Health and institutions such as Harvard University have already taken steps in this general direction. The Economist provides a nice report on the UK bill: http://www.economist.com/node/21559317?fsrc=scn/tw/te/mt/broughttobook In this context the arXiv preprint server is an interesting phenomenon. Some people are putting papers up on arXiv for general feedback and then submitting to journals afterwards for the imprimatur. It looks like phys.org is willing to go straight to arXiv for its coverage, as in the case of this paper on primordial black holes: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-theory-black-holes-predate-big.html That paper was eventually published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1104.3796C). The sequence of events -- whether phys.org went to arXiv or first or noticed that the paper was to appear in the journal -- isn't clear and probably not all that important. I suspect it's just a matter of time before self-publication on preprint servers becomes the de facto way of sharing experimental results and theoretical explorations. Perhaps in the age of blogs and the twenty-four hour news cycle, there are pressures on scientists to get something out quickly in order to establish priority. In my experience the papers on arXiv run the gamut of quality and conventionality. Some papers are very conventional and professionally done, and others are basically notes covering theories that are sure to be highly controversial. If arXiv has a quality control function, it appears to be quite permissive. As more and more people around the world come online, these preprints and the free courses made available by MIT and Stanford and other universities could become an important part of the tertiary education of a large number of people. This seems like another disruptive development whose consequences are hard to foresee. Eric
Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing
Guenter Wildgruber gwildgru...@ymail.com mailto:gwildgru...@ymail.com wrote: (The editors are, ofcourse, the reviewers not) It is basically the editor and the advisory board, which determine who is the competent decider (reviewer) wrt what is valuable in the field. In ordinary life on would call that incest. In ordinary business this would be called a violation of the antitrust laws, or a conflict of interest. Publishing is ordinary business, so that's what I call it. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing
well, the basic idea to keep the reviewers secret is to avoid embarrassment between colleagues. The editor at timmes gets some strange comments from the reviewers, which he has to keep confidential like a catholic priest the confessions of sinners, but ist is the other way round: It is the condemnations of the olympic gods of science, which are hidden to the prdinary humans, which is channeled down. I happened to see some of those (emails), which at times are quite embarrassing. Reviewers don't know about each other, only the editor knows. So his sincerity is essential. This is about ten years ago, and even if I could remember exactly, I would not tell, because somehow I belong to the cartel via friendship, if you will. ( I was not aware of the explosivity of this then. I was just amazed because I did not belong to the cartel, and my professional existence did not depend on it.) The reputation of a journal depends on this confidentialty. A very strange constellation indeed. Upon writing this, I get conscious of that. Self-soul-searching. You know what I mean. Guenter Von: Jed Rothwell jedrothw...@gmail.com An: vortex-l@eskimo.com vortex-l@eskimo.com Gesendet: 20:55 Donnerstag, 26.Juli 2012 Betreff: Re: [Vo]:future of academic publishing Guenter Wildgruber gwildgru...@ymail.com wrote: (The editors are, ofcourse, the reviewers not) It is basically the editor and the advisory board, which determine who is the competent decider (reviewer) wrt what is valuable in the field. In ordinary life on would call that incest. In ordinary business this would be called a violation of the antitrust laws, or a conflict of interest. Publishing is ordinary business, so that's what I call it. - Jed
