Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[DAEL Dennitts]

FYI
> Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:33:29 -0400
> From: meta...@gmail.com
> To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier
> 
> It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how
> to manage such things with volunteers.
> 
> Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model
> where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
> On Sep 24, 2012 6:33 PM, "George Herbert"  wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough
> >  wrote:
> > > On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:
> > >>
> > >> the costs of peer review
> > >
> > > I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer
> > review,
> > > so I'm not sure what these costs are.
> >
> > Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the
> > peer reviews.
> >
> > Peer review logistics is non-trivial - identifying reviewers, ensuring
> > the reviewers review, on time, and making sure they did their work and
> > sorting it out if the answer is neither unambiguously yes or no, etc.
> >
> > I just went through this process on a system administration paper for
> > the LISA conference this year; their peer reviews were significantly
> > lower impact (few paragraphs per reviewer) and done with anonymity and
> > visibility to the author via a web tool.  They still have a couple of
> > people at HQ handling the logistics of the system and related
> > paperwork, plus the conference chair, plus the paper's individual
> > Shepherd (introduced recently).  I think they only pay their HQ staff,
> > but still non-trivial effort.  Hundreds of dollars a paper, at least,
> > and much less than other more scientific papers would take (I think).
> >
> > They're not charging authors or authors' companies/universities, and
> > the papers are open-access.  They appear to handle it as conference
> > overhead, and charge for the conferences.
> >
> > Probably can't do that for most journals, and ads with a conflict of
> > interest are taken badly...
> >
> >
> > --
> > -george william herbert
> > george.herb...@gmail.com
> >
> > ___
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> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> >
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Risker]

On 24 September 2012 21:20, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> > It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of
> how
> > to manage such things with volunteers.
> >
> > Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced
> model
> > where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
>

Well, perhaps. But their "peer review" is courtrooms, where the decisions
are made publicly and are produced by the justice system free of charge to
the journals.  Otherwise, the articles are written by students with faculty
advisors reviewing their work.  I don't think anyone wants medical studies
to be "peer reviewed" by medical students.



>
> Another amusing example is The Economist current affairs magazine. I hear
> their
> contributors don't, as a rule, run to grey whiskers and tweed jackets.
>
> --
>

You're correct; a lot of them are paid journalists, and the rest are paid
columnists.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein  wrote:
> It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how
> to manage such things with volunteers.
>
> Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model
> where the most esteemed publications are run by students.

Another amusing example is The Economist current affairs magazine. I hear their
contributors don't, as a rule, run to grey whiskers and tweed jackets.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Samuel Klein]

It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how
to manage such things with volunteers.

Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model
where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
On Sep 24, 2012 6:33 PM, "George Herbert"  wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough
>  wrote:
> > On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:
> >>
> >> the costs of peer review
> >
> > I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer
> review,
> > so I'm not sure what these costs are.
>
> Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the
> peer reviews.
>
> Peer review logistics is non-trivial - identifying reviewers, ensuring
> the reviewers review, on time, and making sure they did their work and
> sorting it out if the answer is neither unambiguously yes or no, etc.
>
> I just went through this process on a system administration paper for
> the LISA conference this year; their peer reviews were significantly
> lower impact (few paragraphs per reviewer) and done with anonymity and
> visibility to the author via a web tool.  They still have a couple of
> people at HQ handling the logistics of the system and related
> paperwork, plus the conference chair, plus the paper's individual
> Shepherd (introduced recently).  I think they only pay their HQ staff,
> but still non-trivial effort.  Hundreds of dollars a paper, at least,
> and much less than other more scientific papers would take (I think).
>
> They're not charging authors or authors' companies/universities, and
> the papers are open-access.  They appear to handle it as conference
> overhead, and charge for the conferences.
>
> Probably can't do that for most journals, and ads with a conflict of
> interest are taken badly...
>
>
> --
> -george william herbert
> george.herb...@gmail.com
>
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough
 wrote:
> On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:
>>
>> the costs of peer review
>
> I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer review,
> so I'm not sure what these costs are.

Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the
peer reviews.

Peer review logistics is non-trivial - identifying reviewers, ensuring
the reviewers review, on time, and making sure they did their work and
sorting it out if the answer is neither unambiguously yes or no, etc.

I just went through this process on a system administration paper for
the LISA conference this year; their peer reviews were significantly
lower impact (few paragraphs per reviewer) and done with anonymity and
visibility to the author via a web tool.  They still have a couple of
people at HQ handling the logistics of the system and related
paperwork, plus the conference chair, plus the paper's individual
Shepherd (introduced recently).  I think they only pay their HQ staff,
but still non-trivial effort.  Hundreds of dollars a paper, at least,
and much less than other more scientific papers would take (I think).

They're not charging authors or authors' companies/universities, and
the papers are open-access.  They appear to handle it as conference
overhead, and charge for the conferences.

Probably can't do that for most journals, and ads with a conflict of
interest are taken badly...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herb...@gmail.com

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Russian Wikipedia goes on strike

[Fred Bauder]

I wonder if a few iconic Islamic related expressions could not also be
included such as burning or threatening to burn a copy of the Koran?
There would have to be scienter, knowing its significance, of course; a
fact that was not present in a recent case in Pakistan where a
developmentally handicapped young woman was charged.

Fred

> Free speech in the US is, I believe, generally considered to exclude
> both "fighting words" and "shouting fire in a crowded theatre".
>
> On 20/09/2012 04:56, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> I think any laws should be couched in terms of damaging foreign
>> relations or inciting to riot. I'm not sure they would be
>> unconstitutional even in the United States. When the Chairman of the
>> Joint Chiefs of Staff is reduced to begging a fundamentalist preacher
>> in Florida to cool it, something is out of whack. Fred
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>



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] #switch limits

[Richard Farmbrough]

Attempts to de-switch templates are resisted at every turn by folk who 
have CS 101. :-P


On 21/09/2012 05:14, Steven Walling wrote:

Template authors on any and every wiki, this one's for you. ;)

-- Forwarded message --
From: Tim Starling 
Date: Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 9:07 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] #switch limits
To: wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org


Over the last week, we have noticed very heavy apache memory usage on
the main Wikimedia cluster. In some cases, high memory usage resulted
in heavy swapping and site-wide performance issues.

After some analysis, we've identified the main cause of this high
memory usage to be geographical data ("données") templates on the
French Wikipedia, and to a lesser extent, the same data templates
copied to other wikis for use on articles about places in Europe.

Here is an example of a problematic template:

<
https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mod%C3%A8le:Donn%C3%A9es_PyrF1-2009&action=edit
That template alone uses 47MB for 37000 #switch cases, and one article
used about 15 similarly sized templates.

The simplest solution to this problem is for the few Wikipedians
involved to stop doing what they are doing, and to remove the template
invocations which have already been introduced. Antoine Musso has
raised the issue on the French Wikipedia's "Bistro" and some of the
worst cases have already been fixed.

To protect site stability, I've introduced a new preprocessor
complexity limit called the "preprocessor generated node count", which
is incremented by about 6 for each #switch case. When the limit is
exceeded, an exception is thrown, preventing the page from being saved
or viewed.

The limit is currently 4 million (~667,000 #switch cases), and it will
soon be reduced to 1.5 million (~250,000 #switch cases). That's a
compromise which allows most of the existing geographical pages to
keep working, but still allows a memory usage of about 230MB.

At some point, we would like to patch PHP upstream to cause memory for
DOM XML trees to be allocated from the PHP request pool, instead of
with malloc(). But to deploy that, we would need to reduce the limit
to the point where the template DOM cache can easily fit in the PHP
memory limit of 128MB.

In the short term, we will be working with the template editors to
ensure that all articles can be viewed with a limit of 1.5 million.
That's not a very viable solution in the long term, so I'd also like
to introduce save-time warnings and tracking categories for pages
which use more than, say, 50% of the limit, to encourage authors to
fix articles without being directly prompted by WMF staff members.

At some point in the future, you may be able to put this kind of
geographical data in Wikidata. Please, template authors, wait
patiently, don't implement your own version of Wikidata using wikitext
templates.

-- Tim Starling



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Russian Wikipedia goes on strike

[Richard Farmbrough]

Free speech in the US is, I believe, generally considered to exclude 
both "fighting words" and "shouting fire in a crowded theatre".


On 20/09/2012 04:56, Fred Bauder wrote:
I think any laws should be couched in terms of damaging foreign 
relations or inciting to riot. I'm not sure they would be 
unconstitutional even in the United States. When the Chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff is reduced to begging a fundamentalist preacher 
in Florida to cool it, something is out of whack. Fred 
___ Wikimedia-l mailing 
list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: 
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l 



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Richard Farmbrough]

On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:

the costs of peer review
I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer 
review, so I'm not sure what these costs are.


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Slate article on Gibraltar

[Richard Farmbrough]

To give some idea of how poor the research for the writing is:

"/This article originally and incorrectly referred to Gibraltar as an 
island. It is a peninsula."/


Were they to correct the rest of the errors in the article there would 
be very little of the original left.


Just as an example:

" Wikimedia U.K. (which controls all Wikipedia platforms in Britain)"

Arguably since there are no Wikipedia platforms in Britain this could be 
said to be true. But it is misleading or nonsensical at best.


On 20/09/2012 19:25, Richard Symonds wrote:

User:Panyd, who spotted the start of this whole incident on DYK, gave an
interview with Slate magazine, which she's been very misquoted in and is a
little upset about. She just emailed the UK list explaining her thoughts on
all this, so I'm sharing them here:
*


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Andrea Zanni]

There are also other kinds of business models:
http://scoap3.org/

The topic is complex, I know
and Open Access is about a shift of an entire system,
is not about Elsevier (which is important but (just) a main actor in a big
play).

Peer review is crucial, of course,
but I wonder who is being paid:
afaik, reviewers are almost never paid for their work (I understaind that
organizing it must be diffuclt and expensive).

Moreover, I think it is is fairly easy to see that there is something wrong
when a system
make the citizen pay 2 times for research (first time paying academics to
do research, second paying journals through libraries to read that
research).
And when academics are the producers, the reviewers and the customers of
the company itself.
Thus, there *must* be a more clever system for research publishing :-)

Aubrey

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:49 AM, Risker  wrote:

> On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling  wrote:
>
> > On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
> > > It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access
> > > requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not
> > > one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2]
> > > tears here.
> > >
> > >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-catastrophe/
> > >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Elsevier.pdf
> > >
> > > The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at
> > > $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
> >
> > According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and
> > brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They
> > already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article,
> > so they could break even with open access, without increasing the
> > author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company
> > would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's
> grave.
> >
> >
>
> I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit
> journal publishers) still have a place.   The author's processing fee
> (which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently
> charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they
> depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the
> less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across
> several publications.  Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose
> professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more
> for "processing"  than the scientist whose professional journal is read by
> tens of thousands.
>
> Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to
> cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially
> useless:  even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back
> scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost
> will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to
> indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most
> of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees".   A decrease
> in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can
> have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants
> require publication in peer-reviewed journals.  If the number of journals
> available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited,
> scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have
> to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is
> accepted.  That's money that's being taken away from the actual science.
> It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from
> organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector),
> and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big
> Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".
>
> There's no good answer here.  In an ideal world, there would be lots of
> Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good
> peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity".  There's
> a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.
>
> Risker/Anne
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Tim Starling, 24/09/2012 04:24:

According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and
brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They
already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article,
so they could break even with open access, without increasing the
author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company
would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's grave.


Indeed, this is not really about higher or lower costs and revenues: 
it's mainly about a new kind of market and business which Elsevier is 
not ready for. Other publishers, like Springer, have been wiser and 
experimented a lot with Open Access: not because they are 
philanthropists, but to be ready for everything and avoid the risk of 
being swept away by history.


emijrp, 24/09/2012 09:08:
> In the wiki-research mailing list we are talking about Open-Access 
journals

> and new ways to publish and disseminate research results. A summary is
> available http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas

Thanks. I've asked a question on talk: it's also relevant for this 
topic/mailing list if you disagree with my assumption there.


Nemo

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[emijrp]

In the wiki-research mailing list we are talking about Open-Access journals
and new ways to publish and disseminate research results. A summary is
available http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas

2012/9/24 Risker 

> On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling  wrote:
>
> > On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
> > > It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access
> > > requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not
> > > one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2]
> > > tears here.
> > >
> > >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-catastrophe/
> > >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Elsevier.pdf
> > >
> > > The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at
> > > $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
> >
> > According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and
> > brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They
> > already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article,
> > so they could break even with open access, without increasing the
> > author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company
> > would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's
> grave.
> >
> >
>
> I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit
> journal publishers) still have a place.   The author's processing fee
> (which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently
> charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they
> depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the
> less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across
> several publications.  Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose
> professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more
> for "processing"  than the scientist whose professional journal is read by
> tens of thousands.
>
> Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to
> cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially
> useless:  even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back
> scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost
> will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to
> indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most
> of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees".   A decrease
> in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can
> have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants
> require publication in peer-reviewed journals.  If the number of journals
> available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited,
> scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have
> to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is
> accepted.  That's money that's being taken away from the actual science.
> It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from
> organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector),
> and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big
> Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".
>
> There's no good answer here.  In an ideal world, there would be lots of
> Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good
> peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity".  There's
> a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.
>
> Risker/Anne
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-- 
Emilio J. Rodríguez-Posada. E-mail: emijrp AT gmail DOT com
Pre-doctoral student at the University of Cádiz (Spain)
Projects: AVBOT  |
StatMediaWiki
| WikiEvidens  |
WikiPapers
| WikiTeam 
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/emijrp/
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