Comments on: To make open access work, we need to do more than liberate journal articles

By: Peter Simmons

Peter Simmons — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:03:56 +0000

And how do you deal with the anti-scientific and non-scientific shills who will swamp any subject with nonsense? Evolution as well as climate change would be two areas under attack.

By: Peter Simmons

Peter Simmons — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:02:03 +0000

I wasn’t only talking about print, which may well be on the way out, but there’s as much work involved in producing online versions, many journals have both. Nice of him to sound the death of publishers though, how many more professions are going to trashed by people on grants or salaries who don’t have to worry about earning a living? I speak, of course, as a publisher. First it was sending it all to Indian typesetters to cut costs [and ignoring the mistakes non-native speakers make constantly] but now Indian typesetters are getting as much as UK ones, so it’s swinging back just in time to be scrapped! Hisa point about ‘doing most of the work already’ is incorrect; he may think he’s done a splendid job, but if he’s like most of the academics I deal with, he hasn’t, and it needs a publishing professional to see it. Whether on paper or screen, standards will drop. But in an age when language is being downgraded daily, that might not be noticed!

By: Thorbjoern Mann

Thorbjoern Mann — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 15:10:26 +0000

I have problems developing an unequivocal position on the ‘free access’ issue. Being retired but still productive, I have made my work as accessible as possible, but why do I have to pay for ‘marketing’, for example, so that people who then make commercial use and profit from it can get it for free?
On the issue of ‘reputation’, I have been working on an approach to the more systematic and transparent evaluation of the arguments we use in planning and policy-making (the ‘pros & cons’ about proposals) that can also be used to build up planning discourse ‘credits’ based on people’s assessment of the plausibility and significance (weight’ or merit of arguments) of their contributions. It may be useful to develop more meaningful measures or indicators of reputation as well. The argument assessment article “The Structure and Evaluation of Planning Arguments” appeared in the Informal Logic journal December 2010. I am working on a kind of argumentative planning game using that approach to reward participants for their contributions, aiming not only on players’ ‘winning’ by getting more points than others but also based on the overall quality of the solutions achieved (which is assessed by all the players). If the resolution of the free access to information lies i the issue of fair rewards for the producers of the information, these ideas might help getting there.

By: Editor

Editor — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:50:36 +0000

As a free science publication model, arXiv seems to answer those objections. The print method of science publishing seems anchored in the hierarchical past. (See Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing.)

By: Peter the printer

Peter the printer — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:37:29 +0000

The research may have been publicly funded, but the work necessary to publish in a journal isn’t funded – correcting, typesetting, designing, proofreading. It’s easy making these assertions when your own livelihood isn’t compromised. Journal subscriptions barely cover the production costs, how are you going to compensate professionals for the work they do? All very well making ‘public access’ noises, but we’ve seen what public access can do with regard to climate change; hundreds of scientifically illiterate people with an agenda drowning out the science. I’m sure it’s a vote winner for politicians though.

By: Bob Vasquez

Bob Vasquez — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:26:11 +0000

There is much having been publicly-funded from which the public does not benefit unless it pays a private entity.

By: Editor

Editor — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:00:33 +0000

Working on it….

By: melajara

melajara — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:31:00 +0000

@Editor.I’m sorry for all the typos left in my post. Usual rambling: we badly need a “post-publication” edit button here ;-)

By: melajara

melajara — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 12:19:08 +0000

We are more and more driven to a reputation based economy.
This trend IMHO is perfectly compatible with open sourcing meaningful academic publication achieving recognition via post publication article validation.

Now one as to define an acceptable metric for “reputation”. Of course it can’t be based only on quantitative and external “easy” criteria like e.g. “number of downloads” or (already better) number of quotes from other publications, but for example it could be achieved by “points” collected from post publication peer reviewing.

Reputation is a transitive and somewhat reflexive property. If an article gets a “reputation award” from someone her/himself highly regarded, this reputation mark is something more valuable than the same so called “award” coming from n nobody where it simply becomes a meaningless distinction (for the sake of science).

Besides for scientific subject this “reputation” has to be acquired in the exact subject field exemplified by the article, so yet another issue is to match meaningful “reputations” against each other.

One thing has to be made clear, “reputation” has not to be blurred with “popularity” but of course it doesn’t hurt to be reputable AND popular ;-)