iMechanica - Open Source Publishing - Comments

More news on open publishing

Mikael Öhman — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:15:14 -0400

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/mit-to-make-all-faculty-...

And it looks like good news to me.

I'm a student, about to start my PhD, and when i first learned about the way publishing works (the classical way) I have always found it very unethical.

I'm will be doing government funded science, and I like the idea of free knowledge so it makes me a bit nervous how my first real publication will be done.

Mike, I have read your link on peer review. It was a very interesting read.
I shall try to dig through this thread in detail one day when I have more time.

Some recent posts on the subject

Mike Ciavarella — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:15:42 -0400

Important updates (July 8th, 2008:

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

The role of Open Access in improving countries

RoozbehSanaei — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:32:55 -0400

Great expectations: The role of Open Access in improving countries’ recognition

Hajar Sotudeh and Abbas Horri

(1) Department of Library and Information Science, Faculty of Education & Psychology, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran
(2) Department of Library and Information Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

PlosOne Is Good but it is not Enough!

RoozbehSanaei — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:09:10 -0400

And also many others.

The Open Drug Delivery Journal

The Open Nanoscience Journal

The Open Chemical Engineering Journal

The Open Biomedical Engineering Journal

The Open Nanomedicine Journal

The Open Colloid Science Journal

but they are not enough.

We Should Find a tool. maybe dynamic review papers.

having no harmony is main issue of a little richer third world!

More discussion looking at the special case of PlosONE

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:54:36 -0400

Looking at this very successful case (impact factor raised fast as never before for a journal, will it reach soon Nature?)

Harvard is moving strongly towards Open Access. have you seen it

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:21:42 -0400

have you seen this

Harvard to collect, disseminate scholarly articles for faculty

de Mike *Ciavarella's* blog | iMechanica de Mike Ciavarella

I wonder if Zhigang and Imechanica know of this:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

I agree with you -- today reviewers don't go good unless you pay

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:20:48 -0400

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

there is a norm ZG, and it is next door, in the harvard library!

Mike Ciavarella — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:19:32 -0400

have you seen this

Harvard to collect, disseminate scholarly articles for faculty

de Mike *Ciavarella's* blog | iMechanica de Mike Ciavarella

I wonder if Zhigang and Imechanica know of this:

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2008/02.14/99-fasvote.html

michele ciavarella
www.micheleciavarella.it

A message from Peter Suber on open access

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:54:12 -0400

I forwarded the above comments of mine to Peter Suber, of Open Access News. The following is his email reply, which I post with his permission.

Dear Zhigang,

You're right on in 1 and 2. In #3 I wouldn't call PLoS
"bloated" but I would say that it's a high-end operation and
that other OA journals needn't do all that PLoS does and therefore
needn't incur all of its expenses either.

BTW, I'd say that $300k/year for two academics (salary and benefits) is
very much on the high side!

On the rest, there are already several OA-dedicated platforms much more
efficient and inexpensive than traditional publishers. One is
Scholarly Exchange,
<
http://www.scholarlyexchange.org/>.

All the best,

Peter

Open Source Publishing Support

ericmock — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 16:28:29 -0400

I got great support letters from:

1. Karen Thole (PSU), Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering department head who has agreed to provide teaching release for the PI;

2. William Burkhard (PSU), Director of Information Technology and Design who has agreed to support the needed computing infrastructure;

3. Robin Schulze (PSU), English department head who enthusiastically endorses the English undergraduate internships that will be supported;

4. Charles Steele (Stanford), the past editor of the International Journal of Solids and Structures and the current editor of the Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures who will discuss using a version of the OSPS with the editorial board;

5. Thomas Conklin (PSU), the head of the Engineering Library who strongly supports the move to an economically sustainable model for academic publishing; and

6. George Voyiadjis (LSU), president of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) Inc. who will work with the PIs to encourage SES member support and possibly start the first SES journal.

Tom Conklin wrote a great letter containing:

"As an academic technical librarian, I wholeheartedly support the investigation into and the development of alternative approaches to scientific communications. The current system of publishing in journals is economically unsustainable. In my 32 years in the profession, I have seen the scholarly publications problem grow from concerns over a handful of overpriced journals into a crisis that threatens the foundations of library collections budgets. Commercial publishers have taken control of the academic publishing world which is comprised of a captive audience of editors and authors who need to publish and contribute professionally to achieve tenure and advancement. Through shrewd marketing, pricing, and strategic mergers, a relatively small group of STM (scientific/technical/medical) publishers now dominate the industry and are highly profitable. Academic library collection budgets are buckling under the annual cost increases of commercial STM journals and have been forced to move money from book budgets and other areas to help cover serials costs. The actual number of journal subscriptions at many large research universities has decreased over the last decade as a result of journal cancellations made in response to rising costs."

All but Steele based their letter on a template I gave them below.

Eduardo Misawa, Coordinator

Program Manager, Directorate for Engineering

Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation, RM 545S

The National Science Foundation

4201 Wilson Boulevard

Arlington, Virginia 22230

Dear Dr. Misawa:

I write this letter in strong support of “Open Source Publishing 2.0” by a team led by E. Mockensturm in response to the proposal solicitation for Engineering Virtual Organizations (EVO).

As the **, I am enthusiastic about projects that promote collaboration and development of virtual organizations, and have a high likelihood of sustainability after initial funding. From my perspective, this project does both. The innovative faculty team has drawn upon their individual strengths to develop a proposal that builds on existing work and resources to establish a coherent and comprehensive system to allow research collaboration on any scale, from small teams to entire publishing communities. The project addresses important topics (virtual organizations and cyberinfrastructure) and will impact both students and established researchers in many different fields and programs. This is indeed one of the few proposals that presents a meaningful and sustainable connection between PSU's College of Engineering, College of Science, College of Liberal Arts, and College of Information Science and Technology. The project will pull together a host of resources and create a system where that will be a tool for anyone in engineering, science or liberal arts that can be used as an effective collaboration tool. The beauty of the proposed tool is that it is open for group to use as it sees fit. Creative people can find unintended and unanticipated ways to use the resource to best server their needs.

The proposed system will use newly developed and existing cyberinfrastructure and could truly revolutionize how scholarly publishing is done. The system will allow for: 1) submission and dissemination of basic ideas, 2) rapid interactions between authors and reviews, 3) real-time online editing of content, 4) an open reviewing system in which reviewers can be recognized by the community, and 5) development of communication channels large (entire journals) and small (within research groups).

Support from established groups such as the Society of Engineering Science and iMechanica.org will allow the system to be tested and refined during the funding period so that it becomes a robust tool for all to use.

The College of Engineering's Electronic and Computer Support group will support the server infrastructure during the funding period. After which individual persons and organizations will use their own cyberinfrastructure to host the system.

The PSU Department of English will support the effort in three ways through internships and two upper level classes (ENGL417: Editorial Process and ENGL418: Advanced Technical Writing and Editing). Internships, required for a degree with a publishing emphasis, will allow senior English students to gain experience with technical editing and provide a sustainable and free pool of editors for the demonstration journal content. Should a sustainable journal based at PSU result from the demonstration project, continued internships will be sponsored by the editorial board. Internships will also be sponsored during the grant period to have students develop documentation for the system, and help organize the user interface to best present, browse, and search through the content. The system, and it's development, will also be a resource for instructors and students taking ENGL 417 and 418. To realize these efforts, the Department of English will provide co-PI Stuart Selber one course per year release time for the two-year grant period.

The Society of Engineering Science (SES) which does not currently publish its own journal is interested in working with the PIs to test the system to see if it can form a basis for the societies first publishing effort. Should a pilot journal be successful, SES could lead a revolution of scholarly publishing that other for- and non-profit publishers are sure to follow.

To allow the PI to spend the enormous amount of time required to expand this cyberinfrastructure beyond the preliminary stages currently develop, the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering will reduce Mockensturm's teaching load by one course for the two-year grant period.

In closing, I reiterate my enthusiastic support for this project because of the stated goals and the manner in which the team proposes to accomplish them.

Congratulations to Eric on submitting the NSF proposal!

Zhigang Suo — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 04:42:37 -0400

Dear Eric:

Congratulations on submitting the proposal!
This thread of discussion initiated by you is very helpful to many of us to think about the issues. We may not have reached agreement, but have a better understanding various points of view. For complex issues like these, perhaps an understding of diverse points of view is even more useful than reaching an agreement.
You have received quite a few supporting letters for this proposal. Would you consider asking the permissions of the writers and post these letters online?
Please check the two links that you have just added to your post. The links do not work for me.

Some pros for the experiment to post anonymous reviews

Zhigang Suo — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 03:02:03 -0400

Dear Robin:

The last paragraph in your comment concerns a previous comment of mine regarding an experiment to post anonymous reviews online.

The situation is imperfect now. On one hand, some of the reviews are perceptive, coming from experts on the subjects. It is a terrible loss of their insight, and work, if these reviews are just viewed by very few people. On the other hand, using somone's work without permission may cause discomfort to many people. The level of discomfort may depend on the kind of use. Here are examples:

Quote a review in a conversation at a dinner table.
Quote a review in a presentation in a conference.
Show a review in a slide during the presentation.
Include a review in the tenure package, which may be viewed by a fairly large number of people.
Forward a review to other people in an email, which may be viewed by a fairly large number of people.
Quote part of a review online.
Quote the entire review online.

Each individual will consider a subset of the above uses fair, but no guideline seems to exist. Who should set the guideline? Should publishers set the guideline? Should researchers experiment for a period of time and let a social norm emerge naturally? Any other ways to resolve the issue?

Note that the last three uses are possibilities provided by the Internet. The Internet may give the freedom to the authors, but may also give publishers and other large organizations an easier way to monitor and control the uses, as explained by Lessig in his book, Code. Incidentally, iMechanica uses a copyright license designed by Creative Commons founded by Lessig. The license allows anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and remix the work.

In addition to letting excellent reviews out, allowing authors to post reviews may have another benefit: it also exposes incompetent or thoughtless or unfair reviews, and careless decisions made by editors based on such reviews. Of course, a large purpose of doing so is to encourage good reviews.

These are pros for the experiment. Any cons?

open access publishing vs Physical Review

Robin Selinger — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 14:20:24 -0400

I am a biased commentator in this debate because my husband, Jonathan Selinger, serves as an associate editor of Phys Rev E. He is also a professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar at Kent State University. Jonathan spends about 12 hours/month evaluating incoming manuscripts for PRE, assigning them to referees, and making editorial decisions. Physical Review pays associate editors for their time so this is not volunteer work.

Can an open-source publishing system replace the efforts of such hard-working editors and the journal's administrative staff? I honestly don't know. That kind of community effort seems to work beautifully for Wikipedia and Linux, but I can't predict whether it will work well for scientific publishing.

To make an imperfect analogy... one could set up a high school as an educational collective, with each age group teaching the younger students and learning from the older ones. Parents could help out where needed as volunteers. With no paid teachers or administrators, tuition would be very low, just enough to pay for classroom space, books, computers, and supplies. In the best case such a school might work extremely well, with a self-selected team of bright students dedicated to the success of their community enterprise. But in the worst case, the school might come to resemble something between "Animal Farm" and "Animal House."

I personally prefer to send my kids to a school with paid teachers and administrators, and likewise, I prefer to submit my papers to a journal that employs expert editors and staff.

At this stage, I am in favor of a small-scale pilot effort to see how the open-source model will work for scientific publishing. The liquid crystal community, for instance, has an open-source publishing website at http://e-lc.org, managed by my colleagues at Kent State's Liquid Crystal Institute. E-LC accepts postings of manuscripts, dissertations, and presentations.

Like ArXiv, E-LC functions as a preprint library, but it's much more than that. The editor of E-LC reserves the right to reject submissions. Secondly, there is a threaded discussion forum available for each submitted document. So far, the number of submissions is modest but it will likely grow with time.

So, I have an open mind on open-access publishing and would like to see NSF fund some small-scale pilot efforts. At this stage I am not entirely optimistic that it will work as well as traditional journals, but am willing to give it a try.

Regarding referee reports being "outed"....From the legal standpoint, I would treat a referee report the same way I'd treat any personal letter from a colleague. I do a fair amount of refereeing of manuscripts and proposals and would be very displeased if someone posted my report online in its entirety without my permission. On the other hand, the recipient is certainly welcome to include copies of my report in a tenure/promotion portfolio or other private communication.

Robin Selinger
Professor, Chemical Physics Interdisciplinary Program
Liquid Crystal Institute
Kent State University
Kent, OH 44242
(330) 672-1582

Notes taken while reading Eric's comments

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 08:19:21 -0400

Dear Eric:

It seems to me that we agree more than we differ. Here are some notes I jotted down as I was reading your comments.

Perhaps the aparent difference in our opinions comes from what we mean by open access publishing. To me, posting a paper in a repository is open access publishing if the repository has two basic ingredients, (a) trustworthy timestamp and (b) permanent open access. I value peer review, but don't think that peer review ought to be included in the definition of open access publishing. arXive has the two basic ingredients, and I regard it as a repository of open source publishing.
I agree with you that many people don't do open access publishing for some reasons, including (a) they don't know that repositories are available, (b) they don't see much point in doing so with the existing repositories, and (c) they are unware that most publishers explicitly permit researchers to post their preprints on any websites. Understanding these and other reasons and removing them ought to be important things to do.
I agree with you that PLoS is bloated. However, with the current mode of operation, it just cannot be cheap. Let's say a journal wants to pay two full-time employees, one doing web development and the other running the journal. Let's say the two people will have a combined salary and benefit of 300k per year. To pay for this salary, this journal will need 100 paying authors a year, each paying $3000 per paper.
Of course, the above numbers assume that the two employees are just publishing a single journal. What if the technology has been well enough developed that they can run 1000 journals? The two employees will of course be helped by volunteers from many fields of study, and several other full-time employees may even join them. This scenario might be, in a nutshell, envisioned by many open-access startups. They would like to create a platform to run a large number of journals.
Who already has such a platform but is not using it for open access publishing? Any existing large publisher! When the open-access publishing becomes the most profitable business available, the existing publishers might just switch, and still make handsome profits.
To me, their real competitor is not open access, but is more efficient technology companies that are not traditionally in the business of publishing. Needless to say, these technology companies will also be competitors for open-access publishing entities, such as arXive and PLoS.
On subscription on the per paper basis, I posted an entry called "Pay per paper" a while ago It was first posted on Applied Mechanics News, where quite a few comments can be found, written by people with diverse background. You might find them interesting.

More on open access (PLoS is a bloated pig)

ericmock — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:18:55 -0400

Zhigang,

I disagree with your first contention. I think researchers are ready to embrace open access and have been ready for a long time. This is because there is really nothing to embrace. So why haven't we? Because we have not been given the option. arXiv is a great thing but suffers greatly from a lack of peer review. Thus, I do not consider arXiv to be an open access option. I think many people do not upload to arXiv because they are not aware that it has gone beyond physics. I think if you take a poll of faculty in ME departments, the vast majority will say that arXiv is for physics. Even if you just take people in applied mechanics, I think you'll find nearly the same.

The other reason I think people don't upload is that it's an extra step and some extra work of which they see no benefit. Anyone that I can imagine that would want to read my papers probably has access through some institution, or they can simply ask for a copy. I would rather they ask me for a copy than anonymously download my work so I know who's interested.

If arXiv actually had a peer review system, I think it would explode in popularity and would diminish the popularity of PRL.

It is curious that more people do not post their papers online, and I have to admit to not. I'm not sure why I don't. Partly I think I'm just cynical about my research; why would anyone care about it? Also, the benefit just doesn't seem to be worth the effort (which I admit is miniscule).

Also, I think that as researchers we are decoupled from the cost of access. Take a walk over to your engineering library and talk to the head librarian. This person will give you an earful about the cost. In fact, I stopped by to chat with the PSU COE librarian the other day to talk about this proposal. He had a list of journals on a sheet of paper on his desk trying to figure out which ones to cut. Even Harvard () has cut back, http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=518548.

I think Vin Crespi (one of the PIs on the proposal) had a great statement, "I'd say the enormous scatter is due to the monopoly effect of copyright: once a given journal has a given paper, researchers will demand that their libraries provide access to that paper, so libraries are forced to pay the fees or have a gap in their collections. Imagine, for example, if each paper was involuntarily licensed to exactly TWO journals, and libraries could subscribe to a journal a la carte--article by article. That would immediately force competition on cost and normalize fees."

The PLoS model is one solution but I think they have really done the open access movement a disservice with their business model. They have targeted the extreme high end of publishing and their charges reflect this. You certainly do not need to pay $3.5M/yr in salaries to run a journal. You also don't need office in downtown SF, costing $250k/yr. Nor do you need to spend $200k in travel for one year, or have $20k in bad debt expenses, or spend $290k on advertising. Anyone can access their financial statements at http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2006/680/492/2006-680492065-02cc2b... They have basically built a very expensive infrastructure and now need to charge excessive fees ($2750 and climbing) to pay for it. That's what happens when NIH's budget grows so big. Thus, I think PLoS is a very poor comparison.

I have nothing against for-profit publishers, they're doing their job (well). But their interests are primarily to they stockholders, which conflicts with researchers trying to disseminate their work as inexpensively as possible.

Open Source Publishing

ericmock — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 11:24:13 -0400

I am putting together a proposal in response to NSF's Engineering Virtual Organizations solicitation regarding what I call Open Source Publishing. The proposal can be found (and edited if you setup an account) here. I would encourage you to register and edit if you're interested. All revisions are saved so there is no risk of messing something up. The proposal is fairly unstructured at this point and consists of mostly just my thoughts. I am working to organize it better and any suggestions would be appreciated. If you're interested in officially becoming a part of the proposal, let me know.

As there has been significant discussion about publishing and open access on iMechanica, I would greatly appreciate any feedback people can give. Also note that the current plan is to incorporate the open source publishing system with iMechanica. This stemmed from a discussion with Zhigang after I realized some components of the NSF proposal he posted were similar to what I had written.

I would like to use the proposal as an example of my vision for open source publishing so please do register, edit, and post comments in the discussion page (see tabs at top of page).

Eric

It's done! Thank you all for your thoughts (and the obvious time you spent considering the issues). I think the proposal benefitted greatly from this discussion. Hopefully NSF reviewers will be convinced this is a good idea. I've had some recent luck with NSF so hopefully that will continue.

The proposal has now been submitted. You can see the final version at the link above. To view in HTML click on Submission Repository. To view in PDF, click on Typeset version.