The Selected Papers Network (Part 2)

Last time Christopher Lee and I described some problems with scholarly publishing. The big problems are expensive journals and ineffective peer review. But we argued that solving these problems require new methods of

• selection—assessing papers

and

• endorsement—making the quality of papers known, thus giving scholars the prestige they need to get jobs and promotions.

The Selected Papers Network is an infrastructure for doing both these jobs in an open, distributed way. It’s not yet the solution to the big visible problems—just a framework upon which we can build those solutions. It’s just getting started, and it can use your help.

But before I talk about where all this is heading, and how you can help, let me say what exists now.

This is a bit dangerous, because if you’re not sure what a framework is for, and it’s not fully built yet, it can be confusing to see what’s been built so far! But if you’ve thought about the problems of scholarly publishing, you’re probably sick of hearing about dreams and hopes. You probably want to know what we’ve done so far. So let me start there.

SelectedPapers.net as it stands today

SelectedPapers.net lets you recommend papers, comment on them, discuss them, or simply add them to your reading list.

But instead of “locking up” your comments within its own website—the “walled garden” strategy followed by many other services—it explicitly shares these data in a way that people not on SelectedPapers.net can easily see. Any other service can see and use them too. It does this by using existing social networks—so that users of those social networks can see your recommendations and discuss them, even if they’ve never heard of SelectedPapers.net!

The idea is simple. You add some hashtags to let SelectedPapers.net know you’re talking to it, and to let it know which paper you’re talking about. It notices these hashtags and copies your comments over to its publicly accessible database.

So far Christopher Lee has got it working on Google+. So right now, if you’re a Google+ user, you can post comments on SelectedPapers.net using your usual Google+ identity and posting process, just by including suitable hashtags. Your post will be seen by your usual audience—but also by people visiting the SelectedPapers.net website, who don’t use Google+.

If you want to strip the idea down to one sentence, it’s this:

Given that social networks already exist, all we need for truly open scientific communication is a convention on a consistent set of tags and IDs for discussing papers.

That makes it possible to integrate discussion from all social networks—big and small—as a single unified forum. It’s a federated approach, rather than a single isolated website. And it won’t rely on any one social network: after Google+, we can get it working for Twitter and other networks and forums.

But more about the theory later. How, exactly, do you use it?

Getting Started

To see how it works, take a look here:

https://selectedpapers.net

Under ‘Recent activity’ you’ll see comments and recommendations of different papers, so far mostly on the arXiv.

Support for other social networks such as Twitter is coming soon. But here’s how you can use it now, if you’re a member of Google+:

• We suggest that you first create (in your Google+ account) a Google+ Circle specifically for discussing research with (e.g. call it “Research”). If you already have such a circle, or circles, you can just use those.

• Click Sign in with Google on https://selectedpapers.net or on a paper discussion page.

• The usual Google sign-in window will appear (unless you are already signed in). Google will ask if you want to use the Selected Papers network, and specifically for what Circle(s) to let it see the membership list(s) (i.e. the names of people you have added to that Circle). SelectedPapers.net uses this as your initial “subscriptions”, i.e. the list of people whose recommendations you want to receive. We suggest you limit this to your “Research” circle, or whatever Circle(s) of yours fit this purpose.

Note the only information you are giving SelectedPapers.net access to is this list of names; in all other respects SelectedPapers.net is limited by Google+ to the same information that anyone on the internet can see, i.e. your public posts. For example, SelectedPapers.net cannot ever see your private posts within any of your Circles.

• Now you can initiate and join discussions of papers directly on any SelectedPapers.net page.

• Alternatively, without even signing in to SelectedPapers.net, you can just write posts on Google+ containing the hashtag #spnetwork, and they will automatically be included within the SelectedPapers.net discussions (i.e. indexed and displayed so that other people can reply to them etc.). Here’s an example of a Google+ post example:

This article by Perelman outlines a proof of the Poincare conjecture!

#spnetwork #mustread #geometry #poincareConjecture arXiv:math/0211159

You need the tag #spnetwork for SelectedPapers.net to notice your post. Tags like #mustread, #recommend, and so on indicate your attitude to a paper. Tags like #geometry, #poincareConjecture and so on indicate a subject area: they let people search for papers by subject. A tag of the form arXiv:math/0211159 is necessary for arXiv papers; note that this does not include a # symbol.

For PubMed papers, include a tag of the form PMID:22291635. Other published papers usually have a DOI (digital object identifier), so for those include a tag of the form doi:10.3389/fncom.2012.00001.

Tags are the backbone of SelectedPapers.net; you can read more about them here.

• You can also post and see comments at https://selectedpapers.net. This page also lets you search for papers in the arXiv and search for published papers via their DOI or Pubmed ID. If you are signed in, the homepage will also show the latest recommendations (from people you’re subscribed to), papers on your reading list, and papers you tagged as interesting for your work.

Papers

Papers are the center of just about everything on the selected papers network. Here’s what you can currently do with a paper:

• click to see the full text of the paper via the arXiv or the publisher’s website.

• read other people’s recommendations and discussion of the paper.

• add it to your Reading List. This is simply a private list of papers—a convenient way of marking a paper for further attention later. When you are logged in, your Reading list is shown on the homepage. No one else can see your reading list.

• share the paper with others (such as your Google+ Circles or Google+ communities that you are part of).

• tag it as interesting for a specific topic. You do this either by clicking the checkbox of a topic (it shows topics that other readers have tagged the paper), by selecting from a list of topics that you have previously tagged as interesting to you, or by simply typing a tag name. These tags are public; that is, everyone can see what topics the paper has been tagged with, and who tagged them.

• post a question or comment about the paper, or reply to what other people have said about it. This traffic is public. Specifically, clicking the Discuss this Paper button gives you a Google+ window (with appropriate tags already filled in) for writing a post. Note that in order for the spnet to see your post, you must include Public in the list of recipients for your post (this is an inherent limitation of Google+, which limits apps to see only the same posts that any internet user would see – even when you are signed-in to the app as yourself on Google+).

• recommend it to others. Once again, you must include Public in the list of recipients for your post, or the spnet cannot see it.

We strongly suggest that you include a topic hashtag for your research interest area. For example, if there is a hashtag that people in your field commonly use for posting on Twitter, use it. If you have to make up a new hashtag, keep it intuitive and follow “camelCase” capitalization e.g. #openPeerReview.

Open design

Note that thanks to our open design, you do not even need to create a SelectedPapers.net login. Instead, SelectedPapers.net authenticates with Google (for example) that you are signed in to Google+; you never give SelectedPapers.net your Google password or access to any confidential information.

Moreover, even when you are signed in to SelectedPapers.net using your Google sign-in, it cannot see any of your private posts, only those you posted publicly—in other words, exactly the same as what anybody on the Internet can see.

What to do next?

We really need some people to start using SelectedPapers.net and start giving us bug reports. The place to do that is here:

https://github.com/cjlee112/spnet/issues

or if that’s too difficult for some reason, you can just leave a comment on this blog entry.

We could also use people who can write software to improve and expand the system. I can think of fifty ways the setup could be improved: but as usual with open-source software, what matters most is not what you suggest, but what you’re willing to do.

Next, let mention three things we could do in the longer term. But I want to emphasize that these are just a few of many things that can be done in the ecosystem created by a selected papers network. We don’t need to all do the same thing, since it’s an open, federated system.

• Overlay journals. A journal doesn’t need to do distribution and archiving of papers anymore: the arXiv or PubMed can do that. A journal can focus on the crucial work of selection and endorsement—it can just point to a paper on the arXiv or PubMed, and say “this paper is published”. Such journals, called overlay journals, are already being contemplated—see for example Tim Gowers’ post. But they should work better in the ecosystem created by a selected papers network.

• Review boards. Publication doesn’t need to be a monogamous relation between a journal and an author. We could also have prestigious ‘review boards’ like the Harvard Genomics Board or the Institute of Network Science who pick, every so often, what they consider to be best papers in their chosen area. In their CVs, scholars could then say things like “this paper was chosen as one of the Top Ten Papers in Topology in 2015 by the International Topology Review Board”. Of course, boards would become prestigious in the usual recursive way: by having prestigious members, being associated with prestigious institutions, and correctly choosing good papers to bestow prestige upon. But all this could be done quite cheaply.

• Open peer review. Last time, we listed lots of problems with how journals referee papers. Open peer review is a way to solve these problems. I’ll say more about it next time. For now, go here:

• Christopher Lee, Open peer review by a selected-papers network, Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience 6 (2012).

A federated system

After reading this, you may be tempted to ask: “Doesn’t website X already do most of this? Why bother starting another?”

Here’s the answer: our approach is different because it is federated. What does that mean? Here’s the test: if somebody else were to write their own implementation of the SelectedPapers.net protocol and run it on their own website, would data entered by users of that site show up automatically on selectedpapers.net, and vice versa? The answer is yes, because the protocol transports its data on open, public networks, so the same mechanism that allows selectedpapers.net to read its users’ messages would work for anyone else. Note that no special communications between the new site and SelectedPapers.net would be required; it is just federated by design!

One more little website is not going to solve the problems with journals. The last thing anybody wants is another password to remember! There are already various sites trying to solve different pieces of the problem, but none of them are really getting traction. One reason is that the different sites can’t or won’t talk to each other—that is, federate. They are walled gardens, closed ecosystems. As a result, progress has been stalled for years.

And frankly, even if some walled garden did eventually eventually win out, that wouldn’t solve the problem of expensive journals. If one party became able to control the flow of scholarly information, they’d eventually exploit this just as the journals do now.

So, we need a federated system, to make scholarly communication openly accessible not just for scholars but for everyone—and to keep it that way.

The Selected Papers Network (Part 1)

Christopher Lee has developed some new software called the Selected Papers Network. I want to explain that and invite you all to try using it! But first, in this article, I want to review the problems it’s trying to address.

There are lots of problems with scholarly publishing, and of course even more with academia as a whole. But I think Chris and I are focused on two: expensive journals, and ineffective peer review.

Expensive Journals

Our current method of publication has some big problems. For one thing, the academic community has allowed middlemen to take over the process of publication. We, the academic community, do most of the really tricky work. In particular, we write the papers and referee them. But they, they publishers, get almost all the money, and charge our libraries for it—more and more, thanks to their monopoly power. It’s an amazing business model:

Get smart people to work for free, then sell what they make back to them at high prices.

People outside academia have trouble understanding how this continues! To understand it, we need to think about what scholarly publishing and libraries actually achieve. In short:

1. Distribution. The results of scholarly work get distributed in publicly accessible form.

2. Archiving. The results, once distributed, are safely preserved.

3. Selection. The quality of the results is assessed, e.g. by refereeing.

4. Endorsement. The quality of the results is made known, giving the scholars the prestige they need to get jobs and promotions.

Thanks to the internet, jobs 1 and 2 have become much easier. Anyone can put anything on a website, and work can be safely preserved at sites like the arXiv and PubMed Central. All this is either cheap or already supported by government funds. We don’t need journals for this.

The journals still do jobs 3 and 4. These are the jobs that academia still needs to find new ways to do, to bring down the price of journals or make them entirely obsolete.

The big commercial publishers like to emphasize how they do job 3: selection. The editors contact the referees, remind them to deliver their referee reports, and communicate these reports to the authors, while maintaining the anonymity of the referees. This takes work.

However, this work can be done much more cheaply than you’d think from the prices of journals run by the big commercial publishers. We know this from the existence of good journals that charge much less. And we know it from the shockingly high profit margins of the big publishers, particularly Elsevier.

It’s clear that the big commercial publishers are using their monopoly power to charge outrageous prices for their products. Why do they continue to get away with this? Why don’t academics rebel and publish in cheaper journals?

One reason is a broken feedback loop. The academics don’t pay for journals out of their own pocket. Instead, their university library pays for the journals. Rising journal costs do hurt the academics: money goes into paying for journals that could be spent in other ways. But most of them don’t notice this.

The other reason is item 4: endorsement. This is the part of academic publishing that outsiders don’t understand. Academics want to get jobs and promotions. To do this, we need to prove that we’re ‘good’. But academia is so specialized that our colleagues are unable to tell how good our papers are. Not by actually reading them, anyway! So, they try to tell by indirect methods—and a very important one is the prestige of the journals we publish in.

The big commercial publishers have bought most of the prestigious journals. We can start new journals, and some of us are already doing that, but it takes time for these journals to become prestigious. In the meantime, most scholars prefer to publish in prestigious journals owned by the big publishers, even if this slowly drives their own libraries bankrupt. This is not because these scholars are dumb. It’s because a successful career in academia requires the constant accumulation of prestige.

The Elsevier boycott shows that more and more academics understand this trap and hate it. But hating a trap is not enough to escape the trap.

Boycotting Elsevier and other monopolistic publishers is a good thing. The arXiv and PubMed Central are good things, because they show that we can solve the distribution and archiving problems without the help of big commercial publishers. But we need to develop methods of scholarly publishing that solve the selection and endorsement problems in ways that can’t be captured by the big commercial publishers.

I emphasize ‘can’t be captured’, because these publishers won’t go down without a fight. Anything that works well, they will try to buy—and then they will try to extract a stream of revenue from it.

Ineffective Peer Review

While I am mostly concerned with how the big commercial publishers are driving libraries bankrupt, my friend Christopher Lee is more concerned with the failures of the current peer review system. He does a lot of innovative work on bioinformatics and genomics. This gives him a different perspective than me. So, let me just quote the list of problems from this paper:

• Christopher Lee, Open peer review by a selected-papers network, Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience 6 (2012).

The rest of this section is a quote:

• Expert peer review (EPR) does not work for interdisciplinary peer review (IDPR). EPR means the assumption that the reviewer is expert in all aspects of the paper, and thus can evaluate both its impact and validity, and can evaluate the paper prior to obtaining answers from the authors or other referees. IDPR means the situation where at least one part of the paper lies outside the reviewer’s expertise. Since journals universally assume EPR, this creates artificially high barriers to innovative papers that combine two fields [Lee, 2006]—-one of the most valuable sources of new discoveries.

• Shoot first and ask questions later means the reviewer is expected to state a REJECT/ACCEPT position before getting answers from the authors or other referees on questions that lie outside the reviewer’s expertise.

• No synthesis: if review of a paper requires synthesis—combining the different expertise of the authors and reviewers in order to determine what assumptions and criteria are valid for evaluating it—both of the previous assumptions can fail badly [Lee, 2006].

• Journals provide no tools for finding the right audience for an innovative paper. A paper that introduces a new combination of fields or ideas has an audience search problem: it must search multiple fields for people who can appreciate that new combination. Whereas a journal is like a TV channel (a large, pre-defined audience for a standard topic), such a paper needs something more like Google—a way of quickly searching multiple audiences to find the subset of people who can understand its value.

• Each paper’s impact is pre-determined rather than post-evaluated: By ‘pre-determination’ I mean that both its impact metric (which for most purposes is simply the title of the journal it was published in) and its actual readership are locked in (by the referees’s decision to publish it in a given journal) before any readers are allowed to see it. By ‘post-evaluation’ I mean that impact should simply be measured by the research community’s long-term response and evaluation of it.

• Non-expert PUSH means that a pre-determination decision is made by someone outside the paper’s actual audience, i.e., the reviewer would not ordinarily choose to read it, because it does not seem to contribute sufficiently to his personal research interests. Such a reviewer is forced to guess whether (and how much) the paper will interest other audiences that lie outside his personal interests and expertise. Unfortunately, people are not good at making such guesses; history is littered with examples of rejected papers and grants that later turned out to be of great interest to many researchers. The highly specialized character of scientific research, and the rapid emergence of new subfields, make this a big problem.

In addition to such false-negatives, non-expert PUSH also causes a huge false-positive problem, i.e., reviewers accept many papers that do not personally interest them and which turn out not to interest anybody; a large fraction of published papers subsequently receive zero or only one citation (even including self-citations [Adler et al., 2008]). Note that non-expert PUSH will occur by default unless reviewers are instructed to refuse to review anything that is not of compelling interest for their own work. Unfortunately journals assert an opposite policy.

• One man, one nuke means the standard in which a single negative review equals REJECT. Whereas post-evaluation measures a paper’s value over the whole research community (‘one man, one vote’), standard peer review enforces conformity: if one referee does not understand or like it, prevent everyone from seeing it.

• PUSH makes refereeing a political minefield: consider the contrast between a conference (where researchers publicly speak up to ask challenging questions or to criticize) vs. journal peer review (where it is reckoned necessary to hide their identities in a ‘referee protection program’). The problem is that each referee is given artificial power over what other people can like—he can either confer a large value on the paper (by giving it the imprimatur and readership of the journal) or consign it zero value (by preventing those readers from seeing it). This artificial power warps many aspects of the review process; even the ‘solution’ to this problem—shrouding the referees in secrecy—causes many pathologies. Fundamentally, current peer review treats the reviewer not as a peer but as one who wields a diktat: prosecutor, jury, and executioner all rolled into one.

• Restart at zero means each journal conducts a completely separate review process of a paper, multiplying the costs (in time and effort) for publishing it in proportion to the number of journals it must be submitted to. Note that this particularly impedes innovative papers, which tend to aim for higher-profile journals, and are more likely to suffer from referees’s IDPR errors. When the time cost for publishing such work exceeds by several fold the time required to do the work, it becomes more cost-effective to simply abandon that effort, and switch to a ‘standard’ research topic where repetition of a pattern in many papers has established a clear template for a publishable unit (i.e., a widely agreed checklist of criteria for a paper to be accepted).

• The reviews are thrown away: after all the work invested in obtaining reviews, no readers are permitted to see them. Important concerns and contributions are thus denied to the research community, and the referees receive no credit for the vital contribution they have made to validating the paper.

In summary, current peer review is designed to work for large, well-established fields, i.e., where you can easily find a journal with a high probability that every one of your reviewers will be in your paper’s target audience and will be expert in all aspects of your paper. Unfortunately, this is just not the case for a large fraction of researchers, due to the high level of specialization in science, the rapid emergence of new subfields, and the high value of boundary-crossing research (e.g., bioinformatics, which intersects biology, computer science, and math).

Toward solutions

Next time I’ll talk about the software Christopher Lee has set up. But if you want to get a rough sense of how it works, read the section of Christopher Lee’s paper called The Proposal in Brief.

Open Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research

According to a White House webpage, John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has

… issued a memorandum today to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publicly available free of charge within 12 months after original publication.

This is already true for research funded by the National Institute of Health. For years some of us have been pushing for the National Science Foundation and other agencies to do the same thing. Elsevier and other companies fought against it, even trying to pass a law to stop it…. but a petition to the White House seems to have had an effect!

In response to this petition, Holdren now says:

while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.

If this really happens, this will be very big news. So let’s fight to make sure this initiative doesn’t get watered down or undermined by the bad guys! The quickest easiest thing is to talk to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, either by phone or email, as explained here. A phone call counts more than an email.

One great thing about Holdren’s new memo is that it requires open access to experimental data, not just papers.

And one sad thing is that it only applies to federally funded research in the sciences, not the humanities. It does not apply to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Done well, research in the humanities can be just as important as scientific research… since most of our problems involve humans.

Elsevier: Strangling Libraries Worldwide

 

After academics worldwide began a boycott against Elsevier, this publisher claimed it would mend its ways and treat mathematicians better.

Why just mathematicians? Maybe they didn’t notice that only 17% of the researchers boycotting them are mathematicians. More likely, they’re trying a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy.

Despite their placating gestures, the overall problem persists:

Elsevier’s business model is to get very smart people to work for free, then sell their results back to them at high and ever-rising prices.

Does that sound sustainable to you? It works better than you might think, because they have control over many journals that academics want, and they sell these journals in big ‘bundles’, so you can’t stop buying just some of them. In short, they have monopoly power.

Worse, the people who actually buy the journals are not the academics, but university libraries. Librarians are very nice people. They want to keep their customers—the academics—happy. So they haven’t been very good at saying what they should:

Okay, you want to raise your prices? Fine, we’ll stop subscribing to all your journals until you lower them!

And so, libraries world-wide are slowly being strangled by Elsevier.

A while back, when the economic crisis hit here at U. C. Riverside, our library’s budget was cut. Journals eat up most of the budget, but librarians felt they couldn’t drop subscriptions to all the Elsevier journals, and Elsevier’s practice of bundling meant they couldn’t drop just some of them. The only ways to cut costs were to cut library hours, lay off staff, cut journals published by smaller—and cheaper!—publishers, and buy fewer books. Books can always be bought later… in theory… so they took the biggest hit. Our book budget was slashed to about a tenth of its original level!

The people most hurt were not mathematicians or scientists, but people working in the humanities. They’re the ones who use books the most.

And here’s a shocking story I recently got in my email. I’ll paraphrase, because the details of cases like this are kept secret thanks to Elsevier’s legal tactics:

I wanted to inform you that the University of X is negotiating our new contract with Elsevier for 2013–2015, and what effect Elsevier’s proclaimed changes have.

First of all, the university library has a 42% smaller budget in 2013 than in 2010 for books, journals, etc. So they are negotiating with many publishers, to be able to cancel more subscriptions than allowed in the existing contracts.

The Elsevier contracts for journal subscriptions ends in 2012, and for the so-called “Freedom Collection”—a bundle providing access to all non-subscribed journals—it ends in 2013. I asked the librarian whether there was a price reduction for the new contracts. He reported:

At the beginning of the negotiations he told the Elsevier sales representative, Mister Q, that the University of X has its back to the wall due to the 42% budget cut. Q offered the new contract with moderate price increase of around 5%. A price decrease was out of the question.

Our librarian asked whether he could cancel various subscriptions, many more than allowed in the expiring contract. Q agreed in principle—as long as the total price does not decrease! He was quite cooperative, and essentially offered various different knives to be stabbed with, such as:

• a price increase for the Freedom Collection

or

• an increase of the content fee: this fee, charged in addition to the subscription if one wants electronic access, could go up to 25%. This fee is charged even if one wants only the electronic access and no printed volumes.

Then our librarian asked Q what he should reply to my question about price decreases. Q sent a long reply including that:

- our national science foundation bought the Elsevier archive already some years ago. Therefore we would not benefit from the fact that the archives are now partly free.

- our university cancelled all its math subscriptions already in 2007. Therefore we do not benefit from the price decrease of math journals.

Then he explained at length that we would benefit from what they were doing “as part of our ongoing project to address the needs of the mathematics community”: “holding down 2013 prices, launching a Core Mathematics subject collection, convening an advisory Scientific Council for Mathematics – designed to meet the specific needs of the mathematics community, members of which were critical of Elsevier in the wake of the Cost of Knowledge petition.”

I hope you see why we all need to boycott Elsevier. Stop publishing our papers with them, stop refereeing papers for them, stop working as editors for them, and convince your librarian that it’s okay to unsubscribe to their journals. Please go to this website and join over 12,000 top researchers in this boycott.

For more information, click on this:

Free Access to Taxpayer-Funded Research — Act Now!

If you’re a US citizen, your taxes pay for lots of scientific research. If you sign this White House petition, you may get to see the research you paid for!

Just click this:

We need a total of 25,000 signatures before June 19th for this to land on the president’s desk. That sounds hard. But:

• On May 29th, we only needed 5825 more.

• On May 30th we only needed 4765 more.

• Right now, on May 31st, we only need 3354.

We can do it! Sign it and pass it on!

The petition says:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

If you want more information, read about the Federal Research Public Access Act. This is a bill that would make taxpayer-funded research freely available, while still preserving the legitimate rights of publishing companies.

The Education of a Scientist

Why are scientists like me getting so worked up over Elsevier and other journal publishers? It must seem strange from the outside. This cartoon explains it very clearly. It’s hilarious—except that it’s TRUE!!! This is why we need a revolution.

(It’s true except for one small thing: in math and physics, Elsevier and Springer let us put our papers on our websites and free electronic archives… though not the final version, only the near-final draft. This is a concession we had to fight for.)

What can you do? Two easy things:

• If you’re an academic, add your name to the boycott of Elsevier.

• If you’re a US citizen, sign this White House petition before March 9.

Why the problem is hard

Why is it so hard it is to solve the journal problem? Here’s a quick simplified explanation for outsiders—people who don’t live in the world of university professors.

There are lots of open-access journals that are free to read but the author needs to pay a fee. There are even lots that are free to read and free for the author. Why doesn’t everyone switch to publishing in these? Lots of us have. But most haven’t. Two reasons:

1) These journals aren’t as “prestigious” as the journals owned by the evil Big Three publishers: Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell. In the last 30 years the Big Three bought most of the really “prestigious” journals – and a journal can’t become “prestigious” overnight, so while things are changing, they’re changing slowly.

Publishing in a “prestigious” journal helps you get hired, promoted, and get grants. “Prestige” is not a vague thing: it’s even measured numerically using something called the Impact Factor. It may be baloney, but it is collectively agreed-upon baloney. Trying to make it go away is like trying to make money go away: people would not know what to do without it.

2) It’s not the professors who pay the outrageous subscription fees for journals – it’s the university libraries. So nothing instantly punishes the professors for publishing in “prestigious” but highly expensive journals, except the nasty rules about resharing journal articles, which however are invisible if you live in a world of professors where everyone has library access!

So, the problem is hard to solve. The fight will be hard.

But we’ll win anyway, because the current situation is just too outrageous to tolerate. We have strategies and we’re pursuing lots of them. You can help by doing those two easy things.

Research Work Act Dead — What Next?

A larger victory for the rebel forces!

One day after Elsevier dropped its support for the Research Works Act, the people pushing this ugly bill—who coincidentally get regular contributions of cash from Elsevier—have decided to let it die! At least for now.

Here’s the joint statement from Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn B. Maloney, who proposed this bill… together with my translation into plain English:

“The introduction of HR 3699 has spurred a robust, expansive debate on the topics of scientific and scholarly publishing, intellectual property protection, and public access to federally funded research. Since its introduction, we have heard from numerous stakeholders and interested parties on both sides of this important issue.

Translation: the Association of American Publishers supported this bill because it would crush the Public Access Policy that makes taxpayer-funded medical research freely accessible online… and stop this practice from spreading to other kinds of research.

But then, scholars and ordinary people worldwide erupted in a wave of revulsion, even using this bill as an extra reason for boycotting the publisher Elsevier—the most vocal supporter of this bill.

For example, all way across the Atlantic, an editorial in the Guardian shouted: “The result would be an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide. The only winners would be publishing corporations such as Elsevier (£724m profits on revenues of £2b in 2010—an astounding 36% of revenue taken as profit).”

Since Elsevier is a global corporation, this is not what they want people to read in British newspapers.

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future.

Translation: the big publishers are doomed in the long run.

The transition must be collaborative…

Translation: but Elsevier makes $100 million in profits every month now, so let's not move too fast.

… and must respect copyright law and the principles of open access. The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid.

Translation: we’re not evil. We’re for everything that sounds good, even things in direct contradiction to the bill we proposed!

This conversation needs to continue and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.

We’ve beaten, for now.

As such, we want Americans concerned about access to research and other participants in this debate to know we will not be taking legislative action on HR 3699, the Research Works Act. We do intend to remain involved in efforts to examine and study the protection of intellectual property rights and open access to publicly funded research.

But watch out: we’re not giving up.

So, we need to heed the words of open-access advocate Peter Suber:

This is a victory for what The Economist called the Academic Spring. It shows that academic discontent—expressed in blogs, social media, mainstream news media, and open letters to Congress—can defeat legislation supported by a determined and well-funded lobby. Let’s remember that, and let’s prove that this political force can go beyond defeating bad legislation, like the Research Works Act, to enacting good legislation, like the Federal Research Public Access Act.

So, folks, please:

1) Learn about the Federal Research Public Access Act. Blog about it, tweet about it: this is one of the few really good bills that Congress has considered for a long time.

2) If you’re a US citizen, sign the White House petition supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act. If 25,000 sign by March 9th, the president will review it.

3) No matter where you are, add a comment supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access petition. And if you live in the US, sign the petition!

4) If you teach or study at a university, click on the picture below to get a PDF file of a poster explaining the boycott. Print it out and put it on your office door. While for some of us the Elsevier boycott is old news, a surprising number of people who should know haven’t heard of it yet! Within the field of mathematics, professional associations are planning a PR blitz to solve that problem. But if you’re in one of the bigger sciences, like biologist and chemistry, we really need you to help publicize what’s going on.

Elsevier Gives Up On Research Work Act

A small victory for the rebel forces:

• Elsevier Withdraws Support for the Research Works Act.

Yay! Let’s keep up the pressure, crush the Research Works Act, and move to take the offensive!

In case you haven’t heard yet: this nasty bill would stop the National Institute of Health from making taxpayer-funded research freely available to US taxpayers. It’s supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)—but various AAP members, including MIT Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have already come out against it. Now, put under pressure by the spreading boycott, Elsevier has dropped its support.

However, they make it crystal clear that this is just a tactical retreat:

… while withdrawing support for the Research Works Act, we will continue to join with those many other nonprofit and commercial publishers and scholarly societies that oppose repeated efforts to extend mandates through legislation.

I don’t know what position Springer and Wiley-Blackwell take on this bill: besides Elsevier they’re the biggest science publishers. If they all drop their support, the bill may die. And then we can take the offensive and push for the Federal Research Public Access Act.

This bill would make sure the people who pay for U.S. government-funded research—us, the taxpayers—don’t have to pay again just to see what we bought. It would do this by expanding what’s already standard practice at the National Institute of Health to some other big funding agencies, like the National Science Foundation.

On Google+, open-access hero Peter Suber writes:

This is a victory for what The Economist called the Academic Spring. It shows that academic discontent—expressed in blogs, social media, mainstream news media, and open letters to Congress—can defeat legislation supported by a determined and well-funded lobby. Let’s remember that, and let’s prove that this political force can go beyond defeating bad legislation, like the Research Works Act, to enacting good legislation, like the Federal Research Public Access Act.

Indeed, for companies like Elsevier, the great thing about bills like the Research Work Act is that they make us work hard just to keep the status quo, instead of what we really want: changing the status quo for the better. And they’re perfectly happy to stage a tactical retreat in a little skirmish like this if it distracts us from our real goals.

So, let’s keep at it! For starters, if you teach or study at a university, you can click on the picture below, get a PDF file of a poster that explains the boycott, print it out, and put it on your door. While for some of us the Elsevier boycott is old news, a surprising number of people who should know haven’t heard of it yet!

Luckily, a PR blitz in various math journals will start to change that, at least in the field of mathematics. And soon I’ll talk about some exciting plans being developed on Math 2.0. But if you’re a biologist or chemist, for example, you really need to start the revolution over in your field.

Elsevier and Springer Sue University Library

The battle is heating up! Now Elsevier, Springer and a smaller third publisher are suing a major university in Switzerland, the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, or ETH Zürich for short. Why? Because this university’s library is distributing copies of their journal articles at a lower cost than the publishers themselves.

Aren’t university libraries supposed to make journal articles available? Over on Google+, Willie Wong explains:

My guess is that they are complaining about how the ETH Library (as well as many other libraries in the NEBIS system) offers Electronic Document Delivery.

It is free for staff and researchers, and private individuals who purchase a library membership can ask for articles for a fee. It is a nice service: otherwise most of us would just go to the library, borrow the printed journal, and scan it ourselves (when the electronic copy is not part of the library’s subscription). This way the library does the scanning for us (so we benefit from time better used) and the library benefits from less undesired wear-and-tear and loss from their paper copies.

The publishers probably think the library is illegally reselling their journal articles! But here’s an article by the head of the ETH library, making his side of the case:

• Wolfram Neubauer, A thorn in the side for science publishers, ETH Life, 17 February 2012.

He says the delivery of electronic copies of documents is allowed by the Swiss Copyright Act. He also makes a broader moral case:

• More or less all scientifically relevant journals rely on the results of publicly funded research.

• The brunt of evaluating scientific findings (i.e. peer reviewing) is borne by the scientific community, with the publishers playing only a supporting role.

• By far the most important customers for all major science publishers are academic libraries, the vast majority of which are themselves supported by public funding.

He concludes:

In the legal proceedings, the aim must therefore be to strike a balance between the services provided by the ETH-Bibliothek for the benefit of science and research on the one hand and the commercial interests of the publishers on the other.

It’ll be interesting to see how this goes in court. Either way, a kind of precedent will be set.

Math 2.0

Building on the Elsevier boycott, a lot of people are working on positive steps to make expensive journals obsolete. My email is flooded with discussions, different groups making different plans.

Email is great, but not for everything. So Andrew Stacey (the technical mastermind behind the nLab, Azimuth Wiki and Azimuth Forum):

and Scott Morrison (one of the brains behind MathOverflow, an important math question-and-answer website):

have started a forum to talk about the many issues involved:

• Math 2.0.

That’s good, because these guys actually do stuff, not just talk! Andrew describes the idea here:

The purpose of Math 2.0 is to provide a forum for discussion of the future of mathematical publishing. It’s something that I’ve viewed as an important issue for years, and have had many, many interesting conversations about, but somehow nothing much seems to happen. I’m hoping that the momentum from Tim Gowers’ recent blog posts might lead to something and I’d like to capitalise on that.

However, most of the discussion currently is happening in the comments on blog posts. This is hard to follow, and hard to separate out the new suggestions from the discussions on old ones. I think that forums are much better for discussion, hence this one.

The name, Math2.0, is intended to signify two things: that it’s time for an upgrade of the mathematical environment and that I think we can learn a lot from looking at how software—particularly open source software—works. By “mathematical environment”, I don’t mean how we actually do the mathematics but what happens next, particularly communicating the ideas that we create. This is where the internet can really change things for the better (as it has started to do with the arXiv), but where I think that we have yet to figure out how to make best use of it.

This doesn’t just include journals, but I think that that’s an obvious place to start.

So: welcome to Math2.0. Please join in. It’s important.

Andrew Stacey has also emphasized a principle that’s good for reducing chat about starry-eyed visions and focusing on what we can do now:

In all these discussions, there is one point that I would like to make at the start and which I think is relevant to any proposal to set up something new for mathematicians (or more generally, for academics). That is that whatever system is set up it must be:

Useful at the point of use

This is something that I’ve learnt from administering the nLab over the past few years. It keeps going and there is no sign of it slowing down. The secret of its success, I maintain, is that it is useful at the point of use. When I write something on the nLab, I benefit immediately. I can link to previous things I’ve written, to definitions that others have written, and so link my ideas to many others. It means that if I want to talk to someone about something, the thing we are talking about is easily visible and accessible to both (or all) of us. If I want to remember what it was I was thinking about a year ago, I can easily find it. The fact that when I come back the next day, whatever I’ve added has been improved, polished, and added to, is a bonus—but it would still be useful if that didn’t happen.

For other things, then I need more of an incentive to participate. MathOverflow was a lot of fun in the beginning, but now I find that a question needs to be such that it’s fairly clear that I’m one of the few people in the world who can answer. It’s not that my enthusiasm for the site has gone down, just that everything else keeps pushing it out of the way. So a new system has to be useful to those who use it, and ideally the usefulness should be proportional to the amount of effort that one puts in.

A corollary of this is that it should be useful even if only a small number of people use it. The number of core users of the nLab is not large, but nevertheless the nLab is still extremely useful to us. I can imagine that when a proposal for something new is made, there will be a variety of reactions ranging from “That’ll never work” through to “Sounds interesting, but …” with only a few saying “Count me in!”. To have a chance of succeeding, it has to be the case that those few can get it off the ground and demonstrate that it works, without the input of the wider sceptical community.

So: if you’re a mathematician or programmer interested in revolutionizing the future of math publishing, go to Math 2.0, register, and join the conversation! You’ll see there are a number of concrete proposals on the table, including one by Chris Lee, and Marc Harper and myself.

I’ll say more about those later. But I want to add a principle of my own to Andrew’s ‘useful at the point of use’. The goal is not to get a universal consensus on the future of math publishing! Instead, we need a healthy dissensus in which different groups of people develop different systems—so we can see which ones work.

In biology, evolution happens when some change is useful at the point of use—and it doesn’t happen by consensus, either. When some fish gradually became amphibians, they didn’t wait for all fish to agree this was a good move. And indeed it’s good that we still have fish.

Jan Velterop has some interesting thoughts on the evolution of scholarly publishing, which you can read here:

• Richard Poynder, The open access interviews: Jan Velterop, February 2012.

Velterop writes:

As a geologist I go so far as to say that I see analogies with the Permian-Triassic boundary and the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, when life on Earth changed dramatically due to fundamental and sudden changes in the environment.

Those boundary events, as they are known, resulted in mass extinctions, and that’s an unavoidable evolutionary consequence of sudden dramatic environmental changes.

But they also open up ecological niches for new, or hitherto less successful, forms of life. In this regard, it is interesting to see the recent announcement of F1000 Research, which intends to address the major issues afflicting scientific publishing.

[...]

The evolution of scientific communication will go on, without any doubt, and although that may not mean the total demise of the traditional models, these models will necessarily change. After all, some dinosaur lineages survived as well. We call them birds. And there are some very attractive ones. They are smaller than the dinosaurs they evolved from, though. Much smaller.