New at Reason

July 3, 2007

Ronald Bailey recounts how scientific publishing finally embraced the future.

Comments

zoe|7.3.07 @ 7:36AM|#

Fighting the War on Terror, one old lady at a time.

Stevan Harnad|7.3.07 @ 8:03AM|#

(1) Open Access (OA) self-archiving does not bypass traditional peer-reviewed publication; it provides supplementary access to publications, before and after peer review.

(2) OA Repositories (including Arxiv) contain both preprints (before peer-reviewed publication) and their final peer-reviewed drafts (postprints).

(3) There are hence two ways to provide OA: Publishing in an OA journal (Gold OA) or publishing in a traditional journal and "http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/">self-archiving the eprint in an OA Institutional Repository (Green OA).

thoreau|7.3.07 @ 9:05AM|#

What Steve said.

Optics Express is another open access journal to check out as well.

|7.3.07 @ 9:39AM|#

If we take in our hand any volume; of engineering or school physics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any methods concerning flying cars in quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning ways to prolong my existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Just kidding. One of the oldest uses of the Internet has been to circulate academic information, both of the peer-reviewed variety and otherwise. Why, I think that use even predates porn. Whoa.

|7.3.07 @ 9:57AM|#

Stevan & Thoreau: Thanks for the comments. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough. OA with conventional peer review is widening access to info for researchers and the public. Whereas Nature Precedings and the PLoS One are speeding info to researchers and the public. Finally, I also think that the PLoS One model of post-peer-review will become the standard model for scientific publication in the next decade or so--and that will be a good thing.

|7.3.07 @ 9:57AM|#

Why, I think that use even predates porn. Whoa.

By about three days.

|7.3.07 @ 9:58AM|#

PL: Yes, ArpaNet and NSFnet come to mind. But the creation of OA archives and now online permanent peer-review is relatively new.

|7.3.07 @ 10:41AM|#

Back in the heady excitement of the 90s, I worked at the Ohio Supercomputer Center. While they were working on all the cutting edge stuff at the time (like Internet II), some of the older academics still used, or at least talked about, some of the older channels of communication.

That job had some great elements. Besides all the high-tech fun, like VR caves, it was also the kind of environment where everything shut down and we all crowded around the television to watch the Mars rock announcement. I don't think we'd do that where I work today.

thoreau|7.3.07 @ 10:44AM|#

Ron,

The PLoS One model of ongoing review by the community after initial peer review is a very good thing. In some sense, it's the way science has always been done, albeit with wider dissemination of critiques and easier participation.

The Nature Precedings approach is a bit different from that, since it happens before peer review.

I think peer review will continue as a means of evaluating a researcher's output. In the marketplace for products, people still look for professional certification (e.g. the stamp of approval from Underwriters Laboratories), and peer review is one such stamp. A fairly modest hurdle to clear, but a hurdle nonetheless, and one that people look for when, say, hiring.

Then again, perhaps these online communities will develop their own stamps of approval.

|7.3.07 @ 10:56AM|#

thoreau,

Some mechanism is needed to weed out the chaff. With more channels for publication (or a broader base of reviewers), legitimate outlier research topics should avoid being tossed out with the garbage, and, of course, peer-review or the equivalent will keep the more mainstream research in the eyes of the authors', well, peers :)

Some higher standard of review is needed--not as a gatekeeper, but, as you said, as a certification mechanism. I'm reminded of the non-peer-reviewed law reviews, which can be a mixed bag. They've even been used by rogue sociologists and the like to get journal publication without actually going through peer review. Naughty, naughty.

thoreau|7.3.07 @ 11:03AM|#

Some higher standard of review is needed--not as a gatekeeper, but, as you said, as a certification mechanism.

Exactly. If I'm looking to hire a research assistant, and he has a CV with 20 publications, I need to know whether that spectacular publication record (and 20 would be pretty good for a junior assistant, considering that I only have about 10, counting the ones where I'm not first author, albeit a few more in the pipeline) came about via journals with review processes.

Perhaps in the online world we can get away from soliciting a few experts to take a first look, and go by citations or something, but even there you worry about gaming the system (there are companies that supposedly specialize in getting a page ranked high on Google, for instance).

In the end, if you can't get a few knowledgeable scientists to say "Yeah, this is an interesting and plausible report that merits further scrutiny" then you aren't doing good science. We need a mechanism to identify that. And if online tools enable more people to participate in that process, and make results known to more people, so much the better.

|7.3.07 @ 11:38AM|#

Ah, citations. The few I got for my few publications are preserved in amber, such is my academic pride. You only exist when people recognize you in footnotes. Or--bestill my heart--in the actual text.

At Urkobold, we're considering offering a troll-review process for young scientists. It won't certify the scientific merits of their research; however, it will attack the papers based on their poor grammar and style, statements that we find amusing, the nationality of the author (if funny), and any other arbitrary criticisms that can be made. Passing troll review is an achievement that only the greatest, least humor-inspiring scholars can hope to reach.

Jeff Smith|7.3.07 @ 1:08PM|#

Given the large number of readers of reason with economics backgrounds and interests I am surprised that Ron ignored developments in his piece. I would highlight two:

1. Working paper series increasingly serve as a valuable way to circulate work. Typically reasearchers put a paper into a working paper series at the time of first submission to an academic journal. The working paper series typically do not screen papers, only researchers. Thus, for example, members of the National Bureau of Economic Research can put basically any serious research paper they write into the NBER working paper series. The same is true of the IZA working paper zeries for the much longer list of researchers affiliated with that institute. Screening by researcher rather than by paper saves screening costs but also means that insiders can use the various series to establish priority to particular topics, results and approaches.

2. The Berkeley Press journals are attempting to do several things: increase access by making articles available free on line to all (not just those with access via an institution or personal subscription as with many other journals), to speed up editorial response times and to allow one-stop shopping by providing a portfolio of journals of differing quality but common submission and editors.

Jeff

Russell|7.3.07 @ 8:59PM|#

What's to deliver us from the temptation to dump all of our papers that fail to make the grade in the major leagues into the hopper of the online pubs, in the reasonable expectation that the second string reviewers will be sufficiently snowed by our having incorporated the suggestions of the hardball guys into the rejected papers.

Most people think they're doing OK if they bat 250 at say, Nature, but that means their erstwhile peers reading load would double if the top third of the rejects were born again online .

thoreau|7.3.07 @ 10:38PM|#

Russell-

What, you've never resubmitted a paper to a journal with a lower impact factor?

I sure have.

Russell|7.4.07 @ 3:33AM|#

Thoreau
as have I- question is about the potential proliferation of things to read that that are more noise than signal, and the danger of any old polemicists and the usual suspects on K Street salting the archives with stuff solely to claim that it is 'peer reviewed science'