[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 07:53:26 UTC 2014

I completely agree with Bjoern. I have come to the same conclusion and was
preparing a series of blog posts on it. I'll phrase it differently...

The Opportunity cost of all Open Access - as currently practised - is huge.
[The opportunity cost of Closed Access is several times that].

In other words we are spending huge amounts of time on non-science which
does not in anyway enhance the process of science. Science isn't BETTER
because it's in an Open Access journal. Researchers still spend time
reformatting references, redrawing diagrams because the journal wants to
compete with other journals. It's appalling that the publication industry
has not long ago adopted or created universal ways of authoring.

But it's worse. The process of publishing stifles scientific communication.
Why have journals? because publishers want to compete, not because it's an
efficient modern process. And the green-OA evangelists repeat the mantra of
the sacred version-of-reference. This is nonsense. Science is always
capable of improvement. I deposit my software daily. Mat Todd deposits his
antimalarial chemical data daily. If either are capable of improvement we
improve it on a daily basis. You couldn't do this in the nineteenth century
but you can now.

So journal-based publication and publisher-based publication have vast
opportunity costs. No innovation, little discoverability (we supinely wait
for Google to index our science) , no semantics, dead science in pixels
rather than live objects.

The only place it's done properly is arXiv. The APCs costs are trivial (7
USD - compare 7000 Elsevier). Authors WANT it (they don't want journal
based publication). There's no precious formatting. Word and LaTeX are
totally sufficient. I have never heard of a scientist who has refused to
read a paper because it's in LaTeX or Word rather than double-column,
unreformattable, landscape PDF (one of the worst visual interfaces ever).
Tables split across 2 pages ?? ARGGH. Diagrams measured with a ruler. data
omitted because of "space". three graphs crammed into one diagram etc...

arXiV works. Many submitters then update their papers to reflect better
versions. Except that this then the publishers tell scientist to remove
these. You couldn't make this up. Publishers of all sorts now map onto Ray
Bradbury's firemen in Fahrenheit 451 or Orwell's Ministry of Truth.

We are at the start of the Digital Enlightenment. It's touched government,
creative arts, and many areas outside academia. There Open means true
OKD-Open - free to use, reuse and redistribute and offered as a growing
point for innovation and community building. It's meritocratic and
democratic.

Open Access looks backward - it is not part of the Digital Enlightenment.
It's authoritarian and debases the author.

Bjoern - I am happy to be in the vanguard.

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 1:24 PM, Bjoern Brembs <b.brembs at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, March 24, 2014, 10:53:59 AM, you wrote:
>
> > That's why publishers so often do things that we hate: the
> > fundamentally do not want what we want. It's that simple.
>
> Precisely!
>
> In fact, after Richard's interview, I'm seriously considering phasing out
> all editorial support I've given the new startup publishers. It was fun and
> some of them were/are very innovative and full of smart and dedicated
> people.
>
> But in the end, I'm slowly starting to realize that it only increases the
> Balkanization of our infrastructure. Moreover, as we see now, the constant,
> ongoing license debates will not go away - in fact the more publishers and
> journals we have, the worse it will be as we'd have to take on every single
> one of them! And the news this morning about retracting a paper for legal
> reasons by Frontiers: I mean, that sort of thing just opens so many doors,
> it seems like if we continue to go down this road of ever more publishers
> and ever more journals each and everyone doing what they want, soon we'll
> be bogged down completely just to patch up all the different holes that
> start springing up all over the place.
>
> Technically, taking care that text, data and code are accessible and
> re-usable is a piece of cake. Do we really want to spend our time telling
> others how to do it right, correcting them only to then turn around and do
> the same thing all over again, ad adfinitum, rather than getting it right
> to begin with?
>
> Bjoern
>
>
>
> --
> Björn Brembs
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurogenetics
> Universität Regensburg
> Germany
>
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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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