[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 08:02:28 UTC 2014

"arXiV works. Many submitters then update their papers to reflect
better versions. Except that this then the publishers tell scientist
to remove these."

[citation needed].

If you can show me evidence of this, I promise to blog the heck out of it.

-- Mike.

On 25 March 2014 07:53, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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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