[Open-access] Crowdsourcing request + BMJ OA Policy

Tue Mar 25 08:46:31 UTC 2014

PMR>Many submitters then update their papers to reflect better versions.

And this is the dizzying void which has opened up at everyone's feet since
the advent of electronic publication. While such practices doubtless better
reflect the actual thought and working processes of scientists, five
hundred years or so of the stable referencing enabled by faithful printing
on paper is perhaps not to be discarded too lightly: let's not forget that
Elsevier got started by publishing Galileo, and that Copernicus' work was
largely inspired by the reproduction of astronomical tables made newly
possible by the printing press.

For example, these taxonomists:

http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/list/2013/3735%281%29.html

recently railed against the "completely unstable and unpredictable new
world of ephemera" , and they may have a point.

It's clear enough that a powerful external publisher function is valuable,
as is a considered, canonical text; but it's also quite clear that the old
guard's rent-seeking is intolerable in the current era, quite apart from
the hindrances they impose upon scientific communication as they scrabble
to retain their relevance in a new technological era.

MT> Of course the old version-of-record system is just the degenerate
MT> version of this scheme, where the only version number is 1.

Be fair! And published corrections, retractions, and errata slips. :)  And
salami publication. :(

Regards to all,

D.

2014-03-25 9:07 GMT+01:00 Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>:

> I think it's probably more that authors are frightened to post their final
> versions. But we can ask -  Any impediment is too much. And maybe this list
> can give a more authoritative picture - that's why we set it up.
>
> And - note - I don't mind posting material that is then communally
> corrected. It's a discourse , not a formal presentation.
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 8:02 AM, Mike Taylor <mike at indexdata.com> wrote:
>
>> "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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>> >
>>
>
>
>
> --
> 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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