For years, the open science movement has sought to light a fire about the “closed” journal-publication system. In the last few weeks their efforts seemed to have ignited a broader flame, driven mainly, it seems, by the revelation that one of the most resented publishers, Elsevier, was backing the Research Works Act — some tomfoolery I noted in Congress Considers Paywalling Science You Already Paid For, on Jan 6. Now, 24 days later, scientists are pledging by the hundreds to not cooperate with Elsevier in any way — refusing to publish in its journals, referee its papers, or do the editorial work that researchers have been supplying to journals without charge for decades — and the rebellion is repeatedly reaching the pages of the New York Times and Forbes. This is easily the biggest surge the open-science movement has ever put on. At The Cost of Knowledge, the site created for the roster, there were 1,400 signatories last night, and when I woke today at 5 a.m., over 1,600. The thing seems to be snowballing. Some have ached to take action for years. Others are newly radicalized. In my feature I speculated whether librarians would eventually lead the charge. But Jason Hoyt, then of Mendeley and now of OpenRePub, seemed to have it closer: The revolution awaited only the researchers. A skim through their testimony (below the jump here) is an education in why the call for open science is going mainstream:
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Scott Aaronson MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab – Computer Science
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Nigel Brown University of Edinburgh – Biology
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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David Atkinson FL Institute for Human and Machine Cognition – Computer Science
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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David Doyle Industry
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Jean-Luc Eggen Tudelft, inscipa.com
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| won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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David Eppstein University of California, Irvine – Computer Science
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Mark Everitt National Institute of Informatics – Physics
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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John Faithfull Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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José Figueroa-O’Farrill University of Edinburgh – Physics
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Kai von Fintel MIT
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Andy Forceno University of Connecticut
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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David Gerts USAF – Physics
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Ian Gibson Memorial University of Newfoundland Libraries
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Lus Ibanez Kitware Inc. – Computer Science
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Eric Kansa Opencontext.org / UC Berkeley
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Lew Yao Long Swinburne University of Technology (Sarawak Campus) – Chemistry
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Paul Manning Trent University
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Paul Muhly University of Iowa – Mathematics
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Ardal Powell University of Cambridge
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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DAO Duy Quang Institut Pprime, UPR CNRS 3346 Département FTC, Branche Combustion, 1 Avenue Clément Ader, BP 40109 86961 Chasseneuil Futuroscope, France, – Chemistry
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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Florian Wolf mergeflow AG – Computer Science
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| won’t publish, won’t referee, won’t do editorial work |
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This is great news!
I worked for several years at the American Chemical Society, overseeing a group of 11 editors. Their job was to take papers that had been accepted by scientific journals and clean them up. Not heavy editing, mind you, but correcting typos, making sure it adhered to the style guide, and so on. One editor had even automated the process to a large extent with a rather complex Word macro.
The big joke of all this was that university libraries had to pay through the nose for these journals — despite the fact that these colleges actually _provided_ the journals’ content! How did the ACS justify its exorbitant subscription prices? The editing. Most of which could be done with Word macros.
So universities not only fund the research done by scientists, but then the ACS charges them to see the results of that research. “Scam” doesn’t begin to describe it. And, of course, it means that taxpayers who fund the research then have to pay a private organization to actually see the results.
Sure, the justifications were rampant: Editing, printing, etc. But they always rang hollow. And the idea that science could someday be PUBLIC — well, ha ha ha. No, you see, if you want to see science, the American Chemical Society (or Elsevier, or whomever) will want its cut first.
Hard to get too worked up about it when most of the people uniting for a cause here are doing rather well already. If you want to find a victim to feel sympathy for and rally behind you usually have to look further down the food chain. Perhaps their interns and students? Yeah they probably need our help more than these folks. What are they going to call this movement the 96-to-97th percent?
Not sure where you’re getting your information from. While senior researchers and PIs do make a fair bit of money (around 60k/yr) a lot of us postdocs and grad students (and we greatly outweigh the former group in numbers) make 16-30k a year.
Regardless of how much money we make, the argument here is that US taxpayers (and that should be the 100%) are funding work which publishers turn around and charge you $30 per article to access. They also charge the scientists publishing the article a publication fee. Finally they sell advertising in their journals. Meanwhile a lot of their editors/reviewers are university professors who are being paid by US taxpayer money (NIH grants) and they do not get any compensation from the journals for their services.
This would be similar to Wired charging you to comment on this article as well as charging others who read your comment AND charging their advertisers for ad space.
The point isn’t financial compensation, you dolt! These academics aren’t itching for a piece of the cut.The point is making information openly available, to the entire 100%. The academics (the ones who do the research, write the papers, and even review the papers) want the public at large to be able to read their work, instead of having it hidden behind exorbitantly, unduly, obscenely expensive paywalls. They’re not in it for the money; they’re in it for the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. But institutional and bureaucratic inertia prevents them from realizing the benefits of the Internet and keeps them shackled to the no longer relevant traditional journal system. That’s the problem; the academics are trying to be charitable, not greedy, but the publishers are flexing every rent-seeking muscle they have to prevent a more open paradigm of research from flourishing.
A good correction, but if you please, kindly refrain from “you dolt” and similar. Like to keep it civil here. Many thanks, David
Most western universities have their own printery and on-line libraries that are linked in a closed, world-wide tertirary group that is accessible with a username and password for a yearly fee. In house publications do occur. This needs to be developed more, even as an alternative to traditional journal publications.
I work to compile and correlate research that can help parents and teachers better understand the many dimensions of science related to how human beings learn to become who they become. My work is free. I’ve often followed promising trails only to hit the walls of journals that want a prohibitive fee for accessing what I’m interested in. I am all for “free science” and I am looking forward to the wall coming down.
Excellent movement.
Sean Carroll brought me here.
I’m not a scientist- yet (undergrad currently). And it enrages me to think that if I were to be publishing scientific papers that they would not be accessible to everyone.
For the sake of the world, information ought to be free. Charging for information is stifling a system that will lead to more efficient breakthroughs in all of science. It’s an absolutely greed driven system that ~only~ favors the few people who make a profit off of the publication, parasitizing the rest of us…
What is worse are the lies and hypocrisy that the publishing companies are spewing to justify their usury.
I’d like to see more than just scientists join in this rebellion. Let the humanists and the social scientists join as well. For academic work I see no reason in the world to hide what we do behind any sort of wall, either of privilege or of money.
Yes! I’ve never joined the publish or perish world. And I am annoyed when web search is blocked by a paywall when a significant part of the production of that material is public domain – private or for-profit IP rarely sees the journals in a meaningful ways as to not leave money laying around.
Open source (registered and moderated wiki style) would be amazing – especially if the “number of hits” started to have an impact on ranking for stuff like tenure or contract work.. Credibility is important – but so is breaking down the walls of the research club.
Stuff like this could be very disruptive in many ways – and may be just what the world needs to revamp the centuries-old professional journal establishment.
wow
Without the peer review work, the journals will sink to the bottom like Titanic. This is the most important part and it is done for free. The journals make too much money on free contributions of the scientific world.
Good for them. Get ’em!
So instead of just boycotting the bad thing, maybe some of us could get together to create a replacement? Seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult (relatively speaking) to design/implement a web-based journal system the works somewhat along the line of the WIKI model…possibly pulling in ideas from other “web 2.0” applications for quality/content control, etc…
There are quite a few projects looking to replace, part by part, the conventional research-and-publish system. I’m putting together a post about them presently, hope to publish tonight or Wed (2/1) a.m.