Talk:Open science

The New Your Times: Cracking open the scientific process -- Jouni 08:09, 21 January 2012 (EET)

Cracking Open the Scientific Process

A GLOBAL FORUM Ijad Madisch, 31, a virologist and computer scientist, founded ResearchGate, a Berlin-based social networking platform for scientists that has more than 1.3 million members.

By THOMAS LIN

Published: January 16, 2012

The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (1846), and disinfecting hands and instruments before surgery (1867), among others.

For centuries, this is how science has operated — through research done in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large. But to many scientists, the longevity of that process is nothing to celebrate.

The system is hidebound, expensive and elitist, they say. Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only “if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.”

Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for “open science” say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction.

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Dr. Nielsen, 38, who left a successful science career to write “Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science,” agreed that scientists have been “very inhibited and slow to adopt a lot of online tools.” But he added that open science was coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”

On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

Indeed, he said, scientists who attend the conference should not be seen as competing with one another. “Lindsay Lohan is our competitor,” he continued. “We have to get her off the screen and get science there instead.”

Facebook for Scientists?

“I want to make science more open. I want to change this,” said Ijad Madisch, 31, the Harvard-trained virologist and computer scientist behind ResearchGate, the social networking site for scientists.

Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook.

A year ago, ResearchGate had 12 employees. Now it has 70 and is hiring. The company, based in Berlin, is modeled after Silicon Valley startups. Lunch, drinks and fruit are free, and every employee owns part of the company.

The Web site is a sort of mash-up of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, with profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and “like” and “follow” buttons (but without baby photos, cat videos and thinly veiled self-praise). Only scientists are invited to pose and answer questions — a rule that should not be hard to enforce, with discussion threads about topics like polymerase chain reactions that only a scientist could love.

Scientists populate their ResearchGate profiles with their real names, professional details and publications — data that the site uses to suggest connections with other members. Users can create public or private discussion groups, and share papers and lecture materials. ResearchGate is also developing a “reputation score” to reward members for online contributions.

ResearchGate offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its “self-archiving repository.” Since most journals allow scientists to link to their submitted papers on their own Web sites, Dr. Madisch encourages his users to do so on their ResearchGate profiles. In addition to housing 350,000 papers (and counting), the platform provides a way to search 40 million abstracts and papers from other science databases.

In 2011, ResearchGate reports, 1,620,849 connections were made, 12,342 questions answered and 842,179 publications shared. Greg Phelan, chairman of the chemistry department at the State University of New York, Cortland, used it to find new collaborators, get expert advice and read journal articles not available through his small university. Now he spends up to two hours a day, five days a week, on the site.

Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiology instructor who supervised Dr. Madisch at Harvard and was one of ResearchGate’s first investors, called it “a great site for serious research and research collaboration,” adding that he hoped it would never be contaminated “with pop culture and chit-chat.” Enlarge This Image Mike Peel

EVOLUTION Michael Nielsen, a quantum physicist, says that as online tools slowly catch on, open science is coalescing into “a bit of a movement.”

Dr. Gupta called Dr. Madisch the “quintessential networking guy — if there’s a Bill Clinton of the science world, it would be him.”

The Paper Trade

Dr. Sönke H. Bartling, a researcher at the German Cancer Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0,” wrote that for scientists to move away from what is currently “a highly integrated and controlled process,” a new system for assessing the value of research is needed. If open access is to be achieved through blogs, what good is it, he asked, “if one does not get reputation and money from them?”

Changing the status quo — opening data, papers, research ideas and partial solutions to anyone and everyone — is still far more idea than reality. As the established journals argue, they provide a critical service that does not come cheap.

“I would love for it to be free,” said Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, but “we have to cover the costs.” Those costs hover around $40 million a year to produce his nonprofit flagship journal, with its more than 25 editors and writers, sales and production staff, and offices in North America, Europe and Asia, not to mention print and distribution expenses. (Like other media organizations, Science has responded to the decline in advertising revenue by enhancing its Web offerings, and most of its growth comes from online subscriptions.)

Similarly, Nature employs a large editorial staff to manage the peer-review process and to select and polish “startling and new” papers for publication, said Dr. Clarke, its editor. And it costs money to screen for plagiarism and spot-check data “to make sure they haven’t been manipulated.”

Peer-reviewed open-access journals, like Nature Communications and PLoS One, charge their authors publication fees — $5,000 and $1,350, respectively — to defray their more modest expenses.

The largest journal publisher, Elsevier, whose products include The Lancet, Cell and the subscription-based online archive ScienceDirect, has drawn considerable criticism from open-access advocates and librarians, who are especially incensed by its support for the Research Works Act, introduced in Congress last month, which seeks to protect publishers’ rights by effectively restricting access to research papers and data.

In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times last week, Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.”

In an e-mail interview, Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier, wrote that “professional curation and preservation of data is, like professional publishing, neither easy nor inexpensive.” And Tom Reller, a spokesman for Elsevier, commented on Dr. Eisen’s blog, “Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry’s ability to recoup these investments.”

Mr. Zivkovic, the ScienceOnline co-founder and a blog editor for Scientific American, which is owned by Nature, was somewhat sympathetic to the big journals’ plight. “They have shareholders,” he said. “They have to move the ship slowly.”

Still, he added: “Nature is not digging in. They know it’s happening. They’re preparing for it.”

Science 2.0

Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has refused to conduct peer review for or submit papers to commercial journals. “I got tired of giving free labor,” he said, to “these very rich for-profit companies.”

Dr. Aaronson is also an active member of online science communities like MathOverflow, where he has earned enough reputation points to edit others’ posts. “We’re not talking about new technologies that have to be invented,” he said. “Things are moving in that direction. Journals seem noticeably less important than 10 years ago.”

Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. “Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,” he said. “I believe in evolution.

“When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.”

Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate’s board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.

“It’s one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn’t anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,” he said, adding that “trillions” are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.

Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.

“If you said years ago, ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” he said. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”

A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2012, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cracking Open the Scientific Process.

Online discussion: All comments (144)

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Dick Turpin Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California Flag It is true that "the system is hidebound, expensive and elitist," as are pretty much all systems governed by gatekeepers (i.e., editors and publishers). However, without those gatekeepers, the audience must become its own editor and sift through all the garbage to find the quality. Ask yourself, do you have the time and desire to do that? If you do, all the power to you - but I'm betting that you don't have the time because you have a day job, hobbies, a marriage, a family, etc. So while, on the one hand, the gatekeepers are in a privileged position to arbitrarily impose their own standards and views on content (as editors usually do), they also serve the purpose of conserving the audience's most precious commodity - time. That applies to science content as much as any other content out there. Mr. Dick Turpin Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:57 p.m. Recommended7 Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter Partha Mitra New York I've published ~ 100 papers (physics, then neuroscience) in major journals (Nature, Science etc). At the same time I have put up my manuscripts on the free physics preprint archives (arxiv) prior to publication - including at least one manuscript which has been cited but which I never submitted to a journal. This particular manuscript had a small error - which was pointed out to me by someone who read it and emailed me a comment - following which I posted a revised, corrected version. Scientific publication should first and foremost be about communicating and sharing scientific results and findings. In the internet era, it makes no sense to hold this process hostage to a broken peer review system and large user fees that puts most science articles out of reach for most people (even in academic settings - libraries have limited resources). The alternative could be free access to the raw articles, but paid access to editorial selection, in a two step process: 1. Author driven publication without gatekeepers and fees (eg deposit a manuscript in arxiv - if Perelman could do that for his proof of the Poincare conjecture, I don't see why the rest of us can't - and I don't buy that biomedicine is exceptional). 2. A subsequent process of reviewing, revising, vetting - this second stage should have expert reviewers (paid for their efforts), editors, etc. and the results accessible through paid subscriptions. I doubt this can be accomplished by "liking" on a social network. Jan. 18, 2012 at 10:50 a.m. Recommended7 Ralph Haygood Durham, NC I have a ResearchGate account, but I don't find it useful, because few of the people whose work matters to me are there too. I'd like to think this will change; we'll see. Certainly, the only people for whom the standard system of scientific publication really works well are the commercial publishers. I've dealt with a number of them, and I've concluded they add very little value in exchange for the bloated subscription fees they collect from university libraries. The real work - the research, writing, and reviewing - is almost all done by scientists who are paid nothing by the publishers. Given the ease of distributing the finished products over the web, about the only value the publishers add is a bit of copy editing, but I've found their copy editors are often less able prose stylists than I am. Moreover, they waste authors' time by, for example, demanding Microsoft Word documents, refusing superior formats such as LaTeX (not all but some do this, including Nature Publishing Group as of the last time I had to deal with them). Accordingly, I won't be mourning their decline. In case anyone from ResearchGate reads this: one thing that would make your site more useful is a better search engine. The current one is lousy. It reminds me of AltaVista 15 years ago, regularly returning results without apparent relevance to my queries while failing to return results with obvious relevance that I know are there. Jan. 18, 2012 at 9:30 a.m. Recommended1 Fisk USA Commercial publishers add no more nor less value than fat-cat CEOs and investors who skim most profits or benefits of any enterprize (profit or non-profit) while "real work" is done by rank-and-file employees paid so much less. That's how any organized social system works, from academia to military to business to government. If you think the managing process is so easy, why not start your own commercial publishing house (esp. given your superior style and editing skills)? Jan. 18, 2012 at 10:43 a.m. Great American Middle of the Country Dah, follow the money....corruption of honest academics should be curtailed. Force all investigators to release reproduced publicly funded scientific data for all scientists to review on the internet via the Freedom of Information act (The Senator Shelby® Amendment). Prohibit rights of first refusal on scientific data for private companies performing research in non-for profit institutions which receive public funding. Any rights to profits obtained from intellectual property and patents invented with combined funding from government and private sources should be split fairly among the contributing government institutions and any other private corporations funding the research, as well as with the individual inventor. Academic data accounting is notoriously corrupt. Data funded by one source is often shared and used to raise money or acknowledged to be produced by another or multiple sources. When it comes to Intellectual Property, scientific data is often attributed to the source with the most potential financially. Finally, data is often obfuscated and delayed while academic institutions strive to create intellectual property thru their office of technology affairs, thereby slowing the process of referenced data sharing among colleagues.. In essence, there is no collegiality, and academics, although tax free fudge their accounting books and operate as a big profitable data hording and hiding business, whats good for society ain't good for the University. Jan. 18, 2012 at 8:32 a.m. Recommended2 Fisk USA While peer review is sure better than no review, is there smth. better than peer review? I think there could be - a review by professional reviewers paid by the journal to do it full time as a lifetime career in a certain field. While competent as Ph.Ds and former scientists in the field, they would not have the usual peer review problem that "whoever is qualified, has a conflict of interest and whoever does not, is not qualified". Please don't tell me they would lose competence by ceasing to practice science themselves - USPTO and foreign patent authorities have examiners who aren't practicing inventors. In fact, Nature and Science largely run this way with key acceptance decisions made by staff, although using peer reviewers in a secondary capacity. May be this is why they are the top journals? Of course, implementing this approach broadly would cost quite a bit. But that may be one of the best national investments to advance science. Jan. 18, 2012 at 8:05 a.m. TMM GA The current system is unfair. The government subsidizes the research, and the reviewers review the article no cost. Is the cost of someone in an office sending emails really that expensive? If printing and shipping costs are expensive, then offer online access alternative with an annual CD-ROM of the year's articles. I would like to see universities assume the role of online academic publisher. The universities have the people, and network infrastructure. Jan. 18, 2012 at 7:49 a.m. Recommended1 TMM GA There is an alternative model. Post articles at a research web site. Initial article status would be "submitted" with authors anonymous. Interested qualified anonymous reviewers would review, comment and grade the online paper. The paper would now move to either "acceptable" or "not acceptable" online article status. Once graded as "acceptable," others could read, comment and grade the value of the paper on 5 point scale. The primary benefit is that the process would be automated and public without print and shipping costs. The reader could search for papers in the area of interest ranked by the 5 point scale. Jan. 18, 2012 at 7:41 a.m. Josh New York, NY I was pleasantly surprised to see MathOverflow referenced in this article. For those who are unfamiliar, MathOverflow is built on the same technology that originally powered the StackExchange platform (http://stackexchange.com). While MathOverflow is still alive and well, StackExchange now has its own math-oriented site (http://math.stackexchange.com/). But StackExchange is much more than a math website. It originally started as a Q&A service for programmers and other technology professionals to get answers to their questions. A big part of the reason it was founded was to provide a free alternative to pay-walled services like ExpertsExchange, which require people seeking answers to pay for them. The entire premise of this article really comes down to the battle between ExpertsExchange and StackExchange. More on point, a recent blogger posed the question, "Can Stack Exchange save scientific peer review?" Naysayers aside, it is possible to create quality on open platforms. Just look at Wikipedia's incredible success, or to any of the millions of StackExchange questions that have been answered by professionals from around the globe in their respective fields. Not only in technical fields like physics, math, and computer science; but also in cooking, bicycling, biblical hermeneutics, and parenting. The rigor of scientific research is surely in need of quality-control and intensive peer review; but the Internet has already shown us that it is more than up to the challenge. Jan. 18, 2012 at 7:04 a.m. Recommended1 Payam Sunny, CA There this article contains one CRITICAL error. It is NOT private research that is published in commercial journals. It is PUBLICLY funded research that is published in journals published by consortia of for-profit (Elsevier, Wiley, etc.) and nonprofit (professional societies) entities. Given that 99.99% of all research that is published is publicly funded (private entities tend to patent findings instead), it is grossly irresponsible for the NYT to imply that private concerns are publishing in public journals. That said, the issue is hardly new. The American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News had the courage to publish my scathing criticism of the way they are reducing access to publicly funded research: http://payam.minoofar.com/2006/11/19/publishing-academics-and-freedom-of... The most salient point it is wrong for publishers of all stripes to charge more money for less access. Such a system small liberal arts schools and poorly funded public schools at a severe disadvantage relative to bigger institutions like the University of California or the ivy league schools. The net result is a measurable degradation of higher education. This is a far worse outcome than the denial of access to publicly funded research to the populace that funded it! Publishers don't have to behave this way. Yet, they choose to. Witness their latest attempt to stifle competition. http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:h.r.3699: Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:05 a.m. Recommended3 Thomas Lin The New York Times The phrase "research done in private" refers to a process that is not open or widely collaborative. It does not refer to the manner of funding, which, as Payam notes, largely comes from taxpayers. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:12 a.m. Noah Reuter brooklyn I think both systems have potential to work but no matter what happens every system you can come up with will be flawed in some way. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:03 a.m. Beach dog NJ Good point. A broader acceptance of accountability would be welcome. And not just in the sciences.... Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:03 a.m. Recommended1 jimneotech Michigan Thanks, Johnathan. I'll give it a try. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:02 a.m. Charles Jencks Vida, Oregon While you were pontificating....... Started in 2008 with few features, it was reshaped with feedback from scientists. Its membership has mushroomed to more than 1.3 million, Dr. Madisch said, and it has attracted several million dollars in venture capital from some of the original investors of Twitter, eBay and Facebook. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:02 a.m. Steve Hoge Boulder CO [ It's a shame that the NYTimes' "new" commenting system doesn't allow us to see exactly who Mr Jencks considered to be pontificating. ] Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:58 p.m. Hannah Baltimore I have been reading these articles with interest, but I think there are some important issues that have to be addressed. Like ownership: if you freely share your data all over the internet, you lose control over it. It could be misused. And if it's preliminary data you'll probably later find out it was wrong in some way. But it's too late, the information is out there! Good luck setting the story straight. Also would be hard to patent something you invent in the course of your freely-shared research, which means no company will buy it and develop it for public use. I am curious about ResearchGate and will probably check it out, but I will keep my unpublished data to myself for now. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:02 a.m. James Iowa City I've always wondered why the government funds research, but does not fund the publication of results. Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:01 a.m. Recommended2 C.S.D. Univerity Park, PA I think open access is an excellent idea. Although some of the commentators here expressed concern over the apparent luck of peer-reviewing, in reality the discussion among scientists of one's scientific work on an online forum such as ResearchGate is exactly the peer-review process done directly and transparently online. This way, possible errors can be corrected in a timely manner, and people working on the same problem could finally work together rather than competing to obtain not only faster but most likely better results. Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:49 a.m. Recommended1 W. Park Silicon Valley While freely available research represents an ideal for many, it will take considerable time as long-standing practices regarding tenure - which are currently tied to one's research appearing in prestigious journals - must be replaced with a willingness to instead accept publications in free (open access) journals which may have lesser reputation and impact factor at least initially. Rather than wait and hope for this institutional change, our company, DeepDyve.com, is attempting to address the problems of expensive and fragmented access through technical innovation. With DeepDyve, our users can "rent" and read an article for as little as $0.99, a huge benefit for individuals and knowledge workers in companies large and small that are outside the funded access of universities. By letting users rent articles from the cloud, we are able to offer dramatic discounts, typically 90% or more compared to the cost of purchasing and downloading the article. We've partnered with dozens of the leading publishers who have shown a strong willingness to experiment with new access models such that we now offer over 5 million articles in life sciences, technology, medicine, social sciences and more. In addition, we also aggregate and offer free access to over 20 million articles from free content sources such as ArXiv, PubMed, PLoS and more. Jan. 18, 2012 at 2:36 a.m. Tim Smith NYT Pick As a professor at a major research university, I need to publish in for-profit journals for the time being because of their reputation. My internal and external evaluations (e.g., raises, grants) depend on the "quality" of the journals I publish in. Perhaps more importantly, the papers I co-author with my graduate students need to be in journals with a good reputation in order to help my students get started in their careers. Currently, open-access engineering journals are considered to be of lower quality than popular for-profit journals. As soon as open-access (engineering) journals reach a reputation on par with those I currently publish in, I plan to switch to open-access journals. I want to support open-access publishing, but not if it puts my career and the career of my students at risk. Jan. 18, 2012 at 2:25 a.m. Recommended3 Jose Menendez Tempe, AZ Peer review is bad. And anything that potentially circumvents peer review is a catastrophe. So unless the new alternatives to traditional journals find a way to introduce something at least equivalent to peer review, in the future it will be impossible to find valid papers in a sea of Vodoo science and "breakthroughs" that prove Einstein wrong. Jan. 18, 2012 at 1:27 a.m. Recommended2 Wayne Himelsein Los Angeles, CA I think we need some way to officially validate those scientists whose work we are funding with our tax dollars, and peer review is a sufficient way to do it. That being said, I look forward to the contributions amateur scientists can make in the digital age. I am delighted to think that these projects are encouraging a whole new generation of naturalists. Jan. 18, 2012 at 1:16 a.m. Vic Washington No, you don't want to do anything like that. Science works differently: among perhaps thousands of projects that are being funded, only a few will REALLY succeed. By REALLY, I mean a true scientific advance and not just another publication or a box checked in a grant report. It is impossible to predict with certainty which ones will succeed, but there is one thing that is certain: if you don't invest in science, you are guaranteed to fall behind in many areas and the technological progress will stop. If you do invest, the progress will continue, but when and where the next development is going to happen, nobody can predict. Furthermore, in most cases, the successful project will deliver something completely unexpected that has nothing to do with what the proposal "promised" to do. And this success only comes after many failures. That's how it works in science. You have to allow failures, if you want a success. The only known (to me at least) form of validation of scientific work is peer review. It has its downsides, but I don't see an alternative at the moment. All attempts to quantify scientific progress by a single number or a simple metric are unreasonable and destructive. They are proposed and promoted by people, who have no idea what they are talking about. Jan. 18, 2012 at 1:52 a.m. Recommended1 Stewart Lyman Seattle A new publishing model, dubbed iPubSci, has been proposed that solves many of the problems cited in this article. Details can be found on the website www.ipubsci.com. iPubSci is envisioned as a mix of PubMed blended with an iTunes-like interface that would make it easy to find and download science articles on a per-article basis. iPubSci was designed to provide easy, affordable, and legal access to the scientific literature. The impetus for this proposal: scientists at a majority of the nation's biotech companies cannot afford significant access to much of the scientific literature. This is an important problem since Big Pharma is now planning on sourcing a significant percentage of their drugs from small, innovative biotechs. However, the capacity of this group of companies to deliver new leads in seriously impacted by their inability to access the science literature. iPubSci solves one of the biggest problems in the field in that it encompasses affordable access to the legacy scientific literature, which comprises 2/3 of the articles in PubMed that currently cannot be accessed for free. The for-profit publishers want $30-35 apiece for these articles. Open access advocates have no solution that allows affordable access to these articles that could form the basis for many future discoveries. Those that think only academics need access to the literature are seriously misinformed, and the future of drug development is imperiled by this lack of affordable journal access. Jan. 18, 2012 at 12:24 a.m. Recommended2 Paul Vanden Bout Charlottesville, Virginia In focusing on bio-medical research publication, where predatory commercial publishers flourish, the article fails to note that publication policies are highly discipline-specific. In particular, astronomy has achieved a very workable balance between the unrefereed open preprint website (arXiv) and a traditional publication model (the journals of the American Astronomical Society). The typical research article in astronomy is submitted to both astro/ph and the Astronomical or Astrophysical Journal. The former provides quick and immediate open access, the latter two the imprimatur of a rigorous refereeing process and the guarantee of long term data curation. Readers of astro/ph rightly regard articles labeled "accepted" by the ApJ or AJ more highly than those merely labeled "submitted". The AAS journals have low page charge and subscription rates, publish articles quickly, and are very highly cited. Astronomers should hope that government efforts to address the publication problems in other fields do not damage their own happy circumstances. Jan. 18, 2012 at 12:00 a.m. Recommended2 JK Indiana You don't have to scrap peer-review to have open access (or something like it). Peer-review is a great way to ensure quality (probably the only way), but it doesn't necessitate a bloated, for-profit publishing infrastructure. The actual reviewers aren't getting paid anyway, for the most part. So let's not confuse the important but distinct issues of peer review and journal access. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended16 mike97 Seattle Let us draw an analogy with The New York Times Online. The New York Times Online just recently instituted a subscription service. Some may even complain that it's somewhat expense ( as opposed to free!). It justifies this subscription because it has an excelent Editorial staff - analogous to Peer Reviewers - and an excellent writers. Why not replace this "17th Century" structure with a social networked New York Times Online, with 1,000 randomly selected people picking and choosing articles for publication on a social media basis? Get rid of the Editors, and maybe some of the writers? Of course, then The New York Times would not be of the quality we expect nor need. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended6 Vic Washington Excellent point. I do not understand why it is so important to allow access to scientific literature for all. Those who work in a respective field always have access to the main journals in the field. I have hard time imagining why anybody outside the field would want to read professional scientific literature beyond their areas of expertise written with terminology and language they don't understand. But if you REALLY want to read a scientific article, go to a library and read it. By giving free access to the scientific literature and destroying well-established journals, you will only further subsidize China and the like. Furthermore, this development would inevitably destroy the prestigious and influential US and European journals like Science, Nature, Cell, Physical Review Letters, PNAS, etc; the brand-names that have taken many decades to build. There is no question that this would further undermine the US leadership in Science ( I am not even an American citizen, but I find it puzzling why the US seems to deliberately give away its leadership in many areas). As for ResearchGate: As far as I understand, it is a marriage of facebook and Twitter but intended for professional scientists. No question that the motivation behind this project is to convert it into a money-making business, much like facebook but on a smaller scale. I don't think it is a good thing for a variety of reasons, not the least of them being that it would likely dumb down the scientific process. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:52 p.m. Recommended3 Shelley San Francisco I used to be the managing editor of a peer reviewed medical journal. Reviewers had to meet clear criteria. They had to specialize in the areas covered by the article and had to have no conflict of interest. If the only specialists did have a conflict of interest, we would get their opinion, but then get another reviewer to review that person's review to make sure the conflict of interest was not a major influence. We tried to get people to do the reviews within two weeks but sometimes it took months because people were scrutinizing the material closely and checking the research. I saw firsthand how difficult it was to make decisions about publishing papers. This was way before the Internet, when FAX machines were first invented and it was a big step forward to get a review sent in by FAX. Anyway, I believe that even though it was time-consuming, there was a sense of confidence when a paper was finally published, because we knew how much scrutiny had been involved and if there was any doubts at a later date, we had all the documents showing the process of the reviews. Nowadays it is shocking to see how quickly papers are published and it is obvious that there was a weak review process. I believe we have sacrificed quality for speed. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:20 p.m. Recommended4 Gideon Fraenkel Columbus, Ohio For whatever its faults the system of journals backed by academic societies and the peer review process which supports it still provides a modicum of standards, probably better than the free for all your writer advocates.The faults could be addressed. The internet already provides the medium for scientists to interact and communicate and we all use it for that. Not a new idea. Actually scientists were the first to use e-mail. In principle access to the scientific literature for all is a good idea. Some way can be found to do that using the present system of journals see NIH. It will cost, taxpayers. If you want data or a report on something government funding has supported you still have to pay. The internet on which your writer and those who comment pin their hopes already has its problems. Journals took up electronic publication and dissemination because it saves them money on paper and distribution. They have also managed to require fees paid continued access after publication in contrast to paper. To publish in a scientific journal we word process the document with all structures and graphics and them set it up publication ready. . One wonders why they have so much trouble with finances, have to keep increasing their fees. Don't forget the inherent fragility of electronic data bases, easily hacked, changed and destroyed, not likely to be properly maintained given political and economic instabilities . Easily spied upon as you read. Jan. 17, 2012 at 10:39 p.m. Recommended1 RBS Little River, CA NYT Pick I have been an editor of a established scientific journal for 20 years. The time to publish under the current system is mentioned as a reason for alternative models for dispersing scientific findings. It has been my experience that this problem has its genesis in the responsiveness of reviewers and the workload of editors. Good reviewers are very often well established in their fields and receive many requests for review in addition to their own research and teaching obligations. However, it is only human nature that scientists would put reviewing the contributions of others further down the list of things to do than in producing and publishing papers of their own, especially when there are many such requests for review. From an editor's perspective this means that I usually have to invite 5-6 reviewers and it may take several weeks for answers and then I may have to ask additional potential reviewers if I do not get at least two acceptances. It is not unusual to have to send invitations to 10 or more reviewers. Then I rarely get the reviews within the requested time. Receiving 100 papers a year and having my real job as well to attend to one can see that the system can easily back up and the initial review process stretch into months. I must say that the implementation of an internet based submission and review process over the last 10 years has helped in many ways with both the time of review and my efficiency. Peer review is absolutely essential. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:51 p.m. Recommended4 Viktor Los Angeles The peer review process is absolutely central to science and there must be a high barrier for publishing a serious research paper in a visible publication outlet that would attract attention of people on the forefront of scientific research. If you remove these barriers, you will get a lot of junk and this is already happening unfortunately, because the so-called open science attracts not only serious researchers, but also a growing army of pseudo-scientists who litter the information space with their thoughts and "results" that they should really keep to themselves. It requires time, effort, and expertise to be able to separate gems and original scientific ideas from pure junk. Senior researchers do not have the time and young people do not yet have the expertise to do that and as a result, gems get lost in the pile of garbage, while on the other hand, easy-to-read papers full of trivialities and hype oftentimes become scientific hits. This creates a new breed of "successful" "scientists" with poor education and extremely short attention span. Furthermore, simplifying and dumbing down the publication process to the level of facebook gives the wrong impression that to do science is easy. It is NOT easy, nor it is supposed to be fast.We do NOT need a facebook for science. Real progress in science comes only long hours of hard and focused work on very complicated problems, which is exactly the opposite to exchanging shallow trivialities and ranking pictures on facebook. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:12 p.m. Recommended5 6gillshark Left Coast I agree that there is no substitute for rigor in science. Further, I agree that creating a social media style site for the dissemination of science has the potential down-side you've suggested. So I would never argue against the peer-review process. The problem as I see it is that access to the peer reviewed publications is pretty much limited to those associated with colleges, or universities that can maintain collections of very expensive periodical subscriptions. One of the great, sad days of my life was when I realized that completing my MS meant that I would no longer have access to the scientific publications at my alma mater. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:55 p.m. Recommended2 R.O. Wilson New York There's nothing to celebrate in medical science so long as companies have the choice of publishing research they pay for or burying it. How many findings indicative of danger from a prescription drug have been buried, causing untold misery? Also, I know an FDA research scientist who told me that he's been offered bribes twice to falsify findings. He didn't take them, but couldn't speak for his associates. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:06 p.m. Recommended4 John Vermont My first scientific paper was published 40 years ago this November, in the traditional way, and in an excellent journal. But papers have value, and it has long astounded me that we scientists give them away and then pay significant sums to be able to read them! Would't it be nice to be able to submit a paper to a variety of journals, which can review it as each wishes and come back to me with its offer of what that journal is willing to pay me (if anything) to publish my paper. I would be happy to grant publication rights to the appropriate, if not always highest, bidder, taking into account the relative financial resources of a scientific society journal versus a truly commercial, for-profit journal. The proceeds would go to further my research, not to my or my co-authors' pockets. Let the market play a role - intellectual ideas and results have value, just as creative literature does. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:50 p.m. Recommended7 Macmanchgo chicago, IL This hits the nail on the head. The problem with scientists giving research results away is a prime example of how they are exploited. Publishing companies have found a way to exploit their naivety. Another problem is with the overproduction of scientists in the market place. How well would the medical system thrive if unlimited numbers of MDs were generated every year and they didn't need alicense to practice? Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:38 p.m. Steve Hoge Boulder CO Would you propose that the remuneration offered you for publishing rights by a journal go back to your funders? Or into your pocket? Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:53 p.m. jonathanikatz St. Louis Peer review is overrated. It does screen out crackpots, but in most fields of science they are not a problem (while annoying, any serious reader just ignores them). Too often it consists of nit-picking, or attempts by the reviewer to make the author adopt his preferred style of presentation or views (or give prominent citation to his own work).. In some fields (climate science, theoretical astrophysics) it too frequently amounts to attempts to suppress the work of rivals. A reviewer almost never finds error, even if present (the reviewer is not going to redo the experiment or calculation). Open source journals are an admirable idea, but should waive publication charges for unfunded authors (there are many in theoretical physics because the funding agencies know they will continue to do research even if unfunded). There are two reasons why some authors go to privately published journals with outrageous subscription prices and that refuse to permit free distribution of papers: One is that these journals have no publication charges (see preceding remark about unfunded scientists). The other is that the referees at more reputable journals have rejected the paper. Perhaps the paper isn't very good, but sometimes it is a matter of professional rivalry. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:45 p.m. Recommended1 John S Orient Point, LI, NY Surely the 'journal' system lacks efficiency and stifles some efforts. But the idea of abruptly going all-in on an open, technology-fueled approach leaves me deeply concerned that when coupled with human nature will result in a system which overvalues speed at the expense of thoroughness. As a result, we dramatically increase our vulnerability to unintended consequences. Such unbridled competition and use of technology gave us Enron, Credit Default Swaps, Collateralized Debt Obligations, etc. These entities and instruments were created with good intentions to limit risk but we all now know where that road led. I'm no luddite. I believe in technology and that it is underutilized in solving many of our problems. But there are no silver bullets. Technology gives us data and tools for its analysis but it cannot make the kind of complex, multivariate, reasoned decisions necessary. Any good solution will still take the time and attention of highly skilled individuals, in copious amounts. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:45 p.m. Recommended3 grinning libbber OKieland There is no doubt that the current system is antiquated and needs updating. On the other hand good peer review is critical. All you have to do is look at some health or food blogs on the net to know how much crank science can result. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. Recommended3 Kay Connecticut If they can figure out a way to have this open publishing while having legit (but fair) peer review to ensure scientific validity and rigor, this would be a great way of leveling the playing field. As it is, the funding agencies (and drug and device companies) seek a "big name" --either a scientist or a university--to conduct their sponsored research. To get to be a "big name," you have to do a lot of this kind of work. Most research is expensive to conduct (i.e., you can't do it in your garage and you have to find a way to pay for your very educated time). So most scientists need to find a funding source. So, if everyone needs funding, but sources only want to fund "big names," and the sources have control over who becomes a "big name," then sources have control over what does and doesn't get investigated. This is not good for anybody. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. Recommended2 Beach dog NJ Diluting the scientific literature would be polluting the remaining solid research that can be found. In an era of negligible funding, increasing pressure to publish and relentless anti-science noise from the GOP, there have to be some standards. Is the scientific process perfect? Hardly. Anonymous peer reviewers are free to vent, insult and launch poisonous attacks as they see fit. Examples of rejected grants suddenly becoming part of a competing lab's research arsenal are hardly rare. Retraction rates are increasing in response to untenable federal funding levels, as investigators are discouraged from the "long view" in favor of the short and expediant results that peer review committees can understand. A better process would be to publish the reviewers names to ensure accountability (which is done in the physical sciences) at all levels, including federal study sections. Our current system may have issues, but just flooding the journals with trash won't help. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:57 p.m. Recommended2 jonathanikatz St. Louis Reviewers' names are not published in most of the physical sciences, at least not in the fields I (a physicist) know. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended1 Anony Mouse Richmond VA I work in a (very) small biotechnology research company. Elsevier's policies are a continuous problem to people not connected with a university library. Whereas most publishers have put their old archives free online, Elsevier continues to ask outrageous charges ($30 per article) for research papers that may or not be relevant when you actually get into the full text (many papers refer to other papers for the methods they use). The Research Works Act clearly goes against the good of science and scientists and the public interest. As a citizen, I feel that any work that is publicly funded by NIH, NSF, USDA, DOE or any other federal agencies should be free to access after a few months, which still gives the journals time to make their profits, as libraries and specialists will still subscribe. I would like to see all scientists boycott Elsevier and other publishers who don't make their articles available after a maximum of a year's time. Peer review is still important to maintain research quality, but we are now at a time when scientific publishing could all be accomplished online and for free (peer reviewers have never been paid). It is just a matter of establishing online journals with similar reputations to the print journals. Elsevier - you time is limited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:54 p.m. Recommended15 Terry East Bay, CA While peer review should be an important aspect, as others point out, it FAR too often turns into peer censure. Reviewers take far too much liberty editing papers and research design for the original authors. Reviewers will often insist discussions be changed or eliminated if the authors present a discussion that doesn't agree with the reviewers opinion, regardless of whether the presented discussions is one of the plausible explanations of the data. Reviewers will also often insist that research be redone how the REVIEWER would have done it, regardless of whether the original design was scientifically valid. Reviewers will also review papers that are a clear conflict of interest if not for current project in their own lab, but if it is in conflict with the overall paradigm and potential grants trajectory. If journal editors were more willing to reign in their reviewers to reviewing for scientific rigor instead of opinion and censure, the system can be saved. However, as it is currently a self-policing, it functions like most self-policing group: poorly. As the editors and the reviewers are not anonymous to each other, and the editors are also still active researchers, they are far too unwilling to step in and risk peer censure of their own publications and grant applications. And yes, I have both published scientific peer review articles as well as reviewed articles for publication. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:50 p.m. Recommended2 Vipul Mehta San Diego Peer review is an essential part of the scientific publishing system. Any systems that does away with anonymous review (e.g., by turning it into popularity contest where everything is published) is doomed. The high fees charged by for-profit journals is a totally separate issue. The reviewers are actually paid nothing, so it is not an issue of cost of reviewing. I support any system that lowers fees by publishing only online, by giving authors rights to their work, by being not-for-profit. As long as it as anonymous peer review by experts as a central component. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:41 p.m. Recommended2 Paul New York, NY It is already difficult to find solid papers, even in the best journals. Please, do not dilute rigorous and careful science even more. The painful process that is high-standard peer review, while nowhere near perfect and wreaking of personal politics, is the best way to ensure that the scientific foundations we build upon with future science are not "junk". This whole idea seems like a way for unsuccessful scientists to get their ideas heard. If you're curious, smart, efficient, and meticulous you'll publish well. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:41 p.m. Recommended1 jonathanikatz St. Louis Peer review works when the editors review the reviewers---reject reviews that do not substantiate their conclusions. The culture varies from field to field---in some, review is serious and constructive, in others it is nit-picking, and in others it is taken as an opportunity to undermine the careers of rivals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. patents@aip.org Naples, FL My first paper to Phys. Rev. Let. did not appear in the normal time. I called the Editor, who said that the reviewer had not responded, and that he had sent the paper to a second reviewer. I could barely sit still for fear I would be scooped. After that experience, I asked my colleagues what could be done. They suggested that, in future, I should submit a list of the 4 top people in the field who I was sure could review the manuscript. I sent them preprints, called and said that I wanted to submit their names as reviewers, and asked if they were available in the next weeks. This system worked for me for many years, and produced many reviews which I considered valuable in the final paper. I would never submit a paper under my name without review. I would not consider contributing to the river of undifferentiated opinion and force others to wade through the mass looking for reliable information. My suggestion for the internet age would be for an author to add to the paper, after publication, names and contact information of at least two reviewers who had signed off on the paper . I would hope that an author who could not get the signatures within several weeks would withdraw the paper, and I would know that a paper without the reviewers names after a month would have less credibility. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:36 p.m. Recommended1 mike79 Kennewick, WA The issue of rigorous peer-review will not go away in science; it cannot be replaced by "Like" or "Comment", nor 140-character Tweets in a social networking environment. That said, the fact is that very few active scientists actual go to the library or have subscriptions to journals. They download PDFs from their library source of journals to their office computer. Requests for peer reviews come in emails with URLs to log-in and download a PDF copy of the article to be reviewed. Online peer-reviewing and commentary are the standard. Actual printed copy is rare. I am sorry to hear that Dr. Nielsen compares this process to being "stuck in 17th Century technology". It is decidedly not 17th Century, but 21st Century. Perhaps he has been out of the science too long? Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:26 p.m. Recommended2 R2L Minneappolis As a scientist, I have had plenty of successes and failures with regard to publishing my work with and without collaborators. The failures not due to my own shortcomings were due to the following factors (among others): 1. Entrinched editorial boards, who are nearly always appointed for life. 2. Editorial members who have extraordinary personal biases for what they want published. 3. Editorial members who have politcal agendas, often involving favors or favoritism to other scientists (authors and/or reviewers), e.g., for getting their own papers published. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:23 p.m. Recommended3 jimneotech Michigan As an R&D engineer for 40 years I find the current system increasingly frustrating. One can research a topic on the web only to find that an article which seems interesting is $35. That's a bit much for an article that may or may not (based on the abstract) be relevant. (Don't say the company should pay for it because that simply ain't going to happen.) The way I see it with computer technology the cost of publication has plummeted. The cost of articles has skyrocketed. Where is the money going ? If the publishers' answer is to choke the infomation flow even further with greater restrictions on internet transfer all of us will pay in inventions which never occur and where knowledge is ever more cloistered. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:19 p.m. Recommended3 jonathanikatz St. Louis The solution is arXiv, which works very smoothly. All access is free, and there are no publication charges. Unfortunately, at present it is limited to math, physics and astronomy (and some allied sub-disciplines), but there is nothing to prevent it from expanding to chemistry, biology, etc. Just label the papers as chemical physics, biophysics, etc. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:02 p.m. Jim D Las Vegas NV Authors have grumbled about peer review taking too long, printing taking too long, etc for years. The implied choice between journal or blog is a red herring. Collaboration facilitated by electronic means is good. However, a formally reviewed result does not require paper, nor needlessly slow dissemination of results. "Facebook" science is not science. It is a social network that has no REQUIREMENT for response to valid criticism. Peer review is a formal process in which an author MUST respond to documented criticisms or face rejection of the submission. There is no reason why the community has to be wedded to 'paper' journals. Marriage of electronic transfer and a rigorous peer review process into an electronic journal is both feasible and desirable. Arguments about 'page' charges and slow printing times would be moot. In a 1994 experiment I required a report to be composed, reviewed, and finalized sans paper at any step. The quality of the product was not compromised. It DID require that participants become facile with text and graphic software so they could comment without paper (the document included many illustrations and graphs). Much of the drive to dump the peer review process is simply that egotistical authors seek instant gratification without the bother of formal process. They are not scientists. Sensible modifications could take advantage of new technology rather than turning a valuable, tried-and-true system on it's head. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:17 p.m. Howard Iowa A colleague and I are preparing a paper. However she tells me that if we use our own figures from an earlier paper we had already published and that we cite in the new paper we have to ask for permission from the publisher of that earlier paper! Talk about ridiculous! Too (explicative deleted) lawyers in the mix.. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:50 p.m. Recommended1 Kay Connecticut Because the earlier paper is copyrighted by the journal. You signed that agreement when you published it. It prevents the paper from being distributed by anyone (e.g., some magazine or newspaper clipping a portion of it and running it, or some drug company running off a bunch of copies and having their sales reps hand them out), and allows the journal to cover its costs by charging subscription fees for access. If you had published in an open-access journal, you would have had to pay a fee (or a larger one than you paid). And I think they still copyright it. They will grant you permission without a problem, no doubt. But there is definitely room for improvement in this system! Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. citizen314 new york, new york Correction - Of course smart people communicated! What I meant was that many more can now communicate that could not before the internet. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:50 p.m. HJBoitel New York 1. A significant aspect of the cost of journals is the printing and distribution of hard copies. 2. There should be two branches of internet publishing of scientific papers: -- A formal branch that functions substantially the same as the present hard copy approach, except the entire enterprise is in pdf format. Editors would decide what will be published, would see to it that the articles conform to presentation and substantive standards, and would seek to coordinate peer review and topics. -- A semi-formal branch in which the authors would seek such editorial assistance and peer review, as they choose from whomever they choose. The only requirement would be that the authors would submit, with the paper, whether the paper or the author has been subsidized by sources having an interest in the subject matter of the paper, and the identity of those persons who edited or reviewed the paper. Once published, all modifications to the paper would be tracked. Both approaches should permit qualified persons to give their support or their disagreement, as to the paper, even years after publication. Publication in the semi-formal branch could later be followed by republication in the formal branch. After a decade or so, the system would be assessed to determine whether one or the other or both approaches ought continue to be followed. The semi formal approach will also allow experimentation with new forms of presentation, collaboration and review. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:49 p.m. entprof Minneapolis The scientific process involves three distinct pieces discovery, validation and dissemination. Open Science has significant potential to speed up discovery because of its ability to decrease the costs of collaboration. Open Science also has the potential to dramatically increase the speed of dissemination, but there is no system in Open Science to the strict validation provided by the blind peer-review process. In order for science to thrive all three processes are necessary with out validation science devolves to political opinion, validation is an exacting and critical process. Young researchers may not like, I hated it and still do, but the system cannot function with out. Nobody in the Open Science movement has even begun to provide a serious validation process. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:35 p.m. Recommended3 Vipul Mehta San Diego That is exactly right. You see many people wanting to eliminate review process and just publish everything (this type of outbursts typically happen after their paper has been fairly or unfairly rejected). Then popularity decides what is valid and what is not. This is preposterous. Like any process involving humans, reviewing is not perfect, but essential nonetheless. It is a simple fact that all claims made by everyone are not equally valid. They need to be scrutinized and critically examined. Doing that takes a lot of training and effort. Review system should be made stronger and stricter, not eliminated in the name of "openness". If you publish everything, the few good results will be drowned in noise. No one can carefully examine all that is published on a topic. What will happen is that people will have to rely on name recognition and stature as a filter, because they simply can't read everything. This actually works against young researches. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:28 p.m. Recommended2 citizen314 new york, new york This is not an either/or scenario. Of course rigorous peer review is essential to solid empirical science. The point is that before our information age, very smart people could not communicate - they now have that ability. Therefore whether we like it or not our collective mind evolution is making a quantum leap - as in this blog we are participating in. Peer review as in the points system mentioned in the article within a well run open source internet site by legit scientists is as valid as any other publication. This will only open up new opportunities to brilliant folk who may not have the money to publish and or need resources to do experiments. A similar battle has been going on in the internet - open source - copyleft versus copyright . If not for a few brilliant heroes who made open sourced software like lynux legally binding - our internet would be a closed system controlled by elite forces - the .01% that control everything else. Profit incentives = greed and professional career power grabs keep all research top secret to the detriment of society. What's at the core? Unfortunately Capitalism that is not going anywhere anytime soon. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:29 p.m. Dave Wisconsin It is always hard to uproot existing business models. The longer they are around, the more influence they have over industry and study. People learn to exploit them as best they can, some for good and some for bad. This entire set of industries will be shaken to their core, which will provide much better, more reliable and efficient science, and the business models that result are unknown. Resisting such changes by defending business models is futile. And maybe people will actually get paid for doing good work rather than staking out a position... Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:11 p.m. ExFiz Doc Illinois It seems to me that the real issue is peer review. How can the public gain greater access to peer-reviewed scientific findings? This is where the power of social networking can have a big impact. As a group we should be able to derive a model that will both maintain scientific quality while making the work available to the greatest number of people. I have never been paid to review a manuscript for publication. I do this as a professional obligation. I expect others to do the same for my work. So peer review per se does not add to the cost of publishing. However, administrating peer review does. Just look at the extensive list of editors and staff for a typical journal. Could this be managed more efficiently? What if I as an author of a manuscript ask 2 people to review my manuscript. If accepted, the reviewers names are published with the paper. Thus, the reviewer's reputations are on the line as well. Also, if the same people keep being listed on my papers, then cronyism would be rightfully suspected, and my papers more highly scrutinized by the scientific community at large or simply ignored. Thus, I have an incentive to ask those who actually have the expertise and will give an honest and fair review. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:07 p.m. Recommended4 Vipul Mehta San Diego The problem comes not when the paper is good, but when the paper is bad. If the reviewers are always known to you, it is much harder to be honestly critical. There is an inherent and healthy conflict between the authors and reviewers. The author wants it published while the reviewer is examining it critically. If you cannot criticize freely, the purpose of review is defeated. And if the review does his/her job, the relations between the authors' group and the reviewer are quickly soured, and would likely affect reviewer's future publications and grant applications. That's why it is essential that reviewers be anonymous. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. jonathanikatz St. Louis The editors are usually volunteer senior scientists, unpaid by the journal (they are rewarded by the prestige of being chosen editor). This process doesn't cost the journal anything. The proposed solution of identified reviewers, nominated by the author, is meritorious and worth a try. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:11 p.m. Steve Labadie, MO The "science lite" nature of this article was a disappointment. In any discussion of a new paradigm for scientific publishing, the topic of peer review is going to have to take front-and-center. This is the quality control mechanism that strengthens the edifice of scientific knowledge. And if you dislike scientific fraud you're going to deplore what happens when there are no controls at all. It's not even clear who would benefit from this new model. Most scientists currently have access to the primary literature through their institutions, whether academic or industrial, so what is the gripe? The lay public? Get real. Not one in a hundred non-scientists will be able to understand in depth a modern scientific publication, and for the summary conclusions there are secondary publications appropriate to that audience. As a scientist myself, I find page fees and the high cost of document retrieval truly unfortunate, at at times inconvenient, but I also recognize the value of review and curation. Requesting a .pdf directly from the author is great ... as long as I have contact info, and the author is still alive, and the author is willing and able to locate the proper computer file and send it to me. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:03 p.m. Recommended17 agaricus San Francisco I'd just like to highlight a key passage in the comment above, which perfectly expresses these new demands on the culture and institutions of science: "Most scientists currently have access to the primary literature through their institutions, whether academic or industrial, so what is the gripe? The lay public? Get real." Many scientists who work for universities or corporations with a professional library staff simply don't notice the barriers that keep others from accessing scientific literature. Because the fees have been paid and the subscriptions managed by an institutional service layer that they don't have to touch, they assume that no problem exists. They say: "it doesn't hurt me therefore what's the problem?" Although this narrow view is losing credibility in the debate over access, it is good to call it out when it appears. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:21 p.m. Recommended1 Scott Illinois The system is at a tipping point - on the one hand, peer-reviewed journals, once run as non-profit operations by professional societies with fees covering printing costs are now profit centers for media conglomerates. This is unsustainable and is too-slowly being supplanted with online journals. On the other hand, the absence of competent peer-review (already quite marginal or larded with cronyism in some fields) will go away and the combination of junk science, bad journalism and corporate misrepresentation of products will turn most fields of science into patent medicine shows. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:01 p.m. Recommended4 John M Oakland, CA Exactly right - imagine what would have happened in, say, research into the effect of smoking on cancer rates if the peer-review system lacked gatekeepers. How many "scientific" papers would be published denying any link between human activities and global warming without disinterested peer review? That said, a non-profit endowed model is probably better. Imagine a system where colleges (even down to the community college level) reviewed papers for scientific accuracy and posted them in a searchable index modeled on Wikipedia. Great training for upper-division students in that particular academic area (with adequate professorial supervision). There'd need to be restrictions (don't review your own school's papers, anonymize the authors' names to help avoid favoritism, etc.) - and the big journals could concentrate on publishing major advances. The value of the journals is that they act as what the New York Times Public Editor called "truth vigilantes." There's lots of information available on the Internet - some of it is even true. If the journals (and the New York Times) want to remain relevant, publishing isn't enough - they also need to verify the accuracy of what they're publishing. (The infamous New York Times Public Editor "truth vigilante" posting is at http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/should-the-times-be-a-t... Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:52 p.m. Steve Durham, NC "Profit centers for media conglomerates" doesn't begin to touch it. Most academic libraries have had to cut their journal subscriptions dramatically over the last decade with annual subscriptions running in the thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars with annual increases of 15%-20%. It is encouraging to see the scholarly community finally starting to deal with this situation in a manner consistent with today's technology. In the past, any library that had the temerity to challenge the status quo was immediately threatened with crippling lawsuits. And while "peer review" is certainly at the heart of legitimate academic research and dissemination , it is a total red herring to use it as an argument against online open access publication. It is already being done. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. Peter Jones Toronto There are different needs in scientific communication than just publishing the canonical journal article. The so-called "end result" of research as a precious article is a myth. Most researchers publish what they need to for the grant or their career needs - tenure and promotion. As long as the academic employer wants to see high-quality and citable publications, the mainstream publishing process and the "branded" journals will have a place. what needs to change is the type of communication that the public can read, for free. That is not a research article. The real concern should be for peer review, which is fraught with many difficulties. Peer reviewers are part of a journal community, not just free-floating nice guys who like reviewing. They expect to be given good treatment when they publish. This is not a wisdom of the crowd thing - good reviewers have to know the research topic of a submitted article. And they rarely - never - have the time to review the data from a study. So bad papers do get published in good journals, and in medicine, that can be a problem. Clinical harm is not self-correcting, unlike a biochemistry experiment. Are open publishing systems reinventing peer review? Who will be the reviewers,and what's their motive for donating valuable attention to draft papers? As an author, do you trust the "open" reviewers? Who really pays? Open journals make the author pay. I don't have $1000 to publish online for a journal maintained in someone's office. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:56 p.m. Recommended5 MLH Delaware Someone/group has to step up to the plate to expose the "crap" science. I am thinking now of the recent debacle regarding relating vaccinations to autism. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:44 p.m. Recommended3 War Eagle Auburn, AL There must be a median here. We've seen enough phony research even in sophisticated journals, but important decisions should not be based on the moral equivalent of Yelp or TripAdvisor. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:43 p.m. Recommended5 blasmaic Washington DC Colorfully said, and with some validity. Last night while watching the GOP debate I was thinking of those online polls where people express their views. Everyone says they're non-scientific, and they are in fact non-scientific. But those who would game the results with repeated clicks or calls are overwhelmed by the honest participants that play fair and the outcome is not completely wrong. The way the gamesters are minimized is through the huge reach of mass media. Small web sites and small review processes don't permit for that. Consequently, the research must be considered valid if vouched for by educational elites, but the major conclusions must be tested on wider review processes. We shouldn't use limited review processes to serve as the foundation or the selling point for a grand conclusion with sweeping implications. A good case in point is Italy where they're attempting to square results contradictory to Einstein's research. Each step is well documented and widely published, even to the general public. On the day when it is confirmed as news, if that ever happens, it will be no surprise. The research's scrutiny is not limted and its stepping stones are not automatically accepted. One thing the process lacked at its last public review was an obviously Semitic surname on the list of researchers. Revising Einstein has cultural and scientific aspects. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:02 p.m. Recommended2 RTC MS In my field (physics) this is nothing new. The article failed to mention that arxiv.org has been putting unpublished papers on the web since 1991! Authors often place a "preprint" version of their paper on arxiv immediately after they write it and before it is published in a traditional journal. Anyone can download it for free at that point. At scientific meetings people also freely discuss their unpublished work. So it is not a problem to find out new results without access to a traditional journal. The problem now for scientists is to deal with the HUGE flow of new preprints, papers, and other information that comes out. No one has time to keep up with it all or read anything critically. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:43 p.m. Recommended2 Chris D WI Maybe they added it after your comment but as I read the article now it does mention arxiv.org: "Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years." Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:56 p.m. Jeff Wang San Francisco, California NYT Pick As a businessperson, I have often been confused by the lack of proper incentives for efficient and effective scientific research. There is tremendous redundancy in the "industry" by having multiple specialists studying the same thing with little to no collaboration, trying to scoop each other. This redundancy is largely driven by the rewards system in science, where researchers compete in vying for high-impact-factor publications. It's a zero-sum-game, and it's wasteful. Opening up the process to more collaboration and sharing would likely benefit science and society in the long run. But in the meantime, I can't imagine large populations of researchers opting for the open-source route, since they are essentially punished professionally for sharing their data. Open source science cannot coexist with the current publication process, since sharing essentially invites others to scoop your work. For things to really change, universities and institutes need to change the way they hire and promote researchers, decoupling professional development from publication records and impact factors. The would need to develop a new currency that measures a researcher's value in an open-source world. The "reputation points" example in this article may be a prototype for such a currency. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:43 p.m. Recommended10 Yiannis Minneapolis Why do we need to continue moving away from deliberate, careful processes in favor of speed and immediacy? In time, all published material may become publicly accessible. For example all research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be publicly available withing months of publication, even by commercial publishers. So why is there a need for non-specialists to read the newest article in Cell as soon as it is published? And speaking about profit, isn't there money involved in these new Facebook-like endeavors? I would rather have Science and Nature editors decide on scientific truth than venture capitalists. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:33 p.m. Recommended10 LanceSmith USA Precisely - I agree completely. This "rush to change" seems analogous to the "rush to change" everyone made in the 90's towards New Business Models...New Business Rules...etc. What did we witness? The very real fact that business is still business, and you can't build companies that never expect to turn a profit. In many ways, we are still in the throes of this rush to change even today. The analogy is striking, but instead of a wall street crash like we saw at the turn of the century, we'll see a crash in our ability to do good science. Science is and must be rigorous. That rule is fundamental. Without rigor all we are left with is opinion. I see nothing about these changes that help increase rigor. I am great with open-journals (like PLoS, etc), but those journals still require a real peer review process to end up with a final paper. The rest of the collaborative stuff noted in the article is great for helping people stay connected, but that's a separate issue. Papers (even those in open-journals) are still needed to maintain the rigor...unless someone can tell me how a glorified Facebook is going to increase rigor in the community. If anything, I see it as just the opposite. It reminds me of folks that want to use Wikipedia as primary literature. Wikipedia is a great resource, but it isn't primary literature....nor will it ever be (if we are ever to hope to maintain rigor in the field). Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:55 p.m. Recommended8 tparrett Tampa, FL It is the scientist who do the lionshare of the work and taxpayers who pay the lionshare for this work, not the publishers. They are becoming useless bottlenecks for critical information. If a fair system, these papers would be released in the public domain after a certain time period. As to the person who claimed he has never had any problems accessing information for his career, I do not know what planet he is on, but I and many others have had have these problems everyday in my work. It certainly has prevented me in a busy medical practice collecting useful previously published case and clinical studies related to current cases I am evaluating, and I see all too often people just give up and do non-comprehensive searches. It costs next to nothing to release those electronic records, and nearly nothing to maintain a server for them. It is just shameful, in many cases the greatest math, physics, medical literature written by people decades ago is somehow owned and exploited by a small group of people who had no part in their creation. Many people would be more than happy to scan or distribute electronic pdfs of the scientific literature for free, if it was legal...what is it a few dozen terabytes? phish! Banks are not the creators of capital, people and their productivity is. They have gotten too big and are no longer serving their useful purpose. I see the corrupt scientific publishing system now in the same light. They need downsizing. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:25 p.m. Recommended4 Paul F. Stewart, MD Belfast,Me. Just what we need , more junk science on the internet. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:23 p.m. Recommended7 Joseph More Waltham, Massachusetts Absent peer review, What will guide us in navigating the tsunami of postings on any subject? Already using web-search engines is getting more laborious and difficult, due to an excess of search-result of dubious credibility and relevance. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:20 p.m. Recommended3 Rocketscientist Chicago, IL Read "Betrayers of Truth" by William J Broad. Science needs to open its doors to comments and criticism even if by the uninformed. I remember the story of the truck stuck under a bridge. After experts were consulted, a little girl watching from the sideline shouted, "Take the air out of the tires!" To the amazment of the experts, this worked. Just look at medicine in recent years. Who's to stop pharma from having its input into publications in medical journals? Let's hear the questions of journalists and other informed laymen. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:17 p.m. JB Maryland This article meanders through its topic with no clear point. On one hand it seems to suggest that the old scientific model, as represented by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is undergoing an evolution. The article seems to suggest, and here I am gleaning, that there are two essential components to NEJM model: (1) work was done privately and (2) results were published in peer-reviewed journals. With regards to the first point, for at least 50 years now, experiments in the world of high energy physics, for example, have consisted of huge collaborations. All sorts of social networking has been going on for years. And in other areas, whether biology or chemistry, there are conferences and regular meetings of professional organizations. So OK, the Internet is used nowadays, but I see no break with the so-called NEJM model. Seems like that model i's only a straw dog. So let's turn to the publication of results. Scientists have essentially two ways to publish: (1) in peer reviewed journals and (2) in non-peer reviwed conference proceedings. And they can present unpublished results at meetings. This article is not clear at all on whether the scientific community is moving away from this. One scientist is quoted that he no longer does peer reviews because he feels uncompensated by large publishing houses. He doesn't have a problem with the peer review process per say. Perhaps these publishing houses should work on a not-for-profit basis, but that's a different issue. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:11 p.m. Recommended8 Helen Ardmore,PA As a lay person, opening up the communication and discovery pipeline is great . As with Cell and other pay to play journals, the writer /researchers work hand and glove with almost all published pieces. Recently we have witnessed in the paper fraudulent data collected during a goverment grant on Resveratrol. I wonder how many articles were published in the previous closed system ? Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:51 p.m. MW Baltimore As a parent I’ve had a pediatrician show me an article or a medical book with a description of my child’s ailment. I’m not sure how I would feel, especially given my understanding of how unreliable information on the web can be, if the pediatrician said “I saw this cool procedure on a blog and I’d like to try it on your child.” The article is romantic but unrealistic. I think the two (traditional journals and online groups like ResearchGate) can co-exist but in no way will blogs and like buttons replace peer review. If they do, shame on us. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:44 p.m. Recommended17 Beth Near an airport Editors and reviewers help ensure that the conclusions are supported by the data. But once published, the manuscript belongs to the journal since that's the point of the copyright transfer agreements. The public may want access to data and there is nothing to stop authors from sending preprints or reprints (electronically) to anyone who requests it. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:43 p.m. Recommended3 MS Northampton, MA "Nothing to stop authors from sending preprints or reprints (electronically)" . . . unless the journal's publisher rigs those pdfs to limit the number of readers and printouts. (Yes, that can be done and at least one major publisher -- Wiley VCH -- does it.) Jan. 18, 2012 at 4:03 a.m. Recommended1 Tom Rapid City Speeding up the process and eliminating the choke-hold coteries have would be good; however, if I don't happen to be an expert in a certain area, what trust could I place in an article and how can I sort through a potential explosion in the number of articles? Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:25 p.m. Recommended1 Wasting time DC Louisa - the page charges in your NSF grant are just that - your page charges. However, page charges do not cover the full cost of publication. Not even close. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:21 p.m. Louisa Minneapolis Of course not- that's why there are advertisements and subscriptions. That doesn't change the fact that taxpayer money has been spent toward publication. Does that mean the public should have unlimited access to the articles? I think that's a separate question, but there is probably a middle ground between the status quo and a complete shift to open access. However, what is certainly true is that for every paper published in a traditional journal (except Science), the public is essentially subsidizing a for-profit company and rarely seeing the results. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:06 p.m. Michael Chicago Dear Keith, The outsource principle is a fantatstic idea and can help science move forward in leaps and bounds. However, the Chinese, who are not exactly our friends and ruthless cyberthiefs, will benedit greatly. They will not have to do any research at all, just read and implement all our science. It's liking selling metal and timber to Japan just prior to WWII. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:21 p.m. Dan Maryland Michael, China and many Chinese universities are more than wealthy enough to buy important journal subscriptions just like top US universities. There isn't anything of note in scientific journals that isn't already available in China. Limiting journal access prevents US citizens without easy access to university libraries from learning about tax-payer funded research. Internationally, it limits researchers in poorer counties from being able to access scientific knowledge. Regarding China, It affects whether China has to pay European publishing companies for access to US funded research, but that's about it. I'm not saying what is or is not the solution, but the issue has little to do with protection of US intellectual resources. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:34 p.m. Keith Lewis Atlanta, GA This is a great development. As a technical student, it's often difficult to access highly technical information or research unless you search through the universities database system. Sometimes, traditional online search methods like Google are actually pretty useless for highly specific technical information because they're based on what the general population is looking for. But if you're working on a challenging research project, you need more than Wikipedia and Joe's online physics forum. The easier it is to access information online, the easier it will be to contribute and build off of earlier work. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:51 p.m. Recommended2 Rockologist Tulsa, OK The American Association of Petroleum Geologists launched "Search and Discovery" years ago, where papers are posted with only cursory editorial review. In at least one instance, a seriously and obviously flawed paper was removed, but overall the project has achieved its goal of expediting the publication of new findings to the geology community. I peruse the AAPG's Search and Discovery website regularly. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:50 p.m. Recommended1 JenofNJ NJ I don't want to see this degenerate into peer-review-bashing. While it certainly has its problems, peer review is crucial to the process of publishing. It insures that the papers are carefully read, criticized, rewritten and edited. As a healthcare provider, I absolutely cannot practice based on "the latest thing" or what a bunch of people "like". I need evidence-based articles that are peer-reviewed, so that I can make informed decisions that will impact my patients' health. This article did not address the world of medical publishing, unfortunately. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:50 p.m. Recommended34 RW Boston, MA It's important in these discussions to understand that high-profile journals have a very different model from normal journals. In a normal Elsevier journal you might expect the ratio of submitted papers to accepted papers to be around 2:1. For PLoS One, it's probably somewhere in the region of 1.5:1. At Nature and Science it's at least 10:1, and even accepted papers usually go through multiple rounds of review. Why the low acceptance rate? Because these journals aim to pick the very best papers. (Whether they do a perfect job of this is another matter.) If they do their job well, lots of people will want to read what they pick. That's why it makes sense for these journals to use a reader-pays model. If they shift to author-pays, the price per paper published will be prohibitive, unless they charge for submission, not acceptance. Do we want a world in which only rich labs can submit to the top journals? In the PLoS model, the more selective journals (e.g. PLoS Biology) are subsidized by the highly unselective journal (PLoS One). If authors cooperate, papers are passed down from the more selective journals to the less selective ones, so PLoS can capture some income from most of the papers submitted to them. PLoS has burned through a lot of grants and subsidies since it started up, it'll be interesting to see if it eventually stabilizes. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:46 p.m. Recommended14 Carolyn Egeli Valley Lee, Md. Science is now owned privately is the problem. With that, knowledge has become just another commodity, not something we all pay for together and then use among ourselves. The patenting of genes is a good example of this. While Lyme disease flourishes, research on it is secret and owned by those that have the patents on the bacteria. What a mess! The Journals are just hacks for the big companies. Anyone who actually reads the research written about in journals, often find the report in these journals out and out lies. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:44 p.m. Recommended1 David King New York NY There is a Swiss site that provides a far more extensive collaborative process (5m articles) since late 2007. see http://www.frontiersin.org/ I know the founders who are all published scientists themselves.... Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:43 p.m. LL Oregon Like it or not, the trend is toward openness, sharing and democratization, and that includes scientific work and publications. Most scientists will welcome the option to have access to "open science", which most likely will help them along in their own research, and, through collaborative efforts, speed up breakthroughs in science. Viva la Internet! Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:43 p.m. JM Young Rochester, NY I agree with Kenarmy: science must be rigorous. However, I also agree with Nostromo: Nobody is perfect, i.e. there are problems in big impact journals as well. The ethics involved in adding rigorous detail ultimately are (read: should be) independent of what journal the work is published in. Q1: With everybody (journals and scientists) looking to generate bigger and bigger impact, is there more emphasis on one-hit-wonder science? While there is certainly a need for new, cutting/bleeding-edge ideas, should everybody be focused on that avenue? These questions come from the fact that between 1990 and 2008, of the 27 million new jobs created in the US, only 2% were in the tradable sector (Spence M. Foreign Affairs, July/August 2011). The majority of professionals that held these jobs had advanced degrees. Perhaps the benefit of open-access publication is that it opens a larger volume of new ideas to entrepreneurs and companies that have the opportunity to further develop these ideas, generate industry, develop the tradable sector of economies, and reduce economic disparity. Q2: Relatedly, isn't a poorly developed article an opportunity? Q3: Does the development of open-access publication mean we should re-evaluate the definition of impact factor? Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:43 p.m. Recommended2 Noeze Chicago NYT Pick The cost of accessing articles published in the medical literature is so outrageously high that many healthcare providers simply cannot afford to read them. As Dr. Gavin Yamey has written (http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2009/07/oped1-0907.html), it costs $30 - $50 to read but a single article in a typical medical journal, such as The New England Journal of Medicine. A subscription for online access to a single journal costs individual subscribers $150 - $200 per year. Conducting a review of the literature on a single subject requires being able to read many articles in multiple journals, potentially costing any reader who does not have privileges at a university medical library or other large institutional library hundreds of dollars. For many healthcare workers, particularly outside wealthy countries such as the US, these high prices completely exclude access to potentially life-saving knowledge. Most subscription-based medical journals also prohibit readers, under traditional restrictive copyright licenses, from making multiple copies, translations, or derivative works of journal articles - so a reader cannot share an article he or she has found with colleagues unless each of them individually pays for access. Success of the open access movement in the dissemination of medical knowledge has the potential to improve the quality of health care provided to countless millions. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:41 p.m. Recommended11 Janne Seppänen Finland Peer review can be better: fast, fair, efficient, accurate and rewarding. Check out Peerge of Science, a system already used by over 500 biologists and one prestigious scientific journal. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:40 p.m. Recommended1 foxhound4 Jersey City The baseline content for all sciences supports this model - can the financial markets be far behind? Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:40 p.m. SJ Washington, D.C. I wonder if this would work with the social sciences, particularly in the less quantitative fields. They are always accused of being merely "high octane journalism" and this would even make the field murkier I fear. Interesting field for debate. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:39 p.m. Recommended1 Jessie Henshaw way uptown NYT Pick What's missing from the social network idea of promoting science is what's going to prevent the networks from dividing into cells of shared belief, like social networks naturally do with everything. The deep problem, that "knowledge is a social construct" and prone to dividing into silos of thinking, somewhat ignorant of each other, taking unexamined questions on faith, would get worse. That's even a problem for the slow traditional process of advancing papers through careful reading by critical reviewers, of course. Still, I personally find the open networks for fundamental research I've long been involved in to be rather socially exclusive, each with their own unexamined rules of exclusion. The social network becomes a filter for what ideas are welcome or not. Criticism then gets based on whether the authors seem to be "team players" playing along with the crowd, just like in business. Speeding that up will only make the problem worse I think. There's just a huge spectrum of scientists who don't want to discuss facts that contradict their theories, as they have lots better things to do it seems. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:39 p.m. Recommended21 Sharma NJ High time! Even better, non-degreed scientists and naturalists (think Darwin) can finally have a way in to the rather stuffy peer-review and dog-eat-dog world of competitive science. Who doesn't know someone whose work/ideas were stolen by someone on a grant committee or someone with, for instance, tenure? Maybe now there's a way to say that, 'well, that data belongs to me, see, it's published.' As for the "non-profit" piece, well, now, what precisely does that mean for the CEO, administrators and staff of those organizations? Let's pull all scientific fields into collaboration using current technologies - until other replace even these. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:35 p.m. Kenarmy Columbia, MO And what exactly is a person that is not a professional scientist going to publish? His/her "opinion." We're no longer in the 19th cdentury where people have their own laboratories in their homes: e.g. Thomas Edison or Christian Herter. Scientific research is published by scientists who in the main work in rigorously controlled environments, using materials/animals from suppliers that produce these products under controlled conditions. The Home Depot is not a scientific supply house. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:49 p.m. Recommended4 MN Michigan NYT Pick There is hierarchy of journal quality that functions to direct attention (and credit) to work that can withstand very critical review. Human judgement is the only tool we have for evaluating excellence. The two systems can co-exist, as they do now - and scientific readers can choose whether to read a relevant paper that passed the critical reviewers of NATURE or one that was accepted by PLoS One. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:35 p.m. Recommended8 David Mebane Morgantown, WV Unless they can't afford a subscription to Nature, in which case, PLoS it is. I see a lot of comments like this, to the effect that open access means less rigorous peer review. The only reason this is true at the moment is the relative dearth of submissions to open access journals. But as is pointed out in the article, reviewers do not get paid, so this would likely be remedied by a broad shift to open access publishing. So fears about junk science dominating the literature under an open access model are overblown. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:48 p.m. Recommended1 Tom Midwest Trusted The key to the article is the focus on commercial journals as opposed to the vast majority of research being published in non profit journals with extensive peer review and other free sources on the the internet. In my own case, the publication process required a complete in house peer review, a review at a regional office, submission to a journal and another complete peer review process at that time. Added to that was a review by people you knew and trusted before even entering the process. Granted, even the non profit journals do have page charges but many waive them or reduce them and further, publication costs are frequently provided in the research budget. As to networks, that is developed by the scientist on their own through conferences and in today's environment, through the multitude of free sites, listservs and discussion groups on the internet. By the time I retired, my email address book was well north of 2000 contacts. I don't disagree that someone may want to make money off the process, but in my field of study, it rarely occurs. Further, to quote many of my professors as well as graduate advisers, if the literature cited has not been rigorously peer reviewed, don't bother to add books or on line sources in your own literature cited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:29 p.m. Recommended7 Wasting time DC This is not true. Michael B. Eisen, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founder of the Public Library of Science, wrote that if the bill passes, “taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.” The grants covered the cost of the research, not the cost of publication. It is like saying that tax dollars paid for the federal highway system so we should not have to pay tolls. But it takes more money to maintain that system. Which is why we have to pay $4.00 to drive the 24 miles of I-95 in Delaware and another $3.00 if we want to cross the bridge, and another $12 if we want to get all the way to DC. Not to mention the federal fuel tax of 18.4 cents per gallon that goes to funding of the interstate highway system. If I don't want to pay these taxes and tolls, I can take the local roads. If I don't want to pay for easy (24/7 online) access to journals, I can go to a library or e-mail the author and request a pdf. Time and convenience have a cost, and that cost - I repeat - is not covered by the research grant. Publishing - in any form - has a cost and the grants do not cover those costs. In Mr. Eisen's field, which is largely funded by NIH, grants are huge. In my discipline, grants are typically an order of magnitude smaller than NIH grants - or less! Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:25 p.m. Recommended6 Louisa Minneapolis While this may be true for your field of study or perhaps your funding organization, my recently funded NSF proposal contains a modest amount earmarked for publication costs. As far as I can tell from colleagues (mostly funded by NSF and NOAA), this is common. So, I think it is indeed fair to say that taxpayers have already paid for both the research and its publication. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:49 p.m. Recommended1 Bob Tube Los Angeles DC, if you move to California you could skip most of that toll-paying nonsense (except around SF Bay Area). Out here, we have FREEways. And better weather. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:44 p.m. john NY I don't know what your field is, but for those of us covered by NIH and NSF grants (the vast majority of science in the US), the grant DOES cover author publication costs, which are not insignificant. It seems to me the $1,000-3,000 author costs should be able to cover a well run journal who basically rely on free labor (reviewers). So to repeat, grants DO cover publishing costs, and me and everyone else in my field writes in a budget line for these costs. Perhaps you've missed this somehow in your field? (whatever it is) Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:54 p.m. Jay Philadelphia Dear editors: ArXiv is not a journal, but a repository of papers that for the most part have been published, or have been submitted for publication. Please clarify. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:24 p.m. Thomas Lin The New York Times Yes, arXiv is, as its name suggests, an archive, while PLoS publishes several peer-reviewed open-access journals online: "Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years." Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:34 p.m. Wasting time DC Not only does PLoS charge hefty publication fees - that diminish the research grants, which are already very thin in some disciplines - but they also have subscription fees disguised as memberships and they received enormous donations to get started and continue to rely on outside donations. Not a level playing field, certainly not with the many journals published by not-for-profit scientific societies operating on a relative shoestring. So please stop touting PLoS' alleged achievements. It is, to borrow a cliche, like being born on third base and thinking you hit a home run. That's not to say that open access is a bad thing. It is a good thing. But let's not overlook the substantial barriers and the likely downsides (such as the potential extinction of small scientific societies and their journals). Let's not assume that every society and journal can attract millions of Soros bucks - they can't - and that scientists in most disciplines have grants large enough to pay those big publication charges - they don't. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:19 p.m. Recommended4 WJH New York City What three embittered losers did you interview to get these attitudes? Anyone in science knows that although peer reviewed journals have their (many) problems, something not peer reviewed has a strong possibility of being unreliable. Moreover every discipline has websites on which all papers can be posted before they are peer reviewed so that we have virtually unlimited access to all kinds of work before it is published. The one in math and physics is called ArXiv and it is run out of Los Alamos. We all know that Elsevier and Springer are putting the squeeze on university libraries and that Elsevier books are outrageously expensive to the point that nearly no one buys the wretched things. But the idea that this is such a broken system as to be unworkable or that it really ties anyone in knots is just so silly. In my forty years in mathematics and through all of my articles in books and conference volumes I never once felt obstructed. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:15 p.m. Recommended8 kate dublin There should be no place in academia for for-profit publishers. Nothing published in them should ever count for promotion anywhere. The university press model served the humanities and much of the rest of academia well until the cost of for-profit on-line journals in the sciences, usually at least twenty (and often or more) times more than subscriptions to a good humanities journal, resulted in drastic cutbacks in the the number of books college and university libraries are able to afford to purchase. Moreover, the for profit presses promote themselves through a new industry of bibliometrics, in which impact factor and citation indices triumph over any consideration of the actual content of work; one of the best ways to get a high citation rate is to get something demonstrably wrong into a high impact journal. The British RAF process, which costs more than running a decent university, is a huge contributor to this problem, which it threatens to export to the rest of the European Union, but the costs are equally high in the United States. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:13 p.m. Recommended1 allsiante CA and EU I prefer (and I will prefer) to publish in journals that don't require the authors to pay for publication, but requires readers to pay for access, rather than the inverse. I simply wouldn't trust that a review process would be fair when it's obvious that the author generates the revenue, not the readers. Simple as that. There are prestigious journals today in which you can publish for free, and if you manage to get in, that means a huge deal in your professional life. In the academic circles that I move around, payed-for publications in so called free access "journals" count for exactly nothing, and I totally understand that. Readers with the "freedom" urge need to understand that high level journal publications are not just an outlet of results, not an entertainment magazine for the masses (at least not all of them :)), but also a judge-and-be-judged performance measurement platform for real scientists. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:11 p.m. Recommended3 galwegian NY Not addressed in this article is the parallel need to maintain high-quality peer review. The main reason people read and trust published manuscripts is because they have been subjected to the intensive scrutiny of colleagues before their being accepted for publication. This process can occasionally fail, but this is the notable exception to the rule. A Facebook-like approach that assumes that 'the community' will pitch in and review the work of others is not grounded in reality, as peer-review is, frankly, very onerous. Many people clicking 'like' for a manuscript will not replace the several hours of scrutiny required for a stringent review that looks for everything from experimental errors to fraud. Journal publication costs are unbelievably expensive these days, even for online-only publications, something has to change, but a social media or wiki-based model that ignores the critical role of detailed and focused peer-review is highly likely to fail, as it is their quality of peer-review, not publication mechanism, that confers status on the contents of these journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:09 p.m. Recommended28 JenofNJ NJ Thank you. My thoughts exactly. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:44 p.m. Recommended3 Bob Phoenix "a social media or wiki-based model that ignores the critical role of detailed and focused peer-review is highly likely to fail," While I wholeheartedly agree that a "like" button has no place in a peer-review process, I take exception with your assumption that wiki-based models can't work. It's all about the execution. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:43 p.m. melitides NYC The article mentions, but does not discuss, the fact that there are not insignificant publications costs imposed upon the author. So, it is not clear why this mode of publishing is preferable to those who complain about journal subscription costs, which, by the way often do come at a discount subscription rates to individual scentists affiliated with one or another society. Similarly, the fact that the author pays to publish raises concerns that appearance of the article is due more to the income it garners rather than the quality of the article and therefore the journal in which it appears. A journal that relies on subscriptons (library or individual subscriptions) will survive only if its published material is of high quality and relevant. This, in the long run, is a very good screening process, however painful it is to get those rejection letters. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:04 p.m. Recommended2 Johann Hibschman NYC In the current system, the author already pays to publish. I just looked up the Astrophysical Journal's page charges: they currently run $110/page, plus $350/page for color figures. The PLoS One charges are certainly not significantly more than this. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:35 p.m. BG Athens, GA The main benefits of journals are 1) Articles are peer-reviewed, and 2) They are useful for promotion and tenure: an article published in a very selective journal gives some assurance that the author has done something significant. Journals used to have an additional function, that of disseminating information, but that is much less significant now. In the past, it was difficult for scientists to produce and distribute their own journals, but this is no longer the case. The best approach is not to get rid of journals, but to get rid of the commercial publishers, who no longer add any value. In mathematics, this has happened a couple of times: the journal Compositio Mathematica severed itself from its commercial publisher, and most of the editors of the journal Topology resigned to start a new and less expensive competing journal. We need more of this. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. Recommended14 Manuel Xishuangbanna, China This article somewhat confounds science-focused social networking sites, which serve the purpose of improving communication and collaboration among scientists during and, especially, before the publication process with alternative publication models such as ArXiv and open-access journals. ArXiv depends on the broad user community to evaluate research and works best in disciplines such as Math and Theoretical Physics where the start-up and infrastructure costs of the research are often small so that research can be more easily replicated. Open-access models simply shift the cost of publishing from the reader to the author; they require no changes in the peer-review process. Open-access models do NOT, in and of themselves, preclude for-profit publishers from raising the cost of publication to exorbitant levels. Open-access works best in fields where funding is higher and easier to obtain, e.g., cancer biology vs. plant taxonomy. Another publication model worth considering is the traditional model with a 'not-for-profit' press, a system where the publisher is not beholden to shareholders and where authors do not pay the publication costs. If scientific societies committed to such companies, then at least flagship journals in specific disciplines would not suffer from the 'for-profit high subscription rate' problem and authors with less funding would still be able to publish their work. Jan. 17, 2012 at 2:58 p.m. Recommended5 PQuincy California Nature and Science are large, expensive, but non-profit organizations. In contrast, aggressive for-profit corporate publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Cell Press do similar work, but also spin of very substantial profits for their owners. They are also known for their aggressive tactics towards university libraries, one of their main clients, doing their best to pick them off, keeping prices secret and unequal, and so forth. Given that non-profit publishing still produces the top science journals, and many of the others (though non-profit professional associations increasingly hope that their journals can subsidize their other operations), what is the justification of the for-profits' costs? Their sanctimonious comments about "private sector information products" -- that is, scientific research largely paid for with public funds, by scientists on public or non-profit institution payrolls, with free peer review provided by other publicly-supported scientists, and then sold (very profitably) to public and non-profit institutions -- is both unpersuasive and ugly. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:24 a.m. Recommended31 Thomas Lin The New York Times Just to clarify, Nature is published by the for-profit Nature Publishing Group while Science is published by the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science. Both Nature and Science have among the highest impact factors in scientific publishing. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:43 a.m. Bert Gold Frederick, Maryland Point-of-information: Nature is part of Nature Publishing Group, owned by Macmillan. It is decidedly a for-profit publication. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:22 p.m. Recommended2 Luca New York Hi. I work at Nature and can tell you that our firm is anything but non-for-profit. We're privately owned by a German family, and they do care a lot about profitability! Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:50 p.m. Recommended1 Mark San Francisco Unless open science sites act responsibility to provide peer review and other safeguards against bias and fraud they run the risk of being little more than a lowest-common-denominator repository like Wikipedia. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:51 a.m. Recommended27 RichWa Banks, OR Wikipedia has been found to be a very reliable source in numerous studies including comparisons to Britannica where it was found to be as accurate. http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/10/03/bisc1003.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110414131855.htm http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:24 p.m. Recommended1 Roberto WA Bias and fraud? You mean Science and Nature and many major magazines that have published fake for years, before scam artists are "caught"...... Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:44 p.m. Recommended2 Bob Phoenix One word answer, WikiJournal. Seems like the great folks who brought us all the other Wikimedia could solve this one. Dump the self-serving publishers and go independent. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:17 a.m. Recommended4 Kenarmy Columbia, MO I recently had occasion to read a PLoS article for my research project. It was truly dreadful. The data did not address the hypothesis or the conclusions. A good editor would have rejected the manuscript without review. Good reviewers would have rejected the manuscript, and complained to the editor that he/she was wasting their time. On-line journals are going to have to get their "game" up to a reasonable level is they want to compete with the "old guard" journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:17 a.m. Recommended15 Read All 6 Replies John Hrvatska NY Kenarmy, what was the paper that was so terrible? Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:40 p.m. Recommended1 RW Boston, MA I assume you mean PLoS One. PLoS Biology is a good journal. Most of the papers published in PLoS One are the "oops, this didn't work out very well and/or the person doing the work has left the lab" papers. It may still be better for science to have the data out there, though. And even PLoS One has some hidden gems. The first open-access journals in biology, as far as I'm aware, were the BMC journals. They are much less talked about than PLoS because they started up with little fanfare, but I think they are actually doing a sustainable and straightforward job of getting decent science out for people to read it. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. Recommended

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JenofNJ NJ Flag I don't want to see this degenerate into peer-review-bashing. While it certainly has its problems, peer review is crucial to the process of publishing. It insures that the papers are carefully read, criticized, rewritten and edited. As a healthcare provider, I absolutely cannot practice based on "the latest thing" or what a bunch of people "like". I need evidence-based articles that are peer-reviewed, so that I can make informed decisions that will impact my patients' health. This article did not address the world of medical publishing, unfortunately. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:50 p.m. Recommended34 Share this on Facebook Share this on Twitter PQuincy California Nature and Science are large, expensive, but non-profit organizations. In contrast, aggressive for-profit corporate publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Cell Press do similar work, but also spin of very substantial profits for their owners. They are also known for their aggressive tactics towards university libraries, one of their main clients, doing their best to pick them off, keeping prices secret and unequal, and so forth. Given that non-profit publishing still produces the top science journals, and many of the others (though non-profit professional associations increasingly hope that their journals can subsidize their other operations), what is the justification of the for-profits' costs? Their sanctimonious comments about "private sector information products" -- that is, scientific research largely paid for with public funds, by scientists on public or non-profit institution payrolls, with free peer review provided by other publicly-supported scientists, and then sold (very profitably) to public and non-profit institutions -- is both unpersuasive and ugly. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:24 a.m. Recommended31 galwegian NY Not addressed in this article is the parallel need to maintain high-quality peer review. The main reason people read and trust published manuscripts is because they have been subjected to the intensive scrutiny of colleagues before their being accepted for publication. This process can occasionally fail, but this is the notable exception to the rule. A Facebook-like approach that assumes that 'the community' will pitch in and review the work of others is not grounded in reality, as peer-review is, frankly, very onerous. Many people clicking 'like' for a manuscript will not replace the several hours of scrutiny required for a stringent review that looks for everything from experimental errors to fraud. Journal publication costs are unbelievably expensive these days, even for online-only publications, something has to change, but a social media or wiki-based model that ignores the critical role of detailed and focused peer-review is highly likely to fail, as it is their quality of peer-review, not publication mechanism, that confers status on the contents of these journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:09 p.m. Recommended28 Mark San Francisco Unless open science sites act responsibility to provide peer review and other safeguards against bias and fraud they run the risk of being little more than a lowest-common-denominator repository like Wikipedia. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:51 a.m. Recommended27 Jessie Henshaw way uptown NYT Pick What's missing from the social network idea of promoting science is what's going to prevent the networks from dividing into cells of shared belief, like social networks naturally do with everything. The deep problem, that "knowledge is a social construct" and prone to dividing into silos of thinking, somewhat ignorant of each other, taking unexamined questions on faith, would get worse. That's even a problem for the slow traditional process of advancing papers through careful reading by critical reviewers, of course. Still, I personally find the open networks for fundamental research I've long been involved in to be rather socially exclusive, each with their own unexamined rules of exclusion. The social network becomes a filter for what ideas are welcome or not. Criticism then gets based on whether the authors seem to be "team players" playing along with the crowd, just like in business. Speeding that up will only make the problem worse I think. There's just a huge spectrum of scientists who don't want to discuss facts that contradict their theories, as they have lots better things to do it seems. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:39 p.m. Recommended21 Steve Labadie, MO The "science lite" nature of this article was a disappointment. In any discussion of a new paradigm for scientific publishing, the topic of peer review is going to have to take front-and-center. This is the quality control mechanism that strengthens the edifice of scientific knowledge. And if you dislike scientific fraud you're going to deplore what happens when there are no controls at all. It's not even clear who would benefit from this new model. Most scientists currently have access to the primary literature through their institutions, whether academic or industrial, so what is the gripe? The lay public? Get real. Not one in a hundred non-scientists will be able to understand in depth a modern scientific publication, and for the summary conclusions there are secondary publications appropriate to that audience. As a scientist myself, I find page fees and the high cost of document retrieval truly unfortunate, at at times inconvenient, but I also recognize the value of review and curation. Requesting a .pdf directly from the author is great ... as long as I have contact info, and the author is still alive, and the author is willing and able to locate the proper computer file and send it to me. Jan. 17, 2012 at 6:03 p.m. Recommended17 MW Baltimore As a parent I’ve had a pediatrician show me an article or a medical book with a description of my child’s ailment. I’m not sure how I would feel, especially given my understanding of how unreliable information on the web can be, if the pediatrician said “I saw this cool procedure on a blog and I’d like to try it on your child.” The article is romantic but unrealistic. I think the two (traditional journals and online groups like ResearchGate) can co-exist but in no way will blogs and like buttons replace peer review. If they do, shame on us. Jan. 17, 2012 at 4:44 p.m. Recommended17 JK Indiana You don't have to scrap peer-review to have open access (or something like it). Peer-review is a great way to ensure quality (probably the only way), but it doesn't necessitate a bloated, for-profit publishing infrastructure. The actual reviewers aren't getting paid anyway, for the most part. So let's not confuse the important but distinct issues of peer review and journal access. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended16 Anony Mouse Richmond VA I work in a (very) small biotechnology research company. Elsevier's policies are a continuous problem to people not connected with a university library. Whereas most publishers have put their old archives free online, Elsevier continues to ask outrageous charges ($30 per article) for research papers that may or not be relevant when you actually get into the full text (many papers refer to other papers for the methods they use). The Research Works Act clearly goes against the good of science and scientists and the public interest. As a citizen, I feel that any work that is publicly funded by NIH, NSF, USDA, DOE or any other federal agencies should be free to access after a few months, which still gives the journals time to make their profits, as libraries and specialists will still subscribe. I would like to see all scientists boycott Elsevier and other publishers who don't make their articles available after a maximum of a year's time. Peer review is still important to maintain research quality, but we are now at a time when scientific publishing could all be accomplished online and for free (peer reviewers have never been paid). It is just a matter of establishing online journals with similar reputations to the print journals. Elsevier - you time is limited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 7:54 p.m. Recommended15 Kenarmy Columbia, MO I recently had occasion to read a PLoS article for my research project. It was truly dreadful. The data did not address the hypothesis or the conclusions. A good editor would have rejected the manuscript without review. Good reviewers would have rejected the manuscript, and complained to the editor that he/she was wasting their time. On-line journals are going to have to get their "game" up to a reasonable level is they want to compete with the "old guard" journals. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:17 a.m. Recommended15 RW Boston, MA It's important in these discussions to understand that high-profile journals have a very different model from normal journals. In a normal Elsevier journal you might expect the ratio of submitted papers to accepted papers to be around 2:1. For PLoS One, it's probably somewhere in the region of 1.5:1. At Nature and Science it's at least 10:1, and even accepted papers usually go through multiple rounds of review. Why the low acceptance rate? Because these journals aim to pick the very best papers. (Whether they do a perfect job of this is another matter.) If they do their job well, lots of people will want to read what they pick. That's why it makes sense for these journals to use a reader-pays model. If they shift to author-pays, the price per paper published will be prohibitive, unless they charge for submission, not acceptance. Do we want a world in which only rich labs can submit to the top journals? In the PLoS model, the more selective journals (e.g. PLoS Biology) are subsidized by the highly unselective journal (PLoS One). If authors cooperate, papers are passed down from the more selective journals to the less selective ones, so PLoS can capture some income from most of the papers submitted to them. PLoS has burned through a lot of grants and subsidies since it started up, it'll be interesting to see if it eventually stabilizes. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:46 p.m. Recommended14 BG Athens, GA The main benefits of journals are 1) Articles are peer-reviewed, and 2) They are useful for promotion and tenure: an article published in a very selective journal gives some assurance that the author has done something significant. Journals used to have an additional function, that of disseminating information, but that is much less significant now. In the past, it was difficult for scientists to produce and distribute their own journals, but this is no longer the case. The best approach is not to get rid of journals, but to get rid of the commercial publishers, who no longer add any value. In mathematics, this has happened a couple of times: the journal Compositio Mathematica severed itself from its commercial publisher, and most of the editors of the journal Topology resigned to start a new and less expensive competing journal. We need more of this. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:00 p.m. Recommended14 Noeze Chicago NYT Pick The cost of accessing articles published in the medical literature is so outrageously high that many healthcare providers simply cannot afford to read them. As Dr. Gavin Yamey has written (http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2009/07/oped1-0907.html), it costs $30 - $50 to read but a single article in a typical medical journal, such as The New England Journal of Medicine. A subscription for online access to a single journal costs individual subscribers $150 - $200 per year. Conducting a review of the literature on a single subject requires being able to read many articles in multiple journals, potentially costing any reader who does not have privileges at a university medical library or other large institutional library hundreds of dollars. For many healthcare workers, particularly outside wealthy countries such as the US, these high prices completely exclude access to potentially life-saving knowledge. Most subscription-based medical journals also prohibit readers, under traditional restrictive copyright licenses, from making multiple copies, translations, or derivative works of journal articles - so a reader cannot share an article he or she has found with colleagues unless each of them individually pays for access. Success of the open access movement in the dissemination of medical knowledge has the potential to improve the quality of health care provided to countless millions. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:41 p.m. Recommended11 Jeff Wang San Francisco, California NYT Pick As a businessperson, I have often been confused by the lack of proper incentives for efficient and effective scientific research. There is tremendous redundancy in the "industry" by having multiple specialists studying the same thing with little to no collaboration, trying to scoop each other. This redundancy is largely driven by the rewards system in science, where researchers compete in vying for high-impact-factor publications. It's a zero-sum-game, and it's wasteful. Opening up the process to more collaboration and sharing would likely benefit science and society in the long run. But in the meantime, I can't imagine large populations of researchers opting for the open-source route, since they are essentially punished professionally for sharing their data. Open source science cannot coexist with the current publication process, since sharing essentially invites others to scoop your work. For things to really change, universities and institutes need to change the way they hire and promote researchers, decoupling professional development from publication records and impact factors. The would need to develop a new currency that measures a researcher's value in an open-source world. The "reputation points" example in this article may be a prototype for such a currency. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:43 p.m. Recommended10 Yiannis Minneapolis Why do we need to continue moving away from deliberate, careful processes in favor of speed and immediacy? In time, all published material may become publicly accessible. For example all research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be publicly available withing months of publication, even by commercial publishers. So why is there a need for non-specialists to read the newest article in Cell as soon as it is published? And speaking about profit, isn't there money involved in these new Facebook-like endeavors? I would rather have Science and Nature editors decide on scientific truth than venture capitalists. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:33 p.m. Recommended10 LanceSmith USA Precisely - I agree completely. This "rush to change" seems analogous to the "rush to change" everyone made in the 90's towards New Business Models...New Business Rules...etc. What did we witness? The very real fact that business is still business, and you can't build companies that never expect to turn a profit. In many ways, we are still in the throes of this rush to change even today. The analogy is striking, but instead of a wall street crash like we saw at the turn of the century, we'll see a crash in our ability to do good science. Science is and must be rigorous. That rule is fundamental. Without rigor all we are left with is opinion. I see nothing about these changes that help increase rigor. I am great with open-journals (like PLoS, etc), but those journals still require a real peer review process to end up with a final paper. The rest of the collaborative stuff noted in the article is great for helping people stay connected, but that's a separate issue. Papers (even those in open-journals) are still needed to maintain the rigor...unless someone can tell me how a glorified Facebook is going to increase rigor in the community. If anything, I see it as just the opposite. It reminds me of folks that want to use Wikipedia as primary literature. Wikipedia is a great resource, but it isn't primary literature....nor will it ever be (if we are ever to hope to maintain rigor in the field). In reply to Yiannis Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:55 p.m. Recommended8 JB Maryland This article meanders through its topic with no clear point. On one hand it seems to suggest that the old scientific model, as represented by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is undergoing an evolution. The article seems to suggest, and here I am gleaning, that there are two essential components to NEJM model: (1) work was done privately and (2) results were published in peer-reviewed journals. With regards to the first point, for at least 50 years now, experiments in the world of high energy physics, for example, have consisted of huge collaborations. All sorts of social networking has been going on for years. And in other areas, whether biology or chemistry, there are conferences and regular meetings of professional organizations. So OK, the Internet is used nowadays, but I see no break with the so-called NEJM model. Seems like that model i's only a straw dog. So let's turn to the publication of results. Scientists have essentially two ways to publish: (1) in peer reviewed journals and (2) in non-peer reviwed conference proceedings. And they can present unpublished results at meetings. This article is not clear at all on whether the scientific community is moving away from this. One scientist is quoted that he no longer does peer reviews because he feels uncompensated by large publishing houses. He doesn't have a problem with the peer review process per say. Perhaps these publishing houses should work on a not-for-profit basis, but that's a different issue. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:11 p.m. Recommended8 MN Michigan NYT Pick There is hierarchy of journal quality that functions to direct attention (and credit) to work that can withstand very critical review. Human judgement is the only tool we have for evaluating excellence. The two systems can co-exist, as they do now - and scientific readers can choose whether to read a relevant paper that passed the critical reviewers of NATURE or one that was accepted by PLoS One. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:35 p.m. Recommended8 WJH New York City What three embittered losers did you interview to get these attitudes? Anyone in science knows that although peer reviewed journals have their (many) problems, something not peer reviewed has a strong possibility of being unreliable. Moreover every discipline has websites on which all papers can be posted before they are peer reviewed so that we have virtually unlimited access to all kinds of work before it is published. The one in math and physics is called ArXiv and it is run out of Los Alamos. We all know that Elsevier and Springer are putting the squeeze on university libraries and that Elsevier books are outrageously expensive to the point that nearly no one buys the wretched things. But the idea that this is such a broken system as to be unworkable or that it really ties anyone in knots is just so silly. In my forty years in mathematics and through all of my articles in books and conference volumes I never once felt obstructed. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:15 p.m. Recommended8 Dick Turpin Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, California It is true that "the system is hidebound, expensive and elitist," as are pretty much all systems governed by gatekeepers (i.e., editors and publishers). However, without those gatekeepers, the audience must become its own editor and sift through all the garbage to find the quality. Ask yourself, do you have the time and desire to do that? If you do, all the power to you - but I'm betting that you don't have the time because you have a day job, hobbies, a marriage, a family, etc. So while, on the one hand, the gatekeepers are in a privileged position to arbitrarily impose their own standards and views on content (as editors usually do), they also serve the purpose of conserving the audience's most precious commodity - time. That applies to science content as much as any other content out there. Mr. Dick Turpin Jan. 18, 2012 at 3:57 p.m. Recommended7 Partha Mitra New York I've published ~ 100 papers (physics, then neuroscience) in major journals (Nature, Science etc). At the same time I have put up my manuscripts on the free physics preprint archives (arxiv) prior to publication - including at least one manuscript which has been cited but which I never submitted to a journal. This particular manuscript had a small error - which was pointed out to me by someone who read it and emailed me a comment - following which I posted a revised, corrected version. Scientific publication should first and foremost be about communicating and sharing scientific results and findings. In the internet era, it makes no sense to hold this process hostage to a broken peer review system and large user fees that puts most science articles out of reach for most people (even in academic settings - libraries have limited resources). The alternative could be free access to the raw articles, but paid access to editorial selection, in a two step process: 1. Author driven publication without gatekeepers and fees (eg deposit a manuscript in arxiv - if Perelman could do that for his proof of the Poincare conjecture, I don't see why the rest of us can't - and I don't buy that biomedicine is exceptional). 2. A subsequent process of reviewing, revising, vetting - this second stage should have expert reviewers (paid for their efforts), editors, etc. and the results accessible through paid subscriptions. I doubt this can be accomplished by "liking" on a social network. Jan. 18, 2012 at 10:50 a.m. Recommended7 John Vermont My first scientific paper was published 40 years ago this November, in the traditional way, and in an excellent journal. But papers have value, and it has long astounded me that we scientists give them away and then pay significant sums to be able to read them! Would't it be nice to be able to submit a paper to a variety of journals, which can review it as each wishes and come back to me with its offer of what that journal is willing to pay me (if anything) to publish my paper. I would be happy to grant publication rights to the appropriate, if not always highest, bidder, taking into account the relative financial resources of a scientific society journal versus a truly commercial, for-profit journal. The proceeds would go to further my research, not to my or my co-authors' pockets. Let the market play a role - intellectual ideas and results have value, just as creative literature does. Jan. 17, 2012 at 8:50 p.m. Recommended7 Paul F. Stewart, MD Belfast,Me. Just what we need , more junk science on the internet. Jan. 17, 2012 at 5:23 p.m. Recommended7 Tom Midwest Trusted The key to the article is the focus on commercial journals as opposed to the vast majority of research being published in non profit journals with extensive peer review and other free sources on the the internet. In my own case, the publication process required a complete in house peer review, a review at a regional office, submission to a journal and another complete peer review process at that time. Added to that was a review by people you knew and trusted before even entering the process. Granted, even the non profit journals do have page charges but many waive them or reduce them and further, publication costs are frequently provided in the research budget. As to networks, that is developed by the scientist on their own through conferences and in today's environment, through the multitude of free sites, listservs and discussion groups on the internet. By the time I retired, my email address book was well north of 2000 contacts. I don't disagree that someone may want to make money off the process, but in my field of study, it rarely occurs. Further, to quote many of my professors as well as graduate advisers, if the literature cited has not been rigorously peer reviewed, don't bother to add books or on line sources in your own literature cited. Jan. 17, 2012 at 3:29 p.m. Recommended7 mike97 Seattle Let us draw an analogy with The New York Times Online. The New York Times Online just recently instituted a subscription service. Some may even complain that it's somewhat expense ( as opposed to free!). It justifies this subscription because it has an excelent Editorial staff - analogous to Peer Reviewers - and an excellent writers. Why not replace this "17th Century" structure with a social networked New York Times Online, with 1,000 randomly selected people picking and choosing articles for publication on a social media basis? Get rid of the Editors, and maybe some of the writers? Of course, then The New York Times would not be of the quality we expect nor need. Jan. 17, 2012 at 11:24 p.m. Recommended6 RBS Little River, CA NYT Pick I have been an editor of a established scientific journal for 20 years. The time to publish under the current system is mentioned as a reason for alternative models for dispersing scientific findings. It has been my experience that this problem has its genesis in the responsiveness of reviewers and the workload of editors. Good reviewers are very often well established in their fields and receive many requests for review in addition to their own research and teaching obligations. However, it is only human nature that scientists would put reviewing the contributions of others further down the list of things to do than in producing and publishing papers of their own, especially when there are many such requests for review. From an editor's perspective this means that I usually have to invite 5-6 reviewers and it may take several weeks for answers and then I may have to ask additional potential reviewers if I do not get at least two acceptances. It is not unusual to have to send invitations to 10 or more reviewers. Then I rarely get the reviews within the requested time. Receiving 100 papers a year and having my real job as well to attend to one can see that the system can easily back up and the initial review process stretch into months. I must say that the implementation of an internet based submission and review process over the last 10 years has helped in many ways with both the time of review and my efficiency. Peer review is absolutely essential. Jan. 17, 2012 at 9:51 p.m. Recommended4 Tim Smith NYT Pick As a professor at a major research university, I need to publish in for-profit journals for the time being because of their reputation. My internal and external evaluations (e.g., raises, grants) depend on the "quality" of the journals I publish in. Perhaps more importantly, the papers I co-author with my graduate students need to be in journals with a good reputation in order to help my students get started in their careers. Currently, open-access engineering journals are considered to be of lower quality than popular for-profit journals. As soon as open-access (engineering) journals reach a reputation on par with those I currently publish in, I plan to switch to open-access journals. I want to support open-access publishing, but not if it puts my career and the career of my students at risk. Jan. 18, 2012 at 2:25 a.m. Recommended