Scientists are talking, but mostly to each other: a quantitative analysis of research

[Stavros]

This (http://pus.sagepub.com/content/early/2009/03/31/0963662508096776.abstract)is not ceph related. It talks about how new knowledge circulates mostly between fellow scientists and never reaches the public.

I don't know how a journal can cover their expenses otherwise, but at some point, knowledge has to be free and accessible to all. With rising tuition costs, it seems that education is targeted to certain groups.

(The irony: this article is also not free).


Journal publication has long been relied on as the only required communication of results, tasking journalists with bringing news of scientific discoveries to the public. Output of science papers increased 15% between 1990 and 2001, with total output over 650,000. But, fewer than 0.013–0.34% of papers gained attention from mass media, with health/medicine papers taking the lion’s share of coverage. Fields outside of health/medicine had an appearance rate of only 0.001–0.005%. In light of findings that show scientific literacy declining despite growing public interest and scientific output, this study attempts to show that reliance on journal publication and subsequent coverage by the media as the sole form of communication en masse is failing to communicate science to the public.

[gjbarord]

That sounds about right. It can even be more frustrating when scientists are not even able to access the journals for a variety of reasons.

Greg

[hermissenda]

*laugh*

I wouldn't have noticed this !
(The irony: this article is also not free).[/QUOTE]

That being said, the subject if scientific literacy is a complicated one, starting with trying to define it. I don't know that the general public having access to scientific research would improve the case - especially without first educating everyone how to discern a good study from a bad one (which would be a really good thing!) I do think that with the growth of the internet scientists are able to collaborate more outside of journals. Also, with the growth of so many online databases of back articles a lot more research has been combined to create meta-statistics, and that has to be forwarding science. While it is *intensely* frustrating to not have access to, or have to pay a limb for an article one wants, I think on the whole we have more access to scientific research than ever before.

Cindy in Portland OR

[OB]

Peer review remains the solid foundation of scientifice knowledge dissemination. I personally am a staunch supporter of open access publishing. For those who are interested, simply start browsing the Public Library of Science journal PLoS1 to get to grips with its benefits.

[Tintenfisch]

Yes, I have several things I would very much (have) like(d) to make open access, but PLoS1 publication charges are US$1350 per article, and for Zootaxa they would have been $20/page ($3720). A little prohibitive :sad:

[OB]

Whether your (institutional) library spends its funds on subscriptions, or on allowing its scientists to be published, shouldn't matter wrt the total amount spent: someone will have to pay for the process itself... The main difference is that the subscription based model only allows for limited access, while open access allows access for everyone at the same level of investment...

[hermissenda]

Yes, I have several things I would very much (have) like(d) to make open access, but PLoS1 publication charges are US$1350 per article, and for Zootaxa they would have been $20/page ($3720). A little prohibitive :sad:

OUCH! Prohibitive isn't the word! Maybe extortive? I suppose there is a need for some kind of pain threshold/gateway to maintain some intellectual integrity or risk the Wiki effect. I have always assumed the article price tag was coming from the institutions that funded the research, or the researcher and felt they had a right to benefit from the results. Thanks for the enlightenment!

[OB]

Open access needn't be vanity publishing, peer review should be severe and sincere, either way!

[mucktopus]

Many journals can waive publication fees if authors don't have funding (and in the case of PLoS there's a particularly important reason for the paper to be open access).

Also- all publisher links to journal articles also list the contact info for the corresponding author. It's common to write the author directly to ask for for a free pdf reprint if they have one.

[Joe-Ceph]

I'm only a layman, so for give the ignorance, but who owns the copyright to these papers? The authors? The institutions? The journals? What value do the journals provide that justifies the ransom they demand? Why can't the authors or the institutions just make these papers available for $1 each on ITunes? It seems like a rigged system that uses mostly public money to do research that produces results that are then sold back to the public at an extremely high price, effectively denying public access. Am I missing something.

[Stavros]

Some related links to open access journals that OB mentioned above. Each quotation is taken from a different article on the matter.


The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust announced today that they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. Continue reading... (http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html)


This is great news. The more #openaccess journals we have the better. Clearly some of the text here is a dig at existing journals, including PLoS Biology. PLoS Biology definitely needs to work on some things - like transparency (e.g., if your article is rejected, the Academic Editor who advised the professional editors is not names). PLoS Biology is also run by professional editors. Thus it is not run by "active scientists" which is another one of the comments in this press release. Personally I think it would be better if PLoS Biology was run by active scientists. Continue reading... (http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-openaccess-journals-welcome.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheTreeOfLife+%28Th e+Tree+of+Life%29)


It represents the triumph of open access. The most amazing thing about the announcement, and the discussions leading up to it, was how it was universally assumed that this would be a fully open access journal. As far as I can tell, at no point was any consideration given to any other possibility. What a change a decade makes. Continue reading... (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=446)


Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals? (http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/07/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php)

On peer review:


‘If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market,’ says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and intellectual father of the international congresses of peer review that have been held every four years since 1989. Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws. Continue reading... (http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/pdf/bcr2742.pdf)

[mucktopus]

good questions-

‘If peer review was a drug it would never be allowed onto the market,’ says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal Of the American Medical Association and intellectual father of the international congresses of peer review that have been held every four years since 1989. Peer review would not get onto the market because we have no convincing evidence of its benefits but a lot of evidence of its flaws."

I don't agree- my papers have been greatly improved by the input of anonymous reviewers, and when manuscripts have been rejected, I've been grateful in hindsight. Editors have a good way of going outside an author's normal circle to solicit reviews, so you get insights beyond what your immediate research group will disclose. There's no shortage of information out there- NGO reports, government summaries, etc. But when it comes down to it, few publication types hold clout like the peer reviewed paper, scrutinized by numerous colleagues and editors-- you know it's gone through the ringer before you read it.

The journal process itself can definitely use a re-vamp. But I'd vote to keep peer review any day of the week.

Journals usually hold the paper's copyright. Authors can use the data, send pdfs, etc. But the whole published paper itself belongs to the journal. As for costs and re-sale- the system needs rethinking. I've seen journal articles for sale on Amazon. Does the author get royalties? Don't think so! Scientists write the papers, review the papers and serve as editors for free. But layout, copy-editing, etc. and even online support of an article does take expensive infrastructure.

Research is paid for in lots of different ways- some through government funding, but lots of research funding is private, either through foundations, private donors, self-funded, venture capital, industry, etc.

But most of all- most of this information is accessible for free if you just email the author and ask for a pdf. Papers that are not available as pdf are harder to track down, but authors may still have paper reprints available to send. Google Scholar is a great resource for obtaining pdfs, and finding out who is researching what/who to contact for electronic reprints.

[OB]

I'm only a layman, so for give the ignorance, but who owns the copyright to these papers?

The Publishing houses do, in the case of "classical" science publishing. The reasoning is somewhere along the lines of "we put in all the hard work and through peer review ascertain quality and modify content, so we PWN the place".

[Joe-Ceph]

I think I get it; is this correct?:
The author/scientist typically owns the copyright initially, and could post it for free on the internet or sell it for $1 on Itunes if they wanted to, but the paper doesn't really have value until it has successfully passed through the "filter" that is a scientific journal. The value that the journals add is credibility. Right? We trust the journals to sort out the good science from the bad. An analogy would be the way we buy our perscription drugs through a pharmacy instead of from whomever decides to make and sell whatever potion they've cooked up. We trust that the FDA, and the drug delivery infrastructure has vetted the sources, and that only real and trustworthy medicine gets through. In exchange, the journals get the copyright, and can charge whatever they like.

If my assessment is correct, it's clear that the journals provide an utterly necessary service, but the opportunity for corruption and profiteering is kept in check only by the existential need for the journals to maintain their reputations. I'd like to see a better system, but I can't think of one.

[OB]

Open access still involves peer review, it's just more logical from both the financial and the scientific point of view

[Stavros]

Guy downloads millions of JSTOR articles, gets arrested. (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-data-theft/)

Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay

(http://gigaom.com/2011/07/21/pirate-bay-jstor/)

[gjbarord]

After reading those two articles, I really do not feel sorry for the person being indicted. He made the choice to do what he did and knew what he was doing. That second article was a bit biased. I do not think that journals are evil companies? I wonder how many people have actually downloaded any of those files uploaded to pirate bay???

Right or wrong, most of the journals are intended for academic circles and universities that can easily (in most cases) afford the fees to gain access to the journals. I would say that the general public interested in these journals is a very small percentage, small enough that their opinions really do not matter to many of the journals and they are unable to influence the price of single articles. Of course, $30-40 for one PDF article seems to be a bit extreme to me but without public and academic pressure on the journals, nothing will change. If most of the population was interested in the journals, the prices would most likely go down.

Oh well. Good thread!

Greg

[ceph]

This would be an excellent subject for Freakonomics!



If my assessment is correct, it's clear that the journals provide an utterly necessary service, but the opportunity for corruption and profiteering is kept in check only by the existential need for the journals to maintain their reputations. I'd like to see a better system, but I can't think of one.

You nailed it. And I completely agree that the per-review process is critical.

For an example of the difference, earlier today I responded to another observational learning in octopuses post - in the media and even in posts here, keep repeating the same stories over and over again even if there is very good (admittedly less exciting) evidence that casts a lot of doubt on the truth of the original claims. Observational learning in octopuses is likely to live on in popular circles, perhaps for thousands of years. You might think that is an exaggeration but consider that we still occasionally come across the tool use story of octopuses dropping rocks into open bivalves; this one goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks! It also is a great story, it just isn't true. Peer-review helps to weed these things out of at least the scientific literature. It isn't a perfect system but it does helps keep us from repeating the same stories over and over when the data either do not exist or no longer support the conclusion.

Also keep in mind that the scientists that review journal submissions are volunteering their time - they are not compensated. So the scientists write the grants, spend taxpayer (or their own) money to do the work, write the paper, review other scientists papers, make corrections based on feedback and then sign over the copyright of their work to the journals they publish in. Those journals then charge them for copies of their own work (you do usually get a few for free). The publishing costs of small press run printing is very high but with PDFs, that is no longer true. Things are changing, but changing slowly - here is one possible reason why:

All journals are not created equal. Journals have something called Impact Factor - roughly how often papers published in them are cited in other papers. Broad journals that have been around for a long time, like Science, the journal the original 1992 Observational Learning in Octopuses papers was published in, have a very high impact factor. Specialized journals like the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, where the original enrichment paper was published, have very low impact factors. Scientist's publications are often judged by the journals they publish in. Newer journals have barriers to entry as they do not yet have a strong impact factor. On the plus side, the old way of doing things does not sit well with many scientists, especially younger ones. So things are changing.

In the mean time, why wait around? There is TONMO, You Tube and other newer ways to share your science in normal English. . . once it is published. Scientists still have to go through the peer review system first - journals understandably also require that the work be new and not published elsewhere.

Clear as mud?

James



James

[OB]

Plus, the niche journals have a typical subscription base of anywhere between 50 to 300 institutional libraries world wide. The high prices are fueled by scarcity of demand, combined with the necessity of access. Again, I am in favor of open access publishing, but don't expect many lay persons to be interested in 99%+ of available publications.

[Stavros]

How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? (http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/)

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th August 2011

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the Western world? Whose monopolistic practices makes WalMart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

Everyone claims to agree that people should be encouraged to understand science and other academic research. Without current knowledge, we cannot make coherent democratic decisions. But the publishers have slapped a padlock and a Keep Out sign on the gates.

You might resent Murdoch’s paywall policy, in which he charges £1 for 24 hours of access to the Times and Sunday Times. But at least in that period you can read and download as many articles as you like. Reading a single article published by one of Elsevier’s journals will cost you $31.50(1). Springer charges Eur34.95(2), Wiley-Blackwell, $42(3). Read ten and you pay ten times. And the journals retain perpetual copyright. You want to read a letter printed in 1981? That’ll be $31.50(4).

Of course, you could go into the library (if it still exists). But they too have been hit by cosmic fees. The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792(5). Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930(6). Though academic libraries have been frantically cutting subscriptions to make ends meet, journals now consume 65% of their budgets(7), which means they have had to reduce the number of books they buy. Journal fees account for a significant component of universities’ costs, which are being passed to their students.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier’s operating-profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2 billion)(8). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles(9).

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can’t publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it’s not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionized scientific communication in the past 15 years.”(10) But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”(11) Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more(12).

What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning.

It’s bad enough for academics, it’s worse for the laity. I refer readers to peer-reviewed papers, on the principle that claims should be followed to their sources. The readers tell me that they can’t afford to judge for themselves whether or not I have represented the research fairly. Independent researchers who try to inform themselves about important scientific issues have to fork out thousands(12). This is a tax on education, a stifling of the public mind. It appears to contravene the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that “everyone has the right freely to … share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”(13)

Open-access publishing, despite its promise, and some excellent resources such as the Public Library of Science and the physics database arxiv.org, has failed to displace the monopolists. In 1998 the Economist, surveying the opportunities offered by electronic publishing, predicted that “the days of 40% profit margins may soon be as dead as Robert Maxwell.”(14) But in 2010 Elsevier’s operating profit margins were the same (36%) as they were in 1998(15).

The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones.

Government bodies, with a few exceptions, have failed to confront them. The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17). But Research Councils UK, whose statement on public access is a masterpiece of meaningless waffle, relies on “the assumption that publishers will maintain the spirit of their current policies.”(18) You bet they will.

In the short-term, governments should refer the academic publishers to their competition watchdogs, and insist that all papers arising from publicly-funded research are placed in a free public database(19). In the longer term, they should work with researchers to cut out the middleman altogether, creating, along the lines proposed by Bjorn Brembs, a single global archive of academic literature and data(20). Peer-review would be overseen by an independent body. It could be funded by the library budgets which are currently being diverted into the hands of privateers.

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the Corn Laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research which belongs to us.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. I sampled costs in these Elsevier journals: Journal of Clinical Epidemiology; Radiation Physics and Chemistry and Crop Protection, all of which charge US$31.50. Papers in a fourth publication I checked, the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, cost US$35.95.

2. I sampled costs in these Springer journals: Journal of Applied Spectroscopy, Kinematics and Physics of Celestial Bodies and Ecotoxicology, all of which charge Eur34.95.

3. I sampled costs in these Wiley-Blackwell journals: Plant Biology; Respirology and Journal of Applied Social Psychology, all of which charge US$ 42.00.

4. I went into the archive of Elsevier’s Applied Catalysis, and checked the costs of the material published in its first issue: April 1981.

5. Bjorn Brembs, 2011. What’s Wrong with Scholarly Publishing Today? II. http://www.slideshare.net/brembs/whats-wrong-with-scholarly-publishing-today-ii

6. http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/506062/bibliographic

7. The Economist, 26th May 2011. Of goats and headaches. http://www.economist.com/node/18744177

8. The Economist, as above.

9. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, 2008. The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing. Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, volume 9, number 3.

http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v09n03/mcguigan_g01.html

10. Springer Corporate Communications, 29th August 2011. By email. I spoke to Elsevier and asked them for a comment, but I have not received one.

11. Deutsche Bank AG, 11th January 2005. Reed Elsevier: Moving the Supertanker. Global Equity Research Report. Quoted by Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

12. John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders, March 2009. But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access. Economic Analysis & Policy, Vol. 39, No. 1. www.eap-journal.com/download.php?file=692

13. Article 27. http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a27

14. The Economist, 22nd January 1998. Publishing, perishing, and peer review. http://www.economist.com/node/603719

15. Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

16. See Glenn S. McGuigan and Robert D. Russell, as above.

17. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

18. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/documents/documents/2006statement.pdf

19. Danny Kingsley shows how a small change could make a big difference: “Currently all universities collect information about, and a copy of, every research article written by their academics each year. … But the version of the papers collected is the Publisher’s PDF. And in most cases this is the version we cannot make open access through digital repositories. … the infrastructure is there and the processes are already in place. But there is one small change that has to happen before we can enjoy substantive access to Australian research. The Government must specify that they require the Accepted Version (the final peer reviewed, corrected version) of the papers rather than the Publisher’s PDF for reporting.”

http://theconversation.edu.au/how-one-small-fix-could-open-access-to-research-2637

20. Bjorn Brembs, as above.

[gjbarord]

Good stuff Stavros!

Greg

[Stavros]

A parallel issue with book copyrights


I might not be an author

September 12, 2011
by seth godin

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The Author’s Guild is suing the University of Michigan and other college libraries because of their selfish, heinous plan to digitize and freely share old books for which authors cannot be found.

The Author’s Guild, which does not speak for me, nor for any author I know or possibly have ever met, says that this plan could lead to a “potentially catastrophic, widespread dissemination” of books.

Catastrophic?

It’s catastrophic to share dusty books for which the author cannot be found? Why?

Either books are a cultural treasure, part of our heritage and discourse and worthy of discussion, or they are merely a way to make a living. If being an author means that you view the distribution of your work (after you’re so far gone as to be unfindable) as catastrophic, I’m probably not an author.

Count me out.

[Stavros]

Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here’s some direct action. (http://www.badscience.net/2011/09/academic-papers-are-hidden-from-the-public-heres-some-direct-action/)

September 16th, 2011 by Ben Goldacre in academic publishing,

This week George Monbiot won the internet with a long Guardian piece on academic publishers. For those who didn’t know: academics, funded mostly by the public purse, pay for the production and dissemination of academic papers; but for historical reasons, these are published by private organisations who charge around $30 per academic paper, keeping out any reader who doesn’t have access through their institution.

This is a barrier to the public understanding of science, but also to ongoing scholarship by people who’ve wandered away from institutional academia. There are open access alternatives, where academics pay up-front and the paper is free to all readers, but these are patchy, and require your funder to pay a thousand pounds per paper. If the journal your work is best suited for doesn’t do open access, then you might reasonably accept a closed access journal.

The arguments are big. What I find interesting is the recent rise of direct action on this issue.

Aaron Swartz is a fellow at Harvard’s Centre for Ethics, and a digital activist. He has been accused of intellectual property theft on a grand scale, and the federal indictment document, available in full online, describes an inspiringly nerdy game of cat and mouse.

Swartz denies all charges. Allegedly, he bought a laptop to harvest academic papers from the website JSTOR. Using a guest login at MIT – they last 14 days – he set a program running to download papers in bulk. JSTOR and MIT smelt a rat: they blocked access to whole ranges of computers in MIT, creating havoc. Swartz set two computers on the job, running so fast that several JSTOR servers stopped working.

So then, allegedly, he tried a slower approach. You’ll have seen racks of flashing network equipment in office buildings. He opened one up, in a quiet basement, plugged in a laptop, with some external hard drives, hid them under a box, and left this package quietly downloading papers by the million. Months later he was seen returning, peering cautiously through cracks in doors, carrying his bicycle helmet over his face and looking through the ventilation holes. He was arrested and bailed for $100,000: he had downloaded 4.8 million academic papers.

It’s hard not to be impressed, and this is not the first time Swartz has taken public data access into his own hands. In the US, court records are available online, but at a cost, in a scheme generating a $150 million budget surplus. When free access was given at 17 libraries, Swartz set up a script to harvest the lot. He got 19,856,160 pages before the system was shut down.

Now, the US government allege that Swartz intended to release his vast academic paper stash for free on file-sharing websites. This may be true, but he did not do so. Shortly after his arrest, however, a posting appeared on the Pirate Bay website, declaring the release of an immense file, free for download. It contains 33 gigabytes worth of academic papers from the UK journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This file, explained the poster, was an act of protest about Swartz’s arrest. The papers in it range from the seventeenth century up to 1923, and are mostly out of copyright.

These are, in some respects, remarkable tales of Robin Hood behaviour. JSTOR expended huge effort on scanning these Royal Society papers in the 1990s, when scanning was tougher, and they should be thanked. But it’s hard to believe we can’t find any better way to do so: JSTOR sells each paper for between $8 and $19, while the Royal Society estimate that the pay-per-view income from the public accessing them is half a percent of their journal income.

One major problem with the current publishing model is that it’s hard to give access for free to the motivated public, while still gathering income from institutions. My hunch is, at some stage, this problem may be partially sidestepped, when someone manages an illegal workaround that individuals can play with, but which no university could endorse. I may be wrong: but either way, these are very interesting times for information.

[Stavros]

IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers


D. J. Bernstein (http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html)
Notes on writing papers

Don't publish with IEEE!
Before you read this page, you should understand (1) authors putting papers online to benefit readers, (2) commercial publishers using copyright to limit #1, and (3) authors dedicating papers to the public domain as one way to stop #2. I have a separate page discussing these issues.

It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.

I learned about this from a UIC graduate student who had submitted a paper to a conference whose proceedings were to be published by IEEE. After the paper was accepted, IEEE notified the student that a copyright transfer was required. The student declared his intention to put his paper into the public domain. The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager threatened the student with non-publication of the paper. Faced with this pressure, the student capitulated and, rather than eliminating the copyright, transferred it to IEEE.

When I heard about this incident, I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain his overall assertion that IEEE refuses to publish public-domain papers:

Works from government authors are in the public domain, and I find it difficult to believe that IEEE refuses papers from government authors. I see that the IEEE Copyright Form has a special section for government authors.

How many public-domain papers does IEEE actually publish? Surely you have the exact figures for each year. Is it fair to say that, in fact, IEEE publishes many public-domain papers?

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to answer these questions.

In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had asserted that ``IEEE needs to be the owner of the work ... by assignment.'' Obviously this is impossible for papers in the public domain: copyright assignment isn't possible when the copyright no longer exists. I looked at the IEEE Copyright Policies and found that public-domain papers were clearly exempted from the copyright-transfer requirement:

Such transfer shall be a necessary requirement for publication, EXCEPT for material in the public domain.

(Emphasis added.) I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager to explain the contradiction between his statements and the IEEE Copyright Policies. His only response was the rather idiotic comment that ``IEEE policy requires authors to submit an IEEE Copyright Form in order for publication to occur''; needless to say, the IEEE Copyright Form is written by the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights office.

In his messages to the student, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had explained IEEE's alleged need for being ``the owner of the work'' as follows: ``We can put it into the Xplore database and license it to others as one of our ongoing electronic distribution of IEEE publications.'' I asked the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager for clarification:

When there is no copyright, IEEE is completely free to do these things. It can distribute the work as widely as it wants, and it can authorize others to do so. All IEEE gets out of a copyright is the power to _stop_ the distribution of the information.

If the public domain is a problem for IEEE, how does IEEE publish works from government authors? Do you have a better explanation for your desire to be the owner of the work? Is it fair to say that IEEE actually _does_ want to stop the distribution of scientific information?

Naturally, the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager had also devoted some effort to trying to fool the student into believing that papers could not simply be dedicated to the public domain. I asked for clarification:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has commented that ``It is well settled that rights gained under the Copyright Act may be abandoned.'' The standard way to abandon copyright is by a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain. One example of a public-domain dedication is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain; surely you're aware of attorney Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons effort.

You stated that ``there is a specific legal process for placing your work in the PD.'' When the student asked you for details, you refused to answer. Instead you said that you were ``dubious about the idea of simply declaring one's intention to inject a work into the public domain,'' and that IEEE needed to be able to ``prove'' its rights.

If IEEE has trouble ``proving'' its rights to publish a public-domain paper, then how does IEEE ``prove'' alleged authorship of a paper whose copyright is allegedly transferred, and how does IEEE ``prove'' an allegation of government employment? Is the ``legal process'' you mentioned something more than making a clear written dedication of the work to the public domain? If so, what exactly is the process? Why didn't you answer the student's question regarding this process? Is it fair to say that the IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Office is trying to intimidate authors into transferring copyright to IEEE?

The IEEE Intellectual Property Rights Manager refused to respond.

The bottom line is that IEEE is refusing to accept public-domain papers except from government authors. IEEE has no justification for this position. IEEE's action is a blatant attempt to maintain control over papers that would otherwise have been freely available to the public. Unfortunately, at least in this student's case, the attempt succeeded: a paper that was accepted by IEEE's scientific referees, and that would have been in the public domain without IEEE's pressure, is now part of IEEE's copyright portfolio.

Consequently, I am blacklisting IEEE here. I recommend that authors find another publisher. Springer, for example, tacitly (although quite unhappily) allows public-domain papers, and AMS explicitly does not require a copyright transfer.

[Stavros]

Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals – unless waiver granted
(http://theconversation.edu.au/princeton-goes-open-access-to-stop-staff-handing-all-copyright-to-journals-unless-waiver-granted-3596)


Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted. The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly…
Princeton Princeton University hopes its new Open Access policy will pressure academic publishers to stop requiring the copyright to the papers they publish. Flickr/Yakinodi

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”

“The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues,” the policy said.

“The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal.”

Under the policy, academic staff will grant to The Trustees of Princeton University “a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorise others to do the same.”

In cases where the journal refuses to publish their article without the academic handing all copyright to the publisher, the academic can seek a waiver from the open access policy from the University.

The policy authors acknowledged that this may make the rule toothless in practice but said open access policies can be used “to lean on the journals to adjust their standard contracts so that waivers are not required, or with a limited waiver that simply delays open access for a few months.”

Academics will also be encouraged to place their work in open access data stores such as Arxiv or campus-run data repositories.

Princeton University spokesman, Martin A. Mbugua, said the policy was not an outright ban on staff handing copyright to journal publishers.

“It is a new open access policy that gives our faculty an advantage, and the option of seeking a waiver,” he said.
A step forward

Having prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard fly the open access flag represented a step forward, said open access advocate Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions,” he said.

“Essentially, this approach – if it becomes general – normalises an open access regime and offers authors the option of opting out of that regime. This is a large improvement on the present position whereby copyright restrictions and price barriers are normal and authors have to attempt to opt in to open access publishing, or risk prosecution by posting their work in breach of copyright.”

“The only interests that lose out under the Princeton proposal are the big journal publishers. Everyone else gains.”

Professor Tom Cochrane, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Technology, Information and Learning Support at the Queensland University of Technology, who has also led an Open Access policy mandate at QUT welcomed Princeton’s new rule but warned that the waiver must not be used too regularly, lest the policy be undermined.

If all universities and research institutions globally had policies similar to Princeton’s, the ultimate owner of published academic work would be universities and their research communities collectively, Professor Cochrane said.

“They are the source of all the content that publishers absolutely require to run their business model,” he said.

Dr Danny Kingsley, an open access expert and Manager of Scholarly Communication and ePublishing at Australian National University said the move was a positive step and that the push for open access should come from the academic community.

In practice, however, the new policy requires staff have a good understanding of the copyright arrangements they currently have with journal publishers in their field.

They will need to ensure future publisher’s agreements accommodate the new position and if not, obtain a waiver from the University.

“This sounds easy but in reality might be a challenge for some academics. There is considerable evidence to show that academics often have very little understanding of the copyright situation of their published work,” she said.

“What will be most telling will be the publishers' response over the next year or so. If they start providing amended agreements to Princeton academics then the door will be open for other universities to follow this lead. I suspect however they will not, as generally the trend seems for publishers to make the open access path a complex and difficult one.”

[Stavros]

Academia.edu Raises $4.5 Million To Help Researchers Share Their Scholarly Papers (http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/30/academia-edu-raises-4-5-million-to-help-researchers-share-their-scholarly-papers/)


Academia.edu, a social network for researchers, is having a good year. In 2011 it’s tripled its total registered userbase to 800,000, and today it’s announcing some major news that ensures the site will be expanding well into the future: it’s just raised $4.5 million in a funding round led by Spark Capital, with participation from True Ventures. This is the company’s second round of funding, after a $2.2 million round in late 2009 (the investors from that round participated in this one as well).

Academia.edu can be thought of as a social network for academics, in that it allows them to forge connections and follow updates around their field, but it has another benefit: it gives them a powerful, efficient way to distribute their research. Unlike, say, a personal website, which probably won’t have much in the way of analytics or search engine optimization, Academia.edu will let researchers keep tabs on how many people are reading their articles with specialized analytics tools, and it also does very well in Google search results. Academics are uploading 2,500 articles to the site each day, and, as a result, the site is now drawing some 3 million unique visitors, many of whom are arriving at the site’s articles via Google.

Founder Richard Price (whose Academia profile you can check out here) says that aside from getting an increasing amount of traction with researchers, the site is also benefitting from a recent movement among universities and researchers that’s referred to as ‘Open Science‘. If you’ve ever tried looking up scholarly papers online, you’ve likely encountered one of the many paywalls put up by the journals those papers were published in. Access to these papers can be very expensive, depending on the journal — in some cases prohibitively so. In short, the information is fragmented and doesn’t flow freely.

Recently some scientists have begun to combat this by deeming their papers ‘open access’, thereby making them publicly accessible for free. Princeton now requires researchers to get a waiver if they want to assign all copyright to a journal; MIT and Harvard have both enacted open access policies as well. Many researchers believe that this open access will help streamline the research itself, allowing for faster innovation.

Academia.edu benefits from this movement because it means that researchers are free to share papers amongst themselves on the site. Price says that Academia.edu is already the largest platform for sharing these research articles, and the company looks to help foster this trend going forward.

Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers. The company’s mission is to accelerate the world’s research. Academics use Academia.edu to share their research, monitor deep analytics around the impact of their research, and track the research of academics they follow.

[Stavros]

Source: Everybody's Libraries (http://everybodyslibraries.com/2012/01/01/public-domain-day-2012-five-things-we-can-do-in-the-us/)

It’s New Year’s Day again, and in much of the world, this means another year’s worth of works enter the public domain. That’s a cause for celebration, as Europe and many other countries that have “life+70 years” copyright terms welcome works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jelly Roll Morton, and Elizabeth von Arnim into the public domain. The Communia Project’s Public Domain Day website focuses on works by these and many other authors that are entering (in many cases, re-entering) the public domain in “life+70 years” countries. Meanwhie, folks in Canada, New Zealand, and other countries that have held the line at the “life+50 years” terms of the Berne Convention can now freely enjoy the works of people like James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, and H.D.

There’s not so much excitement about Public Domain Day in the US, where no published works are scheduled to enter the public domain for another 7 years, due to a 20-year copyright extension enacted in 1998. But Americans don’t have to simply sigh and contemplate what might have been if our copyright terms hadn’t been extended. The new year still provides a number of important opportunities for Americans to improve access to the public domain.

1. Find and free newly public domain unpublished works

Some works are going into the public domain in the US today: works never published prior to 2003 (or copyrighted under US law prior to 1978) by authors who died in 1941– the same authors whose published works go into the public domain in Europe today.

But who would care about such obscure works? one might ask. Well, if you’re at all interested in understanding the dense, allusion-laden fiction of Joyce, or the psychology of Woolf, or the jurisprudential thinking of Louis Brandeis, or the inner lives of any of the rest of the “class of 1941″, having the right to freely access, publish, and build on their unpublished works can be crucial.

Up until now, for instance, scholars studying James Joyce have often been frustrated by sharp restrictions and legal threats made by the administrator of Joyce’s literary estate. In 2008, Rebecca Ganz characterized the administrator thus: “[His] primary purpose is to quell any scholarship that he finds distasteful or an invasion of his family’s privacy. He has a history of harassing authors and artists until they buckle under the strain of trying to obtain legal rights to quote from the late author’s writings.” Scholars wishing to invoke Joyce’s unpublished works in their work have either had to undertake multi-year legal battles, or cut back on the lines of inquiry they might otherwise pursue.

American libraries and archives have many illuminating papers by authors who died in 1941– even non-US authors like Joyce and Woolf. US digitizers, librarians, and archivists can open up and publicize these works. In some cases, we’re uniquely positioned to do so, since their unpublished works may still be under copyright in some other countries.

2. Increase worldwide availability of public domain works

Many of the millions of digitized books on the Internet are hosted in the US, in large-scale repositories like Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. Many of these services give limited access to non-US readers or materials. Google and HathiTrust, for instance, limit non-US access by default to books published as long as 140 years ago, to avoid falling afoul of “life+70 years” copyright terms abroad. JSTOR likewise limits access to non-US journal volumes published in 1870 or later.

With another year’s worth of copyrights expiring in “life+70 years” countries, it should be safe for these US-based services to also open up worldwide access to another year’s worth of works, further freeing up the public domain. HathiTrust is also willing to manually review copyrights on specific books to open up access. If you come across any books in HathiTrust solely by authors who died in 1941 (or before) that are currently labeled only as “public domain in the United States”, you can request that they review it for opening up access worldwide. Just use the “Feedback” button at the bottom of the book’s HathiTrust page, or the suggestion form on my Online Books Page; and make sure you ask specifically for non-US access.

3. Restore access to obscure copyrighted works from 1936 (and earlier)

After libraries and archives expressed concerns about the fate of obscure works under longer copyright terms, Congress included a special exemption in their 1998 copyright tem extension. The exemption, codified as section 108(h) of the copyright law, states that “during the last 20 years of any term of copyright of a published work, a library or archives, including a nonprofit educational institution that functions as such, may reproduce, distribute, display, or perform in facsimile or digital form a copy or phonorecord of such work, or portions thereof, for purposes of preservation, scholarship, or research”, under certain conditions. In particular, if the institution finds, after a reasonable investigation, that such a work is not “subject to normal commercial exploitation” (such as by being in print) and cannot “be obtained at a reasonable price”, and no rightsholder has filed a claim otherwise, the work qualifies for this special exemption. As of this year’s Public Domain Day, qualifying publications from 1936 join what is now 14 years of works in this category.

So far, I have found very little digitized content online where this exemption is explicitly invoked. (There are advantages to explicitly doing so, both because it helps clarify the right to use the material, and helps prevent inadvertent unauthorized propagation of the works, such as the commercial reprints of digitized books that are now common on many large bookselling sites.) Yet many of the works in HathiTrust’s (currently suspended) orphan works initiative, and in the Internet Archive’s lending library, and more besides, could well qualify for this treatment– and unlike orphan works, where legislation has yet to be passed, the exemption for these materials is already explicitly authorized by statute.

Providing online access for these works is not without controversy. A 2002 article by lawyer Mary Minow details some of the potential possibilities and risks. While she concludes that libraries can put such works on the Web, the recent Author’s Guild complaint in its lawsuit against HathiTrust includes some push-back against this idea. But as the public domain in the US recedes further into history, and digital library projects increasingly look for ways to make our cultural heritage available online, American libraries would do well to proactively establish and exercise these rights for older works now languishing in obscurity.

4. Strengthen and sustain coalitions for reasonable copyright limits

The curtailment of the public domain is just one aspect of the overreach of copyright law in the US and elsewhere. Right now, Congress is considering two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), whose enforcement provisions threaten to disrupt the core structures of the Internet and enable far-reaching censorship, in the name of stopping piracy. Supporters of these bills hoped to have them passed by Christmas, but opposition from both “left” and “right” sides of the political spectrum has slowed the process down, caused some companies to withdraw support, and led to the proposal of less harmful alternatives for fighting piracy.

It’s still quite possible that SOPA and PIPA will pass, though. Public Domain Day provides an opportunity for Americans to reflect on some of the good reasons for limiting the power and scope of copyright enforcement, and to redouble efforts to keep those limits reasonable. Moreover, a coalition that can stop SOPA and PIPA can also work to prevent further extensions of copyright terms. This can ensure that Americans will have more to celebrate in Public Domain Days to come– especially starting in 2019, when the remaining 1923 copyrights should finally expire in the US.

5. Give copyrights of your own to the public domain

Of course, those wishing to maximize public access and use of their works don’t have to wait for their copyrights to expire on their own. They can dedicate them to the public domain any time they want. Public Domain Day is a particularly auspicious time to make such gifts, no matter what country you’re in. And with tools like the CC0 declaration, it’s easier than ever to do so.

A few years ago, I started an annual personal tradition of reviewing copyrights to works I’d created more than 14 years ago (the original initial term of copyright enacted by the founders of the US, and also approximately the ideal copyright term given in a recent economic analysis) and dedicating works to the public domain that I didn’t feel needed further copyright. Accordingly, today I dedicate all the work of my creation that I published in 1997, and for which I still control rights, to the public domain. For me, this consists primarily of websites like The Online Books Page as of that year, and other online writings. But others have dedicated more high-profile material to the public domain after the same term. And I’d be very happy to hear from others who are making similar dedications today (whether or not it’s after 14 years).

So, happy Public Domain Day to everyone in the US and elsewhere! We all have things to celebrate, and things we can do, in the name of the public domain.

[Stavros]

Research Bought, Then Paid For (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html?_r=1)
By MICHAEL B. EISEN
Published: January 10, 2012

Berkeley, Calif.

THROUGH the National Institutes of Health, American taxpayers have long supported research directed at understanding and treating human disease. Since 2009, the results of that research have been available free of charge on the National Library of Medicine’s Web site, allowing the public (patients and physicians, students and teachers) to read about the discoveries their tax dollars paid for.

But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.

This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.

The bill is backed by the powerful Association of American Publishers and sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. The publishers argue that they add value to the finished product, and that requiring them to provide free access to journal articles within a year of publication denies them their fair compensation. After all, they claim, while the research may be publicly funded, the journals are not.

But in fact, the journals receive billions of dollars in subscription payments derived largely from public funds. The value they say they add lies primarily in peer review, the process through which works are assessed for validity and significance before publication. But while the journals manage that process, it is carried out almost entirely by researchers who volunteer their time. Scientists are expected to participate in peer review as part of their employment, and thus the publicly funded salaries most of them draw through universities or research organizations are yet another way in which taxpayers already subsidize the publishing process.

Rather than rolling back public access, Congress should move to enshrine a simple principle in United States law: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it. This is already the case for scientific papers published by researchers at the N.I.H. campus in Bethesda, Md., whose work, as government employees, has been explicitly excluded from copyright protection since 1976. It would be easy to extend this coverage to all works funded by the federal government.

But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists, libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo out of a combination of tradition and convenience. But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public.

Researchers should cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many “open-access” journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded). Libraries should cut off their supply of money by canceling subscriptions. And most important, the N.I.H., universities and other public and private agencies that sponsor academic research should make it clear that fulfilling their mission requires that their researchers’ scholarly output be freely available to the public at the moment of publication.

These steps would not only accomplish an important public good — unlimited access to the latest scientific and medical findings — but they would also send a powerful sign of gratitude to the taxpayers, on whose continued support our research depends.

Michael B. Eisen, an associate professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder of the Public Library of Science, an organization devoted to making research freely available.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on January 11, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Research Bought, Then Paid For.

[Architeuthoceras]

and here (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=807) :mad:

[Stavros]

JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles (http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/jstor-tests-free-read-only-access-to-some-articles/34908)
January 13, 2012, 10:32 am
By Jennifer Howard

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

To start, the program will feature articles from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase are American Anthropologist, the American Historical Review, Ecology, Modern Language Review, PMLA, College English, the Journal of Geology, the Journal of Political Economy, Film Quarterly, Representations, and the American Journal of Psychology .

The 7o journals chosen “represent approximately 18 percent of the annual turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the organization said in an announcement previewing Register & Read. “Once we evaluate how the beta is going, including any impact on publishers’ sales of single articles, and make any needed initial adjustments to the approach, we expect to release hundreds more journals into the program.”

Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost 150 million individual attempts to gain access to articles. “We are committed to expanding access to scholarly content to all those who need it,” the group said. Register & Read is one attempt to do that.

In September 2011, JSTOR also opened up global access to its Early Journal Content. According to Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early Journal Content from September 2011 through December 2011. “About 50% of this usage is coming from users we know are at institutions that participate in JSTOR (e.g. we recognize their IP address), and the other 50% is not,” she said in an e-mail. ”We absolutely consider this to be a success. In the first four months after launch, we are seeing over 1 million accesses to this content by people who would not have had access previously. This is at the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled with this result. The Register & Read beta is an exciting next step that we are taking, working closely with our publisher partners who own this content.”

Ms. McGregor said that JSTOR would consider expanding the three-article, 14-day restrictions, depending on how the beta test goes. “We are testing whether we can provide more free access in ways that help people around the world but that also balance the need to sustain, preserve, and invest in services to support the use of this content going forward,” she said.

[Stavros]

Elsevier = Evil (http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/01/elsevier_evil.php)

Posted on: January 16, 2012 12:45 PM, by PZ Myers

Along with SOPA and PIPA, our government is contemplating another acronym with deplorable consequences for the free dissemination of information: RWA, the Research Works Act (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699:). This is a bill to, it says, "ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector", where the important phrase is "private sector" — it's purpose is to guarantee that for-profit corporations retain control over the publication of scientific information. Here are the restrictions it would impose:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

This is a blatant attempt to invalidate the NIH's requirement that taxpayer-funded research be made publicly available. The internet was initially developed to allow researchers to easily share information…and that's precisely the function this bill is intended to cripple.

Who could possibly support such a bill? Not the scientists, that's for sure; and definitely not the public, unless we keep them as ignorant as possible. The corporations who love this bill are the commercial publishers who profit mightily from scientists' work (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science?CMP=twt_fd). And first among these is Elsevier, the gouging publisher scientists love to hate.

If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH's public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls. The result would be an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide. The only winners would be publishing corporations such as Elsevier (£724m profits on revenues of £2b in 2010 - an astounding 36% of revenue taken as profit).

Since Elsevier's obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company's base in the Netherlands if this bill were enacted, what kind of American politician would support it? The RWA is co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (Republican, California) and Carolyn B. Maloney (Democrat, New York). In the 2012 election cycle, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 donations to representatives: of these, two went to Issa and 12 to Maloney, including the largest individual contribution.

So Elsevier bought a couple of politicians to get their way. It's typical unscrupulous behavior from this company; at least they stopped organizing arms trade fairs a few years ago (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/may/30/armstrade.weaponstechnology), so we know their evil can be checked by sufficiently loud public opinion.

Tell your representatives to kill RWA. It's another bill to benefit corporations that will harm science.

[Stavros]

Cracking Open the Scientific Process (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/science/open-science-challenges-journal-tradition-with-web-collaboration.html?_r=2&ref=science?src=dayp&pagewanted=all)

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/01/17/science/17OPEN_SPAN/17OPEN-articleLarge.jpg

Timothy Fadek for The New York Times
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 (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/thomas_lin/index.html?inline=nyt-per)

Published: January 16, 2012

The New England Journal of Medicine marks its 200th anniversary this year with a timeline (http://nejm200.nejm.org/timeline/) celebrating the scientific advances first described in its pages: the stethoscope (1816), the use of ether for anesthesia (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/anesthesiaandanesthetics/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) (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 (http://arxiv.org/) and the Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org/) (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org/), 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 (http://mathoverflow.net/), mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project (http://polymathprojects.org/), mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/a-combinatorial-approach-to-density-hales-jewett/) found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.
And a social networking site called ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/home.Home.html) — 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 (http://www.nature.com/), 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 (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9517.html),” 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 (http://scienceonline2012.com/). Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger (http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/a-blog-around-the-clock/) 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 (http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/v/venture_capital/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) 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 (http://www.researchgate.net/topic/PCR/post/PCR_products_stick_in_gel_wells_PCR_prob lem) 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.”
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 (http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/cancer/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier) Research Center who is editing a book on “Science 2.0 (http://blog.researchgate.net/masterblog/7221_Four_pillars_of_Science_20_How_to_e nable_web_20_for_scientists_and_overcome _the_legacy_gap),” 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 (http://www.sciencemag.org/), 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 (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3699:), 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 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/opinion/research-bought-then-paid-for.html) last week, Michael B. Eisen (http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/), 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 (http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html),” 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.

[DWhatley]

This was from an Octobot post entitled Science copies how squid change color (colour since is a BBC video :grin:) (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554359) but the scientists are primarily promoting the speed the internet and tools have added and the open source that will allow ease of access to their new findings. Very cool!

[DWhatley]

Another octobot post from Science 2.0 blog's Squid A Day, this one entitled Neurotoxins In Stranded Squid (With Bonus Rant About Academic Publishing) (http://www.science20.com/squid_day/neurotoxins_stranded_squid_bonus_rant_ab out_academic_publishing-86281) calling for more "to each other" communication


This is why we in the life sciences (and all the rest of science) really need to get on board with arXiv or something like it. If we were posting pre-prints of our work, we would be connected. We each would have been able to cite the other group's article, and write more comprehensive dicussions. We could even have improved each other's work--Group #1 might have been inspired to look at PST, and Group #2 to look at plankton blooms in the water.

I hope in a few years we'll look back on this as the Time for opening science . . .

[Architeuthoceras]

Through venues such as the "Present and Past Symposium" held every four years, fossil cephalopod workers, for the most part, all know what the others are working on. I know my work has been enhanced because I attended the last one. TONMO could also be a good venue for collaboration if we could only get more scientists to join up, and share their work... :sly:

[Stavros]

Another octobot post from Science 2.0 blog's Squid A Day, this one entitled Neurotoxins In Stranded Squid (With Bonus Rant About Academic Publishing) (http://www.science20.com/squid_day/neurotoxins_stranded_squid_bonus_rant_ab out_academic_publishing-86281) calling for more "to each other" communication


Through venues such as the "Present and Past Symposium" held every four years, fossil cephalopod workers, for the most part, all know what the others are working on. I know my work has been enhanced because I attended the last one. TONMO could also be a good venue for collaboration if we could only get more scientists to join up, and share their work... :sly:

This point of 'doing' science definitely deserves a thread of its own. Unfortunately, most grad programs do not teach us on how to form collaborations and more often than not, a student strives to become a 'one-man-show' rather than a collaborator outside his/her lab. Different folks may have different reasons for deciding to go solo- pride and inability to trust others have a lot to do with it, as well as the false romantic belief of a lone, silent researcher succeeding against all odds and with no help from the gods.

However, the main reason for this is the fact that science is highly competitive and it feels, therefore, more natural for one not to share results, or for early-career researchers to wait until they are able to publish results before coming in the open to establish their presence. At the end of the day though, science is social and depends on clear communication and community collaboration. Collaboration slices down the time it takes for a project to get done (resources, equipment, skill set and so on), and that means more projects at the end of the day. And it's more fun this way. The learning that takes place in settings like this, working with new people and sometimes from different fields, is unparalleled and definitely not matched by a lone worker. Lastly, the other extreme is when there are a lot of roosters and only one dawn, meaning that for the sake of doing team-work, people are put on a project that requires one person only and that can be costly as well.

[Stavros]

Been busy the last 3 weeks, here are some of the articles written since.

Comfort is the death knell of academia: why I’m standing down as a journal referee (http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/01/stand-down-journal-referee/)


Concerned that his field is completely beholden to closed access publishers, Matthew Todd calls an end to his time as a referee and author for Elsevier journals and joins over 2,500 academics who have signed an online petition in an effort to push for open access publishing and the transformative benefits that they see lying behind the ability to tinker, re-mix and play with open data.


----------------

Academics to boycott Elsevier journals (http://felixonline.co.uk/news/2118/academics-to-boycott-elsevier-journals-/)


Thousands to refuse work related to publisher over profit-making tactics


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Elsevier — my part in its downfall (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/)


Timothy Gowers, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, has suggested that mathematicians should boycott leading journals published by Elsevier.


----------------

The Cost of Knowledge (http://thecostofknowledge.com/?)


The key to all these issues is the right of authors to achieve easily-accessible distribution of their work. If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below.

[Stavros]

Not sure how much change this will bring to the status quo, but it surely is an exciting time in academia...



Critics say campaign unfairly singles out firm over widespread practices (http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/02/17/science-elsevier-journal-boycott.html)
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Posted: Feb 17, 2012 9:54 AM ET
Last Updated: Feb 17, 2012 11:23 AM ET

Dutch-based Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year and its archives contain seven million publications.

To publish or not to publish? That is the question medical and science academics are asking after 6,000 of their colleagues boycotted one of the world's largest publishers.

The "Cost of Knowledge" campaign was started by an international group of researchers in January after a blog post by Cambridge University math professor Timothy Gowers. He criticized the Dutch-based publisher Elsevier for charging "very high prices" for access to its articles, using a "ruthless" approach to negotiations with academic libraries and supporting legislation that could hamper the move to more open access to published research.

Since then, thousands of researchers around the world, including several university and government researchers in Canada, have publicly committed to the protest by declaring they will not publish in Elsevier journals, peer review papers for those journals, or do editing work for them.

But others say they don't know what all the fuss is about.

Elsevier publishes 250,000 articles a year and its archives contain seven million publications.

This week a number of Australian academics joined a global protest against the scholarly publishing powerhouse.

"The boycott is saying we are no longer going to provide our services to you for free. We are no longer going to write articles and submit them to your journals, and we are no longer going to review for your journals," says Danny Kingsley an expert in scholarly communication at the Australian National University's Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.

The petition's signatories have two complaints: the publisher is charging excessively for its journals, and is pushing to stop free access to taxpayer funded research.

"Well for a start it's just a moral issue that money that [the scienstists are] spending in taxes is having to be double-dipped to prop up a publishing industry which is making extraordinary profits in times where other industries are falling down completely," says Kingsley.

"The feeling has been for some time that the research itself has been paid for by the public purse and the peer-review process and often the editorial process is also being paid for by the public purse in the form of academic salaries; and then the public purse has to again pay to get subscriptions to the work."

In 2010, Elsevier made $1.6 billion for an operating profit margin of 36 per cent.

Andrew Wells from the Council of University Librarians believes Elsevier is being unfairly singled out.

"The practices that Elsevier has both in dealing with authors and in selling scholarly content to libraries are very similar to those used by many other scholarly publishers such as Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor & Francis and Springer," he says.

"The real issue here is how the whole scholarly publishing system works and certainly that's a good topic for authors."
Blocking pre-publication

Academics often submit an original research paper to their university before it goes to peer review and is published. University websites typically make these available to the public for free.

Elsevier wants to change that arrangement and has thrown its support behind three bills currently before the US Congress. They could, among other things, prevent universities from holding pre-publication versions of research papers.

It means Australian academics will have to pay to access research that's already been paid for.

Gavin Moodie, the principal policy advisor at RMIT University in Melbourne added his name to the boycott.

"But it has been stronger in its opposition to digital publishing rights and its attempt to close down websites which it claims infringes copyright. I think that's the main distinction from the other big publishers and that's mainly why I signed the petition," says Moodie.
Research at stake

Kingsley says researchers depends on funding from two sources; through block funding to university and grants funding.

"A large portion of what your grant relies on is your track record of publication," she says. "So publication is central, not just to actually having research continue, in that you can read what other people have done and continue with that, but also it's central to your career in terms of being able to have some money so that you can do your research."

Some Australian research bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council will change their funding model later this year. They'll mandate that any work they contribute to must be available to the public for free.

With files from CBC News
© Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2012

[OB]

Every single scientist looking for open access publication of their paper is free to submit to PLoS One, if they wish. The reason why they often don't, is that open access publishing requires authors to pay for publication, rather than their institutional libraries for access (subscription). That, combined with the outdated notion of using the Impact Factors of journals published in (to see how well Academic groups are performing), will mean we have quite a bit of road, still ahead.

You can not have a free system, where both the author as well as the reader get to publish and access for free, respectively. The taxmoney spent on research is gone, and unless we wish to cannibalize some of that to pay for the publication and dissemination of the acquired knowledge, someone will always have to pick up the tab.

The much more fundamental discussion is why we as societies spend trillions of Euros and US dollars annually on pointless ads, sales and marketing activities, unnessesary consumer goods, company restructurings, bloody wars in far away places and then some, when we could be spending a tiny fraction of that on science and technology and VASTLY improve our outlook within 4 to 5 generations.... Why aren't we on Mars, yet? Why does the majority of people think the latter to be a nonsensical question? Think about it.

[Stavros]

Thanks for clarifying OB. I'm sure it's going to take time for things to shift, especially to get public's interest on it.

What part of the process of publishing a journal is more costly? Paying the staff or paying the printer? I guess a solution would be to only have PDFs to save the printer costs, but I'm sure there are multiple reasons why it has not been applied yet.

I'm just glad that some are willing to fight this fight for the rest of us in academia- it's not worth going against the system all the time.

[Stavros]

From Tim Gowers' blog (http://gowers.wordpress.com/)

Elsevier’s open letter point by point, and some further arguments
February 26, 2012

I’ve had this post sitting around half written for a long time, so I’ve decided to post it without saying everything I wanted to say and have done with it. Even the things I do say are not as organized as I’d normally like.

In response to the recent boycott and the discussion it has generated, Elsevier has put out an open letter entitled A message to the research community: journal prices, discounts and access (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/elsevieropenletter). It was more or less guaranteed that I would not be satisfied by what they had to say, since my view is that the entire system of commercial publishing of academic papers needs to be replaced, whereas Elsevier was almost certain to be arguing from within the current system. When a paradigm shift takes place, one does not expect the main players to remain the same.

Nevertheless, it seems only fair to make some attempt to respond to the points Elsevier has to make, rather than simply saying that there is nothing they can do, or at least nothing they can do that they would be likely to be prepared to do. So let me explain why I find their open letter unsatisfactory even on their own terms (that is, even if we make the assumption that what is needed is more like an adjustment to the current system than a replacement of it). The letter starts with some statements of the kind one might expect, about how their mission is to serve the research community and so on. The substantive part of their letter is then divided into bullet points, where they claim to correct the distortions that have been advanced. I’ll look at each of those in turn.

Read the rest of this entry » (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/elseviers-open-letter-point-by-point-and-some-further-arguments/#more-3993)

[OB]

I would say the most costly aspect of it all is keeping a system alive which allows for access ad infinitum. In the old universe of print, you'd archive in a library/depository, in pdf or hypertext you'll need to keep verything intact and available for continuous access, linking and future reference... And then, back in my days a s science publisher, there was my expense account :wink:

[Architeuthoceras]

Between a rock and a (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016699511000957) hard place

[Architeuthoceras]

What is the world coming to?

Solid Earth; An Interactive Open Access Journal of the European Geosciences Union (http://www.solid-earth.net/index.html)

Open Access – Public Peer-Review & Interactive Public Discussion

8-)

[DWhatley]

It looks like someone put a lot of effort into a best of class attempt (why only solid earth though?) format. If qualified people participate, it could be a great template for additional topics.

[Architeuthoceras]

Change takes time, if this catches on who knows. At least fossil cephs can be found in this journal

Using Belemnites for paleoenvironmental studies (http://www.solid-earth-discuss.net/4/315/2012/sed-4-315-2012.html)

[Stavros]

Elsevier’s recent update to its letter to the mathematical community (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/elseviers-recent-update-to-its-letter-to-the-mathematical-community/)

Elsevier has recently put out a new statement giving details of some changes it has made. In their own words,

In February, we informed you of a series of important changes that we are making to how the Elsevier mathematics program will be run. In this letter, we would like to update you on where we currently stand, and inform you of some new initiatives we have undertaken based upon the feedback we have received from the community.

--More-- (http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/elseviers-recent-update-to-its-letter-to-the-mathematical-community/)

[OB]

http://peerj.com/

Not intended as a commercial plug, just to inform you that the man behind PLoS One has just improved on the concept :smile:

[DWhatley]

Too bad they are in the UK. They are looking for a programmer and this would be a fun challenge.

[OB]

One of the co-owners lives in San Fran and these days, you don't have to be in an office to communicate with your colleagues?

[OB]

PS: If you're up for it, I can get you that introduction, creatively.

[DWhatley]

LET'S GET CREATIVE :sagrin: (sent you a PM)