Slashdot Log In
MIT To Make All Faculty Publications Open Access
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Mar 26, 2009 11:23 AM
from the take-that-conyers dept.
from the take-that-conyers dept.
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."
Related Stories
[+]
New Bill Would Repeal NIH Open Access Policy 223 comments
pigah writes "The Fair Copyright in Research Works Act has been reintroduced into Congress. The bill will ban open access policies in federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). These policies require scientists to provide public access to their work if it has been funded with money from an agency with an open access policy. Such policies ensure that the public has access to read the results of research that it has funded. It appears that Representative John Conyers (D-MI), the author of the bill, is doing the bidding of publishing companies who do not want to lose control of this valuable information that they sell for exorbitant fees thereby restricting access by the general public to an essentially public good."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Hats of for MIT (Score:5, Interesting)
now that's the kind of university that one would want his/her children to go to.
Re:Hats of for MIT (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Unless the are copyright capitalist barbarians.
In which case they go to Harvard.
Re:Hats of for MIT (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Harvard mandated Open Access in 2008 [harvard.edu].
Dirty communists!
Parent
Re:Hats of for MIT (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, because I would have been devastated to see my kids attend MIT before this.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've said this many times before:
If you send your kids to MIT, have them study marketing.
MIT's engineering program might be quite good -- I have no reason to doubt this. However, the amount of PR buzz that the school generates is disproportional to the amount of research that they produce, especially compared to similar institutions. Their marketing people must be very good.
As an aside, I should also grumble here about my ethical issues with an institution of learning that charges $45,000/year, and inten
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? You're complaining that they don't have infinite capacity? There's a limit to how many professors and classrooms even a $45K tuition can buy, you know!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
For a second there I could have sworn you said Harry Mudd and was going to ask what their rates for androids was.
Free to boot (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I said "free". For those interested in getting an education from MIT in any course/degree offered, go to MIT OpenCourseWare [mit.edu] for full free access to all material needed to learn whatever the school has to offer.
Certification and faculty attention, however, is kinda pricy.
Parent
Re:Hats of for MIT (Score:5, Funny)
The girls are much hotter at Stanford. Of course, given that you're a math geek, arrogant, and also a Slashdotter, that's unlikely to be a factor for you anyway.
Parent
Geek girls IMHO are some of the hottest. (Score:5, Interesting)
They may not spend as much time with makeup and outfits as the uberbimbos. But IMHO their bodies are often quite as functional. Even more so: Brains have a lot to do with that.
Tracing the individual variations on peripheral neural pathways and working out their operation is even more fun (for both) when the tracee knows and appreciates what is going on and can give additional feedback beyond the basic flushes, indrawn breath, postures, erections, secretions, etc. And there's such synergy when the partner can reciprocate.
Being able to have an intelligent conversation can be far better afterplay than smoking cigarettes. (Though sometimes it DOES distract.)
Then there's the love for gadgets, tool-making, and tool use. (For instance: It's not a coincidence that some of the largest and most active consensual BDSM communities formed in Silicon Valley and other tech centers and organized over the net and email, or that some of the big names in tech are major participants. Did you really think all that pron on the intertubes was just frustrated geeks who COULDN'T get any? B-) But even if such tastes are more common with geek girls it's far from a universal attraction. So use care bringing it up.)
But one of the hottest things about geek girls is that they can appreciate a geek's mind and tend to be attracted - indeed, turned on - by a good one. If said male geek can reciprocate, treating her as a valued team member rather than someone to play smarter-than-you-nyah mind games on, it's the foundation of a solid long-term relationship.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
for computer science I would say yes rice is a better option.
do undergrad there, save the money, then go on to master and postdoc
at either stanford or MIT.
Re:Hats of for MIT (Score:5, Insightful)
My experience has been that there are different tiers. Schools within a given tier are going to have comparable program quality (but one's style might match you better). Generally speaking, going to any school within the top 50 or 100 for a field will result in a good education. Also, some schools are higher in their ranks because of their research. However, graduate students benefit from this far more than undergrad students do.
I will say this, though. Being in the real world with a lot less college debt is nice.
Parent
Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
This should put to rest any concerns that closed access journals protect the interests of the authors.
Re:Thank you! (Score:5, Insightful)
What about them, huh? Are they not people too?
Parent
What about academic freedom? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a big fan of the move toward open access. But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
Think about it: a university is establishing rules and giving itself oversight over where faculty can publish. From the article: "Anybody who wants to publish with a journal that refuses to grant these rights will have to submit a written request for an exception to the MIT provost." Imagine 2 faculty members who want to publish papers in journals that do not cooperate with MIT's policy. One does popular research that the provost likes, the other does controversial research that the provost doesn't like. Why should the fate of these 2 faculty's research be left in the provost's hands?
Like I said, I agree with the goal, but I worry that this is a lousy way to reach it.
Parent
Re:What about academic freedom? (Score:4, Insightful)
But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
The fact that I can find all the world's knowledge online except academic publications is far worse! The purpose of a Univeristy is to increase the knowledge available to mankind. Various sorts of academic freedom are important for that goal, but that freedom is a means, not the goal.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to rain on your tirade, but this policy was UNANIMOUSLY approved by the same faculty it would effect. Perhaps the, very bright, faculty of MIT actually liked the policy and felt it was fair to everyone. Perhaps they considered what you have said, and found that the policy was fair or that your issues were unfounded. Somehow, I think that the faculty of MIT understand the ramifications of this policy and feel that it is 'good'.
Not a whole lot can be said against any restrictive policy that has the una
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a major blow to an industry with an outdated business model. Scientific publication is starting to move beyond the need for the middleman, and I am extremely glad to see it happen.
That said, the major publishers will scramble to try and patch this hole in the business model, and they will probably make the overall situation worse before it really starts to improve.
Oh well. Got to start that process at some point. Go MIT.
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a major blow to an industry with an outdated business model. Scientific publication is starting to move beyond the need for the middleman, and I am extremely glad to see it happen.
That said, the major publishers will scramble to try and patch this hole in the business model, and they will probably make the overall situation worse before it really starts to improve.
Oh well. Got to start that process at some point. Go MIT.
Nothing personal to you, sir or madame. I see "outdated business model" time and time again on Slashdot as an euphemism for basically saying "not offering something for free".
First of all, business models do not become outdated. They may become worthless because someone has started doing business another way that eliminates one from making money from their current way of doing business. For example, in the beginning of the Internets, folks were charging for content. Then, someone had the brilliant idea that they don't have to charge and they'll have advertising. Thereby making most sites who charged the consumer for the content "outdated" and thereby making everyone else lose money. Then again, tell that to these guys [wsj.com]
Now consider this, many folks are becoming independent contractors and doing crafts and whatnot at home to make a living - just like the pre-19th century factory system. Outdated indeed.
There's no such thing as an outdated business model. MIT is financing these publications by other means, that's all. Also, exactly how much does it really cost to publish this stuff online? The authors aren't paid. What are the costs associated? I don't think this is such a sacrifice for MIT or any other institution that does this.
Parent
Re:Finally (Score:4, Insightful)
I do not agree in this case. The model is clearly outdated (in the sens not good for today). It had meaning before when there was no Internet. Accessing articles was expensive because you had to print journal issues.
Today, we no longer use paper version but mainly electronic one. So the only thing the publisher provides is an electronic access to publications. But, universities and laboratories can do that them self.
So why are we still using "private" journals? The only reasonable answer is : reputation. A journal such as Nature or Transaction on computers are well known. It is know that the editorial board only select top quality papers. But, one should recall that the editorial board IS NOT the journal itself but professors and researchers spread all over the world which do the job for free.
Why not switch to per university (but peer reviewed) publication without the editors ?
We could take the editorial board of a good journal and make an independent journal. The problem is research evaluation. It is currently done through crappy index such as the impact factor. A new publication method will badly perform according to this index and thus research will be badly evaluated.
You need to be a prestigious university to say : "we do not want this model anymore". And that is what the MIT is doing which is great.
PS: The publishers currently propose some minor correction to fit into a given format or to check for grammatical errors. This could be done by universities too. (or research lab, or independant foundation...)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
More than you might think. While the costs of storage and bandwidth can be modest if you already have a significant IT infrastructure to co-opt a portion of... You still need to pay someone to design and operate the site. An institution the size of MIT will be producing a great deal of material, and that means you'll need a paid professional running the site. It's not an amateu
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I see "outdated business model" time and time again on Slashdot as an euphemism for basically saying "not offering something for free".
I do not speak for the Slashdot gestalt. When I write 'outdated business model', I mean 'founded on pre-internet artificial scarcity'. That doesn't mean free, it just means *both* the supply and demand curves shift quite a bit, and the places in the system where there are profitable opportunities shift. This applies to the MPAA, the RIAA, the scientific publishing industry, and a whole bunch more.
Scientific publishing, in particular, makes money from both the author and the reader. They got greedy, clai
Darned Liberals (Score:5, Funny)
They're setting America on a path to certain destruction. Why how's a good, god-fearing businessman gonna make a buck if he can't do it by reselling publicly funded publications???
I think the businessmen have tried to close public access to NOAA data too.
Re:Darned Liberals (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Unanimous? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unanimous? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure
The article says nothing of the sort. It says the line is being drawn between publishers and funding groups. Funding groups want open access precisely because it brings the papers more exposure, without the barrier of a paid journal subscription.
The publishers are the only ones on the other side. Basically, their business model made sense before the internet, because the most efficient way to read papers was to have a subscription to a journal and read the physical copy. Today, the most efficient method
Computer Science (Score:4, Informative)
I always thought that this is the standard also in other disciplines. What is the publication standard in other disciplines?
Re:Computer Science (Score:4, Insightful)
Standard? No. And as there's no standard way for how a web page should be organised, there's no standard way to find such articles, and no guarantee that they won't disappear tomorrow. Would you take the chance to cite a paper that's not even properly published?
MIT's decision will hopefully mean that you'll find the electronic version through the library's database, with persistent links that don't disappear when a professor moves to a different university.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's the same in Mathematics. You'll usually find a selection of "preprints" of a lecturer's most recent work, along with copies of his or her best-known papers.
Typically, in order to lay claim to anything they're working on, an academic will upload a paper to ArXiv.org as soon as they possibly can. ArXiv is a site which allows access to preprints in maths, computer science, physics, dynamical systems etc...
It isn't peer-reviewed though, so it's still necessary to publish in a journal.
econ (Score:3, Informative)
This is the same in many other disciplines. In economics, for example, this kind of story is non-news.
For the past 10+ years, even most "old fashioned" journals allow you to post your paper, as long as you post some blurb acknowledging that you passed copyright to the publisher. That arrangement worked out just fine. As an academic, who cares who has the copyright; just give me the paper!
Even for journals that did not offer this, authors would blatantly post their paper anyway. Yet I never once heard of
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Simply processing it in a different stylefile and removing any mention of the journal it's actually published in is sufficient to address this concern, meaning a "preprint" style
Too f&*(ing right ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Good arguments against open access? (Score:3, Funny)
I have a really hard time coming up with good arguments against open access publishing. Do they exist? Or are all arguments against flat out support of the publishers' business model?
Re:Good arguments against open access? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good arguments against open access? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd buy point (a) if there wasn't a practice of journals charging authors for the ability to publish (which they pay in order to continue to have a career). I'd agree with point (b) if the peer reviewers were paid. There may be advantages to the closed source model, but neither of those are it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While all of that is technically true, I was under the impression that in almost no circumstances are academic journal editors or reviewers paid for their work. Rather, to sit on the editorial board of a prestigious journal is considered its own reward.
From what I have heard, even the publishers don't present it that way. Publishers (Blackwell Synergy, Wiley, ScienceDirect, etc.) aren't editors. Editors are academics. The publishers argue that journal costs pay for the actual cost of distribution, as well a
Editors, Authors, Referees (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you submitted an article to a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Have you been a referee for such an article? I have been in both roles, and more than once. Your view of an editor's work is not consistent with my experiences.
As a referee, I was never harassed by an editor. At first, they simply ask if you're willing to referee a paper, and ask you to suggest a different referee if you are unwilling to be referee yourself. If you accept, you're expected to give a reasoned assessment of the article within a few weeks. They typically use several referees, so if there's a laggard, it does not matter. Most referees are conscientious and timely (I and my colleagues are).
As an author, you are expected to follow the guidelines which the journal publishes. Most of them provide LaTeX or Word templates, and strict typesetting guidelines on figures, headings, citations, captions, etc. If you don't follow their guidelines, your article will be rejected by a secretary who will politely provide the formatting guidelines. It won't even reach the editor and certainly won't go out for peer review.
Oh, I also know editors of a few journals personally (including two journals I have published in, but I met the editors long afterwards at conferences). None of them ever mentioned any need for harassment of authors or referees. They did need to harass their own employees (fill the advertising space, dammit!) and subcontractors (this is printed on SC paper, I said to use coated stock!). That's where the time is spent.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In almost all journals you have to subscribe to it in order to get your paper published.
You also almost always have to sign away your rights to that intellectual property. If you want to go back to that paper and turn it into a book? You have to get permission from the publisher
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Publishing is expensive. Peer review is expensive. If you want to have high quality widely distributed science you need both. However, as a scientist myself I don't think this on it's own is a good argument against open access.
Bottom line is we need a new way to do publish science, and such a system is evolving. There are a number of journals that are online only, or release copies of work for free (for example JHEP). The current system is only really viable for the big name journals (and many of these are
its a policy, not a mandate (Score:4, Interesting)
A possible compromise with the journals might be a 6 to 12 month delay before it goes on the MIT site.
irony of growing "closed stack" research libraries (Score:4, Informative)
This is going to hurt smaller research groups a lo (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a small-fry researcher at a small-fry university. Without name recognition, what gets my research read is the fact that I can (occasionally, when it's worthy) get it into a name-brand journal where approval of the referees signifies real merit. Without that exposure, no matter how good my research is, it will be very difficult to get it widely read because evaluation of quality takes serious time and thought -- time that most researchers are not willing to spend on every paper on Arxiv posted by any yahoo.
The converse is also true -- I use the journal's screening to figure out what to read because I don't have time to read every single thing, even preliminarily. The most cursory reading of a novel scientific paper is ~10 minutes, and even then, I've probably just read the abstract, skimmed the figures and then jumped to the conclusion. You can't seriously expect me to do that for every vaguely relevant paper in the field -- I just can't. So if there is an important paper that I should read, I count on the journals to bring it to my attention.
IMO, what will actually happen is that a free/open system is that the loss of the imprimatur of journal publication will mean increased reliance on other ways to quickly evaluate works. Without name-brand journals, name-recognition will become even more important, which will lead to even more of the sort of "superstar" science in which funding and interest is ever more concentrated in a few research groups.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Re:This is going to hurt smaller research groups a (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
Parent
Re:This is going to hurt smaller research groups a (Score:4, Interesting)
Whether or not editors get paid varies based on the discipline as well as the journal. In my area (mathematics) a few journals may pay editors, but most do not. Editors, just like referees, work voluntarily; except that editors get the prestige of having their name associated with a well-known journal.
Also, I think you vastly overestimate the cost of running a journal. In math there have been a few cases of mass resignations of editorial boards (essentially killing the journal), and a brand-new journal springing up to take its place. Remarkably, these new journals that are basically equivalent to the old ones manage to charge 5 or 10 (!) times less to get the same job done.
Journal prices have been rising out of proportion with actual publishing costs for a long time now.
Parent
Publishers stewing in their own blood... (Score:3, Insightful)
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
medical is worst culprit (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Evolutionary pressure now comes into play. (Score:3, Insightful)
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively ad