George Soros Funds Open-Publishing Software

blair1q writes "BBC has a story reporting that George Soros and his Open Society Institute are funding "open access" media for scientific publishing. These outlets will compete with the quasi-monopolies held by the journal industry and provide information to researchers whose institutions can't afford to subscribe to large numbers of overpriced periodicals. Part of the funding will go to improve the open-access enabling EPrints software, which is under GPL."

Re:Wonderful

[Daemonik]

Just because it's open doesn't mean that it is unedited.

Consider another open publishing project: Nupedia, the open encyclopedia. All the submissions are reviewed by the author's peers. The biggest advantage however, is that subsequent authors are free to quote from and add too the material without fear of a cadre of copyright attorneys descending upon their home.

Open sourcing scientific journals will greatly increase the dispersion of scientific information into the greater pool of human knowledge.

Good studies on journal costs

[TheMatt]

To let people know the costs of some of these journals, here are a couple of sites to look at.

First, a general overview of costs in the mid-90s (done in 2000, so just imagine how expensive they are now!) can be found here [ucsd.edu].

A more recent review of chemistry journals can be found here [wisc.edu]. It is amazing to think that some of these journals cost ~$4.50 a page (neuroscience journals are even more expensive!).

Re:Cool... Can he do it for music?

[voinageo]

Don't even think about Soros not making profits. He fucked a lot of people in Estern Europe with his schemes. In Romania for ex. he created several non profit ISPs to offer Internet connection to school. After several years he was obliged to transform them in companies because it was proved that in fact they were registered as nonprofit only not to pay taxes.

EPrints.org GPL Software

[elseware]

In a surprising "coincidence" version 2.0 of the eprints archive software has just been released by us monkeys at the University of Southampton working for Stevan Harnad (who proposed self archiving).

The software is pretty generic, it does research papers by default but can be configured *lots*. And it's designed to add your own scripts and stuff (perl).

At one end of the spectrum (what it's funded to do) it generates archives of research papers, although you could practically implement mp3.com with it (and a huge server or two).

Links of interest:

EPrints Home: http://www.eprints.org/

Demo Archive: http://demoprints.eprints.org/

Re:Is 'science' ending? An opinion.

[aardvaark]

I don't think so. What you say has always been true. Companies try to hold on and patent the things they do, then other companies reverse engineer it when it comes out. Anything that has government funding however (read NSF), almost _must_ fascilitate data sharing and publication.

For instance, I am in seismology. My research group puts out arrays of seismometers in the western U.S. The data we obtain is only proprietary (even though we did _all_ the work) for a couple years. After that it is open to the world. If we haven't published yet, tough luck., and if we don't publish, don't count on another grant in the future. This is because we took NSF money to do it.

I work in the journal industry...

[Dikarika]

I've worked on journals for ACM, Kluwer/Academic and more. Where I work is where the prepress stuff is done, the actual building of the journal. Much more goes into these journals than picking submissions and throwing them all together. We have on staff editors who oversee the journals work and status, proofreaders (some of you submitters have worse spelling than Taco...), art scanners, art editors and coders/typesetters. I can see why you are angry at the cost of having your work printed, but even with typesetting done in India (New Delhi facility) we still make little over cost. Its just a fact of life that getting this all together, XML or Quark set, art edited and set, PDFs made and printed, and finally shipped and distributed, has a cost.

More Soros funded open source projects

[phitar]

In connection to this article, Soros also funds media oriented projects.

Trying to follow the links can be tedious, but the structure is interesting (snippets cut and pasted from the various websites).

George Soros funds a network [soros.org] of foundations. Among them, Media Development Loan Fund [mdlf.org] (MDLF) assists independent news organizations working in difficult economic and political climates. Of which Center for Advanced Media-Prague [mdlf-camp.net] (C@MP) has been bringing new-media concepts and solutions to independent news organizations worldwide since 1998

Camp is developing and diffusing cost-effective, open-source solutions to independent media through its CAMPWARE [campware.org] initiative. Which brings us to another open source ongoing development project: CAMPSITE [campware.org], an automated web-publishing environment for news media.

/philippe [phitar.com]

Re:Typesetting costs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for AAAS, which publishes Science magazine. Believe me, there was much talk there about efforts to create open source alternatives to expensive journals. The librarians have been spearheading these efforts, because they are tired of libraries being screwed over by the likes of Elsevier.

Science is supposed to be a multidiscplinary scientific magazine. In reality they've tilted the content towards the biological sciences, because that is where the ad revenue is at.

Where does the money go? The subscription costs for Science aren't very high compared to other scientific magazines. The money, at least at Science, went to support the association, which has around 300 employees. The money mostly goes to pay salaries.

But AAAS is a nonprofit, so the question should be why do most scientific journals cost so much? Leaving aside the viscious cycle between specialty publications and libraries that cancel titles, many publications are published by a few provate corporations. The money is going to investors.

BTW, AAAS Enroned my pension fund.