Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All 347
A user writes "The register reports how the Dutch open up their research to the rest of the world.
It goes on to tell that commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science are not happy with it.
Will other countries and universities follow, or will they stick to the idea that knowledge is a commodity?"
the new "industrial" revolution... (Score:1, Interesting)
free market at work (Score:5, Interesting)
That is partly balanced by the fact that papers published in well-marketed journals with recognizable brand names will be cited more frequently. But they still have to be well-known, which is why even expensive journals tolerate "illegal" copies of scientific papers (this is similar to software companies tolerating some piracy and low-cost versions in order to keep low-cost competitors from entering the market).
On balance, I think academic publishers are going to lose this one for the most part. In the end, they don't offer any value, since all the hard work is already volunteer work. All the academic publishers do is marketing, printing, type setting, and mailing to libraries, and none of those are essential for academic journals anymore. Some journals will probably continue to be proprietary and expensive, but most will probably not be.
Re:Make the world a better place (Score:3, Interesting)
"Those who keep knowledge from you are setting a trap"
This attributation courtesy of google.
Re:The Dutch sure are funny (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing funny about it. Listening to music is ungood. Reading scientific papers is doubleplusgood. This is the 'knowledge economy' policy our government talks about in action.
Look at the double digit economic growth rates in China: access to science and information good, access to porn, political rambling, etc ungood. QED
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:2, Interesting)
Great sources of information, although I admit I spend more time in the Fiction section than the Non-Fiction and Reference areas.
The way to do collaborative research is changing (Score:5, Interesting)
In the old days if you wanted to read a particular paper in a journal your library didn't carry you had to contact one of the authors and ask for a reprint of the article, which you would receive by snail-mail a few weeks later.
Now you just look it up on Google, most of the time it's there, or the author will send you a PDF a few hours later.
The main contribution of journals to research is no longer diffusion, now people usually don't go to the library to read a journal. They receive a summary of the month's issue by email and then go and consult it online. Clearly this could be replaced by informal web publication just as easily.
However the editorial board work is still essential. They make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly and that each paper looks nice in the end. This is not so easily replaced, even though the editors do a volunteer job.
What is definitely not clear is why journal should be allowed to charge scientist huge premiums for the privilege of having those same scientist work for them for free.
Over the next few years we should see the reactive journal boards realize this, and propose a very cheap online-only service. The IEEE is already thinking about this very hard. When others realize this works fine, the era of expensive printed journal will simply come to an end.
Next will be the issue of books. Scientists are already realizing that it is now extremely cheap to self-publish. Even a top-quality, 500 pages book costs less than $40 to print in small quantities. Yet publishing houses typically sell them $200 a piece or more. Then they go out of print but since the publisher has the copyright everybody is screwed.
For conferences, self-publishing is now more cost effective, and authors get to keep their copyright. Soon the era of expensive conference proceedings will also come to an end.
The last remaining bastion will be reference books or textbooks. These will remain in print for the next few years, because people appreciate having a nice book in hand rather than reading hundreds of pages online, but as the cost, speed and quality of desktop printers improve, we should see a new era of freely available, high-quality online textbooks. There are lots of them online already, ready for printing.
All of this will be good for science. No one will be able to claim in a paper they didn't know about so and so's work and don't have access to it. It will be increasingly easy to do dilettante science without the backing of a huge academic institution.
People will be able to follow a field of science extremely easily. Cross-fertilization will become the obvious way to make progress.
I can't wait, and I want to make that happen.
Re:Wasn't this to be expected? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's why I love the Dutch (Score:2, Interesting)
Elsivier Bad, Societys Good (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.
But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ [aps.org] I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
-- Brandon
Circumventing expensive research journals (Score:2, Interesting)
Journals are very expensive and act as a filter for what is published in them.
It sounds like they are just cutting out the journals which act as a middleman.
Re:Salute the Dutch (Score:3, Interesting)
Um...the U.S. doesn't seem to want to try war criminals in the International Criminal Court. They're much happier to try war criminals using domestic military tribunals. Cuts down on the inconveniences of public oversight and accountability.
Re:headline incorrect (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a flip question, I'm wondering if this could really be a valid metric. Of course, it would be subject to the same scams to which Google page ranking has already been subject.
Re:The way to do collaborative research is changin (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style. Say a researcher at uni UofX creates a paper on say quantum transportation: then just send it round the Internet2 to all the other faculties of quantum transportation around the world and have at least 25% of all those people peer-review it.
That way, you have instant distribution to all places that need it (maybe force 'em to have a webserver open to the public with all the publications) and peer review by the people who can do it. Hell, you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, and make that kind of cross-peer-review mandatory nfor a stamp of credibility (and make participation in that peer-review process a job requirement for being attached to a university.)
Copyright and educational fair use (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, what is the need for peer-review only? Why can't papers be published with peer comments like slashdot?
Very good news (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't want to have to subscribe to that many associations if I just want to read a paper or another ocasionally, science research should be free for all!
Re:journal price resistance (Score:5, Interesting)
And I wouldn't have to much faith in someone who can't write LaTeX correctly... ;-) Anyway, LaTeX is highly popular among mathematicians and CS people. In physics is it somewhat popular, mainly among those who have to deal with a lot of math. As you move to fields where the emphasis is more and more on experimental issues rather than calculations, such as chemical physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, microbiology, and so on, people make less and less use of LaTeX. Word rules, unfortunately. Apparently, if you spend your day dealing with practical issues rather than deriving abstract generalized formalisms, it is less appealing to apply abstract generalizations to document preparation.
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:2, Interesting)
So what you are referring to is not capitalism. These problems are a result of big government, not voluntary trade.