Open Science And Closed Science: Aren't Papers Supposed To Be A Part Of The Conversation?

from the rather-than-a-brick-wall dept

It's no secret that we've got some serious problems with the way the old school scientific journals work -- basically locking up scientific research rather than really living up to their mandate to spread scientific knowledge. Stephen alerts us to a separate issue with traditional journal publications: how they handle the followup discussion. There's a great blog post at Scienceblogs, that compares two separate journal articles where readers felt that the results were falsified in some way (despite being peer reviewed). In one, the scientist had to go to hell and back just to get the editors publish a comment questioning the original article. In the second, even though the article was published in a journal, an outside blog post and its comments became an impromptu forum to question the data in the article -- with many scientists conducting the same experiment themselves and posting the results (including photos) in real-time.

The second one is obviously a lot more of the way research should work these days, though it shouldn't all be hidden in a separate site's comments. If journals are serious about advancing knowledge, rather than locking it up, why not give up on the obviously faulty simple peer review process, and open up the content so that knowledgeable people can input their own thoughts in comments directly on the article in question? Isn't that what knowledge exchange is supposed to be about?

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The Ridiculous Copyright Situation Faced By Academics Who Want To Promote Their Own Research

from the don't-ask,-don't-tell dept

Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with in trying to promote their own works. I've heard similar stories from other professors I know, but this one is worth reading. Shieber points out the importance of academics getting their research published in journals, but how annoying it is that most journals require those academics to give up all sorts of rights -- including the right to distribute their own research on their websites. However, he notes that most published academics simply ignore this rule, and you end up with a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Even though they're legally prevented from putting up a PDF of their work on their website, they do so anyway, and journals just look the other way.

Shieber, however, finds this situation to be a bad thing, and instead adds an amendment that at least grants him the right to publish his own research on his own website. It seems pretty ridiculous that this should even be an issue at all. He notes that most journals haven't had a problem with this -- which is surprising, but good to hear. He did run into one publisher, however, who fought him on it, and after lots of back and forth, his paper was pulled. The reasoning that the journal gave didn't make much sense, and Shieber shows how wrong they are (for example, they claim that if professors published the works on their website, demand for journal subscriptions would go down -- but Shieber did a quick look, and found that about 80% of those who published in the same journal had posted the content anyway, and it hadn't killed off the journal, so arguing against him seemed pointless). Eventually, he was able to convince the journal to change its policies and got his paper published, but it delayed publication for a while.

It's really unfortunate that journals still think that locking up such content makes sense. The idea that researchers shouldn't be allowed to share their own research with the world because some journal needs artificial scarcity for its business model is something that needs to be put to rest.

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Yes, Academics Can Add To The News Ecosystem; No, It Doesn't Need To Be In Newspapers.

from the news.-not-newspaper. dept

If high-quality reporting is prohibitively expensive, why not cut the cost of labor? So goes the thinking of NYU history professor Jonathan Zimmerman whose piece in The Christian Science Monitor argues that professors should be encouraged to write for newspapers for free, much as they did historically. Instead of publishing in journals solely for academics, professors should contribute their expertise to the general public through frequent newspaper commentary on world events.

Of course, the structure of success in academia -- "publish or perish" -- motivates professors to publish in journals that are inaccessible to general consumption. Plenty of well-respected professors already publish OpEd pieces in newspapers on a regular basis, but they tend to be already tenured. (Take Amartya Sen's recent article in FT accompanied by his very lengthy piece in the New York Review of Books -- all of which are an outgrowth of his scholarly publishing.) Zimmerman suggests that if "30 or 40 prominent research universities issued a joint statement, urging their faculty to publish in popular venues," more would do so. Unfortunately, coordinating such a move would be difficult and distracting.

Instead, academia should be thinking larger. We do not need professors to write for newspapers -- the medium itself is not necessary. Academia can do two things to support a vibrant, reliable information ecosystem: support open access and support faculty blogging. Open access publishing increases the availability and reach of scholarship; the original articles are more accessible, allowing more general purpose writing to piggy-back off them. And as for academic blogging, the future of news need not contain newspapers as we know them. Plenty of brilliant professors have compelling and informative blogs, but for the most part, these are not considered positively in the tenure process, creating a disincentive to young scholars. If Zimmerman and others who care about high quality information want to promote it, they should encourage tenure committees to support academic blogging.

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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