"But they do show the influence that the UK is having on international debates." Considering that the UK proposal was unveiled yesterday, perhaps this wasn't an influence - but an independent will?
The author is from the UK. If you read a bit more, you discover that the EU has already been doing a pilot on the FP7 research framework for 20% of the publications and has already built the infrastructure to support the open access. A lot of universities all over Europe are also putting their research results in open access databases. So, take it as a bit of biased reporting in the middle of some really encouraging developments.
Oh and to my knowledge no other nation has gone further on open access than the UK to date (not even the US where the NIH mandated submission to open access repository after 12 months).
Though the UK has been mulling the policy for quite a while too (as you can see from the links in the story). At least a year. (The UK also enlisted Jimmy Wales to work out its policy in May.)
I'm glad for both the UK and the EU; this doesn't need to be a competition. I just found that remark amusing, like the famous headline "Fog in Channel; Continent Cut Off" :D
That's quite laughable given that the very article is written by the UK-based for-profit publisher (and part of the science oligopoly), Nature Publishing Group.
For the record, NPG actually supports the form of open access being put forward by the UK and the EU (check out the statements on their website). The company already complies with the 6 month rule and helps authors deposit in PubMed Central. It also runs a number of open access and hybrid model journals...
I'm curious what the remaining costs of publishing are under such an OpenAccess policy.
For the UK proposal, the Guardian article from July 15 [1] mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process. Of course, the peer-reviewing itself is done free of charge by fellow academics. The Nature post doesn't seem to address this point (unless this is what they refer to as "up-front publication costs" in the second paragraph).
Either way, charges around GBP 2,000 per article for processing are hefty (especially given that the bulk of the work is done by the academics for free). Maybe one should ask the question how this figure could be driven down?
"mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process"
I would gladly (and highly profitably) run a for-profit which "manages the peer-review process" for GBP 1 per article.
You'd be able to find 3 relevant peer reviewers for each article, get their comments, feed them back to the author, then make sure the article was appropriately amended prior to publication (or rejected if required) for £1 per article? Your time must be very cheap! Or am I missing something?
Exactly. I fully support the open research movement as it will drive competition, new business models and spread quality research, but the review process is probably a very challenging one to manage.
People will evenutally solve this problem parts at a time, but I wouldn't put a £1 per article price tag on it yet.
Their costs aren't low, and presumably they don't make profit either. It's fair though, although i might say a bit expensive for authors from developing countries. You want to have a barrier in publishing and a good review process, and it's more fair (esp. to students in the developing world) to charge the authors rather than the readers.
Hopefully, if we have competition among open-access journals even the costs may go down.
I use 'surplus', not 'profit' because PLoS is a non-profit. They can build up reserves to guarantee continued existence in times of hardness, or for future growth (for example, they may need money in the bank to rent or buy offices, or to make them more attractive to prospective employees (who is going to work for a non-profit that, every month, hopes to be able to pay your salary?)
The current peer review process requires expert supervision (qualified reviewers need to be selected, etc), so a charge of GBP 2,000 seems reasonable to me.
In time we can hope for an HN-like system where publications are ranked immediately on publication. The algorithm would have to recognize the expertise of authorities when assigning the value of each vote. When this is possible, that cost should dissapear. But until such a system has been proven out, peer review should remain and a charge of GBP 2000 is reasonable.
1) GBP 2,000 still seems steep to me. Assuming I'll have to pay an scientific editor (who selects reviewers, forwards manuscripts and decision revisions, etc) GBP 100 per hour, he could spend 10 work hours on the article -- total cost: GBP 1,000. I realize that there's a large variance on time required though, depending on how referees and authors agree, but 10 hours seems at the upper end of the spectrum. Of course, if we'll have to pay a typesetter + infrastructure, GBP 2,000 might be where we'll end up. However, I have the impression that these proposals offload all typesetting to the authors.
2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).
To rank academic papers you'd need a way to establish certain people as authorities within each field or area, and make their vote stronger. This authority ranking would surely have expert input initially, but I would expect that Citeseer and Google Scholar may be good places to look for inspiration on ways to crowdsource authority rankings.
For starters look at the Page Rank paper (named after Larry Page, not web page). Academic papers need something richer than page rank, but since tens of billion of web pages can be ranked for arbitrary queries, the volume of academic papers should be fime.
Ranking algorithms are one of my favorite subjects, and they are as challenging as they are important. "Search" has little to do with actual searching, it's really a ranking problem. Google's search was the first good ranking scheme for internet search, and their "I feel lucky" button was a way to show that off.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadFor the UK proposal, the Guardian article from July 15 [1] mentions article processing charges (APC) around GBP 2,000 per article, presumably paid by the institution to some private institution to manage the peer-review process. Of course, the peer-reviewing itself is done free of charge by fellow academics. The Nature post doesn't seem to address this point (unless this is what they refer to as "up-front publication costs" in the second paragraph).
Either way, charges around GBP 2,000 per article for processing are hefty (especially given that the bulk of the work is done by the academics for free). Maybe one should ask the question how this figure could be driven down?
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-br...
I would gladly (and highly profitably) run a for-profit which "manages the peer-review process" for GBP 1 per article.
People will evenutally solve this problem parts at a time, but I wouldn't put a £1 per article price tag on it yet.
Their costs aren't low, and presumably they don't make profit either. It's fair though, although i might say a bit expensive for authors from developing countries. You want to have a barrier in publishing and a good review process, and it's more fair (esp. to students in the developing world) to charge the authors rather than the readers.
Hopefully, if we have competition among open-access journals even the costs may go down.
I use 'surplus', not 'profit' because PLoS is a non-profit. They can build up reserves to guarantee continued existence in times of hardness, or for future growth (for example, they may need money in the bank to rent or buy offices, or to make them more attractive to prospective employees (who is going to work for a non-profit that, every month, hopes to be able to pay your salary?)
In time we can hope for an HN-like system where publications are ranked immediately on publication. The algorithm would have to recognize the expertise of authorities when assigning the value of each vote. When this is possible, that cost should dissapear. But until such a system has been proven out, peer review should remain and a charge of GBP 2000 is reasonable.
2) Can you enlighten me (or suggest reading) on how HN ranks submissions? I've had discussions about some sort of ranking of papers, but we generally concluded that the sheer amount of papers published daily would make it tough to get enough (>10?) votes for being somewhat representative I imagine (for example, astro-ph on arxiv sees 50-100 submissions daily). But as you suggest, some algorithm doing preliminary ranking might help this (although it also spells danger).
For starters look at the Page Rank paper (named after Larry Page, not web page). Academic papers need something richer than page rank, but since tens of billion of web pages can be ranked for arbitrary queries, the volume of academic papers should be fime.
Ranking algorithms are one of my favorite subjects, and they are as challenging as they are important. "Search" has little to do with actual searching, it's really a ranking problem. Google's search was the first good ranking scheme for internet search, and their "I feel lucky" button was a way to show that off.
Happy to discuss by email.