Open Science and the Future of Publishing – a round-up of this week’s debate
| 2 March, 2012 | Lucy Pratt |
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Earlier this week, a group from the Materials Science department at Oxford University brought together prominent figures in the current open science debate to discuss The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing, organised by Victoria Watson, who was driving the idea forward, and Simon Benjamin, founder of an experiment piloting rapid dissemination and discussion of research in quantum science, Quantalk. Chaired by Simon, the panel of experts comprised Cameron Neylon, Tim Gowers, Sir Robert Winston, Victor Henning (Mendeley), Alicia Wise (Elsevier), Alison Mitchell (NPG) and Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust).
Journal subscriptions
The discussion between the key individuals representing the two sides of the RWA furore (Alicia Wise and Tim Gowers) was thankfully a calm, rational debate about how far Elsevier and other large publishers have/can/should move towards open access. Alison Mitchell commented that NPG have already launched many OA-only journals, and many of their titles also have OA options. The debate moved onto journal subscription costs, with the surprising comment from the Bodleian Library representative that even they are having to cut back on subscriptions (the issue being made worse in the UK by the VAT applicable to e-journals but not to print journals). Alicia suggested there are other ways to access journal content if you can’t afford a subscription, such as Patient Inform, DeepDyve, and Sir Robert asked what is wrong with having to pay if you want access to something – you have to for everything else.
Robert Kiley restated the Wellcome Trust’s support of open access, highlighting that it enables them to maximise their return on investment, stating that “making your research open should be as normal as wearing a seatbelt”. He also clarified that, from their point of view, all publications must be CC-BY.
Publishing costs
The question of how much it should cost to produce a journal in an online world was raised, starting from the non-peer review model of ArXiv with costs of under $7 per submission, and leading to a conclusion by Cameron that anything up to $1000 to include peer review, typesetting, chasing etc would seem reasonable. This led to a lengthy discussion on whether we really need typesetting. Alison mentioned that NPG had surveyed their authors on this, and the majority were very keen that typesetting was retained, a view supported by a show of hands in the hall.
Cameron commented that current methods of disseminating scientific research (i.e. the journal model) would be perfectly acceptable, were we all still stuck with 18th Century technology. He also made the interesting point that when people first got printing presses, they still printed books to make them look like handwritten manuscripts, and it took around 100 years to fully move on from that layout. Similarly, we are currently doing online publishing as if we were still using print, and we urgently need to change our mindset.
Scientific clarity
Sir Robert Winston’s concerns were less about open access, and more about understandability: it is no good everyone having access to information if they can’t understand it. He then went further, more controversially saying that public access to all this scientific information can actually be problematic, as they may only see part of the story, and become misled by such an unbalanced view.
Peer review
Tim Gowers described his Polymath project where highly complex mathematical problems were solved in a matter of weeks by splitting them up into smaller components, and then opening them up to discussion by anyone via a blog. He explained the utility of a blog for such situations in being a happy medium between journal articles (which build upon each other too slowly) and conversations (which can often be too rapid to solve such complex problems). Cameron highlighted that the publishing industry is very open to being disintermediated by players coming from a completely different angle, and this was supported by Victor Henning’s comment that Mendeley have been asked by authors for collaborative writing and review services, and that they could become a kind of publisher in the future.
Most interestingly for us here at F1000 Research was the question posed by Simon Benjamin: could we have non-journal peer review? Tim Gowers has previously posted on the idea of an online system of submitting and commenting on papers as an alternative to our current system of journals, editors and anonymous referees. He spoke about ideas to create an extended ArXiv-like system with “free-floating editorial boards”. Many of his ideas align well with our core aims for F1000 Research: immediate publication; open, post-publication peer review; open revisioning of work including ongoing updates; raw data deposition and publication. We were obviously pleased to see the majority in the room said they would be happy to publish in an open peer review journal, with only one hand up against.
Thanks to a Twittercentric audience, you can follow the ongoing debate via #evoscidebate, and the organisers promised that the video of the event will be up soon at https://evolutionofscience.org.
UPDATE: a recording of the event is now available online at Oxford’s iTunes U.
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Thank you for your summary, Lucy. I was hoping to get there but couldn’t. They have assured me the event was recorded and will be available somewhere. Some comments:
I am dismayed by Sir Robert Winston’s remarks that Open Access might not help if people can’t understand the contents. That smacks of a rather old-fashioned elitism: we scientists know best – trust us!
If it is indeed true that the language is too technical for the common man, then the answer is not to hide the content, but to make sure that it is written more accessibly, avoiding the usual scientific pomposity.
I am also bemused by the majority favouring “typesetting”, by which I suppose they mean correct line breaks, hyphenation, balancing double columns, etc, and creating a PDF file. I run a “typesetting” company, but I cringe whenever I hear the term. A publication should be “fluid”, and saved in a format “say XML”, which can then be automatically transformed into any form the reader chooses, e.g. ePub, html, or PDF. And in the latter case, all the “typesetting” can be done automatically. The world has moved beyond the PDF. I wish someone would put us out of business so we could do something more interesting. 😉
Thank you for the report, Lucy. I didn’t manage to attend but they assure me event was recorded and will be online.
Somewhat disappointed by Prof Winston’s (elitist) remarks that OA would not do much good, as content would not be understandable to everyone. If that is indeed the case (and I think it is) the solution is not to lock away the content, but to encourage more accessible writing by the scientists, instead of the traditional, pointless gobbledygook. We should fight any form of elitism.
I also cringe when I hear the term “typesetting”, which sounds 20 years out of date. You say the audience seemed to think it was important (I guess they refer to a well laid out PDF page). Well, I think it is too. In fact I run a business doing typesetting for scientific journals. Good pagination and typography is important, but that can all be done automatically from a master file (e.g. XML). What we need is a good XML file which can generate any output, e.g. ePub, html, PDF, on the fly, at the request of the reader. I am afraid our PDF-centric view of publications is holding us back.
I too was horrified to read Robert Winston’s us-and-them notion that “public access to all this scientific information can actually be problematic”. The reverse is very much the case, as shown by the cases described on the new web-site Who Needs Access?. On this site you can read about Wayne Wells (Vietnam veteran, cancer patient and research reviewer), Kelly Trout (nurse and independent researcher), Craig Dylke (teacher and artist) and other who need access to published research for their health, for their jobs and for advocacy.
We MUST stamp out the blinkered, divisive view that says research papers are only for a special scientific priesthood. Open access to research improves all our lives.
Hello! Simon here. Thanks for the excellent write up Lucy. It was indeed a really interesting and eyeopening event. One thing: note that there were two organisers, me and Victoria Watson. She was driving the idea forward.
Just a quick word about the video: I edited it together last week — sadly only two of the three cameras we used worked out, but the footage is nevertheless very clear and the audio is also great. We have a version online but a rendering glitch means it has a minute of black screen, so we’ll replace it tomorrow morning and I’ll put the link here.
Look forward to everyone’s thoughts!
Hi Simon! Thank you for the comments, and for highlighting Vicoria Watson’s involvement – I’ve amended the post, and have added the iTunes U link as an update at the end.
OK here is the link to the iTunes U recording of the event:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=509508541
if anyone can’t get to it via iTunes then email me simon at evolutionofscience.org and I will give you an alternative link.
If you do watch it please rate it (star rating system) and even leave a comment on iTunes U — that way it may come to the attention of more academics.