Aaron Swartz and Open Access
Just time for a very brief comment about the tragic death, apparently by his own hand, of Aaron Swartz on Friday. For those of you who haven’t followed the story, or perhaps don’t even know who he was, Aaron Swartz was an “internet activist” and leading champion of the open data movement. He was a young man, only 26 when he died, who was prepared to fight for a cause he truly believed in. And to die for it.
Aaron Swartz was being prosecuted for alleged illegal downloads of scientific papers from the JSTOR system so he could make them available to the public. If convicted he would have faced a sentence of up to 35 years in prison.
Whether his prosecution was according to the letter of the law is a question I’ll leave for others to discuss. I’ll just say that it’s profoundly objectionable that the papers in the JSTOR are behind a paywall in the first place, just another example of how the academic publishing industry now actively stifles the free communication of scientific ideas and results that it purports to facilitate.
Aaron Swartz was a controversial character, but I know I’m not alone in thinking that his prosecution was at the least heavy-handed and at the worst downright vindictive. Academics have been using the hashtag #PDFtribute on Twitter to pay tribute to his courage and to follow his example by posting their own research publicly free of charge.
Astronomers have making their results available in this way for years, through the arXiv. We have also been paying through the nose for subscriptions to journals that do little more than duplicate the arXiv submission at such a prohibitive cost for access that the public can’t access them. In future we’re supposed to pay huge fees up front to academic publishing houses, to duplicate the arXiv in a different but equally pointless way. Pointless, that is, from any perspective other than their own profits.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve suggested a way to bypass traditional journals and achieve a form of publication that is both open to all and run at a minimal cost to authors. That will be going on-line in the not-too-distant future. One thing remaining to be resolved is the name for the new system. I still haven’t decided on that, but at least I now know to whose name it will be dedicated.
R.I.P. Aaron Swartz (1986-2013).
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In the Dark 
January 14, 2013 at 1:24 pm
Speaking as an evolutionary biologist …
Why do astronomers submit to journals at all? I am genuinely curious. And if it’s just to get a Brand stamped on their forehead, then why does anyone subscribe to the journals?
January 14, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Because publication in certain journals is regarded on CVs as proof of classy work. There is some justification for that view too, but hopefully Peter’s journal or similar will also rapidly gain a reputation for quality and we can dispense with academic journal publishers, who were once symbiotic but are now parasitic – and hugely expensive.
What goes on in evolutionary biology?
January 14, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Oh, things are much worse in biology. We don’t have arXiv, or a credible equivalent. So the only thing to do is publish in a journal — which means running the peer-review gauntlet and multiple rejections if you “aim high”. As a result, most work is several years out of date by the time it’s published.
So my point wasn’t “oh, you silly astronomers should be more like us cool biologists”, but “as we silly biologists strive to reach a situation more the one you cool astronomers enjoy, how can we fully understand how things work in your saner field?”
January 14, 2013 at 1:45 pm
OK, so the purpose of journals in astronomy is purely to Keep Score. I can imagine that. But it leaves the question of why anyone bothers actually subscribing to the journals, when all the actual science is right there on arXiv.
January 14, 2013 at 1:58 pm
The point is simply that things don’t have to be refereed to go on the arXiv, but they do to get in a journal. My plan basically a service to referee arXiv submissions and place a quality mark on those that pass muster. This makes journals entirely redundant. I think they are anyway, actually, because good papers get cited whether they are refereed or not..
January 17, 2013 at 11:03 am
Just thought I’d point out a good and non-refereed arXiv-submission-only paper that has gained more than a few citations – the Cordes and Lazio paper describing their model of the Galactic free electron distribution currently has 599 citations. To be fair this is the only very highly cited article I know of, but given my limited depth of knowledge I’m sure there most be others. Within my field of gravitational waves the LIGO Scientific Collaboration/Virgo Collaboration have started placing some more technical papers as arXiv only.
January 17, 2013 at 12:40 pm
I’m not sure whether there was an attempt to submit this to ApJ or if the authors just liked the ApJ format and decided to LaTeX it using emulateapj.
January 14, 2013 at 1:41 pm
Call it “Swartz’s child”
January 14, 2013 at 2:53 pm
It occurs to me that if the old ‘pay-for-access’ business model had continued, journals would have been out of business sooner or later once more disciplines started switching to archiv-like distribution models, and they could persuade university administrators to stop subscribing to expensive journals.
The switch to ‘pay-to-publish’ has really been a life-line to the journals.
January 14, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Indeed, that vested interests were allowed to hijack the Finch report is a major scandal,
January 14, 2013 at 3:44 pm
It’s only slowly become apparent to me what I should have spotted from the off: the hostility towards author-pays open access on this blog is because you’re all astronomers, and so you’ve grown used to the excellent free service of arXiv.
Over here in biology, where we have nothing like arXiv, author-pays OA is a big step forward, compared with the Nothing Is Freely Available status quo.
That’s certainly not to say that Finch Report’s account of Gold OA was anything close to what it ought to have been. In particular, its cost estimate of £1500-2000 for a typical APC is grossly inflated, as I have argued in detail. (I came up with a figure of £283, which is less then one sixth of what Finch suggests. That is likely to fall further as economies of scale increasingly kick in.)
January 14, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Yes we do have the arXiv, which is great. The question other fields should be asking themselves is why they don’t get something similar instead of paying through the nose for Gold Open Access?
January 14, 2013 at 3:54 pm
I think you underestimate the enormous cultural shift that arXiv has slowly but surely induced in astronomy and the other fields that it covers. Building an arXiv for biology would not be technically very demanding. But getting old-school biologists to use it, or cite material in it, would be a mammoth task.
(For the same reason, although most universities have institutional repositories, they tend to be very forlorn. Little content, poor usability, ambiguous terms, no interoperability.)
January 14, 2013 at 6:18 pm
It needn’t be so difficult Mike. The arXiv at present is as well as journals, not instead of them, so step 1 is not a huge culture shift.
In any case we can conceive of a virtual arXiv comprising links to researchers’ own websites, although this would be more volatile.
January 15, 2013 at 9:33 am
Philip, it’s true that arXiv is gradually extending towards biology, and even palaeontology which is the specific area that I work in. As a matter of fact, I myself deposited a preprint of one of my palaeontology papers in arXiv — a first for palaeo, I think — and have encouraged others to do so.
So credit to arXiv for providing the infrastructure that’s needed here. The problem of course is cultural. As you’ll see from the comments on the linked article, many or most palaeontologists don’t seem to consider this citable. I don’t know how we’re going to go about changing that.
January 15, 2013 at 9:52 am
The fear that journals supported by APCs will blindly accept sub-standard material is an old one. I don’t think it has teeth, though. There have always been good journals and bad journals — we can all point to terrible subscription-based journals. What we do is: not send our stuff to those journals, and not pay much attention to what they publish. Same applies in the Gold-OA world.
So we have PLOS Biology, which is highly respected; and PLOS ONE, which at least in my field is now a very important journal (though I hear that may be different in other fields); and various BMC journals and lots of well-respected singletons. And we also have a barrel-sweeping of crud that no-one pays attention to.
January 15, 2013 at 10:20 am
Mike,
It’s worth taking a step back to gain perspective. Historically, journals provided two services – quality control and dissemination. The cost of journal publication, whether author-pays or via subscription, has gradually become exorbitant. The internet is the game-changer: it renders the dessemination service redundant, and at the same time provides academics with a tool to take back control of publication and save a lot of money. The only question is how to organise ourselves online so as to provide quality control. Debate about that is secondary to the main issue, which is that the internet is available.
Perhaps there is also a moral issue. We don’t like having to give up copyright on our own writings, do refereeing for free, then pay huge sums of money to get behind a paywall to read our own research which in most cases has been publicly funded.
January 15, 2013 at 10:23 am
I agree with all of that, Anton.
January 15, 2013 at 12:17 pm
If people won’t cite articles in arXiv until they’re also in a conventional journal, then what is the point of putting them in arXiv at all?
January 15, 2013 at 12:34 pm
I have to say I am disappointed to find that even in astronomy, only journals are “real”, and arXiv is only an easier way to get hold of journals’ articles. I’d thought — or maybe hoped — that arXiv, which is manifestly superior in every practical sense to the journal system — was the Real Thing in astronomy, the dog that wagged the journal tail.
January 15, 2013 at 1:40 pm
I agree, but the change is inevitable and has already started.
January 14, 2013 at 3:38 pm
“The alternative is that anyone who disapproves of any law is allowed to break it”
Allowed by whom? I can conceive of unjust laws that I would be willing to break as a matter of conscience, and I’m sure that you can too.
” in which case one needs no laws at all and society would no longer function.”
Most people approve of most laws, eg against murder – THAT is why society (or at least its legal code) functions.
“After all, a law is necessary only when not everyone agrees whether it is correct, otherwise there would be no need for one.”
I’m sure that people have murdered in hot blood even though they are against murder.
January 14, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Phillip,
I think your remarks would be spot on if the process of making laws was not hijacked by those with a strong vested interest.
I actually take my hat off to JSTOR in this case for withdrawing charges against Swartz and trying (though unsuccessfully) to persuade both the prosecutor and MIT to do likewise.
January 15, 2013 at 8:26 am
I don’t know how I missed all the posts about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but I’m tremendously excited about it! I’ve grown so used to hearing people complain about the current science publishing model that it’s a bit of a shock to see someone actually doing something about it. 😉 Seriously, though, I’m amazed that you guys have been able to put this together in such a short time, and I hope the launch goes smoothly!
p.s. Since the system still hasn’t been named, I can’t resist putting in another suggestion. Since you’re building a machine that will take in a flood of mixed-quality arXiv papers on one end and let out a trickle of high-quality papers on the other, why not call it “the AstroFilter”?
(Hey, at least it’s catchier than “The Astrophysics Overlay Board“…)
January 19, 2013 at 9:12 am
As it’s a virtual project, how about the Unphysical Review?
January 15, 2013 at 3:05 pm
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