Archive for the Open Access Category

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What to do with Open Access funding in Physics and Astronomy

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on March 5, 2013 by telescoper

I’ve been too busy to keep up with the ongoing activity relating to Open Access recently, and I don’t really have time today to do anything other than a brief post on the topic because I’m in the middle of yet another recruitment process and am exhausted by the day’s interviewing.

I do have time to say just a couple of things. One is that it appears that RCUK may be about to back-pedal on its poorly thought out guidelines on Open Access. I hope the new guidance is a significant improvement on the old policy.

Open Access reared its head during a meeting I attended yesterday. RCUK, which is the umbrella organisation for the United Kingdom’s seven research councils, last year announced that it will set aside £17 million next year, and £20 million the year after that, to pay for Gold Open Access publication of the research it sponsors. These funds will be made available to universities in the form of block grants to enable researchers to pay the infamous APCs  (“Article Processing Charges”). The average cost of an APC has been taken from the Finch report (estimated as £1727 plus VAT). Yesterday I was informed of the allocation of funds for Open Access to the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the University of Sussex arising from these block grants. The cash sum involved is too small to pay for Gold Open Access for more than a handful of papers produced within the School, so difficult decisions would have to be made about who is allowed to pay the Author Processing Charges if this pot of money is used in the way RCUK envisages.

Of course, what RCUK should have done was given universities and other research institutions funds to set up and maintain their own Green Open Access databases or international repositories like the arXiv. Throwing money at  Gold Open Access is disastrous way of proceeding. It’s not only ruinously expensive but also unsustainable. In a few years’ time it is inevitable that the traditional academic publishing industry will be bypassed by researchers doing it for themselves. All the money spent propping up the fat cats in the meantime will have been wasted.

Instead of  splashing money around for Gold Open Access,  I think RCUK should mandate that all its research be published in Green Open Access mode. As I’ve mentioned before this would cause considerable fallout not only for the academic publishing industry but also for the learned societies, which largely survive on the income generated subscriptions to their range of overpriced journals.

Nevertheless, we have the RCUK funds and, as Head of School, I’m supposed to decide how to spend them. Even if I could force myself to grit my teeth and agree to fork out out the money in APCs to the Academic Publishing Racketeers, I can’t think of any sensible basis for deciding which papers should be published this way and which shouldn’t. In any case, at least in particle physics and astronomy, most papers are compliant with the RCUK policy anyway because they are placed on the arXiv. I therefore propose not to pay out a single penny of the RCUK OA funds for Gold Open Access, but simply to donate the entire sum as a contribution to the running costs of the arXiv.

I urge Heads of Physics and Astronomy departments elsewhere to do the same with their allocations.

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Should Open Access Include Open Software?

Posted in Open Access, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on February 4, 2013 by telescoper

Very busy today, so just time for a quick post (and associated poll) about Open Science.

As you all know I’ve been using this blog for a while to bang on about Open Access to scientific publications. I’m not going to repeat my position in detail here except to say that I’m in favour of Open Access but not at the immense cost envisaged by the Finch Report.

I thought however that it might be useful to float some opinions about wider issues related to open science. In particular, the question that often troubles me is that is open access to scientific results actually enough, or do we have to go a lot further?

I think an important aspect of the way science works is that when a given individual or group publishes a result, it should be possible for others to reproduce it (or not as the case may be). Traditional journal publications don’t always allow this. In my own field of astrophysics/cosmology, for example, results in scientific papers are often based on very complicated analyses of large data sets. This is increasingly the case in other fields too. A basic problem obviously arises when data are not made public. Fortunately in astrophysics these days researchers are pretty good at sharing their data, although this hasn’t always been the case.

However, even allowing open access to data doesn’t always solve the reproducibility problem. Often extensive numerical codes are needed to process the measurements and extract meaningful output. Without access to these pipeline codes it is impossible for a third party to check the path from input to output without writing their own version assuming that there is sufficient information to do that in the first place. That researchers should publish their software as well as their results is quite a controversial suggestion, but I think it’s the best practice for science. There isn’t a uniform policy in astrophysics and cosmology, but I sense that quite a few people out there agree with me. Cosmological numerical simulations, for example, can be performed by anyone with a sufficiently big computer using GADGET the source codes of which are freely available. Likewise, for CMB analysis, there is the excellent CAMB code, which can be downloaded at will; this is in a long tradition of openly available numerical codes, including CMBFAST and HealPix.

I suspect some researchers might be reluctant to share the codes they have written because they feel they won’t get sufficient credit for work done using them. I don’t think this is true, as researchers are generally very appreciative of such openness and publications describing the corresponding codes are generously cited. In any case I don’t think it’s appropriate to withhold such programs from the wider community, which prevents them being either scrutinized or extended as well as being used to further scientific research. In other words excessively proprietorial attitudes to data analysis software are detrimental to the spirit of open science.

Anyway, my views aren’t guaranteed to be representative of the community, so I’d like to ask for a quick show of hands via a poll…

…and you are of course welcome to comment via the usual box.

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Missing the Point on Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , on January 28, 2013 by telescoper

Blogging this week will be a bit patchy as I try to finish off a few Cardiff jobs before the big move to Sussex at the end of the week. However, I have got time today for a quick comment on an article I saw in yesterday’s Observer.

The piece tries argue  that the government’s plans for Open Access, stemming from the Finch Report, amount to an “attack on academic freedoms”, a stance apparently held by a number of eminent historians (and others). The argument is that the Gold Open Access model preferred by RCUK will require the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) which could in some cases amount to thousands of pounds per article. Departmental budget holders (possibly administrators rather than academics) will then have to be involved in decisions about which papers can be funded and which can’t. This, it is argued, will mean that researchers will have much less freedom to publish when, where and what they like – the people holding the purse strings will have the final say.

A similar point was made by Mike Cruise in a strange article that appeared in the latest Astronomy and Geophysics (house organ of the Royal Astronomical Society):

Even in the UK it is not clear how the flow of funding for APCs will work. Will universities limit an academic’s publication rate or where he or she can publish? How and by whom will this funding be controlled? Academic freedom may, perversely, be curtailed as a result of open access.

So does Open Access pose a real threat to academic freedom? The answer is “yes”, but only if the Research Councils persist in forcing academics to pay the extortionate APCs demanded by academic publishers, out of all proportion to the real cost of publishing a paper on the internet, which is (at the very most) a few tens of pounds per article. Publishers want a much higher fee than this because they want to maintain their eye-watering profit margins, despite the fact that the “service” they provide has been rendered entirely obsolete by digital technologies. Any protests against open access should be directed to the real enemy, i.e. the profiteers.

The Finch Report was hi-jacked by the publishing lobby, with the result that RCUK has been persuaded to pour  millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money down a gold-plated drain. The model it recommends is absurd and clearly unsustainable. Low-cost repositories and community-based refereeing can deliver Green Open Access at a tiny fraction of the cost of the Gold Option, by cutting out the middle men.

All that’s needed to defend academic freedoms  is to set up on-line subject-based repositories in much the same way as physicists and astronomers have set up the arXiv. In other words, the historians just need an archive.  They should be comfortable with that idea. And as for refereeing, they can do that the way it will shortly be done in astronomy…

P.S.  Astronomy & Geophysics have invited me to write a response to Mike Cruise’s article; my piece should appear in the April 2013 issue. Hopefully it won’t be behind a paywall.

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Open and Direct

Posted in Open Access with tags , on January 17, 2013 by telescoper

Again, no time to post properly today but here’s another variation on the theme of Open Access. The idea described in this post sounds very familiar, actually…

gowers's avatarGowers's Weblog

For some months now I have known of a very promising initiative that until recently I have been asked not to publicize too widely, because the people in charge of it did not have a good estimate for when it would actually come to fruition. But now those who know about it have been given the green light. The short version of what I want to say in this post is that a platform is to be created that will make it very easy to set up arXiv overlay journals.

What is an arXiv overlay journal? It is just like an electronic journal, except that instead of a website with lots of carefully formatted articles, all you get is a list of links to preprints on the arXiv. The idea is that the parts of the publication process that academics do voluntarily — editing and refereeing — are just as…

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Further thoughts on the death of Aaron Swarz

Posted in Open Access with tags , on January 15, 2013 by telescoper

No time for a proper post today, but I couldn’t resist reblogging this thoughtful reflection on the same subject as my most recent offering.

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Aaron Swartz and Open Access

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , on January 14, 2013 by telescoper

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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Elsevierballs

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on December 16, 2012 by telescoper

Have you heard all the stories about the carefully-managed system of peer review that justifies the exorbitant cost of Elsevier journals? Then read this…

Ivan Oransky's avatarRetraction Watch

elsevierFor several months now, we’ve been reporting on variations on a theme: Authors submitting fake email addresses for potential peer reviewers, to ensure positive reviews. In August, for example, we broke the story of a Hyung-In Moon, who has now retracted 24 papers published by Informa because he managed to do his own peer review.

Now, Retraction Watch has learned that the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) was hacked sometime last month, leading to faked peer reviews and retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and Turkey have been retracted from three journals.

Here’s one of two identical notices that have just run in Optics & Laser Technology, for two unconnectedpapers:

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The Art of the Abstract

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on November 19, 2012 by telescoper

I’m one of those old-fashioned types who still gets an email from the arXiv every morning notifying me of the latest contributions and listing their abstracts. I still prefer to get my daily update that way than via logging onto the website, although I suspect that’s really force of habit more than anything. The emails are longer these days than they used to be, of course, so now I only manage a quick skim but it’s still a worthwhile exercise.

I have noticed over the twenty-odd years that I’ve been subscribing to this service that as well as being more numerous now, abstracts are also unquestionably longer (at least on astro-ph), to the extent that one sees the dreaded “[abridged]”, indicating that the (approximately 20-line) length limit has been exceeded, much more frequently now than in the past.

Without criticising individual papers, it does seem to me that excessively long and ponderous abstracts are likely to be counter-productive. The whole point of an abstract is that it is a sort of executive summary of the paper which is supposed to convince the reader that the whole paper is worth reading. Given the number of papers there are flying around, a short pithy abstract with a high density of key ideas and results is much more likely to get people reading further than one that waffles on and on about “discussing” and “constraining” this that or the other. Abstracts should be about answering questions, not merely addressing them.

Another mistake that some abstract writers make is to write the abstract as if it were the introduction, which isn’t the point at all. The first few sentences of the abstract should establish why the topic is interesting, but that doesn’t mean it’s meant to be a mini-literature review. References in the abstracts are best avoided altogether, in my opinion.

When so many experienced professional scientists write poor abstracts it’s hardly surprising that our students also struggle to compose good ones for, e.g., project reports. The best advice I can offer is always write the abstract last of all, when you know exactly what is in the rest of the paper. Incidentally, it is often a good idea to write the conclusions first…

Once you have finished everything else then set yourself the task of making your abstract as brief as possible but ensure that it answers the following questions (in no more than a couple of sentences each):

  1. Why is the topic of the paper interesting? What is the question you’re answering? Summarize the background.
  2. What did you do? What techniques/data did you use? Summarize the method.
  3. What were your results? Summarize the key results.
  4. What are the wider implications of your results? In particular, how do they answer the questions in 1?

If your abstract comes out more than 20 lines long then cut it. If one of the four sections is much longer than the others then chop it mercilessly to restore the balance. The shorter the abstract the better it is, in my view, although perhaps you don’t have to go this far…

Come the revolution, when all papers will be available online, the abstract will be even more important in getting your work recognized. Digital open access publishing will increase the amount of stuff “out there”, and a good abstract is going to be essential to raise your paper’s signal above the noise level.

Abstracts no doubt play different roles in different fields. I understand that in some disciplines abstracts are even actually the primary mode of publication. I think the guidelines above are pretty good for astrophysics, physics generally, and perhaps even most physical sciences. I’d be interested to hear from folk working in other disciplines how they might be modified to suit their requirements, so please feel free to comment below.

Comments will not be abridged.

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RCUK is throwing money down a gold-plated drain

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , , on November 9, 2012 by telescoper

Right. Now I’m annoyed. Annoyed enough to dash off a quick post before getting the train to London to see this year’s RAS Gerald Whitrow Lecture.

RCUK, the umbrella organisation for the United Kingdom’s seven research councils, has announced that it will set aside £17 million next year, and £20 million the year after that, to pay for Gold Open Access publication of the research it sponsors. These funds will be made available to universities in the form of block grants to enable researchers to pay the infamous APCs  (“Article Processing Charges”). The average cost of an APC has been taken from the Finch report (estimated as £1727 plus VAT).

It’s astonishing that RCUK have fallen for this trap. What were they thinking of? The Finch report was clearly hijacked by the vested interests of the academic publishing industry who see the Gold Open Access model as an easy way of maintaining their profit margins at taxpayer’s expense. The new RCUK scheme will simply divert funds away from research into a subsidy for wealthy publishing houses (and, in some cases, the learned societies that run them). The actual cost of processing an article is nothing like £1727 and is any case borne by the people doing the work, i.e. academics who perform the refereeing usually for free. An APC at this level is simply a scam. That the RCUK has fallen for it is a disgrace.

What RCUK should have done was given universities and other research institutions funds to set up and maintain their own Green Open Access databases or international repositories like the arXiv. Throwing money at  Gold Open Access is disastrous way of proceeding. It’s not only ruinously expensive but also unsustainable. In a few years’ time it is inevitable that the traditional academic publishing industry will be bypassed by researchers doing it for themselves. All the money spent propping up the fat cats in the meantime will have been wasted.

However, despite its obvious stupidity, the RCUK did give me one idea. I’ve blogged before about how much learned societies such as the Institute of Physics “earn” from their own publishing houses. In effect, these outfits are living on income provided to them by hard-pressed university library budgets.  In such cases it can be argued that the profits at least remain within the discipline – the IOP does many good things with the money generated by its publishing arm – but is this actually an honest way of supporting the activities of learned societies?

Anyway, it seems clear to me that the financial model under which most learned societies, including the IOP, operate will not operate for much longer, as more and more researchers go for Green Open Access and more and more institutions cancel subscriptions to their ruinously expensive journals. How then can they survive in the long term?

Instead of  splashing money around for Gold Open Access,  RCUK should mandate that all its research be published in Green Open Access mode. That would pull the rug out from under the learned societies, but why not replace the funding they are syphoning off from journal subscriptions with direct block grants. Such grants would have to be audited to ensure that learned societies spend the money on appropriate things, and would probably amount to much less than such organizations currently receive. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think there’s a strong case for the IOP to be downsized, actually.

So there’s my suggestion. No RCUK subsidy for the academic publishing industry, but direct subsidies for the learned societies and Green Open Access to be compulsory for all RCUK funded institutions.

How’s that for a plan?

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A Name for Open Astrophysics?

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , , on November 4, 2012 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog may recall that  while ago  I posted an item in which I suggested setting up The Open Journal of Astrophysics. The motivation behind this was to demonstrate that it is possible to run an academic journal which is freely available to anyone who wants to read it, as well as at minimal cost to authors. Basically, I want to show that it is possible to “cut out the middle man” in the process of publishing scientific research and that by doing it ourselves we can actually do it better.

I was unwell for much of the summer, and more recently have had lots to do in connection with my forthcoming move to Sussex, so things have moved more slowly than I’d hoped but I just wanted to take this opportunity to give my assurance that this project is definitely going ahead. We have a (good) website design with ample space and other resources to run it, and a sufficient number of persons of suitable eminence have agreed to serve on the Editorial Board. It will basically be a front-end for the Arxiv, but will have a number of interesting additional features which make it a lot  more than that.  I’d prefer to save further details to the official launch, which is now planned to take place in January (as it would probably get buried in the pre-Xmas rush if we tried to launch before then). I can also confirm that the service we will provide will be free at the start, although if the volume of submissions grows we may have to charge a small fee for refereeing. And when I say “small” I mean small, not the hundreds or thousands of pounds charged by the rip-off merchants.

One thing I would like some ideas about, however, is the name. My working title for this project is The Open Journal of Astrophysics, which I think is OK but what I’d really like to do is break away from the old language of academic publishing as much as possible. I did think of the People’s Revolutionary Journal of Astrophysics, but feared that it might then split into Trotskyite and Marxist-Leninist factions. In any case the very name “journal” suggests something published periodically, whereas my idea is to have something that is updated continuously whenever papers are accepted. I’m therefore having second thoughts about having the word “Journal” in the title at all. Open Astrophysics might suffice, but I’m sure someone out there can come up with a better name. I know that Shakespeare said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I think a good title might make the difference between success and failure for this initiative…

That gives me the idea of enlisting the help of the denizens of the internet for some help in coming up with a better title; given the nature of the project, this seems an entirely appropriate way of proceeding. So please engage in collective or individual brainstorming sessions and let me have your suggestions through the comments box!

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