Archive for the Open Access Category

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Open Access, of the Closed Kind

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

Last night a story began circulating that the government, through RCUK, was intending to move quickly on the matter of open access to research outputs. This morning there’s a press statement from RCUK, the text of which is here:

Research Councils UK (RCUK) has today, 16th July 2012, unveiled its new Open Access policy. Informed by the work of the National Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings, chaired by Professor Dame Janet Finch, the policy at once harmonises and makes significant changes to existing Research Councils’ Open Access policies.

Professor Douglas Kell, RCUK Champion for Research and Information Management commented: “Widening access to the outputs of research currently published in journals has the potential to contribute substantially to furthering the progress of scientific and other research, ensuring that the UK continues to be a world leader in these fields. I am delighted that, together, the Research Councils have been able to been able both to harmonise and to make significant changes to their policies, ensuring that more people have access to cutting edge research that can contribute to both economic growth in our knowledge economy and the wider wellbeing of the UK.”

Drs. Astrid Wissenburg, Chair of RCUK Impact Group and RCUK representative on the National Working Group on Open Access commented: “As the bodies charged with investing public money in research, the Research Councils take very seriously their responsibilities in making the outputs from this research publicly available – not just to other researchers, but also to potential users in business; charitable and public sectors; and to the general public. Working with other funders such as HEFCE, DFID and the Wellcome Trust, this new policy signifies a move to a sustainable, affordable and transparent model of making outputs from the research that they fund more openly accessible.”

The new policy, which will apply to all qualifying publications being submitted for publication from 1 April 2013, states that peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:

  • must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access, and;
  • must include details of the funding that supported the research, and a statement on how the underlying research materials such as data, samples or models can be accessed.

Criteria which journals must fulfill to be compliant with the Research Councils’ Open Access policy are detailed within the policy, but include offering a “pay to publish” option or allowing deposit in a subject or institutional repository after a mandated maximum embargo period. In addition, the policy mandates use of ‘CC-BY’, the Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ license, when an APC is levied. The CC_BY licence allows others to modify, build upon and/or distribute the licensed work (including for commercial purposes) as long as the original author is credited.

The Research Councils will provide block grants to eligible UK Higher Education Institutions, approved independent research organisations and Research Council Institutes to support payment of the Article Processing Charges (APCs) associated with ‘pay-to-publish’. In parallel, eligible organisations will be expected to set-up and manage their own publication funds. The Research Councils will work with eligible organisations to discuss the detail of the new approach to funding APCs and to ensure that appropriate and auditable mechanisms are put in place to manage the funds.

Along with HEFCE and other relevant Funding Bodies, we shall monitor these policies actively, both to review their effects and to ensure that our joint objectives on Open Access are being met.

The RCUK policy on Access to Research Outputs is available here .

Although this seems like a victory for open access, it isn’t really. If it’s a victory for anyone it’s a victory for the  cartel of  ruthlessly exploitative profiteers that is the Academic Publishing Industry. For what the RCUK proposal involves is shifting the “cost” of scientific publishing from journal subscriptions to “Article Processing Charges”, which means authors will have to pay upfront to have their work  considered for publication. And when I say “pay”, I mean pay. It’s anticipated that the average APC for a paper will be around £2000. That’s why they call it “Gold” Open Access, I suppose.

An APC of this size  is indefensible. Scientific papers are nowadays typeset by the author and refereed by other academics. The cost to the publisher is tiny. That they need such an extortionate amount to maintain their profit levels just demonstrates the extent to which they’ve  been ripping us of all these years. Worse, having to pay up front  excludes scientists who don’t have access to the funds needed to pay these charges. This isn’t open access, it’s just a slightly different form of the old racket.

Moreover, I understand that no new money is coming to pay these charges. RCUK is finding the funds quoted above from its existing budget. That means that research somewhere will be cut to pay the additional cost of running the new system alongside the old. Better in my view to cut out the publishers altogether, and let universities and researchers do everything themselves. In astrophysics, we’re most of the way there already, in fact.

I for one have no intention of ever paying an Article Processing Charge. If the journals I publish in insist on levying one, I’ll just forget about the journals altogether and put my papers on the arXiv. I urge my colleagues to do the same.

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Science 2.0 and all that

Posted in Open Access, Science Politics with tags , , , on July 9, 2012 by telescoper

I cam across this on Twitter today and thought I’d share it. Although I have written at various times about open access and the virtues of sharing scientific data, I hadn’t realised that such things came under the umbrella of “Science 2.0“, a term which is quite new to me. This post contains some very interesting ideas and information on the subject.

katarzynasz's avatarScience 2.0 study

We’re approaching the final stage of our study. So far, we have  opened up our bibliography on our Mendeley group here; our notes through this very blog; our model for open science; and our draft policy recommendations for EU. And we’ve benefited from your comments and insight.

Now, we need your help to improve the evidence about the importance of Science 2.0, if we want policy-makers to take it seriously.

Therefore, we share the final presentation that we have presented to the European Commission, DG RTD here.

Help us improving it, by gathering more data and evidence, showing that Science 2.0 is important and disruptive, and that it’s happening already. In particular, we ask to share evidence and data on the take-up of Science 2.0: how many scientist are adopting it? With what benefits?

We ask all people interested in Science 2.0 to share the evidence at hand, by adding

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Clusters, Splines and Peer Review

Posted in Bad Statistics, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 26, 2012 by telescoper

Time for a grumpy early morning post while I drink my tea.

There’s an interesting post on the New Scientist blog site by that young chap Andrew Pontzen who works at Oxford University (in the Midlands). It’s on a topic that’s very pertinent to the ongoing debate about Open Access. One of the points the academic publishing lobby always makes is that Peer Review is essential to assure the quality of research. The publishers also often try to claim that they actually do Peer Review, which they don’t. That’s usual done, for free, by academics.

But the point Andrew makes is that we should also think about whether the form of Peer Review that journals undertake is any good anyway.  Currently we submit our paper to a journal, the editors of which select one (or perhaps two or three) referees to decide whether it merits publication. We then wait – often many months – for a report and a decision by the Editorial Board.

But there’s also a free online repository called the arXiv which all astrophysics papers eventually appear on. Some researchers like to wait for the paper to be refereed and accepted before putting it on the arXiv, while others, myself included, just put it on the arXiv straight away when we submit it to the journal. In most cases one gets prompter and more helpful comments by email from people who read the paper on arXiv than from the referee(s).

Andrew questions why we trust the reviewing of a paper to one or two individuals chosen by the journal when the whole community could do the job quicker and better. I made essentially the same point in a post a few years ago:

I’m not saying the arXiv is perfect but, unlike traditional journals, it is, in my field anyway, indispensable. A little more investment, adding a comment facilities or a rating system along the lines of, e.g. reddit, and it would be better than anything we get academic publishers at a fraction of the cost. Reddit, in case you don’t know the site, allows readers to vote articles up or down according to their reaction to it. Restrict voting to registered users only and you have the core of a peer review system that involves en entire community rather than relying on the whim of one or two referees. Citations provide another measure in the longer term. Nowadays astronomical papers attract citations on the arXiv even before they appear in journals, but it still takes time for new research to incorporate older ideas.

In any case I don’t think the current system of Peer Review provides the Gold Standard that publishers claim it does. It’s probably a bit harsh to single out one example, but then I said I was feeling grumpy, so here’s something from a paper that we’ve been discussing recently in the cosmology group at Cardiff. The paper is by Gonzalez et al. and is called IDCS J1426.5+3508: Cosmological implications of a massive, strong lensing cluster at Z = 1.75. The abstract reads

The galaxy cluster IDCS J1426.5+3508 at z = 1.75 is the most massive galaxy cluster yet discovered at z > 1.4 and the first cluster at this epoch for which the Sunyaev-Zel’Dovich effect has been observed. In this paper we report on the discovery with HST imaging of a giant arc associated with this cluster. The curvature of the arc suggests that the lensing mass is nearly coincident with the brightest cluster galaxy, and the color is consistent with the arc being a star-forming galaxy. We compare the constraint on M200 based upon strong lensing with Sunyaev-Zel’Dovich results, finding that the two are consistent if the redshift of the arc is  z > 3. Finally, we explore the cosmological implications of this system, considering the likelihood of the existence of a strongly lensing galaxy cluster at this epoch in an LCDM universe. While the existence of the cluster itself can potentially be accomodated if one considers the entire volume covered at this redshift by all current high-redshift cluster surveys, the existence of this strongly lensed galaxy greatly exacerbates the long-standing giant arc problem. For standard LCDM structure formation and observed background field galaxy counts this lens system should not exist. Specifically, there should be no giant arcs in the entire sky as bright in F814W as the observed arc for clusters at  z \geq 1.75, and only \sim 0.3 as bright in F160W as the observed arc. If we relax the redshift constraint to consider all clusters at z \geq 1.5, the expected number of giant arcs rises to \sim 15 in F160W, but the number of giant arcs of this brightness in F814W remains zero. These arc statistic results are independent of the mass of IDCS J1426.5+3508. We consider possible explanations for this discrepancy.

Interesting stuff indeed. The paper has been accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal too.

Now look at the key result, Figure 3:

I’ll leave aside the fact that there aren’t any error bars on the points, and instead draw your attention to the phrase “The curves are spline interpolations between the data points”. For the red curve only two “data points” are shown; actually the points are from simulations, so aren’t strictly data, but that’s not the point. I would have expected an alert referee to ask for all the points needed to form the curve to be shown, and it takes more than two points to make a spline.  Without the other point(s) – hopefully there is at least one more! – the reader can’t reproduce the analysis, which is what the scientific method requires, especially when a paper makes such a strong claim as this.

I’m guessing that the third point is at zero (which is at – ∞ on the log scale shown in the graph), but surely that must have an error bar on it, deriving from the limited simulation size?

If this paper had been put on a system like the one I discussed above, I think this would have been raised…

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Opening Access – The Finch Report

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

Just a quickie this morning for those of you who have been following the debate about Open Access to academic research. Yesterday saw the publication of the Finch Report which was commissioned by David Willetts at the end of 2011. Here’s part of the opening paragraph of the announcement:

The report of the Working Group chaired by Dame Janet Finch published on 18 June recommends a programme of action to enable more people to read and use the publications arising from research. Better, faster communication of research results will bring benefits for public services and for economic growth. It will also bring improved efficiency for researchers, and opportunities for more public engagement with research.

Sounds promising. Even more promising is the following statement you can find in the summary:

The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable

However, it is a long report that also raises many difficulties, some real but many (in my opinion) imaginary. It will take a while to digest it and judge whether the momentum that seems to have been generated towards open access dissipates under pressure from the academic publishing industry, which has been lobbying vigorously in recent months. At first reading, however, I’m bound to say that it looks like a sell-out.

A particular worry is that the report favours the so-called “Gold” open access model in which authors pay up front to make their articles publicly available, rather than publishing them in journals to which access is restricted to subscribers. There’s a danger that this will simply provide the publishers with another way of profiteering and won’t save any money at all. In fact, as the Finch report says, phasing in such a system alongside the old one would cost an additional $50 million per year.

My favoured solution is to dispense with the academic journal racket altogether, and for researchers just to put their results on publicly accessible repositories, like the arXiv. Disciplines such as Physics and Astronomy could stop using journals immediately at no additional cost whatsoever, and with an enormous saving in library subscriptions. This option – the so-called “Green” Open Access – is favoured by most researchers but obviously not the academic publishing lobby. Of course this report could turn out to be an irrelevance, if UK researchers have the courage to go Green unilaterally.

I don’t really have time to do a full job on the Finch Report now, but fortunately you can find a number of commentaries already, including a blog piece by Stephen Curry, a piece by Alok Jha in the Grauniad, an item in the Times Higher, and an article on the BBC Website.

I feel I should also draw your attention to a related piece in the Daily Mail which, in a manner that’s typical for said organ, gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and proceeds to beat about the bush with it. At least it doesn’t claim that Open Access will have a devastating effect on house prices.

Anyway, I’m sure to return to this when I’ve had time to read the report thoroughly, but in the meantime please feel free to comment through the usual channel…

P.S. Let me also plug my recent piece on open access in the Guardian

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The Transparent Dishonesty of the Research Excellence Framework

Posted in Open Access, Science Politics with tags , , , , , , on May 30, 2012 by telescoper

Some of my colleagues in the School of Physics & Astronomy recently attended a briefing session about the  forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. This, together with the post I reblogged earlier this morning, suggested that I should re-hash an article I wrote some time ago about the arithmetic of the REF, and how it will clearly not do what it says on the tin.

The first thing is the scale of the task facing members of the panel undertaking the assessment. Every research active member of staff in every University in the UK is requested to submit four research publications (“outputs”) to the panel, and we are told that each of these will be read by at least two panel members. The Physics panel comprises 20 members.

As a rough guess I’d say that the UK has about 40 Physics departments, and the average number of research-active staff in each is probably about 40. That gives about 1600 individuals for the REF. Actually the number of category A staff submitted to the 2008 RAE was 1,685.57 FTE (Full-Time Equivalent), pretty close to this figure. At 4 outputs per person that gives 6400 papers to be read. We’re told that each will be read by at least two members of the panel, so that gives an overall job size of 12800 paper-readings. There are 20 members of the panel, so that means that between 29th November 2013 (the deadline for submissions) and the announcement of the results in December 2014 each member of the panel will have to have read 640 research papers. That’s an average of about two a day. Every day. Weekends included.

Now we are told the panel will use their expert judgment to decide which outputs belong to the following categories:

  • 4*  World Leading
  • 3* Internationally Excellent
  • 2* Internationally Recognized
  • 1* Nationally Recognized
  • U   Unclassified

There is an expectation that the so-called QR  funding allocated as a result of the 2013 REF will be heavily weighted towards 4*, with perhaps a small allocation to 3* and probably nothing at all for lower grades. In other words “Internationally recognized” research will probably be deemed completely worthless by HEFCE. Will the papers belonging to the category “Not really understood by the panel member” suffer the same fate?

The panel members will apparently know enough about every single one of the papers they are going to read in order to place them  into one of the above categories, especially the crucial ones “world-leading” or “internationally excellent”, both of which are obviously defined in a completely transparent and objective manner. Not.

We are told that after forming this judgement based on their expertise the panel members will “check” the citation information for the papers. This will be done using the SCOPUS service provided (no doubt at considerable cost) by   Elsevier, which by sheer coincidence also happens to be a purveyor of ridiculously overpriced academic journals. No doubt Elsevier are  on a nice little earner peddling meaningless data for the HECFE bean-counters, but I haven’t any confidence that it will add much value to the assessment process.

There have been high-profile statements to the effect that the REF will take no account of where the relevant “outputs”  are published, including a recent pronouncement by David Willetts. On the face of it, that would suggest that a paper published in the spirit of Open Access in a free archive would not be disadvantaged. However, I very much doubt that will be the case.

I think if you look at the volume of work facing the REF panel members it’s pretty clear that citation statistics will be much more important for the Physics panel than we’ve been led to believe. The panel simply won’t have the time or the breadth of understanding to do an in-depth assessment of every paper, so will inevitably in many cases be led by bibliometric information. The fact that SCOPUS doesn’t cover the arXiv means that citation information will be entirely missing from papers just published there.

The involvement of  a company like Elsevier in this system just demonstrates the extent to which the machinery of research assessment is driven by the academic publishing industry. The REF is now pretty much the only reason why we have to use traditional journals. It would be better for research, better for public accountability and better economically if we all published our research free of charge in open archives. It wouldn’t be good for academic publishing houses, however, so they’re naturally very keen to keep things just the way they are. The saddest thing is that we’re all so cowed by the system that we see no alternative but to participate in this scam.

Incidentally we were told before the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise that citation data would emphatically not be used;  we were also told afterwards that citation data had been used by the Physics panel. That’s just one of the reasons why I’m very sceptical about the veracity of some of the pronouncements coming out from the REF establishment. Who knows what they actually do behind closed doors?  All the documentation is shredded after the results are published. Who can trust such a system?

To put it bluntly, the apparatus of research assessment has done what most bureaucracies eventually do; it has become  entirely self-serving. It is imposing increasingly  ridiculous administrative burdens on researchers, inventing increasingly  arbitrary assessment criteria and wasting increasing amounts of money on red tape which should actually be going to fund research.

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Yet another side of the academic journal racket…

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on May 30, 2012 by telescoper

Another illustration of how the Academic Journal Racketeers (in this case one of the usual suspects, Elsevier) have a stranglehold on research. As well as levying huge subscription charges they also supply a service called SCOPUS which the panels in the Research Excellence Framework will use to inform their deliberations. Needless to say, SCOPUS itself is a subscription-only resource. The academic publishing industry is of course very keen on the Research Excellence Framework. It’s certainly an Excellent Framework when it comes to making money. Pity about the actual Research though.

Mike Taylor's avatarSauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Scopus bills itself as “the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources covering nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers.”

Sounds useful. But it’s useless. Literally.

Because it’s a subscription-only resource:

Now I am an associate researcher at the University of Bristol. UoB is part of the UK Access Management Federation, so I select that in the Shibboleth authentication page:

But the list of member universities doesn’t include Bristol, instead skipping straight from “University of Birmingham” to the intriguingly named “University of Bolton – Do Not Use”:

I can’t use it.

So it’s useless to me. Literally.

This is why it’s frustrating to me when I read statements like this from Elsevier’s Alicia Wise:

Commercial publishers are especially able to command resources to … develop new technologies and platforms to access journal content and improve researcher productivity (e.g., ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scirus, CrossRef, CrossCheck. Article of…

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Mike Taylor versus Graham Taylor…

Posted in Open Access on May 26, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s the official complete and unabridged version of Mike Taylor’s excellent point-by-point rebuttal of the Guardian article I posted about yesterday. Read it!

Mike Taylor's avatarSauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable.

It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments.  I did, but because my response was too long for the Guardian‘s comment field, I had to break it into three parts [part 1, part 2, part 3].

Here is the whole thing — Together At Last!

—

As we discuss the access crisis and Academic Spring, it’s great that the Guardian is allowing a platform to representatives of the academic publishing industry. It gives them a chance to demonstrate how utterly bankrupt their position is, and it’s kind of Graham Taylor to oblige. His article is a catalogue of distortions and mispresentations from start to finish.

I don’t…

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The Academic Publishing Empire Strikes Back

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on May 25, 2012 by telescoper

There’s an article in this morning’s Grauniad in which a representative of the academic publishing industry, by the name of Graham Taylor,  tries to counter the vociferous criticism that has been aimed at this sector in recent months. Mr Taylor is right when he comments that most of the furore relates to the issue of Open Access, i.e. the fact that academic  articles are often hidden behind paywalls when published, even when the research on which they are based is funded by the taxpayer.

Mr Taylor actually claims that the publishing industry is all for open access. Perhaps this is true, but if that’s the case it’s because they’ve been forced to that point by pressure from external agencies.  The latest sign of this pressure is a petition in the US to force taxpayer-funded research out into the open. I’m sure academic publishers are smart enough to read the writing on the wall, so it has now become politic for them to pretend that the proposals for open access were what they wanted all along.

However, the main thrust of Mr Taylor’s argument is that we must ensure that any new model of academic publishing is “sustainable”. What he means by that is that he wants academic publishers to be able to sustain their healthy profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer.  I disagree with his arguments in almost every respect, so much so that it actually made me rather angry to read the piece.

Here’s an example

The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving.

This description bears very little relation to what happens in my field. Journals do not “solicit” manuscripts – they just wait for submissions to arrive. “Managing peer review” merely involves farming the job out to unpaid external referees. “Editing and preparing scripts”? All journals I deal with require authors to typeset and copy-edit their own papers. “Producing the articles” is done by the authors! Moreover, everyone in my field also publishes their work for free on the arXiv. Articles can be disseminated over the internet at negligible cost via a number of routes as well as the arXiv.

No, Mr Taylor, the process of academic publishing you describe in your article went out the window years ago. Now virtually everything is done by academics apart from the bit at which the academic publishers really excel – the imposition of extortionate costs to maintain your profits. The fact is that the academic publishing industry is not only redundant but also parasitic. The only viable solution is to bypass it altogether.

Another particularly specious bit of argument is the following:

Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.

This may be the case, but the problem is that the money that underwrites this thriving export industry is taken from a budget that was intended to be spent on research. As the science budget dwindles – yes, it is dwindling – an ever-increasing proportion is being devoted to supporting these racketeers. Can you imagine the outcry if taxpayer’s money were used to support other private publishing interests, perhaps even the porn industry?

And consider this:

However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.

The real scandal is that the cost of journal subscriptions has gone up at all when the real cost of digital publishing has plummeted over the same period. All the price increase has done is line the pockets of folk who seem to think they have a God-given right to sponge off the public purse. And so what if they have created a plethora of extra journals? That’s just to acquire more raw material to mark up and sell on to the gullible consumer.

Returning to the subject of Open Access, Mr Taylor argues for a model in which scholarly publishers can continue to fleece the research sector but in a way that’s different from their current racket. They want authors to pay a huge fee up-front (a “paper management fee” perhaps £2000) to have their paper published. Such a system would have the merit of making research available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, but in terms of its function as a scam it is just as ludicrous as the current racket. Since authors do all the work anyway, there’s no reason to charge an amount anything like this. It simply does not cost  £2000 to publish papers on the internet!  Any fee of this magnitude would just be fed to the parasites.

The activities of academic publishing industry are no longer relevant when it comes to dissemination of research results; academics can do that for ourselves. You have done very well for yourselves at our expense, but you’ve been rumbled. Time to face the music.

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Another take on Academic Publishing..

Posted in Open Access with tags on May 6, 2012 by telescoper

Here’s another take on the Academic Publication racket that I found through a trackback to one of my posts. It misses the point in a number of places, but is well worth a read.

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My Guardian Science Blog…

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on April 20, 2012 by telescoper

Just a very quick post to direct you to a piece by me on the topic of Open Access and the Academic Journal Racket, which appeared today in the Grauniad Guardian Science Blog.

Here’s a taster, but for the whole thing you’ll have to go here.

 

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