Brian Glanz is one of the organizers of Open Science Federation. The OSF is a nonprofit organization which has the goal of making science information more accessible, and historically it has done that by connecting scientists with online technology. There is a core team involved including Brian which has been together since 1999, and they used the phrase “open science” even then. The OSF has promoted lots of projects which are significant for what they are, and some that have been what I would call successful, but does not have the characteristic of being recipient to steady income. Money is a measure of power in many ways; I am not sure what to think of the OSF. The ideas are great, the technology is here now and it was not a few years ago, and social reasons make organizations like OSF much more relevant now than they were a few years ago, but I rarely know how to assess small organizations.
We organized a meeting On Friday 30 December and talked for three hours. It was Brian, Garrett Cobarr whose site is Whole Thinking, Jacob Caggiano of Journalism that Matters and Future Soup, Christopher Sheats of the Washington Pirate Party, Mark Swanson and I.
We talked about the problems of academic journals. The traditional model for publishing in academic journals is that they publish research articles written by scientists who submit them to the journal. The journal arranges a peer-review for the articles, then publishes the article which its editorial system finds to be best. The journal’s marketing team then sells the journal, usually to libraries along with many other journals which a third party sells as a collection of subscriptions. One example of a commercial online database through which a library may access articles in their subscribed journals is Elsevier, so technology exists to serve online articles to users. This system is problematic for the following reasons:
- Much of the research which scientists do is government-funded. The scientists write the articles then donate them to journals, which publish them as commercial content. The public pays taxes for the research, then pays the publishers when public libraries buy their journals. Some people say that the journals are overpriced because online publishing is extremely low cost and their publishing fees are extremely high.
- The journals are each private entities whose editorial boards have bias. They choose what to publish and what to not publish and the views of the journal board may not reflect the desires of contemporary scientists in the field.
- The journals are not infinite in size. They cannot publish all good information, whereas another media like an online repository would be limitless.
- The peer review process is not transparent.
- The journal review process has become outdated as compared with contemporary internet culture.
- Journals promote the use of copyright on articles which they publish, whereas many scientists may want their work freely distributed.
The Open Science Federation works in many projects and especially with the Northwest Association of Biomedical Researchers (NWABR), but it does not currently have a megaproject of international utility. Right now we are exploring our options for getting involved somehow in journal reform.