The Panda's Thumb Legacy Archive — pandasthumb.net

<i>Nature</i> to make many articles widely available

Posted 24 December 2014 by Matt Young

I would not exactly call it a Christmas present, but today I happened to learn of a press release circulated by the Nature Publishing Group on December 2 of this year. The press release was not exactly a model of clarity, but if I understand it correctly, subscribers to any of a number of the publishing group's journals can legitimately make articles available to individual colleagues who are not subscribers. In addition, readers of "100 media outlets and blogs ... will be able to provide their own readers with a link to a full text, read-only view of the original scientific paper." Recognizing that "researchers are already sharing content, often in hidden corners of the Internet or using clumsy, time-consuming practices," Nature has decided to "present a new way to conveniently share and disseminate this knowledge using technology from one of our innovative and disruptive divisions -- Digital Science -- to provide a real solution to the global problem of how to efficiently and legitimately share scientific research for the benefit of all." I consider this development very welcome indeed.

13 Comments

Matt Young · 24 December 2014

Usage note. I have never seen disruptive used in a positive sense before. American Heritage Dictionary accepts that usage; Merriam-Webster does not (yet?). I understand about evolution, but I side with Merriam-Webster.

Palaeonictis · 24 December 2014

Matt Young said: Usage note. I have never seen disruptive used in a positive sense before. American Heritage Dictionary accepts that usage; Merriam-Webster does not (yet?). I understand about evolution, but I side with Merriam-Webster.
UBSBM is the owner of Merriam-Webster, and he doesn't want infidels to hijack the word disruptive, so he banned it from being used in a positive sense.

Steve Schaffner · 24 December 2014

Open access advocates are not exactly cheering Nature's move, e.g. this.

gdavidson418 · 24 December 2014

Imagine the boon to science when the same happens with BIO-Complexity.

Or don't.

Glen Davidson

Matt Young · 25 December 2014

Open access advocates are not exactly cheering Nature’s move ....

I'd certainly recommend reading the article linked to. Nature made no bones about their move being defensive, in a way. But I am not about to look a gift horse in the mouth (apologies for all the idioms) and assume their motives were nefarious: I was interested in the article and gained access to it with a click of the mouse. True, I could not (easily) save it, but all I wanted to do was scan the article and look at the figures. Finally, I sometimes find readers cumbersome and prefer a pdf even if I do not want to archive an article, but this one was easy to use, and the article was very readable. It is a fair point, though, that the reader provides a way to control the content. I had logged in to Science as a guest, by the way, so I did not have to be a member of AAAS to get the Nature article.

harold · 25 December 2014

Steve Schaffner said: Open access advocates are not exactly cheering Nature's move, e.g. this.
As a strong advocate of the idea of open access, I'll mention a number of the barriers to full acceptance. I'm a pathologist, not currently in academics, and have around 20 odd publications from my academic days, none huge impact, for full disclosure. Overwhelmingly the biggest barrier is the "prestige of a known journal name". As an analogy, I always recommend that young students who want to go to medical school to choose the cheapest good undergraduate university they can (since you can't control which medical school will accept you and may end up at a very expensive private medical school) - unless you are accepted by a university so famous that people who haven't gone to university have heard of it. Then brand name kicks in, and the slacker who stumbles out of "Harvard" or "Stanford" with a degree has a huge advantage over the brilliant graduate from Something State University, due to the fact that the superficial - i.e. most people - will view his "brand name" CV as superior. It's grotesque and unfair, part of America's rapid progression to an aristocracy of inherited wealth, but it's undeniable. Likewise, if I had a massively impacting publication, I'd have to consider submitting it to one of the more annoying and expensive for profit journals that have high prestige. If I put a high impact article in a low impact open source journal, it might create a trend. More likely, it would cause potential employers to make a superficial analysis and underestimate the value of my publication. The only way for open source to take off in a major way is for at least some of the really ground-breaking articles to go to open source journals. But the already established people tend to have informal relationships with the for profit journals, and the up and coming people can't take the serious risk of submitting to a journal that might not look "impressive" on their CV, to some chairperson. A lot of people do things like add up the impact factors of the journals listed on a CV. It creates a huge disincentive for any movement away from the established for-profits. And of course, every academic biomedical library always has a subscription to the biggest journals. That dynamic may be less perverse outside of the US, but not necessarily much less so. A second, more benign factor is that in my field, many of the field-specific high impact journals, not all but many, are the organs some sort of "society". For example, if you join the American Society of Hematology, you get the journal Blood in any form you want, and there are many other benefits to joining ASH. Societies like ASH typically offer cheap membership to grad students and trainees. So some journals border on being "open source" for those directly involved in a particular field. But that leaves out everyone who isn't involved enough in hematology, hematopathology, or something related to consider being a member of ASH. (Arguably, trying to get one of these societies to convert its house journal to full open source (*if that has not already been done*) might be a good strategy. Unlike the publishing houses, the "societies" are ostensibly non-profit. They would still need to provide print to older members, but might conceivably consider going open access. They don't gain anything obvious by paying to have paper journals printed. Many, many members pay the full dues and get electronic versions of the journals already. And many society house journals are quite high impact.)

thlawry · 26 December 2014

As a long time subscriber to Nature and Science, there is one difference between their access policies which I find particularly annoying. Science makes ALL of its back issues freely available to subscribers, all the way back to 1887 or whenever the first issue was. And many of their "classic" articles (which really are classic) are free to everyone. Whereas Nature only makes back issues available to 1997. I don't know why Nature has got to be so damn cheep.

harold · 27 December 2014

I doubt if my comment will get much response, but I'll clarify a few potentially controversial parts here -
unless you are accepted by a university so famous that people who haven’t gone to university have heard of it. Then brand name kicks in, and the slacker who stumbles out of “Harvard” or “Stanford” with a degree has a huge advantage over the brilliant graduate from Something State University, due to the fact that the superficial - i.e. most people - will view his “brand name” CV as superior. It’s grotesque and unfair, part of America’s rapid progression to an aristocracy of inherited wealth, but it’s undeniable.
Harvard and Stanford are amazingly great institutions, just as Nature, Science, and other high impact journals are amazingly high quality publications. No denigration of overall quality, nor of the accomplishment of people accepted to these fine institutions or journals, was intended. While my comment about "aristocracy" is clearly mildly exaggerated to make a point, I stand by it. Despite the overall high quality and value to humanity of these entities, there are various ways for people with various types of social connections to gain use of these names. The most important article in a less prestigious journal may be of equal value to what will later be the least important article in an issue of Nature, and the least deserving student at Harvard is undoubtedly equaled by many more deserving students at less famous universities. Americans talk "meritocracy" but even in professional sports, the athletes on the field must perform or be cut, but the coaching and administrative staffs are laden with sons (not daughters) of established coaches and administrators. Americans do tend to judge more by social affiliation than by individual merit. Don't get me wrong, a paper won't get into Nature unless it is extremely interesting and original. Nature and Science are more meritocratic than most other institutions. Sure, it helps a great deal, to put it mildly, of your paper comes from MIT with a famous name on it, rather than from a less famous institution without a famous name. It would be a simple experiment to show that essentially equal papers receive biased treatment based on those factors. But my point here is not to deny the obvious high quality of these journals. It's to note that the "brand recognition" factor creates a bit of a quasi-monopoly, which is a challenge for open source.

Carl Drews · 29 December 2014

Matt Young said: Usage note. I have never seen disruptive used in a positive sense before. American Heritage Dictionary accepts that usage; Merriam-Webster does not (yet?). I understand about evolution, but I side with Merriam-Webster.
I have heard disruptive used in a positive sense in the context of Open Access from John Wilbanks of Creative Commons. The idea is that Open Access is disrupting the strangle-hold that traditional journals have established on scientific research. You can think of the American Civil Rights Movement as disruptive of Jim Crow laws and other practices that hurt minorities. Disruptive technologies cause upheaval in the established system, whatever that system may be. There is usually a shake-out following the disruption, and dinosaurs who cannot adapt go extinct (Dixiecrats?). In the scientific publishing industry, the enormous and sudden success of PLOS ONE is a result of that disruption. In my own scientific publishing I have no use for Science and Nature. Their acceptance rates are way too low, and I'm not willing to wait 6 months to a year for my manuscript to bounce back for non-scientific reasons. Yes, the publication fee for PLOS ONE is $1350, and that money has to come from some budget somewhere. But page charges at traditional journals can easily run over $1000, and so the cost justification for Open Access is easy. PLOS ONE's impact factor of about 4 is just fine for me - when I care about impact factors, which I usually don't. Somebody in my institution may be counting up my peer-reviewed papers, but anyone who is multiplying each paper by the journal impact factor is keeping their activities well hidden! When I evaluate a scientific publication I look for sound reasoning, not the impact factor of the journal. By the way, my job title is Software Engineer, not Scientist. (From Stanford University, too!) Here is an example at PLOS ONE: Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion This paper has received 204,375 views since it was published on August 27, 2014. Do you think they would get nearly that many views following Nature's "personal sharing" method? Not a chance.

Carl Drews · 29 December 2014

Steve Schaffner said: Open access advocates are not exactly cheering Nature's move, e.g. this.
The linked article states:
In addition to allowing subscribers to share links to read-only, DRM filled articles, many news organizations and science blog networks will be able to share these links with their readers. The lay-person interested in science may benefit the most from this program, since they may now be able to at least view the primary research article on which a news story is based.
How does the news sharing work? Surely I don't have to be personal friends with the science reporter (even if I like them just fine).

Carl Drews · 29 December 2014

Looky here! John Wilbanks himself has commented on Nature's Way: http://del-fi.org/post/104125242971/natures-shareware-moment
John Wilbanks said: I got contacted in advance for my take, and I really did think long and hard on this. I wanted to be impressed. I wanted to believe in it. I wanted to be courteous, to find common ground. And I am certainly pleased they included the backfile of old papers in their strategy, a longtime gripe of mine. But I can’t praise. I just can’t. The ability to beg for a link, to be opened in a closed ecosystem that literally disables core functions on your device like “print” and “screenshot”…that’s not an advance. It’s a canonization of a system that privileges the wealthy academic. It’s a canonization of a system that says it’s ok to pay for documents while simultaneously losing all rights. It’s a canonization of a system that says a small number of companies not only do control the world’s knowledge, but should control all the world’s knowledge.

harold · 29 December 2014

PLOS ONE‘s impact factor of about 4 is just fine for me - when I care about impact factors, which I usually don’t. Somebody in my institution may be counting up my peer-reviewed papers, but anyone who is multiplying each paper by the journal impact factor is keeping their activities well hidden! When I evaluate a scientific publication I look for sound reasoning, not the impact factor of the journal. By the way, my job title is Software Engineer, not Scientist. (From Stanford University, too!) Here is an example at PLOS ONE: Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion This paper has received 204,375 views since it was published on August 27, 2014. Do you think they would get nearly that many views following Nature’s “personal sharing” method? Not a chance.
First let me state that I believe that in the twenty-first century, peer-reviewed scientific publications should be open source. The historical print journals have a legacy of high quality content and high quality physical publishing. Having said that, the reason for paying to have journals printed up by publishing houses was only ever to disseminate the material as effectively as possible. Even early science, let alone grant funded science, never followed a fiction-publishing based model of scientists getting royalties for having their articles read by the general public. Print publishing of journals is like steam locomotives - beautiful, worthy of nostalgia, but anachronistic, and ready to be replaced by better things. I wish everyone in every field had the same logical attitude that Carl Drews expresses here. Hopefully that day is coming. I presume everyone understood that when I discussed potential barriers to full acceptance of open source across all fields, I was doing so in the interest of discussing how to best and most efficiently eliminate those barriers.

Matt Young · 29 December 2014

I think they should be open-source too. I think they should be published by professional societies and non-profits, not proprietary publishing houses. They are not. Too bad for me! In the meantime, if Nature allows me to read a full article that is cited by Science, I am not going to bite their hand.

P.S. I once published an article in Optics Communications because they had no page charges, but that was in about 1972, before I knew better. The bottom line for many people is the page charges, nevertheless.

P.P.S. The Dixiecrats did not go extinct; they became Republicans. I suppose you could consider that an adaptation, but it was actually little more than a name change.