Sci Journals, authors, internet
On Monday 10 June 2002 22:20, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Jason Holt wrote:
copyright issues? Why haven't I seen other papers published on usenet and such before going to press?
???? This is a joke right?
Copyright, they want it as the exclusive distributor which they can't do if it's been published somewhere else.
Which is especially impressive since some journals not only wanted the authors to basically give up their copyright but wanted the authors to pay for publication. My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently? SRF -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Vote Idiotarian --- it's easier than thinking
On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
On Monday 10 June 2002 22:20, Jim Choate wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Jason Holt wrote:
copyright issues? Why haven't I seen other papers published on usenet and such before going to press?
???? This is a joke right?
Copyright, they want it as the exclusive distributor which they can't do if it's been published somewhere else.
Some electronic journals, some conferences and some print journals now let authors retain copyright or, if they keep copyright, allow authors to do what they please with their work. It's far more typical, though, for the journal to get all rights, except perhaps classroom use (aka "fair use") by the author.
Which is especially impressive since some journals not only wanted the authors to basically give up their copyright but wanted the authors to pay for publication.
(And then charge the author's institution a fortune to subscribe to the same journal.) I think that there are still some journals iwth these "page charges," in which the employer or (more likely) some grants are expected to pay for publication. This was prevalent in the sciences, not arts and humanities. I never had to pay any, but information science (me) is more like a social science than a hard science in many ways. I *have*, this year, been told that a journal would be happy to publish my screen shots in color for a few $thousand per page, but would do them in B&W free.
My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently?
Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation in the publishing industry. Ejournals are making in-roads, especially in some fields, and are breaking some patterns. Print publishers are working to "extend and embrace" some of the new models. Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued "serials crisis" where the price increases in print journals far exceeds any other cost. There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing. -- Greg
On Monday, June 10, 2002, at 08:55 PM, Greg Newby wrote:
On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently?
Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation in the publishing industry. Ejournals are making in-roads, especially in some fields, and are breaking some patterns. Print publishers are working to "extend and embrace" some of the new models.
Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued "serials crisis" where the price increases in print journals far exceeds any other cost. There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing.
Anyone here who has not already done so should immediately type "xxx.lanl.gov" into their browser. (No, the "xxx" is not a typo, nor is it a porn site.) This is where physics papers are getting published. The print journals are surviving, barely, but I think the handwriting is already on the wall. As libraries balk at paying $6000 per year for "Journal of Advanced Aptical Foddering" and as the referee system goes online as well (*), the print journals will financially fail. Maybe no one will notice. As John Baez has pointed out, most of the grad students he deals with never visit the campus library. All papers of interest in cosmology, quantum physics, solid state, etc. are being published on the arXhive sites. In the last few months, I've been using this system extensively, and have downloaded about 2500 pages of PDF files. I know how many pages because I've printed out most of the papers. Five reams of paper later.... For why my printing out the papers does not vitiate my arguments about the death of tree-based publishing, think about it for a moment. (* The referee system could be more richly nuanced with an online rating system. At the simplest, a vote of N referees, as today. But some papers could be marked "speculative, but not bullshit" (or somesuch). In other words, a two-dimensional rating system, or higher. And, as all Cypherpunks know, the longer-term future is "anyone can publish, but expect users to have sophisticated agents filtering the junk." For the next decade or so, I expect the xxx.lanl.gov approach will be sufficiently better than paper publishing that it will dominate. Then will come the more advanced approaches. But tree-based publishing is dying.) For those concerned with the "sanctity and durability of paper," all sorts of obvious solutions exist. CD-ROMS, DVDs, archival-quality tape and discs, distributed publishing a la Eternity (and my own 1995 proposal), digital time-stamping, etc. --Tim May "Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"
On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Steve Furlong wrote:
Which is especially impressive since some journals not only wanted the authors to basically give up their copyright but wanted the authors to pay for publication.
My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently?
Only many years ago - the first paragraph describes what I dealt with then. Has it changed any? Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Steve Furlong wrote:
My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently?
In practice these days many scientists put copies of their stuff on personal or institutional websites, perhaps regardless of journal's objections. If you Google for the authors of recent papers you often find something, quite often something closely resembling their next paper. There is a difference between refusing a paper that has already appeared elsewhere and trying to enforce copyright after paper publication. Most journals try the first, many no longer try the second. It really depends how much clout they have. /Nature/ might be able to enforce their embargo by the mere threat of not publishing your next paper. /The Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society/ might be less fearsome. I doubt if anyone makes a fuss about papers presented at scientific conferences or privately distributed to colleagues (how "private" is "private" is up to the editors I suppose) Abstracts, posters, and so on don't usually count as prior publication - science could hardly function if they did. Some publishers - such as the American Society for Microbiology - say they won't accept papers published on a non-personal website, but don't mind those that have appeared on a private website. Also data can be published as long as it doesn't "constitute the substance of the submission". Biomolecular journals often /require/ that data (especially sequence data) be freely available online. /Nature/ also allows personal republication: "we are happy to extend to all authors the rights laid out in our new licence agreements in respect of the material assigned to us: to re- use the papers in any printed volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own (not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy) their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and tables." (http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xml&style=xml/05_faq.xsl) /Science/ still demands exclusive copyright as far as I know. (http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/faq/copyright_faq.shtml) but explicitly allows not-for-profit online "reprints" /after/ publication. These days, if your paper is /not/ online, it is less likely to be read. So it is in the interest of the scientist to get it as widely available as possible. Publishers walk a fine line between over-exposure, reducing potential paper sales, and annoying their contributors. On-line access to material has now become a 100% necessity in almost all fields. Most people looking up papers start with abstracting services and citation indexes such as SCI, which is available to research institutions through various deals (ours come through http://tame.mimas.ac.uk), or Medline (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html), Current Contents, EMBASE & so on, all of which are now online. If a journal isn't abstracted (both the ones mentioned above are) it is unlikely to be read except by a small group. Many journals and publishers make some or all of their full texts available on line to subscribers, and a large minority make them available to non-subscribers. Some put recent papers on their websites and withdraw them later, others are print-only for the first year or two and upload older stuff. There are also a number of commercial web archives to which you can subscribe - but of course a great many research institutions do, so many scientists are used to seeing things online. I can see a lot of things from Science Direct (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) or Elsevier. others like PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed). There are old papers archived in places like JSTOR. In the fields I have looked at most - microbial ecology, evolutionary biology - I reckon I can read rather more than half of the relevant papers online, about half of those freely the rest because we subscribe to various services. In straight microbiology the proportion is probably higher, largely because of the American Microbiology Society which puts a lot of its publications on the website. (Such as http://intl-aem.asm.org/ - they also say they throttle the site allowing no more than 1 download per minute per remote site) A lot of learned societies are in effect either charities or government-funded, and so are less concerned with profit. For example the US National Academy of Sciences now puts new papers up daily, often some time before they appear in print - the latest version has Quint, Smith, et al (2002) "Bone patterning is altered in the regenerating zebrafish caudal fin after ectopic expression of sonic hedgehog and bmp2b or exposure to cyclopamine" which is as good a title as any http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/122571799v1 Loads of review & "current" journals are online as well. The "Annual Reviews" are all online (though not all available to nonsubscribers) which are good places to start.
participants (5)
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Greg Newby -
Ken Brown -
Mike Rosing -
Steve Furlong -
Tim May