(apologies for cross-posting)
A petition you should care about: require free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
http://access2research.org/http://wh.gov/6TH
25,000 signatures in 30 days (by June 19) gets an official response from the White House.
Dario
> But the underlying hostility is a problem that bothers me a lot and I have
> been trying to think of ways to bridge the gap.
My understanding has been that historically, edits to articles from
academics with strong credentials are not treated any differently than
edits from anyone else. This has resulted in many academics spending loads
of time editing an article only to be 'reverted' by a single click from a
Recent Changes Patrol, or to be slapped on the wrist with "citation
needed". This has resulted in many misunderstandings, which often did not
get a chance to be discussed in public, because academics often don't have
time to go round and round with someone on Wikipedia talk page.
I believe the culture at Wikipedia has always been that knowledge from
anyone is treated equally. While I admire that principle, it doesn't quite
jive with the academic credential culture, where opinion based on
experience and authority actually counts for something. Go to a faculty
meeting, and you shall see a Full Professor's opinion being weighted more
than an assistant professor just starting out on tenure clock.
There is in operation a Wikimedia Foundation Education program that is
> small and
> will not, in my opinion, scale up easily to the size needed.
Agreed. It's a culture that you're trying to change. Yes, an bridge
program can help, but it won't 'solve' the fundamental cultural differences.
--Ed
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians
how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a
scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of
scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional
salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a
fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the
advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American
History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of
editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate
articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by
their own universities to do this kind of high prestige
"service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and
service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is
$83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff
members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana
University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight
years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book
reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select
the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000
available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted
and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best
10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted
articles and are backed by a major university library (which is
expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that
are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for
meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high
quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed
and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there
but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to
develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary
source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
Actually, I don't think the visibility of public reviews would be likely to result in higher quality reviews. Blind review exists (at least in part) to protect the reviewers and enable them to provide an honest opinion on a submission without having to worry about the retribution for a negative review (e.g., negative reviews on their work in return, not getting recommended for funding or promotion, etc.). Such worries would be particularly problematic for junior faculty or students. I would expect signed reviews to be much more anodyne. You might also imagine the reverse, that someone might submit a falsely positive review hoping for some reward down the road. Blind reviewing does create some problems, but AFAIK it's nearly universal in academic publishing. It would be easy to permit or require anonymous comments though. Or perhaps revealing the names only if the paper is accepted.
Double blind review (meaning that the authors' names aren't known to the reviewers) would also be more difficult in this system. The intent of double blind reviewing is to encourage reviewers to review the paper and not the author. On the other hand, it's often pretty easy to guess who the author is even without the name attached to the paper, which may be why double-blind reviews are not universal.
It's also worth noting that the main problem with peer review is getting reviewers at all, since there's little reward for reviewing and it takes a fair amount of effort to write a good review--note that a paper might be 40 pages and a review several pages long (at least in my field--there's a lot of variation in publication norms from field to field). One argument for reviewing is that you get to read papers earlier, but if everyone can do that anyway, then there's not much incentive to spend the effort crafting a careful review afterwards. It could be though that the volume of comments or the discussion among commenters would compensate for less depth in any single review--it would be interesting to see how that balanced out. Given the small size of research communities and the ratio of readers to contributors on Wikipedia, I wouldn't expect a flood of comments on papers in most subdisciplines though.
On 22-May-2012, at 6:46 PM, FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 3. A key change would be that reviewers' identities would be public.
> Although this would remove the usual complete separation of author and
> reviewer, it also means that the reviews, the relationships, and the
> approach will be completely public and itself open to scrutiny for all
> future time. For those whose repuytation and career rest on clearly
> ethical behavior in their academic work, this might be if anything at least
> as powerful an incentive to review within community guidelines. Future
> emergence of any untoward behavior, or any strange attitudes or unexpected
> review posts at review will be picked up on, and this total transparency
> has the potential to be as effective an encouragement of highest standards
> and deterrent of ethical breach as any formal separation.
Kevin Crowston
Syracuse University Phone: +1 (315) 443-1676
School of Information Studies Fax: +1 (815) 550-2155
348 Hinds Hall Web: http://crowston.syr.edu/
Syracuse, NY 13244-4100 USA
On 05/15/2012 03:38 PM, Chad wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'd like to invite anyone who is interested in Git, Gerrit and
> code review to office hours I will be holding on IRC next
> week. Here are the full details:
>
> Channel: #wikimedia-dev on Freenode
> Date: May 22, 2012
> Time: 18:30-19:30 UTC (13:30 EDT, 11:30 PDT)
> Subject: Git/Gerrit
>
> I will be on hand to answer any questions you have about
> the git migration so far, the process moving forward, and
> anything else interesting you can think up.
>
> Have a great week, and I hope you can join us next Tuesday!
>
> -Chad
A reminder that this is in 8 minutes and will last one hour. If you
don't have an IRC client application in your computer, you can read and
talk in the chat via this webpage:
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-dev .
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
Han-Teng Liao highlights a very serious issue regarding the large
gulf between Wikipedia and academe. University students appear to be
enthusiastic users of Wikipedia while the professors either shy away
or are quite hostile and warn their students against Wikipedia.
One factor is academe's culture of original research and personal
responsibility by name for publications, versus Wikipedia's culture
of anonymity and its rejection of the notion that an editor can be
respected as an expert.
A second factor is the need for editors to have free access to
published reliable secondary sources. I think Google-scholar and
Amazon have solved much of the editors' access problem regarding books.
As for journals--which is where this debate started--I do not think
that open access will help Wiki editors much because I am struck by
how rarely Wiki articles (on historical topics) cite any journal
articles. I've offered to help editors get JSTOR articles but no one
ever asks. There is something in the Wiki culture that's amiss here.
Possibly it's that few Wiki editors ever took the graduate history
courses that explain how to use scholarly journals.
Maybe we need a program to help our editors overcome this gap and
give them access to a massive base of highly relevant RS.
Richard Jensen
For Wikipedia editors perhaps the most useful feature of the typical
article in a scholarly journal is the opening section that summarizes
the state of the debate on a specific issue. Here you can get in a
nutshell what the main issues are and who is taking what position,
with citations to the main publications, In history articles, very
few editors make use of this. That is a serious research failure on
the part of Wikipedia, in my opinion.
Richard Jensen
thanks for the note--
I largely agree. Are relations between Wiki and Academe better in
UK? I hope so
Richard
At 12:51 PM 5/21/2012, you wrote:
>Hi Richard,
>
>Apart from Featured Article work, I suspect that a very large
>proportion of our referencing is driven by Google search and
>latterly Google Books. There have been a few schemes to give the
>more active editors accounts with various reference sources - some
>Highbeam accounts were recently divvied out, and a large proportion
>of us in the UK can get such subscriptions via our libraries. But if
>the first phase of Wikipedia was people writing what they knew, we
>are still largely in the second phase with most of the sourcing done
>via the Internet.
>
>It would be interesting to see if there were many takers for a
>training session on using other sources, but with the majority of
>our editors, and especially the content creators, being graduates,
>post graduates or current undergraduates it would be a fair
>assumption that a very large proportion of our editors know how to
>access journals, but it would be interesting to find out whether
>they don't do so due to lack of time lack of access or some other reason.
>
>
>As for the idea that students use the pedia and professors disparage
>it, that is of course something of a simplification, a few months
>ago I met someone who'd been to a Cambridge meetup and been in the
>minority of non-professors present. But Cambridge will of course be
>ahead of the game in this sort of thing. I suspect the main issue
>here is conservatism, and in a few years time Academics who are
>hostile to Wikipedia will be as common as Academics who despise
>electronic calculators.
>
>This issue of experts and Wikipedia is more complex. Wikipedians are
>rightly suspicious of "experts" who claim that their innate
>knowledge should override that of reliable sources. But experts who
>clearly know their subject, can communicate it to a general audience
>and can furnish sources to back up their content are usually well
>respected, especially if they waive pseudonymity and use their
>userpage to link to their University page. The areas where that
>doesn't quite work tend to be ones where Academic views are
>contentious in real life. Climate change being an extreme example.
>
>
>Regards
>
>
>WSC
>
>On 21 May 2012 18:26, Richard Jensen
><<mailto:rjensen@uic.edu>rjensen(a)uic.edu> wrote:
>Han-Teng Liao highlights a very serious issue regarding the large
>gulf between Wikipedia and academe. University students appear to be
>enthusiastic users of Wikipedia while the professors either shy away
>or are quite hostile and warn their students against Wikipedia.
>
>One factor is academe's culture of original research and personal
>responsibility by name for publications, versus Wikipedia's culture
>of anonymity and its rejection of the notion that an editor can be
>respected as an expert.
>
>A second factor is the need for editors to have free access to
>published reliable secondary sources. I think Google-scholar and
>Amazon have solved much of the editors' access problem regarding books.
>
>As for journals--which is where this debate started--I do not think
>that open access will help Wiki editors much because I am struck by
>how rarely Wiki articles (on historical topics) cite any journal
>articles. I've offered to help editors get JSTOR articles but no
>one ever asks. There is something in the Wiki culture that's amiss
>here. Possibly it's that few Wiki editors ever took the graduate
>history courses that explain how to use scholarly journals.
>
>Maybe we need a program to help our editors overcome this gap and
>give them access to a massive base of highly relevant RS.
>
>Richard Jensen
>
>
>_______________________________________________
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><mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Wiki-research-l mailing list
>Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Dr. Jensen,
You ask who will pay for publication of journals under the open access model.
Closed access journals are supported primarily by university libraries
which pay subscription fees to publishers. Very rarely do the
publishers pay anything to the editors and reviewers who produce the
journals, but they pocket a continuously increasing profit margin,
which has been increasing at about 1% per year, and currently stands
at about 27%, per
http://www.reedelsevier.com/mediacentre/pressreleases/2012/Pages/reed-elsev…
In order to achieve such continually increasing profit margins,
publishers have been forcing price increases through bundling, which
is an abuse of their monopolistic market power which lack of
competition from alternative publishing models has allowed them to
attain.
Under the open access model, universities pay to support the
publication and printing of the journals, but do not pay subscription
fees. Because there is no profit margin charged, these costs are less
to the university than commercial subscription fees, and the resulting
readership is not limited to a tiny fraction of the population.
(Because costs to the universities are less, they can keep more of the
money for university official perks and salaries, tax deductible
junkets for the faculty, and athletic salaries. Sadly, universities
hardly ever pass any savings on to tuition payers. Every subsidy and
loan guarantee supporting tuition in the postwar era has been matched
by tuition increases above the cost of living, sadly, while university
administrative official salaries have kept pace with CEO salaries
generally, exacerbating income inequality, and increases in faculty
salaries, perks, and expenses have also exceeded the inflation rate.)
As you point out, this situation often results in greater charges to
graduate students, unless their sponsors and grant investigators are
kind enough to include the journal production fees in their department
budget. How often does that happen?
Your example of journals charging per-paper open access fees is an
example of subtle extortion in order to cause professors such as
yourself and other authors to take the position that you have, opposed
to open access. Are there any reasons to the contrary? Are there any
reasons that participation in such market manipulation schemes could
be seen as ethical?
Sincere regards,
James Salsman
The funding agencies in the U.S. typically provide a) publication
page-charges by the journals; b) "indirect costs" which are used to
fund the library purchase of journals as well as run the campus. The
notion that taxpayers "should not pay twice" seems to say that a) and
b) should be ended. Furthermore no one will need to pay for a journal
subscription to read the contents, which (I predict) will lead to a
very large falloff in (c) paid subscriptions. The petition will mean
journals that get their funds from a-b-c, will be sharply curtailed
financially. (there are also membership societies that have journals
and I think they will lose a lot of subscribers too.) So who will
step in to support the academic journals?? the taxpayers? the tuition
payers? the foundations? I fear none of them will.
Richard Jensen