(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
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH – as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide – has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the
financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy
of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
There are at least two schools of thought on open access. If there are businesses that make their way through closed journal subscriptions there are also avenues for publishing open access. Libraries are increasingly finding it difficult to pay for journals as the charges for bundled journals are increasing dramatically. Some academics are actively boycotting Elsevier. It is not surprising that this is a time when people are questioning the existing model and looking for other ways to publish and access scientific data. Certainly (imho) it is logical that public funded data should be available for use by the public. Perhaps it is time for those publishing to see why people are questioning the value of the existing model and to reconsider their value proposition.
Janet
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:31 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Richard, I don't want to take over the thread to push a personal opinion, the purpose of my mail was to share an important petition that I believe many on this list should be aware of.
Since you mention "editors and scholars" and the purpose of "paid subscriptions", though, let me add a short note. I don't know about you, but as reviewers and editors most of us do editorial work as a service to the profession: we don't get paid by publishers, we are not subsidized by journal subscriptions. The (closed-access) journals I've been involved with as editorial board member are not threatened by open access: if anything they are threatened by the unsustainable fees that the publisher charges universities and consortia. Academia (that is, authors, reviewers, editors, students) is not supported by journals fees (it would be awesome if it were), publishers are, and in my opinion it's about time to change this.
Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 11:01 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Let's ask: Who will pay for publication? taxpayer=no, tuition = no; university = no; there is one more option that is adopted when open access is required. Here's the notice at the website of a British journal: http://journals.physoc.org/site/misc/publicaccess.xhtml
"To assist authors whose funding agencies mandate public access to published research findings sooner than 12 months after publication The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology, ...currently offer authors the option of paying an open access fee to have their papers made freely available upon publication. The fee is US$3,000."
That is the author pays $3000 to the journal for each article it accepts.
Fees at other journals mostly run from $1000 to $5000 (If you are a graduate student living on $15,000 a year as a teaching assistant and you need to publish to get a job, well there goes your lunch money. Two articles?...that's rough) see the list of charges at major journals at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html
The history and sociology journals I know about hire grad students who will lose their jobs if the journals' funding declines.
Richard Jensen
Some regular journals charge to make an article open access. It is their approach to open access. Other models exist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:20 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Let's ask: Who will pay for publication? taxpayer=no, tuition = no; university = no; there is one more option that is adopted when open access is required. Here's the notice at the website of a British journal: http://journals.physoc.org/site/misc/publicaccess.xhtml
"To assist authors whose funding agencies mandate public access to published research findings sooner than 12 months after publication The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology, ...currently offer authors the option of paying an open access fee to have their papers made freely available upon publication. The fee is US$3,000."
That is the author pays $3000 to the journal for each article it accepts.
Fees at other journals mostly run from $1000 to $5000 (If you are a graduate student living on $15,000 a year as a teaching assistant and you need to publish to get a job, well there goes your lunch money. Two articles?...that's rough) see the list of charges at major journals at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.html
The history and sociology journals I know about hire grad students who will lose their jobs if the journals' funding declines.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Dear Richard,
I am not sure the difference lies in the different viewpoints of editors and scholars on one side, and taxpayers on the other. Let us just say in terms of practices and empirical evidence, journals in various disciplines have their own choices to be made adopting free versus open access (though the choice is increasingly less binary these days). Then can we move on by respecting different alternatives to change and/or maintain status quo?
However, to me it is much an important differences in terms of institutions. You have university/research institutions who conduct research on one hand, and you have publishing institutions who provide indexing and accessing services on the other. And each of them could be public or private institutions, with different sets of revenues and goals. Not every interest of institutions are properly aligned like major university such as Oxford which have both major research institution and major publishing institution. Thus, it is possible for research/teaching institutions like Princeton (which has also good publishing institution) to make a conscious decision to adopt an open access policy as below:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/09/29/28869/
While it is not a "pure" open access policy, it is a policy that highlight the interests of research/teaching institutions may not be aligned perfectly in every case. Perhaps in your own experience, the tensions (if not conflicts) of interests in teaching/researching on one hand and getting revenue/money to run a publishing work can be managed in your context, and the benefits to introduce open access outweight the disruptions and potential issues it may cause.
Here the nature of "public" institutions such as Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities may and should have another set of approaches in dealing with open access policies and push whatever they think is the best for them and for the eco-system of research and publishing.
Therefore, instead of taking a grand stance (almost to the ideological level) regarding for or against open access, I suggest that a practical (even to the mundane level of to-do laundry lists of pros versus cons) approach is better for institutions and communities to find the most appropriate solutions for them. Here, Dario as a researcher working for Wikimedia Foundation whose institution is defined legally largely with its signature open access license, has a mission of free knowledge for all, and has a user base which may lean a bit to open access concepts and practices, it is conceivable that he asks the members in this mailing list to sign up for the petition. It is difficult to argue that the petition is not in the overall interest of Wikimedia as an institution, Wikipedia as a free knowledge for all practice, and arguably most important of all, allowing non-university or poor-university researchers /wikipedians to improve articles.
So chill and relax. If you think Dario is really joining an opposing force that will change the academic and media environment as you know it for the worse, then it is a very big (and sort of US-based if not -centric) public policy debate to be have. But I am curious, can you lay out any reasons why Wikimedia or Wiki researchers should oppose this idea here in this mailing list, given the some of the obvious positions they have on open content licenses?
Best, han-teng liao
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of
journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more
dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 ______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
sorry a typo here: (in the first paragraph) adopting "non-"free versus open access
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 3:17 PM, Han-Teng Liao hanteng@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Richard,
I am not sure the difference lies in the different viewpoints of editors and scholars on one side, and taxpayers on the other. Let us just say in terms of practices and empirical evidence, journals in various disciplines have their own choices to be made adopting free versus open access (though the choice is increasingly less binary these days). Then can we move on by respecting different alternatives to change and/or maintain status quo?
However, to me it is much an important differences in terms of institutions. You have university/research institutions who conduct research on one hand, and you have publishing institutions who provide indexing and accessing services on the other. And each of them could be public or private institutions, with different sets of revenues and goals. Not every interest of institutions are properly aligned like major university such as Oxford which have both major research institution and major publishing institution. Thus, it is possible for research/teaching institutions like Princeton (which has also good publishing institution) to make a conscious decision to adopt an open access policy as below:
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2011/09/29/28869/
While it is not a "pure" open access policy, it is a policy that highlight the interests of research/teaching institutions may not be aligned perfectly in every case. Perhaps in your own experience, the tensions (if not conflicts) of interests in teaching/researching on one hand and getting revenue/money to run a publishing work can be managed in your context, and the benefits to introduce open access outweight the disruptions and potential issues it may cause.
Here the nature of "public" institutions such as Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities may and should have another set of approaches in dealing with open access policies and push whatever they think is the best for them and for the eco-system of research and publishing.
Therefore, instead of taking a grand stance (almost to the ideologicallevel) regarding for or against open access, I suggest that a practical (even to the mundane level of to-do laundry lists of pros versus cons) approach is better for institutions and communities to find the most appropriate solutions for them. Here, Dario as a researcher working for Wikimedia Foundation whose institution is defined legally largely with its signature open access license, has a mission of free knowledge for all, and has a user base which may lean a bit to open access concepts and practices, it is conceivable that he asks the members in this mailing list to sign up for the petition. It is difficult to argue that the petition is not in the overall interest of Wikimedia as an institution, Wikipedia as a free knowledge for all practice, and arguably most important of all, allowing non-university or poor-university researchers /wikipedians to improve articles.
So chill and relax. If you think Dario is really joining an opposingforce that will change the academic and media environment as you know it for the worse, then it is a very big (and sort of US-based if not -centric) public policy debate to be have. But I am curious, can you lay out any reasons why Wikimedia or Wiki researchers should oppose this idea here in this mailing list, given the some of the obvious positions they have on open content licenses?
Best, han-teng liao
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 7:01 AM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of
journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more
dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 ______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Bills for what?
Dead tree publication? Obsolete, switch to print on demand.
Online publication? Once you have free access (no need to set up a "web shop" and collect money), web publishing is relatively simple. Hundreds of thousands if not millions have created web pages, and it is much easier to do so now than it was in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if there already was an OA journal friendly host and/or website creation kit; if there isn't, creating one wouldn't be a major problem (for the kit, free hosts like Google Sites are even less of an issue). If a given editing team has next to zero Internet literacy, ask among the grad students (hire one or get them to volunteer).
Labor? As in authors? Editors? Reviewers? It's not like they are being paid under a current model.
To sum it up, the only real cost associated with journal publishing is that of a single grad student who acts as an assistant/managing editor. That's the cost of about $1,000-$1,500 a month. That doesn't seem terrible, considering the potential sources of funding (universities, grants, professional associations and donations). And as much as I hate to say it, if this amount is really a problem (let the slaving grads starve...), that job could be outsourced for a fraction of that cost to somebody through the Internet freelancing portals. Consider that you can hire people for $20-$30 an hour for such tasks, and consider how many hours really go into this kind of a job...
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/21/2012 2:01 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands
of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even
more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Piotr's evaluation is very much in tone with what happens in Brazil, where all journals are open access.
For journal publishing tools, most journals here use the Public Knowledge Project: http://pkp.sfu.ca/. I would also refer to you the SCIELO project (again?): http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php.
Indeed, costs would include revising, copydesk and page design - usually covered here by a grant for a graduate student.
Juliana.
Dear all, After reading some of the diverse practices in the world regarding open access, allow me share with you one experience that I have with the paid access one. One of the interesting online business in mainland China is selling some kind of grey-access to all major journals/academic databases and even some US university VPN access. I am not sure whether the business model is legitimate. Still many university students can buy them easily online, even pay for access just for a month. My guess is that they expand the business model in selling China's own knowledge database called CNKI. Just give you one example of this as below: http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=9171367599 Taobao is the equivalent of ebay in China. Best, han-teng liao
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 8:24 PM, Juliana Bastos domusaurea@gmail.comwrote:
Piotr's evaluation is very much in tone with what happens in Brazil, where all journals are open access.
For journal publishing tools, most journals here use the Public Knowledge Project: http://pkp.sfu.ca/. I would also refer to you the SCIELO project (again?): http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php.
Indeed, costs would include revising, copydesk and page design - usually covered here by a grant for a graduate student.
Juliana.
-- Profa. Dra. Juliana Bastos Marques Departamento de História - CCH/UNIRIO
http://historiaunirio.com.br/ http://www.historiaunirio.com.br/numem/pesquisadores/julianamarques/ http://www.domusaurea.org/
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Bills for what?
Dead tree publication? Obsolete, switch to print on demand.
Online publication? Once you have free access (no need to set up a "web shop" and collect money), web publishing is relatively simple. Hundreds of thousands if not millions have created web pages, and it is much easier to do so now than it was in the past. I wouldn't be surprised if there already was an OA journal friendly host and/or website creation kit; if there isn't, creating one wouldn't be a major problem (for the kit, free hosts like Google Sites are even less of an issue). If a given editing team has next to zero Internet literacy, ask among the grad students (hire one or get them to volunteer).
Labor? As in authors? Editors? Reviewers? It's not like they are being paid under a current model.
To sum it up, the only real cost associated with journal publishing is that of a single grad student who acts as an assistant/managing editor. That's the cost of about $1,000-$1,500 a month. That doesn't seem terrible, considering the potential sources of funding (universities, grants, professional associations and donations). And as much as I hate to say it, if this amount is really a problem (let the slaving grads starve...), that job could be outsourced for a fraction of that cost to somebody through the Internet freelancing portals. Consider that you can hire people for $20-$30 an hour for such tasks, and consider how many hours really go into this kind of a job...
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/21/2012 2:01 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Sorry Dario, you need to look at it from the editors' and scholarls point of view and not say you are thinking of the "taxpayer"--journal prices have gone up but taxes have gone down, so that's not a real issue. I've been on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals & all would be in real trouble on free access. Who would pay their bills? Who would pay their grad students? Already they are threatened by declining university budgets and losing the subscription base would be a terrific blow. "Access for the "taxpayers" / "taxpayers pay twice" is a rhetorical tool designed to defund science. It is the professors and graduate students who need the journals and who would be hurt when they close.
Richard Jensen
At 11:45 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of
journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more
dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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.
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what I find concerning is the sentiment expressed in the original email: "a petition you should care about," esp. where "care about" seems to mean, "will want to sign."
my understanding is that wiki-research-l is about research into and about how the wikis work. it is not, as far as I know, a platform for political endorsements, especially for ones not directly related to wikimedia (which this is not). the petition takes a political position about an issue not directly related to the wikis, although i do not deny that it may be of interest to wikipedians--but so are many things.
is it not possible that some of us on this list might have a different take on the underlying issue, and that while we might also care about the topic that is raised, we may not actually endorse the position taken by the petition, and our reluctance might actually be considered and genuine? (as a matter of fact, in this case, I think I do support the petition, but its use of vague and categorical language makes me hesitant to sign it. the NIH policy you reference and which i do endorse includes at least two provisions not clearly indicated in the current petition: [1] the NIH policy specifically and exclusively refers to principal investigators and the institutions of *direct NIH-funded research*, a much narrower category than whatever is meant by "taxpayer-funded research"; [2] the NIH policy requires copies of publications to be deposited in a central free repository [PubMed], but does not comment on the existence of non-open source publication venues. this petition asks for "free access over the internet," which does not sound like the same thing as PubMed, even if that's what's meant; it sounds like it *might *mean "no more journals that charge for access," which in my opinion is an explosive request that attacks the livelihoods of many people of good faith.) The NIH policy, for reference: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm.
given the recent and in my opinion unwarranted and misguided attack on the nonprofit journal aggregator JSTOR on this list (somewhat retracted by the person who made the original comments, including the strange assertion that "we"--presumably readers of this list and contributors to wikipedia--"are unaffiliated scholars"), I would hope some care would be taken in approaching this matter in particular. some of us are academics and some of us do not, apparently, see it is as transparently obvious that all our work product should be available absolutely for free. (although i wholeheartedly endorse the widespread creation in US colleges and universities of institutional repositories wherein all professorial research is made available for free to anyone; i make all of my work available this way and have for over a decade, and I believe this kind of policy is rapidly becoming the rule here).
i honestly don't see what the petition has to do with wiki-research-l, but at the very least, an acknowledgement that the rest of the list readers are intelligent human beings, perhaps some of us even working academics, who may want to read the material and make up our own minds would strike me as indicating the respect you ask Richard Jensen to display.
one of Richard Jensen's earlier postings was about ways to get more working academics to participate in Wikipedia, which i do see as an ongoing issue of real concern. i did not see a big outpouring of support for his desire on this list, which worries me. I see signs of persistent assumptions that we do not read this list and are not part of the community, and I include the wording of the original post in this--since among other things, this petition is a direct request for the government to intervene in the working relationship between academic scientists and their publishers, and this list is run by neither academic scientists nor publishers and does not generally discuss policy issues regarding their conduct. Such assumptions do not inspire me to contribute more, or to encourage my colleagues to do so. I hope these assumptions are not widespread and I hope we are welcome to be part of the community.
On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 1:45 AM, Dario Taraborelli < dtaraborelli@wikimedia.org> wrote:
With all due respect, your statement is simply false and ill-informed. The NIH – as well as a growing number of large research institutions and funding bodies worldwide – has been mandating open access for 4 years and I'd like to see any evidence that this is "destroying peer review". There are many sustainable open access models that publishers and scholarly societies are adopting, the only thing this campaign is threatening is the taxpayer's obligation to pay twice for research they have already funded.
Best, Dario
On May 20, 2012, at 10:30 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of
journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more
dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 2:59 PM, David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com wrote:
i honestly don't see what the petition has to do with wiki-research-l
The purpose of this list is "to discuss scientific research into the content and the communities of the Wikimedia projects".
An example of such research is the recent editor survey, which states (cf. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/05/10/59-percent-wikipedians-started-anonymou... ; emphasis added): "We asked editors to choose the top three problems with Wikimedia culture that have affected them personally, making it harder for them to edit. The most commonly picked responses were: Other editors who feel that they own specific articles and don’t want others to collaborate (46 percent), too many rules and policies (41 percent), editors who are not fun to work with (39 percent) and *lack of access to research materials like scholarly articles or books (39 percent).*"
In another survey (cf. http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AExpert_Participa... ), it turned out that Wikipedia contributors are much more likely to have all their academic papers available online than scholars not contributing to Wikipedia. Conversely, practitioners of Open Access are more likely to contribute to Wikipedia than their peers who are less engaged in Open Access.
The problem of lack of access also applies to research of the kind normally discussed on this list, as highlighted by the icons in use to signal OA-ness in the reference section of the Research Newsletter (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-30/Recent_... ).
In all these cases, there is a link between Wikimedia and Open Access. More such links exist, and some are explored in a special report in last week's Signpost (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-05-14/Special... ). Last but not least, the Wikimedia Foundation as well as Wikimedia Germany and Wikimedia Poland are signatories of the Berlin declaration on Open Access to Scientific Knowledge (cf. http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/signatoren/ ), one of the core documents of the Open Access movement.
To sum up, the petition addresses an issue that is relevant to the list in several ways, so posting it here would just seem natural.
Cheers,
Daniel
Peer review is not working very well as it is.
If you want to fix peer review, redirect a fraction of the current journal profits to actually pay reviewers (if only - for the timely reviews).
Piotr, who currently has one article waiting for a reviewer for 13 months, and another, for 11. Sigh.
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/21/2012 1:30 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
The alternative of direct government subsidy of journals is even more dangerous, as it will give politicians control over what gets published.
Richard Jensen
At 11:19 PM 5/20/2012, you wrote:
(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 _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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<quote who="Richard Jensen" date="Sun, May 20, 2012 at 11:30:13PM -0600">
that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for years as the main quality control system --peer review--is destroyed.
If the result of that turmoil is that tax-payers get access to the research they funded and that the product of scientific knowledge is increasing accessible without pay-walls and fees that create roadblocks and exacerbate existing inequalities, I am willing to put up with a little turmoil.
There are already thriving open access journals in many fields and plenty of reasons to believe that peer review is not at risk. But even if we had no idea *how* things would work out, let's not let a lack of imagination keep us from standing up for something that is right. Access to scientific knowledge is deeply important -- and a key part of why Wikipedia exists today. Just as Wikipedia has does in the area of reference works -- and lets not pretend Wikipedia growth has been without turmoil -- let's *make* it possible.
Regards, Mako
Cannot resist the comedic irony I just think of.
"Tear down this pay wall, or otherwise I will buy a cheap access acount from Taobao!"
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@mit.edu wrote:
<quote who="Richard Jensen" date="Sun, May 20, 2012 at 11:30:13PM -0600"> > that's a bad idea--it will destroy the financial base of thousands > of journals and throw the whole science community into turmoil for > years as the main quality control system --peer review--is > destroyed.
If the result of that turmoil is that tax-payers get access to the research they funded and that the product of scientific knowledge is increasing accessible without pay-walls and fees that create roadblocks and exacerbate existing inequalities, I am willing to put up with a little turmoil.
There are already thriving open access journals in many fields and plenty of reasons to believe that peer review is not at risk. But even if we had no idea *how* things would work out, let's not let a lack of imagination keep us from standing up for something that is right. Access to scientific knowledge is deeply important -- and a key part of why Wikipedia exists today. Just as Wikipedia has does in the area of reference works -- and lets not pretend Wikipedia growth has been without turmoil -- let's *make* it possible.
Regards, Mako
-- Benjamin Mako Hill mako@mit.edu http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto
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Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review cannot be crowd sourced or self-organized?
It seems that most circles, societies and recognitions of learned people and experts are in effect self-organized, in that those who are deemed expert are deemed such by other experts. So a self-organizing peer review system based on collaborative wiki-like principles seems conceptually possible.
In the context of a wiki, I could imagine a review system something like this:
1. Paper is published in "Draft:" space, where anyone can contribute, critique, collaborate (if the owner wishes), discuss with the author, or suggest observations on its "Draft talk:" page. 2. When the author/s feel ready for formal review (or other criteria of the community) the paper is "frozen" and reviewers are decided. Perhaps there will be a page where author/s inform the community they want to move a paper to review, and members of the community nominate themselves or otherwise agree who the formal reviewers will be. As with normal peer review there may be reviewers with specialist skills or expertise, or a balance of reviewers, and some papers will surely attract more scrutiny than others. The merits of the paper will surely influience and be judged by the caliber of its reviewers. 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. 4. When reviewers are agreed, the paper is moved to "Review:" space. The old talk page (now "Review talk:") remains open for general participation, and a new page "Review discussion:" is opened for formal review. 5. The paper is reviewed, and if needed edited. If so decided fresh reviewers may be needed at some point. When review and editing seem complete and no further edits or responses by reviewerrs are likely, the community considers whether the paper should be moved to the "Paper:" namespace which is spidered and treated as published by the community.
Disclaimer, I'm not an academic so I have no idea whether exactly this model is already in use somewhere. If so, what are its shortfalls and how does it work in practice?
FT2 On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@mit.edu wrote:
If the result of that turmoil is that tax-payers get access to the research they funded and that the product of scientific knowledge is increasing accessible without pay-walls and fees that create roadblocks and exacerbate existing inequalities, I am willing to put up with a little turmoil.
There are already thriving open access journals in many fields and plenty of reasons to believe that peer review is not at risk. But even if we had no idea *how* things would work out, let's not let a lack of imagination keep us from standing up for something that is right. Access to scientific knowledge is deeply important -- and a key part of why Wikipedia exists today. Just as Wikipedia has does in the area of reference works -- and lets not pretend Wikipedia growth has been without turmoil -- let's *make* it possible.
Regards, Mako
-- Benjamin Mako Hill mako@mit.edu http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote:
Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review cannot be crowd sourced or self-organized?
Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are making billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*)
"In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journ...
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the discussion Richard has raised.
i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences. that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under attack here next.
what we are talking about here is *non-profit publishing*. that is what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not making "billions": making* no profit at all*. JSTOR, previously attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100 years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free.
your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the US Government to intervene in the business of charging for* not-for-profit* academic publications. it could be taken to be asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark.
Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is *any *wage labor OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it.
On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard, Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of which does not come from taxpayer funds.
there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime?
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote:
Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review cannot be crowd sourced or self-organized?
Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are making billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*)
"In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/**02/14/science/researchers-** boycott-elsevier-journal-**publisher.html?_r=1http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
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Thank you for clarifying the issue, I was not aware of the existence of the non-profit non-open content journals. Their existence is certainly not a crime, and people who help out with them are to be commended; I am certainly not endorsing any attack on them (nor am I seeing any here...).
With regards to US funding of education, speaking from personal experience, I hear my collegues at the University of Pittsburgh complain a lot about how they are being affected (negatively) through recent cuts in government funding. How much that can be generalized, I frankly don't have time to research right now, but I am pretty sure that not an insignificant portion of paychecks that Pitt's professors are drawing comes from the taxes on US citizens. Given that, I do find it a problem that their work may be locked behind a paywall, be it for-profit or not.
The main argument in criticizing such non-profits, as far as I understand it, is idealistic: society (scholars, Wikipedians, etc.) would benefit if all research would be free. Locking it behind a paywall drains resources that could be invested in other pursuits, and limits the content only to those who can afford it (a portion of scholars in rich countries).
Now, here's a more constructive (if very theoretical) proposal to consider. Let's assume that a non-profit journal like ''The Journal of American History'' needs to put its content behind a paywall to generate enough $ to stay afloat, in addition to the funds received from the university (although I am a bit confused here, Richard mentined that the staff is paid by the university, so what are the funds for? Office rental?). Anyway, the funds the journal receives come either from the university, or (through some intermediaries) from various other universities (their libraries). It stands to reason that a more efficient way to distribute the funds would be to direct them straight to the journal, obtaining savings (no need for intermediaries), and at the same time allow the journal to operate as an open content one. In other words, in this model the journals are distributed free, and sustained by the money that currently is given to the libraries to buy them.
To sum it up, what some people are criticizing, I believe, is the assumption that the we cannot reform the current model to end up with one where the journal content is freely available online. This can be done, just like many other free things were created in cyberspace (Linux, Wikipedia, many open content journals...).
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/22/2012 8:29 PM, David Golumbia wrote:
i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the discussion Richard has raised.
i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences. that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under attack here next.
what we are talking about here is /non-profit publishing/. that is what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not making "billions": making/no profit at all/. JSTOR, previously attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100 years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free.
your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the US Government to intervene in the business of charging for/not-for-profit/ academic publications. it could be taken to be asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark.
Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is /any /wage labor OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it.
On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard, Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of which does not come from taxpayer funds.
there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime?
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Piotr Konieczny <piokon@post.pl mailto:piokon@post.pl> wrote:
On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote: Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review cannot be crowd sourced or self-organized? Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are making billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*) "In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1 -- Piotr Konieczny "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com mailto:dgolumbia@gmail.com
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I'm glad this conversation was steered back to the original concern that Richard Jensen raised, because I too don't think it has been adequately addressed.
That said, it seems that his objection is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of open access mandates. It seems that he is reacting as if the mandate is for scholarly journals to provide their articles for free (or force them out of business as researchers switch to free access journals), but I think this is a gross mischaracterization. I don't claim to be know the details of every mandate that has been made, but here's what I understand a grant agency open access mandate to usually entail:
*Instead of readers of scholarly articles paying for the privilege to read the articles, the cost of dissemination should be shifted to the grant funding agency.* Thus, whenever a grant funding agency mandates open access publication, it always (to my knowledge) provides funds to cover such publication.
In the petition that Dario posted, there is a claim that "the highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process" [1]. In the referenced policy, NIH explicitly affirms that they pay publication costs as part of their mandate policy [2]. Thus, I understand the petition to request a mandate that all US-government funded research do the same: mandate open access publication plus provide the funds to pay journals for such publication.
A common response to such policies is that an increasing number of publishers (including our beloved Elsevier [3]) are adopting a "hybrid" open access policy. Very simply, this means that they still charge regular journal access fees, but if anyone insists on open access, then the publisher is more than happy to oblige to make an individual author's article open access as long as the author (usually funded by their grant agency) forks over $2,000 to $3,000 to release their article from paywall bondage.
In short, Richard Jensen, this proposed mandate does not attempt to undermine the funding structure of scholarly journals. The only significant change it would push on journals is to adopt a hybrid open access policy, in which they would ask authors to show them the money if their grant funder requires open access publication. While the high cost of open access publication might be debatable, I see no financial threat to scholarly journals, as long as they are willing to make basic changes in their funding structure to keep up with the times.
On a related note, referring to the related thread "real scholarship is expensive", I have to question the description of the costs involved in producing /The Journal of American History/. On looking it up, I find that it is the flagship journal of The Organization of American Historians [4]. According to my general observation, a journal like that, in addition to its function as a leading scholarly publication, also serves as a cash cow for funding a non-profit scholarly society. I am not questioning a scholarly society's need for funding, but I question that the journal alone needs such a large full-time paid staff, beyond the volunteer "staff" of reviewers and editors that is typical of scholarly journals. I might be mistaken, but the staff described sounds to me like the (necessary) staff of a scholarly society office, not that of a standalone scholarly journal.
Regards,
Chitu Okoli Associate Professor in Management Information Systems John Molson School of Business Concordia University, Montréal http://chitu.okoli.org/pro
[1] http://access2research.org/Petition [2] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/FAQ.htm#810 [3] http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/open_access [4] http://www.oah.org/publications/
-------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Access2research petition De : David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com Pour : Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date : 22 Mai 2012 20:29:26
i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the discussion Richard has raised.
i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences. that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under attack here next.
what we are talking about here is /non-profit publishing/. that is what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not making "billions": making/no profit at all/. JSTOR, previously attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100 years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free.
your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the US Government to intervene in the business of charging for/not-for-profit/ academic publications. it could be taken to be asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark.
Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is /any /wage labor OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it.
On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard, Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of which does not come from taxpayer funds.
there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime?
the staff described sounds to me like the (necessary) staff of a scholarly society office, not that of a standalone scholarly journal.
No, the Organization of American Historians (the sponsor) has its own entirely separate office down the street. The organization budget about breaks even every year--there is no "cash cow."
In addition to the Journal of American History there are over 1000 smaller scholarly history journals in the U.S., typically sponsored by academic history departments or historical societies. Of the several dozen i know about, all of them are edited and vetted by paid professionals. Probably many of the smallest ones are local affairs that are indeed operated by volunteers and cater to a local audience.
What's relevant to Wikipedia is that Wiki editors are not allowed to do original research. We are required to base our articles on published reliable secondary sources. In history we do not do very well -- Wikipedia is good at military history, mediocre at political history and poor at social & cultural history. Despite the bitter feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe, that Wikipedia depends upon paid professionals for its material. -- I am referring of course not to the thousands of Wiki articles on video game or TV characters but to the serious material that bears resemblance to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Better yet, compare Wiki with the hundreds of other academic encyclopedias that you can find in university libraries. The quality of content of those paper history encyclopedias, in my professional judgment, is significantly better than Wikipedia.
Richard Jensen
Thanks for the clarification about the Journal of American History; I guess I was mistaken.
Responding to your other comment, I am surprised at your frequent jabs at "the bitter feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe". This is not at all obvious to me, and I doubt it is "obvious" to most people on this list. I've been editing Wikipedia off and on since 2003, have been involved in various Wikipedia lists (like this one), and have never experienced this perceived anti-academic sentiment (though I do hear people talk about it sometimes, like you now).
For sure, I don't go about editing and presenting myself as some sort of authority--I assume that any authority I might have should show in my contributions, and I let them speak for themselves (not that I am an extensive contributor--I am not). I've never faced this kind of problem that you refer to.
On the contrary, I frequently encounter the sentiment of trying to get more academics to participate in Wikipedia. Ironically, this very list is one of the strongest expressions of that pro-academia sentiment, which makes it especially odd that you somehow feel animosity from "the Wikipedians here". Or perhaps I misunderstood your reference to "here".
Chitu Okoli Associate Professor in Management Information Systems John Molson School of Business Concordia University, Montréal
Phone: +1 (514) 993-6648 http://chitu.okoli.org/pro
-------- Message original -------- Sujet: Re: [Wiki-research-l] quality control De : Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu Pour : Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date : 22 Mai 2012 23:21:35
What's relevant to Wikipedia is that Wiki editors are not allowed to do original research. We are required to base our articles on published reliable secondary sources. In history we do not do very well -- Wikipedia is good at military history, mediocre at political history and poor at social & cultural history. Despite the bitter feelings that are obvious among the Wikipedians here toward academe, that Wikipedia depends upon paid professionals for its material. -- I am referring of course not to the thousands of Wiki articles on video game or TV characters but to the serious material that bears resemblance to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Better yet, compare Wiki with the hundreds of other academic encyclopedias that you can find in university libraries. The quality of content of those paper history encyclopedias, in my professional judgment, is significantly better than Wikipedia.
Richard Jensen
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Fou...
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
Richard Jensen
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe.
There's certainly a reflex against the Appeal to Expertise. But on balance I would say Wikimedians have an appreciation and enthusiasm for academia. (many active contributors have connections there, as students, grad students, profs or researchers.)
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes.
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library... provide access to sources... Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources
These are both great ideas.
I believe something like a) has happened at a few universities, if not at scholarly conventions. Conventions might reach a cross-section of hundreds of institutions at once. And something like b) has happened at various libraries. There has been interest in doing that in Boston with focus on a particular field or type of special collection.
Sam.
De: Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu Para: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: Enviado: Miércoles 23 de Mayo de 2012 6:30 Asunto: Re: [Wiki-research-l] - solutions re academe & Wiki
Hi Richard.
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well, it is true that this mismatch exists, mainly due to a different culture clash (academia vs. open distributed production of knowledge).
I wouldn't characterize this as a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. In fact, it affects all communities that follow the commons-based peer production paradigm. Adaption will be progressive, and not very fast, since academia has been following its current procedures since decades ago.
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Fou...
Perhaps the huge success of Wikipedia, and the fact that it was adopted by millions of persons around the world at a very fast pace may introduce some bias in our perception of what is 'scaling up' effectively. For sure, there are thousands of universities and it might not be very realistic to think that 90% of faculties will happily integrate Wikipedia editing in their classes next year. Moreover, there are additional factors that, depending on the case, can make it a bit difficult to succeed in this endeavour (for instance, I'm thinking about "conflicts of interest" created by students that will be evaluated, struggling to introduce content and hard-working wikipedians trying to maintain articles in good shape). However, the undeniable truth is that Wikipedia has now become a commodity for 99% of students (and scholars) today. We will have to learn how to help each other to use our resources in mutual benefit.
That said, I suspect that discontinuing this support in USA and Canada is not linked to either a lack of interest from WMF in this area, or a low level of success of this program. Funding is limited, and now enough start-up materials have been produced and many people (ambassador/students/faculties) have been trained in different univerisities. The next logical step, I would say, would be to let them act as the new broadcast points for others, so that there is any opportunity for the system to scale up (even if slowly). A centralized model could never attain the same capillarity.
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
That is true, and it is something that the program is already doing in different countries. As I said, there is a huge interest from many scholars. Just as an example, faculties attending the last seminar I gave at University of Salamanca ('Workshop on Wikipedia editing') sold out free seats within the first 24 hours after the initial announcement. Most of attendees came from the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. There were also some librarians. For some of them, it was their first contact with Wikipedia editing.
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
This is definitely a very nice suggestion. I concur in that it could be a way to nurture the knowledge stream in the other direction (academia --> Wikipedia). Nevertheless, I still think that wikipedians will tend to favor open access references, in the same way that (willfully or not) people favor the open access Wikipedia on their web pages boosting these links to the top of results from search engines. On top of that, not anyone have access to certain references, since they do not have access to digital resources in university libraries or they do not have public libraries that pay access fees for those references. Perhaps this could be another opportunity for effort distribution, given that many quality references are not going to be freely accessible in the mid-term.
Cheers, Felipe.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ----- Mensaje original -----
To be clear, my rhetorical flourish was not a hostile reaction to the academy itself (I am a dissertating PhD candidate after all) but to rather to its members' patronizing attitudes as embodied by Richard's mischaracterization of Piotr's point and institutional powers' model of profiting from others' freely-given labor while actively undermining competing approaches to knowledge production. While there is a long-standing tension on Wikipedia between openness and credential fetishism going back to Larry Sanger's (failed) editorial process for Nupedia, (failed) attempts to institute a "defer to experts" policy on Wikipedia (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deferring_to_the_experts), and (failing) attempts to have unpaid experts write and regulate Citizendium, expanding the academe's participation in Wikipedia is an entirely different matter from resisting an arrangement in which the actors which add the least value to scholarship have a tendency to profit the most. To be sure, open publication models (e.g., First Monday, PLoS ONE) introduce substantially more variability in the type and quality of scholarly contribution, but insofar as there are no marginal costs for digital distribution, why not let a thousand (peer-reviewed) flowers bloom and the community of scholars adjudicate their value should citation and replication? As for JSTOR being "non-profit", that sobriquet hides any number of sins (see "health insurance providers") -- you're welcome to extrapolate the difference between the revenue associated with ~3000 US institutions licensing some combination of JSTOR's 20 collections at an average annual price of ~$10k (http://about.jstor.org/fees/13008) and compare them with $17m in annual expenditures of the Wikimedia Foundation.
While proprietary and open models for scientific knowledge publication each have their drawbacks, casting lots with the model having greater and more pernicious shortcomings through appeals to authority will not win many over. I don't understand how substantive peer review process will be substantially different under an open versus walled model. In the US, each still involves submissions funded by predominately by federal grant money or subsidized by (diminishing) state contributions, editorial control and review from hundreds of scholars freely giving their labor as a partial condition of employment by their home institutions, and distribution and archival in online databases supported and subsidized by institutional librarians. I don't believe anyone is arguing that knowledge production is free-as-in-beer: each academic domain will have different needs for scholarship (book reviews for history, rapid turnaround proceedings for computer scientists, etc.). Rather, these petitions reflect my belief that scholars should refocus their work towards outlets which limit the opportunity for Elsevier, et al. to enrich their shareholders to the considerable detriment of the austerity-wrecked citizens, scholars, and their academe who actually pay for and create this value.
Finally, I believe we would be remiss as proponents of open publication if we did not also demand open publication of underlying data, programs, and algorithms and importance of replication as crucial components of scholarly work as we transition to new and more open models of science.
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Education_Working_** Group/Wikimedia_Foundation_**Rolehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Foundation_Role
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
Richard Jensen
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Richard, you queried in a previous posting whether relations between Academia and Wikipedians were better in the UK. But I suspect that no-one is truly in a position to answer that. In both the US and the UK the situation will be complex, some Academics are Wikipedians, some Academics judge us by the quality we'd achieved by 2006 and really need to check again and reassess the project. Some Academics respect and value us for the way we try to teach today's kids not to cut and paste. Others despair at us as the source of much of the plagiarism they receive from students.
Of course this is a very different issue to the debate about Open source freely available journals, a debate where some people on this list have strongly held and diametrically opposed views. Wikipedia is a Tertiary source not a Primary or Secondary one and cannot exist without those primary and secondary sources. So their continued health matters to us, but clearly there is a divide as to how that continued health is to be achieved, and indeed defined. Wikimedia is itself very much a part of the open source movement, but that doesn't mean that all Wikimedians believe that everything should be open source.
As for your two suggestions about attending scholarly conferences and working with libraries, there has been a different emphasis between the US and the UK in the last couple of years. Here in the UK we have prioritised outreach to GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), whilst the US prioritised Universities.
That seems to be shifting, with the UK expanding its education links: < http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/EduWiki_Conference_2012%3E http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_strategy
Whilst the US is now expanding its GLAM program.
I have participated in editathons we've had in the UK at both the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, I didn't take part in the British library one, but I gather it was a success. I think that would count as one of your "training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library". The sort of articles coming out of these collaborations include http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoxne_hoard
WSC
On 23 May 2012 05:30, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Education_Working_** Group/Wikimedia_Foundation_**Rolehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Foundation_Role
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
Richard Jensen
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
The approach of getting university resources for Wikipedians is a necessary one. I've asked the foundation to make JSTOR a priority for 5 years now. This year they responded: they explicitly dropped it from the strategic plan as too low a priority. And to get active Wikipedians to use existing library collections on their own account is probably even more difficult. But it is possible: the NYC chapter has had two good workshops with the NYPL, and two with the Princeton archives.
On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Fou...
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
The cited comment might have been a bit over the top, although Brian explains it in this thread. I do have to agree with others that I have not seen much if any of this hostility on Wikipedia, and even the discussion here seems a good illustration that such hostility is rare and rather good faithed.
I have seen once an academic collegue I respect a lot leave Wikipedia after (he has done few edits) having been accused of spamming (he was linking the same academic article on too many pages). The editor who warned him was too blunt, my collegue was too annoyed with a simple message and overreacted along the lines "so I am not welcome here - goodbye", sad but happens. It was, however, the only time I can recall that I've seen an academic leave this project.
I'd say that the problem in academia-Wikipedia relation is that there are too few academics editing it, and this is because for most of them (us...) editing Wikipedia does nothing for our job careers. I am a sociologist, and I've written dozen of sociology related DYKs, several Good Articles and one or two Featured ones on subjects of core importance to my discipline, useful for educating public and teaching students (my Good/Featured Articles are bios of sociologists that are present in all books used for teaching "Sociological Theory" and similar courses). Eventually I feel confident I could bring enough of such bios to Good/Featured article that they would replace the books we currently use, contributing to the open textbook movement. But such work is not recognized by the academia, and my job chances are hurt because when I write an article for Wikipedia, which are freely read by thousands people a day (http://stats.grok.se/en/latest/Karl_Marx is probably my most popular one) I am not writing an article that would be published in a traditional, peer-reviewed and most likely pay-walled journal, read by a tiny faction of readers that read what I write for Wikipedia - but it is such article that my colleagues care, not Wikipedia ones. I like to think that my contributions to Wikipedia are helpful for my discipline, providing free education to students and other knowledge seekers, but I know that they are next to worthless on my CV. And when I talk to my colleagues, be they grad students or veteran professors, I get the same reply time and again about why they think Wikipedia is cool but they don't contribute to it: "it does nothing for my CV/job prospects/tenure review; I have a journal article/book chapter to write/conference to prepare for, so I have no time to write for Wikipedia".
If we want to encourage cooperation between academia and Wikipedia, we have to make it worthwhile for academics to contribute to Wikipedia - worthwhile in terms of their careers. One of the ways to do so would be to have professional organizations for our respective professions institute an award for popularization of the respective discipline on Wikipedia. Till that happens, and till we start treating Wikipedia contributions on par with publishing in peer reviewed publications, the collaboration between Wikipedia and academia will be an exception than the rule, not because of some hostility, but because in the world of cash economics (as some have reminded me), we cannot afford to contribute much to a utopian project that does not pay back, neither in $ nor in professional reputation.
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/23/2012 12:30 AM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Sadly I think this discussion demonstrates some hostility toward academe. (here's a quote from yesterday addressed to me on this list: "...knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production. Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history." I would code his emotional tone as "hostile")
Well it's always nice to see people citing the lessons of history, especially since I'm a specialist in that sort of OR. 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. 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. In any case the Foundation plans to cut the US-Canada program loose in 12 months to go its own way. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/Wikimedia_Fou...
My own thinking is currently along two lines:
a) set up a highly visible Wiki prsence at scholarly conventions (in multiple disciplines) with 1) Wiki people at booths to explain the secrets of Wikipedia to interested academics and 2) hands-on workshops to show professors how to integrate student projects into their classes. (and yes, professors given paid time off to attend these conventions, often plus travel money.)
b) run a training program for experienced Wiki editors at a major research library. (I'm thinking just of Wiki history editors here.) For those who want it provide access to sources like JSTOR. Bring in historians covering main historiographical themes. I think this could help hundreds of editors find new topics, methods and sources that would lead to hundreds of thousands of better edits.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
one of my favourite academic minds (Eben Moglen) speaking about innovation under austerity and disintermediation =) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8
Hi Piotr, hi all,
Piotr, I like your idea about instituting awards because awards may help younger researchers in particular to try something new that their bosses are not likely to have tried out by themselves, e.g. contributing scientific or otherwise research-related stuff to Wikipedia
in my opinion, any idea that helps academics accept open science more wholeheartedly will in the long run benefit Wikipedia and the wikification of scientific publishing
On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:48:27 -0400, Piotr Konieczny wrote [...]
If we want to encourage cooperation between academia and Wikipedia, we have to make it worthwhile for academics to contribute to Wikipedia - worthwhile in terms of their careers. One of the ways to do so would be to have professional organizations for our respective professions institute an award for popularization of the respective discipline on Wikipedia.
let me illustrate this by an example: two words in your post ("for our respective professions" and "award") made me think I might point you to a contest for a scientific award that is currently running, until 31 May which is hosted by an open access journal in Leukemia research et al. (Cellular Therapy and Transplantation, http://www.ctt-journal.com)
the contest's first phase was run in a discussion forum on the journal's site with a subsequent traditional upload of papers to be reviewed by a Jury (whose names were publicized in advance), with the best six papers to be published in that journal afterwards
phase II of the contest is run in a blog, with the blog comments being potentially rewardable (by a prize in money, by votes etc.) and each comment getting its own doi http://maximowaward.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/blog-comment-contest-10-31-may-... terminology/
the organizers think that such a contest is likely to be the first step for researchers in this field to use Web 2.0 for scientiific purposes and in an open science frame.
the next step would be to invite potential authors of this journal to contribute articles in the format of Topic Pages that could easily be "wikified" (thanks to Daniel's initiative, see e.g. his recent mail http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wiki-research-l/2012-May/002124.html)
Q: does anyone know of similar initiatives in medicine or other fields that might help speed up some kind of habit change and maybe enhance new practices among researchers that get them closer to Wikipedia? or maybe of some specific criticism of any award in this regard?
thanks & cheers, Claudia koltzenburg@w4w.net
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 6:28 PM, Benj. Mako Hill mako@mit.edu wrote:
If the result of that turmoil is that tax-payers get access to the research they funded and that the product of scientific knowledge is increasing accessible without pay-walls and fees that create roadblocks and exacerbate existing inequalities, I am willing to put up with a little turmoil.
There are already thriving open access journals in many fields and plenty of reasons to believe that peer review is not at risk. But even if we had no idea *how* things would work out, let's not let a lack of imagination keep us from standing up for something that is right. Access to scientific knowledge is deeply important -- and a key part of why Wikipedia exists today. Just as Wikipedia has does in the area of reference works -- and lets not pretend Wikipedia growth has been without turmoil -- let's *make* it possible.
This is nicely put.
-Kat
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