Tomorrow Elephant

Last week, I tried to access a paper which I cowrote with a bunch of fine people a few years back, only to discover that I couldn’t, since Edinburgh University does not have a subscription to the publication in which it appeared. This made me seriously angry, and so I started thinking about all the things that are wrong with the current scientific publishing model.

Recently I had a pub conversation about copyright and scientific publishing with José, who pointed out that the situation (at least in the mathematical physics field, but undoubtedly elsewhere as well) is absurd. At the moment the scientific publishing model consists of restricted-access journals to which the institutions of researchers must subscribe to. However, it is not clear what the journals and the publishers really contribute to the process anymore. It’s the academics who do the research, the typography (with LaTeX and other modern layout tools) and the peer reviews — for free! And, in the case that their institution does not have a subscription to the journal in which the paper appears, they have to pay to view the final version of their own paper.

There are deeper issues here than just absurdities of an outdated publishing model. Scientific research has always traditionally followed a kind of open source philosophy. Research and access to data have been freely shared with the community, to everybody’s benefit (the occasional mad scientist-style rivalries and hoarding of results aside). It is crucial that things remain this way: otherwise we may indeed hit some sort of innovation ceiling I blogged about previously, solely because of the inertia that a pre-electronic publishing business inevitably suffers from.

It is a fact that paper journals are quickly becoming irrelevant. The main forum of string theory, for instance, is the LANL ArXiv, where electronic preprints of papers are posted before they appear on paper. Nobody, and I repeat, nobody waits for the LANL papers to appear in the journals before responding to them. Instead, once an important paper comes out, there is a flurry of preprints on the same topic, sometimes within weeks or days, until it’s strip-mined bare or a new fad catches on. One could argue that the 90s string Frankenstein that still lumbers onwards was galvanized by this new tool. (Edward Witten didn’t do it all by himself, although sometimes it seems to be the case). To a grad student this furious pace is something of a cause for dread, of course. I’m pretty confident my own thesis topic won’t be subject to this sort of physics piranha attack, but you never know. But the bottom line is that the field is moving faster than ever before, with little or no input from the commercial scientific publishers.

Fortunately, the Science Commons initiative of the Creative Commons foundation is trying to address these issues. It has already made progress with persuading open access medical journals to adopt Creative Commons licenses: in particular Public Library of Science BioMed Central have done so: hopefully the project won’t be suffocated by tightening intellectual property laws.

There is a race here, a race between the Internet’s power for disintermediation and lumbering legistlation. Being an optimist, I put my faith in the former. After all I did, eventually, manage to download my paper…