First Impressions, My Experience with Scientific Publication, and a Summary of the Problem

I found out about this P2PU course from my brother. He is training to be a lawyer and is very interested in intellectual property rights and the digital world. When I published my first scientific publication in 2011, he asked me whether I own the copyright and had the right to freely distribute the paper as I wished. I said, honestly, "I don't know," and then, still honestly, "I don't think it matters. It's out there and the people that would desire to read it can easily get it." At the time, I had hardly thought about open-access (OA) journals and whether or not I should publish in them.

I'm getting ready to publish another large paper in a subscription journal, as this is still the norm among my advisors and peers, and within a year hope to get one or two additional smaller papers. I'm considering publishing these in OA journals.

So, from what I've read so far, here's the OA case in a nutshell: Traditionally (i.e. before computers/Internet) it was time-consuming and expensive to publish scientific results. Busy scientists didn't want to spend their time on the nitty-gritty of copy-editing, printing, and distribution, so publishers stepped in. These publishers established structure in which a scientific paper could be submitted, reviewed by (volunteer) peers of the scientist, and published. The publisher then sold the publication to other scientists or scientific institutions where the target audience could easily access it. The system was good, and it became the norm.

Now, with the power of the digital world and internet connectivity, much of the function which the publishers previously contributed to this process has changed. It's no longer expensive to distribute results. If I sent a copy of a paper I published to a colleague, or a thousand colleagues, my copy is not changed in the slightest. It's actually quite amazing. But the traditional publication system is relatively unchanged. So I use it, just like (nearly) every other scientist I know.

I get access to practically any scientific paper I desire because I work at a research institution which subscribes to all of the relevant journals that I care about. I can Google my name, find my publication, and as long as I'm on campus, I can download it for (from my point of view) free. I can email copies of a pdf version of my paper to whomever I chose, and because it's a fairly small set of people that would actually care to read my paper, I practically never have to worry about copyright or re-use rights. I'd like everyone to be able to find my paper from anywhere and use the results for better research or better understanding, but this problem doesn't impact my day-to-day life all that much. It floats around along with hundreds of other issues which I should probably pay more attention to and be more active in solving.

Additionally, there's a moral / fairness issue to consider. Since I'm funded by government money, ultimately paid for with everyone's tax dollars, my results should be made available for everyone to read if they wanted to. Currently, unless you have a (typically pricey) subscription to the journal, or access to a research institution and the library system managed by that institution, you cannot access my results for free. You would have to pay (quite a lot of money) out of your own pocket do download my article from your home computer. This is because the publishers typically own the copyright, and the re-use rights, of my  publication, which is silly, because they did the least amount of original work in the entire process. This does not seem to be a good system

So, to wrap it all up, OA is "free, immediate, online availability of research articles with full re-use rights [1]." The current problem is that "among the five value adders - authors, editors, referees, funders, and publishers - publishers add the least value and generally demand the ownership rights [2]". But this system is not set in stone. The system exists through tradition, but "there's no evidence that [the Scientific Publishing model we have now] is optimal. We need to experiment will all sorts of different Scientific Publishing Systems and...Openness is clearly the future [1]."

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY
[2] http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm

P2PU: Open Science

This is a placeholder for my blog for the P2PU: "Welcome to Open Science: An Introduction".

Briefly, I'm a 6th year Ph.D. Student at Cornell University studying climate science and atmospheric chemistry. I've published a paper (and am currently submitting a second one) to non-open source journals, as this is the norm among my advisors and peers.