House of Commons call for open publishing
Tom Morris
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The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons have published a report pushing for open publishing, a move that is going to seriously annoy journal publishers but may make science far more accessible for the general public. The Public Library of Science are running two journals PLoS Medicine (which is going to be starting soon, and I'm excited about) and PLoS Biology (which is at volume 2 (7) as I write this).
The PLoS have a series of articles in the PLoS Biology journal discussing the many issues around open publishing: Who pays for it?, Open access and scientific societies, the reactions to the Biology journal, where open access is going, why PLoS are publishing and the opening of the Biology journal.
From a layman's perspective, this is extremely cool. I can read new stuff and it won't cost me anything (I've read medical abstracts recently that want to charge me £12 to read full-text PDF for twenty-four hours). As for the aims that I think future scientific journal publishing should take? Simple. It shouldn't get in the way. By that I mean, the amount of red tape should be kept to a minimum. That is not to say that peer review should not be rigourous or that it should be easy. But it shouldn't be more complicated than it needs to be. Activists working to prevent the introduction of creationism in school biology standards could, perhaps, find sharper tools to fight creationists if they had access to more original sources for free or low-cost. Certainly, work like EvoWiki could be far, far extended if interested members of the public could read the original texts.
Finally, the other thing that I think would heavily help scientific understanding would be some way of producing 'scaling' texts. Imagine something like Wikipedia or EvoWiki (specifically, a science wiki or large hypertext system) that contains a way for users to sign up and register their level of scientific understanding. Then the site would tune the descriptions to suit different levels of knowledege. These would scale up as interest in certain subjects is demonstrated. On that note, I think things like the Oxford "Very Short Introduction" books are a very good example of how to address the layperson - they don't 'dumb down' the subject, but describe it in a way that can be understood by non-specialists.
Open access promises to be interesting and controversial, but possibly very, very beneficial.
The PLoS have a series of articles in the PLoS Biology journal discussing the many issues around open publishing: Who pays for it?, Open access and scientific societies, the reactions to the Biology journal, where open access is going, why PLoS are publishing and the opening of the Biology journal.
From a layman's perspective, this is extremely cool. I can read new stuff and it won't cost me anything (I've read medical abstracts recently that want to charge me £12 to read full-text PDF for twenty-four hours). As for the aims that I think future scientific journal publishing should take? Simple. It shouldn't get in the way. By that I mean, the amount of red tape should be kept to a minimum. That is not to say that peer review should not be rigourous or that it should be easy. But it shouldn't be more complicated than it needs to be. Activists working to prevent the introduction of creationism in school biology standards could, perhaps, find sharper tools to fight creationists if they had access to more original sources for free or low-cost. Certainly, work like EvoWiki could be far, far extended if interested members of the public could read the original texts.
Finally, the other thing that I think would heavily help scientific understanding would be some way of producing 'scaling' texts. Imagine something like Wikipedia or EvoWiki (specifically, a science wiki or large hypertext system) that contains a way for users to sign up and register their level of scientific understanding. Then the site would tune the descriptions to suit different levels of knowledege. These would scale up as interest in certain subjects is demonstrated. On that note, I think things like the Oxford "Very Short Introduction" books are a very good example of how to address the layperson - they don't 'dumb down' the subject, but describe it in a way that can be understood by non-specialists.
Open access promises to be interesting and controversial, but possibly very, very beneficial.
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If you enjoy reading about the open access debate, nature has a collection of articles from various points of view: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/
Happily, they've made access to these articles open.
- kz