Open, moral and pragmatic

ot · on March 8, 2012

Just as an example of how Open Access journals can gain a huge respect from the community, the following post sums up the success of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, an Open Access journal run by a volunteer editorial board:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficien...

Elsevier should understand that it is the editorial board that matters, not who prints the paper.

pjscott · on March 8, 2012

The great majority of that page is unused whitespace, and then the article itself is written in text so tiny that it's almost illegible. If I were a decade older, you could remove the word "almost" from that statement. If you're involved in web design in any way, I beg you: have mercy on the eyes of your readers, and use big enough text to be readable.

I know this is off-topic, but there's a certain threshold where poor typography overwhelms the content itself, and for me this crosses it. Which is a shame, since scientific journal reform is kind of important.

alexchamberlain · on March 8, 2012

Is it not time for a GitHub for publications?

The problem is keeping the quality high, which can only be done with editors, which cost money.

hwh · on March 8, 2012

While it is true that editor work costs money, I think it's important to make clear that Elsevier is not the entity who's paying that money. It's still the universities who pay the editors - since they typically work pro bono. Well, OK, there are non-monetary payments that Elsevier does. Like establishing your name by mentioning it often and making sure you get a nice room and nice food on the next editors' board meetup - if the journal does hold these.

tylerneylon · on March 8, 2012

Some researchers are interested in open source, collaborative tools. A great example is the Polymath Project or Polymath1, which resulted in two interesting papers. This project allowed anyone to join the conversation, and de-emphasized the need for personal credit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project

This approach is great in that it solves hard problems, which is the real purpose. Unfortunately, it is not much of a career boost, which is a key practical purpose.

Anyone can already publish open source papers on github. I tried this out a while ago, and realized the experiment -- to see what contributions were suggested -- wouldn't be useful without any readers (the topic is a bit esoteric):

https://github.com/tylerneylon/math

chrisaycock · on March 8, 2012

There's arXiv, which famously hosts the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, among other notable papers.

http://arxiv.org/

tomjen3 · on March 8, 2012

Actually those editors are free (from the perspective of the periodical) so the problem boils down to nobody wanting to publish in your journal because nobody reads it and so it holds no esteem.