In this talk, Jay said that MacArthur claimed the best ecologists had blurry vision so they could see the big patterns without being overly distracted by the contradictory details. This immediately made a huge amount of sense to me. Biology is so full of special cases, of details that don’t fit theories, that it is easy to despair of advancing with broad, general theories. But we need those theories, for they tell us where to look next, what data to collect, and even what theory to challenge. I am a details person, but love the big theories.

The whole post is definitely worth a read.

Despite my concerns about the impacts of increasingly closed journals, with increasingly high costs, on the dissemination of research and the ability of universities to support their core missions of teaching and research, I have continued to volunteer my time and effort as a reviewer to Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell. I did this because I have continued to see valuable contributions made by these journals and I felt that this combined with the contribution that I was making to science by helping improve the science published in high profile places made supporting these journals worthwhile. I no longer believe this to be the case and from now on I will no longer be reviewing for any journal that is published by Elsevier, Springer, or Wiley-Blackwell (including society journals that publish through them).

Why have I changed my mind? Because of the pursuit/support by these companies of the Research Works Act. This act seeks to prevent funding agencies from requiring that the results of research that they funded be made publicly available. In other words it seeks to prevent the government (and the taxpayers that fund it), which pays for a very large fraction of the cost of any given paper through both funding the research and paying the salaries of reviewers and editors, from having any say in how that research is disseminated. I think that Mike Taylor in the Guardian said most clearly how I feel about this attempt to exert legislative control requiring us to support corporate profits over the dissemination of scientific research:

Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

You should read the entire article. It’s powerful. There are lots of other great articles about the RWA including Michael Eisen in the New York Times, a nice post by INNGE, and a interesting piece by Paul Krugman (via oikosjeremy). I’m also late to the party in declaring my peer review strike and less eloquent than many of my peers in explaining why (see great posts by Michael Taylor, Gavin Simpson, and Timothy Gowers). But I’m here now and I’m letting you know so that you can consider whether or not you also want to stop volunteering for companies that don’t have science’s best interests in mind.

If you’d like to read up on the publisher’s side of this argument (they have costs, they have a right to recoup them) you can see Springer’s official position or an Elsevier Exec’s exchange with Michael Eisen. My problem with all of these arguments is that there is nothing in any funding agency’s policy that requires publishers to publish work funded by that agency. This is not (as Springer has argued) an “unfunded mandate”, this is a stake holder that has certain requirements related to the publication of research in which they have an interest. This is just like an author (in any non-academic publishing situation) negotiating with a publisher. If the publisher doesn’t like the terms that the author demands, then they don’t have to publish the book. Likewise, if a publisher doesn’t like the NIH policy then they should simply not agree to publish NIH funded research.

To be clear, I am not as extreme in my position as some. I still support and will review for independent society journals like Ecology and American Naturalist even though they aren’t Open Access and even though ESA has made some absurd comments in support of the same ideas that are in RWA. The important thing for me is that these journals have the best interests of science in mind, even if they are often frustratingly behind the times in how they think and operate.

And don’t worry, I’ve still got plenty of journal related work to keep me busy, thanks to my new position on the editorial board at PLoS ONE.

UPDATE: The links to the INNGE and Timothy Gowers post have now been fixed, and here are links to a couple of great posts by Casey Bergman that I somehow left out: one on how to turn down reviews while making a point and one on the not so positive response he received to one of these emails.

UPDATE 2: A great collection of posts on RWA. There are a lot of really unhappy scientists out there.

UPDATE 3: A formal Boycott of Elsevier. Almost 1000 scientists have signed on so far.

One of the things we’ve been reading is a great report by the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences on Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning. The report synthesizes existing research on what to do in the classroom to facilitate meaningful long-term learning, and distills this information into seven recommendations and information on how strongly each recommendation is supported by available research.

Recommendations

1. Space learning over time. Arrange to review key elements of course content after a delay of several weeks to several months after initial presentation. (moderate)
2. Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises. Have students alternate between reading already worked solutions and trying to solve problems on their own. (moderate)
3. Combine graphics with verbal descriptions. Combine graphical presentations (e.g., graphs, figures) that illustrate key processes and procedures with verbal descriptions. (moderate)
4. Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts. Connect and integrate abstract representations of a concept with concrete representations of the same concept. (moderate)
5. Use quizzing to promote learning.
   1. Use pre-questions to introduce a new topic. (minimal)
   2. Use quizzes to re-expose students to key content (strong)
6. Help students allocate study time efficiently.
   1. Teach students how to use delayed judgments of learning to identify content that needs further study. (minimal)
   2. Use tests and quizzes to identify content that needs to be learned (minimal)
7. Ask deep explanatory questions. Use instructional prompts that encourage students to pose and answer “deep-level” questions on course material. These questions enable students to respond with explanations and supports deep understanding of taught material. (strong)

(Quoted directly from the original report via a Software Carpentry blog post)

This is a nice summary, but it’s definitely worth reading the whole report to explore the depth of the thought process and learn more about specific ideas for how to implement these recommendations.

How am I doing?

Recently I’ve been teaching two courses on programming and database management for biologists. Because I’m not a big believer in classroom lecture, for this type of material, a typical day in one of these courses involves: 1) either reading up on the material in a text book or viewing a Software Carpentry lecture before coming to class; 2) a brief 5-10 minute period of either re-presenting complex material or answering questions about the reading/viewing; and 3) 45 minutes of working on exercises (during which time I’m typically bouncing from student to student helping them figure out things that they don’t understand). So, how am I doing with respect the the above recommendations?

1. Space learning over time. I’m doing OK here, but not as well as I’d like. The nice thing about teaching introductory programming concepts is that they naturally build on one another. If we learned about if-then statements two weeks ago then I’m going to use them in the exercises about loops that we’re learning about this week. I also have my advanced class use version control throughout the semester for retrieving data and turning in exercises to force them to become very comfortable with the work-flow. However, I haven’t done a very good job of bringing concepts back, on their own, later in the semester. The exercise based approach to the course is perfect for this, I just need to write more problems and insert them into the problem-sets a few weeks after we cover the original material.

2. Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises. I think I’m doing a pretty good job here. Student’s see worked examples for each concept in either a text book or video lecture (viewed outside of class) and if I think they need more for a particular concept we’ll walk through a problem at the beginning of class. I often use the Online Python Tutor for this purpose which provides a really nice presentation of what is going on in the program. We then spend most of the class period working on problem-solving exercises. Since my classes meets three days a week I think this leads to a pretty decent interleaving.

3. Combine graphics with verbal descriptions. I do some graphical presentation and the Online Python Tutor gives some nice graphical representations of running programs, but I need to learn more about how to communicate programming concepts graphically. I suspect that some of the students that struggle the most in my Intro class would benefit from a clearly graphical presentation of what is going happening in the program.

4. Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts. I think I do this fairly well. The overall motivation for the course is to ground the programming material in the specific discipline that the students are interested in. So, we learn about the general concept and then apply it to concrete biological problems in the exercises.

5. Use quizzing to promote learning. I’m not convinced that pre-questions make a lot of sense for material like this. In more fact based classes they are helping to focus students’ attention on what is important, but I think the immediate engagement in problem-sets that focus on the important aspects works at least as well in my classroom. I do have one test in the course that occurs about half way through the Intro course after we’ve covered the core material.  It is intended to provide the “delayed re-exposure” that has been shown to improve learning, but after reading this recommendation I’m starting to think that this would be better accomplished with a series of smaller quizzes.

6. Help students allocate study time efficiently. I spend a fair bit of time doing this when I help students who ask questions during the assignments. By looking at their code and talking to them it typically becomes clear where the “illusion of knowing” is creeping in and causing them problems and I think I do a fairly good job of breaking that cycle and helping them focus on what they still need to learn. I haven’t used quizzes for this yet, but I think they could be a valuable addition.

7. Ask deep explanatory questions. One of the main focuses in both of my courses is an individual project where the students work on a larger program to do something that is of interest to them. I do this with the hope that it can provide the kind of deep exposure that this recommendation envisions.

So, I guess I’m doing OK, but I need to work more on representation of material both through bringing back old material in the exercises and potentially through the use of short quizzes throughout the semester. I also need to work on alternative ways to present material to help reach folks whose brains work differently.

If you are a current or future teacher I really recommend reading the full report. It’s a quick read and provides lots of good information and food for thought when figuring out how to help your students learn.

Thanks for listening in on my self-reflection. If you have thoughts about this stuff I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11573/nsf11573.htm#prep

Happy post-holiday grant writing to all.

UPDATE 1: Also note that the Biosketches are different for the pre-proposals (changes noted in bold-italics)

Biographical Sketches (2-page limit for each) should be included for each person listed on the Personnel page. It should include the individual’s expertise as related to the proposed research, professional preparation, professional appointments, five relevant publications, five additional publications, and up to five synergistic activities. Advisors, advisees, and collaborators should not be listed on this document, but in a separate table (see below).

UPDATE 2: Though it is not explicitly clear from the link above, Current & Pending Support should NOT be included in pre-proposals (thanks to Alan Tessier for clearing this up).

CONSENT
We appreciate your involvement with this publication, which is published by a John Wiley & Sons company. The publisher would like to contact you by email/post with details of publications and services that may be of interest to you, specific to your subject area, from companies in the John Wiley & Sons group (only) worldwide. Your information will never be passed to any third party companies and as part of any communications you will be given the opportunity to unsubscribe from receiving further contact. Please indicate whether you wish to receive this information by answering the CONSENT question below.

Asking someone who is already working for you for free if it’s OK to also try to sell them stuff while they’re doing it seems like a pretty good definition of classless to me.

Outstanding, motivated candidates are being sought for a post-doctoral position in the Gilchrist lab in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The successful candidate will be supported by a three year NSF grant whose goal is to develop, integrate and test mathematical models of protein translation and sequence evolution using available genomic sequence and expression level datasets. Publications directly related to this work include Gilchrist. M.A. 2007, Molec. Bio. & Evol. (http://www.tinyurl/shahgilchrist11) and Shah, P. and M.A. Gilchrist 2011, PNAS (http://www.tinyurl/gilchrist07a).

The emphasis of the laboratory is focused on using biologically motivated models to analyze complex, heterogeneous datasets to answer biologically motivated questions. The research associated with this position draws upon a wide range of scientific disciplines including: cellular biology, evolutionary theory, statistical physics, protein folding, differential equations, and probability. Consequently, the ideal candidate would have a Ph.D. in either biology, mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, or statistics with a background and interest in at least one of the other areas.

The researcher will collaborate closely with the PIs (Drs. Michael Gilchrist and Russell Zaretzki) on this project but potentiall have time to collaborate on other research projects with the PIs. In addition, the researcher will have opportunties to interact with other faculty members in the Division of Biology as well as researchers at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (http://www.nimbios.org).

Review of applications begins immediately and will continue until the position is filled. To apply, please submit curriculum vitae including three references, a brief statement of research background and interests, and 1-3 relevant manuscripts to mikeg[at]utk[dot]edu.

Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free. The material they publish was commissioned and funded not by them but by us, through government research grants and academic stipends. But to see it, we must pay again, and through the nose.

and backs up his position with a recent analysis by Deutsche Bank

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer’s words) because they “develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years”. But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. “We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn’t be available.”

finally ending with a call to arms that even your, never shying away from a good fight, narrator would have toned down a bit**

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let’s throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us.

Go read the whole thing. This is something that folks are going to be talking about, and I think it’s another good opportunity to ask ourselves whether the the group that contributes the least to the overall scientific process should the one that benefits the most financially. I take it as yet another sign that 2011 is the year that the war over academic publishing officially began.

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*Yes, once I used the word “excoriation” in the title I got a little carried away with the big words.

**Though not for lack of agreement with the general sentiment; clearly.

Very cool. I’m curious, how do you think this will compare/contrast/fight with the Data One project – https://www.dataone.org/ – or is this a different beast altogether?

As I started to answer it I realized that my thoughts on the matter were better served by a full post, both because they are a bit lengthy and because I don’t actually know much about DataONE and would love to have some of their folks come by, correct my mistaken impressions, and just chat about this stuff in general.

To begin with I should say that I’m still trying to figure this out myself, both because I’m still figuring out exactly what DataONE is going to be, and because EcologicalData is still evolving. I think that both projects goals could be largely defined as “Organizing Ecology’s Data,” but that’s a pretty difficult task, involving a lot of components and a lot of different ways to tackle them. So, my general perspective is that the more folks we have trying the merrier. I suspect there will be plenty of room for multiple related projects, but I’d be just as happy (even happier probably) if we could eventually find a single centralized location for handling all of this. All I want is solution to the challenge.

But, to get to the question at hand, here are the differences I see based on my current understanding of DataONE:

1. Approach. There are currently two major paradigms for organizing large amounts of information. The first is to figure out a way to tell computers how to do it for us (e.g., Google), the second is to crowdsource it’s development and curation (e.g., Wikipedia). DataONE is taking the computer based approach. It’s heavy on metadata, ontologies, etc. The goal is to manage the complexities of ecological data by providing the computer with very detailed descriptions of the data that it can understand. We’re taking the human approach, keeping things simple and trying to leverage the collective knowledge and effort of the field. As part of this difference in approach I suspect that EcologicalData will be much more interactive and community driven (the goal is for the community to actually run the site, just like Wikipedia) whereas DataONE will tend to be more centralized and hierarchical. I honestly couldn’t tell you which will turn out better (perhaps the two approaches will each turn out to be better for different things) but I’m really glad that we’re trying both at the same time to figure out what will work and where their relative strengths might be.

2. Actually serving data. DataONE will do this; we won’t. This is part of the difference in approach. If the computer can handle all of the thinking with respect to the data then you want it to do that and just spit out what you want. Centralizing the distribution of heterogeneous data is a really complicated task and I’m excited the folks at DataONE are tackling the challenge.

a. One of the other challenges for serving data is that is that you have to get all of the folks who “own” the data to let you provide it. This is one of the reasons I came up with the Data Wiki idea. By serving as a portal it helps circumvent the challenges of getting all of the individual stake holders to agree to participate.

b. We do provide a tool for data acquisition, the EcoData Retriever, that likewise focuses on circumventing the need to negotiate with data providers by allowing each individual investigator to automatically download the data from the source. But, this just sets up each dataset independently, whereas I’m presuming that DataONE will let you just run one big query of all the data (which I’m totally looking forward to by the way) [1].

3. Focus. The primary motivation behind the Data Wiki goes beyond identifying datasets and really focuses on how you should use them. Having worked with other folks’ data for a number of years I can say that the biggest challenging (for me anyway) is actually figuring out all of the details of when and how the dataset should be used. This isn’t just a question of reading metadata either. It’s a question of integrating thoughts and approaches from across the literature. What I would like to see develop on the Data Wiki pages is the development of concise descriptions for how to go about using these datasets in the best way possible.  This is a very difficult task to automate and one where I think a crowdsourced solution is likely the most effective. We haven’t done a great job of this yet, but Allen Hurlbert and I have some plans to develop a couple of good examples early in the fall to help demonstrate the idea.

4. We’re open for business. Ha ha, eat our dust DataONE. But seriously, we’ve taken a super simple approach which means we can get up and running quickly. DataONE is doing something much more complicated and so things may take some time to roll out. I’m hoping to get a better idea of what their time lines look like at ESA. I’m sure their tools will be well worth the wait.

5. Oh, and their budget is a little over $2,000,000/year, which is just slightly larger than our budget of around $5,000/year.

So, there is my lengthy and meandering response to Jarrett’s question. I’m looking forward to chatting with DataONE folks at ESA to find out more about what they are up to, and I’d love to have them stop by here to chat and clear up my presumably numerous misconceptions.

——————————————————————————————————————-

[1] Though we do have some ideas for managing something somewhat similar, so stay tuned for EcoData Retriever 2.0. Hopefully coming to an internet near you sometime this spring.

The blog is called Distributed Ecology because, as Ted describes,

I chose distributed ecology as a title because I like the idea of ecological thought like distributed computing. Lots of us scientists like little nodes around the web thinking and processing ideas into something great.

Sounds like what I’m hoping to see (and am increasingly witnessing) from the ecology blogs. So, head on over, check it out, click on the RSS button, and welcome Ted to the ecology blogging community.

The skirmishes over academic publishing are over. The war has officially begun. gigaom.com/2011/07/21/pir… gigaom.com/2011/07/19/aar…—
Ethan White (@ethanwhite) July 22, 2011

The last week has been an interesting one for academic publishing. First a 24 year old programmer name Aaron Swartz was arrested for allegedly breaking into MIT’s network and downloading 5 million articles from JSTOR. Given his background it has been surmised that he planned on making the documents publicly available. He faces up to 35 years in federal prison.

In response to the arrest Gregory Maxwell, a “technologist” and hobbyist scientist uploaded nearly 20,000 JSTOR [1] articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to The Pirate Bay, a bittorrent file sharing site infamous for facilitating the illegal sharing of music and movies. As explanation for the upload Maxwell posted a scathing, and generally trenchant, critique of the current academic publishing system that I am going to reproduce here in it’s entirety so that those uncomfortable with [2], or blocked from, visiting The Pirate Bay can read it [3]. In it he notes that since all of the articles he posted were published prior to 1923 they are all in the public domain.

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling
33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
and which should be  available to everyone at no cost, but most
have previously only been made available at high prices through
paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the  documents here is typically sold for $19
USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as
cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article
at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to
locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a
checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I
published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who
profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney
General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers
from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system - the authors are not paid for their
writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics),
and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the
authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously
expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access
fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals,
but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little
significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The
"publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly
weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary
scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather
than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They
are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the
resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask
for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on
the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would
benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed
to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending
it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic
documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid
scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their
attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has
classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give
up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for
creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more
works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence,
when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use
threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly
owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and
lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a prestigious scientific
journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some
18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind,
and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available
freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's
viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to
Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource - where they
could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting
historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus
was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at
the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the
several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of
other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing:
publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation
from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish
reproduction - scanning the documents - created a new copyright
interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial
watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They
might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained
the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover
the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only
unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and
the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is
legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary,
the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives - but "free"
only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about
100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not
disseminators of knowledge - as their lofty mission statements
suggest - but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing
they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are
valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one
steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word
on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence
competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific
inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive
copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question
of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not
paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access
to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued
survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous
industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding,
then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified ΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one
less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent
lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers
a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed
out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would
probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous
charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe
that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful
applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com  Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

These stories have been covered widely and the discussion has been heavy on Twitter and in the blogosphere. The important part of this discussion for academic publishing is that it has brought many of the absurdities of the current academic publishing system into the public eye, and a lot of people are shocked and unhappy [4]. This is all happening at the same time that Britain is finally standing up to the big publishing companies as their profits [5] and business models increasingly hamper rather than benefit the scientific process, and serious questions are raised about whether we should be publishing in peer-reviewed journals at all. I suspect that we will look back on 2011 as the tipping point year when academic publishing changed forever.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

[1] In an interview with Wired Campus JSTOR claimed that these aren’t technically their articles because even though JSTOR did digitize these files, and each file includes an indication of JSTORs involvement, the files lack JSTOR’s cover page, so it’s not really their files, it’s the Royal Society’s files. Which first made me think “Wow, that’s about the lamest duck and cover excuse I’ve ever heard” and then “Hey, so if I just delete the cover page off a JSTOR file then apparently they surrender all claim to it. Nice!”

[2] In addition to questionable legality of the site some of the advertising there isn’t exactly workplace appropriate.

[3] I think that given the context he would be fine with us reprinting the entire statement. I’ve done some very minor cleaning up of some junk codes for readability. The original is available here.

[4] But also conflicted about the behavior of the individuals in question.

[5] ~$120 million/year for Wiley and ~$1 billion/year for Reed Elsevier (source LibraryJournal.com).