Last week I posted an entry on Nature Publish Group, scientific publishing and web2.0. I'd like to add a couple of points, and throw out some links.
I would like to emphasize two points:
1) Feasibility. Yes we all want open information, but how to do it? And how to make it financially feasible? Publishing fees? Support from the NIH and other governmental assistance? Web based advertising?
2) Organization. Do we just dump everything on the web? Will this anarchy be great or will important research that is not directly relevant to your interests be lost? The web has been great to open up information, but people who use the web to gather information that they know of. In my opinion, the web (paradoxically) has driven different constituencies apart. It doesn't have to be so, but how to fix that? Have people sift for the best of everything?
3) Quality & standards. Although much is wrong with the peer review system, will the web diminish it's importance? If I submit my manuscript to Nature, the reviewers (fairly or unfairly) will ask for tough experiments during the review process. But overall the quality of work and the importance of the work is much higher there then on a second tier journal. But if there are no standards how can a reviewer ask a researcher to provide for some relevance for a particular body of work?
I my first post, various links have popped up and I just wanted to alert you of them.
Maxine pointed out this post from Timo Hannay of NPG. Maxine herself blogs about science publishing and web2.0 at her blog Nautilus. (Also check out this post on Nature's newest web feature, Nature Precedings.)
From Coturnix:
Interview with Timo Hannay, Head of Web Publishing, Nature Publishing Group
Scientific Communications in Web 2.0 Context
Publishing Versus Posting: Nature Magazine Turns to a Conversational Content Model
and Coturnix also posted this little note.
Joshua Rosenau has an entry on this topic as well.
If you are interested in various aspects of open access, I recommend that you check out Bill Hooker's blog Open Reading Frame (great name for a blog!)
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To put it this way: how much does an institutional subscription to a renowned magazine cost? For a journal like Neuron it's $1200 or so for just a paper copy - no archive, no nothing - with much more for online access and archives (how much more? They ask you to contact a representative for a quote. That much more). There are journals out there charging substantially more than Neuron.
Assuming you need to pay publishing costs for open access journals, for any one journal how many papers do groups at a specific institution - even a very prestigious one - actually publish in any one renowned journal per year?
As a guess, the actual cost will not really change significantly even assuming a pure publishing-charge system. For smaller institutions especially, with the ratio of subscriptions to published papers being higher, the end result may well be a substantial savings.
As long as you're adding links: Not strictly about open access, but more historical, my paper
"Toward a Post-Academic Science Policy: Scientific Communication and the Collapse of the Mertonian Norms," International Journal of Communications Law and Policy 11 (2006) deals in its conclusion with the relation between open access and the social norms of science.
I think frankly that you are wrong about the quality and importance of the work issue. "Second-tier" journals, especially specialist journals, require the work to be of high quality. Importance is a very subjective notion (I think you basically mean how "hot" the work is, which relates more to opinions on what's new and exciting and topical than it does to what is actually adding value). For example, I suspect that right now it is much easier to get a paper in Nature or Science on embryonic stem cell development (as you've highlighted recently), RNAi, or climate change. However, what is the impact of the nth paper describing how to use RNAi to drive stem cell differentiation? How many are "me too" papers? How many get in because of the "old boy's" network? These questions are very important when thinking about "importance".
Frankly, Nature and Science are for publicity, not building a scientific corpus of knowledge. It is nearly impossible to replicate the science in most papers in these journals, either because they are using a technique that no one else has the resources for, or because the page/word count limits make it impossible.
If you want to build on recent work and develop new techniques and discoveries in a field, you have to read the specialist journals preferentially. Obviously there are exceptions (bad articles get published everywhere), and on average, more rigorous peer review happens at the flagship journals (general and specialist). I think the issue of quality is more complex, however, than your comment implies.
The key issue in terms of buy-in by authors is academic credit. If publication via these new mechanisms does not impress tenure committees and grant review panels, then it will be disfavored.
PhysioProf,
I agree completely.
Publishing ideas and data more often and in smaller content packages in blogs and preprint servers should accelerate research by increasing the chances of collaboration, feedback and raise awareness to the problem studied. This in turn should lead to higher quality research (published via traditional peer review) and this is what will be recognized by the grant review panels.
The benefits don't have be direct for this change to take place.