A Modest Proposal – The Open Journal of Astrophysics
Following on from yesterday’s piece, I thought I’d make a quick suggestion.
Astrophysics has taken the lead for many years in opening up access to scientific publications – all publications of any merit are available for free on the internet via the arXiv and, in my opinion, the traditional journals are already more-or-less redundant even without considering their “astronomical” cost. The one thing that seems a consistent objection to dispensing with journals altogether is the element of peer review.
However, yesterday’s news that many of us are probably going to have to pay up front fees to publish papers (at thousands of pounds a pop) will no doubt have convinced many that the government’s decision is potentially ruinous for science. I think it’s time for astrophysics to lead the way again.
My suggestion is that we set up a quick-and-easy trial system to circumvent the traditional publishing route. The basic is that authors who submit papers to the arXiv can have their papers refereed by the community, outside the usual system of traditional journals. I’m thinking of a website on which authors would simply have to post their arXiv ID and a request for peer review. Once accepted, the author would be allowed to mark the arXiv posting as “refereed” and an electronic version would be made available for free on the website.
Although there are many issues to be sorted out, a limited trial of The Open Journal of Astrophysics could I think happen very soon, perhaps even before the REF.
This idea would require community support setting it up (and doing the refereeing/administration) and it would probably only get off the ground if sufficient senior astronomers get on board. It will no doubt also take money to get it going. However, I feel sufficiently strongly about this that I’m prepared to stump up £10k from my own pocket just to get it started.
If anyone has ideas about how to take this project forward, is willing to help with technical expertise, or if any prominent astronomers would simply like to add their name in support of the idea please do so through the comments box below. Any further pledges of financial support would of course also be welcome.
And please pass this message on via Twitter/email/whatever, so I can gauge the level of support.
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In the Dark 
July 17, 2012 at 9:19 am
[…] ways to incorporate the stamp of approval lent by peer review into the Arxiv system (I see Peter has written about it too). I grumbled, and they came up with an […]
July 17, 2012 at 10:00 am
Great idea. And for what it’s I would submit to such an open journal, and would be happy to do some refereeing also. Oh ya, and you got a RT!
🙂
Evan
July 17, 2012 at 10:19 am
I think this is a very good idea. Not new of course but nothing happened in the past probably because of lack of a clear driving force and a host of arguments as to why it might be a waste of time. Most of the counter arguments seem to have been focussed on the role of publishing houses in providing “respectabililty” for the purpose of evaluating the worth of a paper without having to read it. Some weird combinations of Journal Rankings and H-indexes seems sufficient to determine the future of research.
The issue is perhaps how to get it started and and then how to raise its profile to the point where its “measure of impact” is high enough that job allocators and grant givers will respect it.
There are two interesting case studies which serve to illustrate what this might involve.
The Public Library of Science “Biology” at
http://www.plosbiology.org/static/information.action
PLoS Biology is open but not free: the “publication” fee is US$2900!
Our own Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) run by IOP and SISSA (who handle the refereing):
http://jcap.sissa.it/jcap/help/helpLoader.jsp?pgType=about
and which is not entirely “open”.
There is of course no reason why publishers should be involved and nor is there any reason to “re-print” the paper in some electronic book format – we already have arXiv. Apart from management (editors, referees and the like) what might be needed is a user interface like those of JCAP and PLoS Biology which provides better access to material than the antiquated ADS search engine. Such a web page might “be” the journal inasmuch as ADS is for scientists today. A starting point for this might well be to talk to the people at ADS (eg Edwin Henneken: https://sites.google.com/site/ehenneken/).
For arXiv to become an accredited “journal” it should probably look like a journal.
July 17, 2012 at 10:26 am
I perfectly agree with your criticism of the gold standard: It provides open access, but in a way that s good for journals and not good for science.
Your proposal comes very close to what I’ve coded up already: http://paperrater.org. It automatically reads the submissions to the arXiv (our open access model), and makes them accessible to review from the entire community. It’s is not a journal (and was never meant to as one). It is rather a layer on top of the distribution channel arXiv that provides the feedback and quality assessment currently associated with journal-based peer review.
Just last week (during http://dotastronomy.com), we discussed several interesting concepts of how to make this kind of review mechanism more appealing to the community. Most of them relate to the public recognition good review should get. These ideas are in an early stage, and need to be refined, but they can certainly be implemented with a modest amount of work. I’d be happy to discuss any of this in more detail.
July 17, 2012 at 11:48 am
Having just found paperrater from following along with the #dotastro last week (and seeing it mentioned this afternoon on twitter), I have to say that publicizing, promoting, and establishing a “critical mass” sized community around existing and well featured projects like yours are much more important at this time. Once that community exists, it proves:
1. People will take the time and effort to review papers online (transparently!) for the good of the paper and larger community
2. Open Access is not just a fad or a flash-in-the-pan type trend
3. Old-school critics can look at the reviews/comments and judge their scientific merit/critiquing skills themselves and see that there’s nothing to worry about.
In my mind, in all these discussions and ponderings there’s one *crucial* piece missing: any statement or concern of any kind about what the arXiv wants! Adding anything on their end is going to take time and people power (which equate to money). That’s why I really see things like paperrater having the most immediate impact, since it sits on top of arXiv and is able to provide a much greater value to their service.
July 17, 2012 at 1:41 pm
Ryan, that’s the key point. While arXiv seems to be sympathetic with external sites using their service (they provide an API to interface with it), to me it appears much faster to develop on top of arXiv than in tight collaboration with arXiv.
Once critical mass, with all the benefits you outlined, is reached, arXiv can then decide to introduce the PaperRater contributions (e.g. the reviewer reputation score we’re currently developing). This way we can make the change and experiment with new ideas without a big overhead.
July 17, 2012 at 10:27 am
If we are going to do this then arXiv should remove its ban on papers from nonacademic addresses (like mine is since I quit the universities). Or at least remove its ban on such papers that request refereeing. I would seriously contemplate helping Peter with sponsorship except for this.
July 17, 2012 at 1:21 pm
There is a way around the ban, which is to find someone willing to endorse you as a contributor to the arXiv. I guess it is there to prevent too many crackpot articles being submitted, but it assumes that no crackpots work in universities and everyone who doesn’t work in a unversity is a crackpot.
July 17, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Philip: No I haven’t tried getting endorsed. I gave up publishing in refereed journals some time ago becaue all I really want to publish now is a book that is currently in gestation, plus the occasional conference contribution.
Peter’s suggestion will need some way to prevent authors submitting simultaneously to multiple online-only journals. Maybe online-only journal editors could put with the arXiv version of a paper a statement that they are considering it, and any paper with more than one editor response could be thown off the arXiv.
July 18, 2012 at 10:52 am
In the spirit of not changing too many things, I don’t see why arXiv should be necessarily involved. One could bypass the closed aspects of arXiv with viXra, or allow direct submission. I don’t know if this would result in an unbearable load of crackpot submissions, but editorial rejection would be okay by me.
On the other hand, hosting the journal without using the arXiv would not be hard. ArXiv, after all, was written by a bunch of physicists with some knowledge of Perl, or shell scritping or whatever it was.
An example from mathematics of something along the lines suggested is the Journal of Integer Sequences. It is free and open, authors retain copyright, they developed a LaTeX style, they have a kind of endorsement system (for major results) and they have respected people on the editorial board.
July 17, 2012 at 10:33 am
Count me in!
July 17, 2012 at 12:30 pm
I think this is a good idea- and sorely needed, given recent events!
I personally dont like seeing papers appearing on astro-ph before they are refereed. Thus ideally people should be able to submit their PDF to the “journal” website, and this is reviewed, in a similar way to how the big journals operate now. Then once “accepted” it could be put on arXiv. Of course you couldn’t stop people posting them earlier, but for those of us in fields where this is frowned upon, having the choice would be nice! Coding this up isn’t hard – I would certainly be happy to help if required (although I am sure more qualified people exist!!).
As mentioned above in order to become accepted and recognised it would be good for it to have some consistent style- e.g. a LaTeX template that people would be required to use.
July 17, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Hi Peter, do you envision authors still writing papers ‘as if’ they were going to be submitted to MNRAS, ApJ, etc. Or would you like to see a brand new OJA template/format? Could the journal also accommodate code, scripts, and so-on that authors want to make open source?
In the case of object catalogue aggregators like VizieR, I think they only include catalogues that appear in ‘published’ papers… so the OJA would have to be officially recognised in that sense too.
July 17, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Thanks for this Peter. I am impressed by your commitment.
In case useful: Antony Lewis and I looked into this 5 years ago with library experts and did a community questionnaire
Click to access RIOJA_questionnaire_survey_report_final.pdf
and made a prototype journal including the technical capability to interact with arxiv papers (Antony would explain better):
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/about/
with a test site (not fully configured):
http://arxivjournal.org/index.php/cc/issue/current
My interpretation of the feedback coming from the questionnaire and from talking to journal editors at that time was that the community was not particularly interested in launching into some new fangled risky thing “just” for the sake of open access. But hopefully your suggestion is more timely, given Willets’ new plans.
Can we now address these biggest issues?
(i) The new system needs to be sustainable, including long-term funding for (a member of?) staff to keep the software running and updated (people were not convinced that a network of volunteers would be sustainable).
(ii) This will cost money and so people will have to pay at some point, possibly of order 100 pounds per article rather than 1000 though.
(iii) We need to do this with a learned society (e.g. the RAS) or risk causing learned societies serious financial problems.
(iv) We need a prestigious editorial board and chief editor.
I think all of this points to investing any money in helping a learned society to work out how feasible it would be to switch to running their publishing to be in-house, using overlay software (some of which is already developed).
July 17, 2012 at 1:16 pm
Sarah,
I didn’t know about your study until Antony emailed me this morning about it. In any case times have changed.
I agree that to make it sustainable would probably require a fee to be paid, but £100 is the upper end of the cost range I’d envisage.
I’d also like to see the RAS embrace this idea, but MNRAS generates a considerable revenue for them and they might be reluctant to do anything that endagners that income stream.
Peter
July 17, 2012 at 12:46 pm
For this to work, a few things are needed. First, a decent and enforced peer review system. Second, an editorial system which can reject (or grade) papers. Third, a publishing system (which can be build on arxiv). Fourth, a citing system. Fifth, a financial model. You will probably find that some parts of the existing publishing system make sense and should be retained. The cost will not be zero (my guess would be 200-300k pa), and arxiv might appreciate a financial contribution if you will piggy-back on their system. STFC may be willing to fund it if this saves them money. All of this is manageable, and the main risk is that it would quickly outgrow the resources.
July 17, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Peter – I agree with your suggested approach and I also think that something lightweight (i.e. just linking to arXiv IDs) built quickly would suffice for now.
This feels like an extension of http://paperrater.org, Peter Melchior – is the code available for your application anywhere public?
July 17, 2012 at 1:04 pm
The code for the website is not public as of now. My plan is to offer an API to run queries against the server. What would you like to do?
July 17, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Your Modest Proposal has my support, Peter, unless RAS does the decent thing, and quickly.
I would be quite prepared to publish in a journal established along the lines you suggest, modulo some of the ideas already put forward, just so long as you can formulate a sufficiently attractive LaTeX style file, with lashings of opportunities to be seriously retentive 😉
July 17, 2012 at 2:02 pm
Great idea and I would be in. One issue though: what if nobody steps up to review your paper (because it’s long, bad, or for no reason at all, just because no one is willing to take time)? One of the features of current journals is the guaranteed referee.
July 17, 2012 at 2:55 pm
I agree with many of the commenters that this is a nice idea. But as Sarah points out, it’s important to remember that this stuff does cost money, especially if peer review would be in some way compensated (the mechanism for this aspect may turn out to be a little complicated too). So we couldn’t do away with charges altogether.
@Peter Coles – in your view, would the peer review be “traditional” i.e. anonymous and non-public? Or a more open style as is possible with Paperrater? An interesting novel approach to peer review was proposed recently by neuroscientists Kravitz & Baker – not 100% relevant to astrophysics but good food for thought.
Next step – a detailed costing, and some influential backers? (Seems like you have those!). A nice LaTeX style file? I volunteer as word-spreader, and whatever other skills of mine can be put to use.
July 17, 2012 at 3:03 pm
We all do peer review already. For nothing. Why are people talking like this would be new?
July 17, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Right, but so far refereeing created nothing for the referee, only revenue for the journals. Having it out in the open would do two things:
– Improve the review since one has to remain fair and constructive
– Add reputation for those who do the review (well)
David Hogg mentioned that in the Project Euclid journal, open review (with named referees) is included in the final PDF file: http://projecteuclid.org/DPubS?service=UI&version=1.0&verb=Display&handle=euclid.aos/1112967698
July 17, 2012 at 3:44 pm
I only brought it up because Mike Merrifield mentioned compensation for an independent referee service during our twitter-chat with Peter about this yesterday, which is an interesting idea.
I agree that peer review under this new scheme that Peter proposes doesn’t need to be any different than it is now -no need to get your knickers in a twist.
July 17, 2012 at 2:58 pm
I think there is already a frame in place for what @telescoper describes. See PeerJ for example (http://peerj.com/how-it-works/). At the moment PeerJ does not have plans for astronomy, but it may be worth showing them as a collective that we’re *very* interested.
The mainframe is already there. We just need to convince PeerJ that we’re ready for it.
July 17, 2012 at 3:08 pm
I think this is a great idea. Thanks for taking the initiative and volunteering to put up the money! Other commenters have raised a bunch of issues that need to be looked at, but all of them are solvable, I think.
I’m willing to help out — certainly by refereeing and submitting articles when the time comes, possibly in other ways.
July 17, 2012 at 3:17 pm
Like Sarah, I’m curious about your (Peter’s) thinking on one thing: are you envisioning traditional blind peer review or some sort of open review?
July 17, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Good to see this type of proposal and full support from my side. Although I doubt that astronomy can ‘lead the way’ with just a new peer-review system. The cutting edge seems to be the recent F1000+figshare merger. Now, if astronomy were to create a F1000 which is truly open, then. In the meantime, I think Paperrater is already well-placed as a platform for experimenting with open review
http://www.digital-science.com/blog/posts/figshare-and-f1000-research-shake-up-traditional-academic-publishing-format
July 17, 2012 at 4:43 pm
Keep banging the drum, Phillip. The current editor/referee system is far from perfect, but nor is it in dire need of overhaul. Do I need to be paid to act as editor or referee? No, but i do not expect to be exploited to make money for publishers, as now.
July 17, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Great idea! You may want to submit a “proposal” to the arXiv, just to make it official, and request for people to sign up somewhere with their desired contribution (or just, say, commitment to submit there) and comments.
July 17, 2012 at 5:11 pm
Well, I might have read the original posting in a different way, but if the idea is to create essentially a new open journal, just less expensive, I don’t quite see the point. In this case it might be more useful to push for an astronomy journal on the PeerJ platform, as Eli suggested. In comparison to conventional journals, PeerJ comes with a novel pricing model and optional open review.
July 17, 2012 at 5:30 pm
For the interest of the debate, there is also Scholastica [1], which offers a platform with which to operate a journal. Admittedly, it does already invoke a fee, which can be paid however the journal operator desires, but it also doesn’t try to overhaul the peer-review system.
It isn’t quite free but possibly worth introducing to the debate anyway?
[1] https://scholasticahq.com/
July 17, 2012 at 8:03 pm
Interesting to see how many people have thought about this and begun to develop their ideas. There is huge inertia in the system, because of the use of citation indices, journal quality indicators and peer review in the assessment of papers. We do want to keep many aspects of the existing system. But if the existing system now becomes unaffordable, this may be the time that a new initiative could take off. The only place where a publisher is needed is in the publication. An all-electronic journal working with arxiv may work. The best way to innovate may be if an existing journal changes sides (MNRAS?). Peter, why don’t you call a meeting on this?
July 17, 2012 at 10:58 pm
I would add that citation index, journal quality indicator and peer review are important for the funding bodies and, above them, the government. In the UK, that is the department of Business(!) Bibliometrics and impact factors are needed to convince them their money is well spend.
July 17, 2012 at 9:18 pm
I’m sort of with Phillip here: the only thing I want to change about the current system (apart from the odd rubbish referee report, or the odd editor who won’t back their referee) is the lack of openness and the cost. So I’d publish in a new open access journal if (1) it had an editorial board I trusted to keep the referees under control and the crackpots out, (2) it was backed by a (non-profit!) corporate body like a learned society, and (3) up-front costs were low (but don’t have to be zero).
The variant on the idea that we’ve just come up here is to set up a new RAS-backed open journal, to run in parallel with MNRAS. That would have the advantage that MNRAS wouldn’t have to ‘change sides’ instantaneously; but a lot of the existing MNRAS infrastructure at Burlington House could be re-used without really adding much in the way of cost. Whether this is practical may depend on what sort of deal the RAS has with Wiley-Blackwell.
Just a reminder that the RAS is a democratic organization. If they won’t listen, let’s put up a bunch of people for election next time round on an open-access platform…
July 18, 2012 at 8:16 am
I think ‘quality’ of the sort I care about is implicit in having a decent editorial board and referee selection process. I am not particularly bothered about editing. We cope with the many spelling and punctuation mistakes in the papers that appear on the arxiv; journal editing doesn’t catch them all, and frequently introduces new errors of grammar or, worse, fact.
I would rather keep arxiv out of the loop if the idea were to set up a new ‘proper’ journal, precisely because one doesn’t want to be governed by the intersection of arxiv’s policy and the journal’s (and because arxiv’s policies might change without warning). The subset of arxiv’s functionality that’s needed to publish an all-electronic journal is pretty trivial to implement.
July 17, 2012 at 9:33 pm
There has been a lot of talk and hand-wringing about this. First of all, astronomy is fortunate in that most of our top journals are produced by the professional societies, and not commercial publishers; many other fields are not so lucky, and they have a much bigger problem, as the traditional publishing is dying (think music industry, or newspapers).
There are several different aspects of this problem, which I would group in 3 types: technology, peer review, and persistence.
We are still largely stuck in a printed-paper paradigm, mimicking that ancient medium on a computer screen. Electronic publishing makes it cheaper and easier, but we yet have to make a full use of the possibilities in conveying information in different ways. We also need to broaden the concept and the range of scientific publications.
As for the peer review and editorial discretion, some form of a quality control and validation is necessary; yet, many of us think that the peer review system as it stands is broken, regardless of the medium. Perhaps some form of a controlled/supervised crowdsourcing of the peer review is a good path to explore.
Finally, one key function of scholarly publishing is to assure a longevity of the publications (printed paper was good at that, but it also required some long-term, special housing, aka the libraries). Established professional societies may be natural curators of our long-term electronic libraries, but there are many practical issues to resolve there as well.
We had some good discussions of these issues at the first two Astroinformatics conferences, and plan to continue at AstroInformatics 2012 (htp://astroinformatics2012.org). Please come and contribute, if you are interested.
July 18, 2012 at 2:48 pm
A few thoughts on abandoning (La)TeX in manuscript preparation: http://theconfusionlimit.tumblr.com/
July 19, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Jim, have you seen MathJax? To my mind it does everything needed of a web-based LaTeX-quality mathematical typesetting system
July 19, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Thanks Paul, no I haven’t seen this MathJax before, but it looks ideal – just what you’d want for a pure online journal implementation.
July 18, 2012 at 7:45 am
Thanks for all the comments and suggestions on this post, and also for the offers of help I’ve received by email. It will take me a while to read them all in detail and work out what to do next, but I think it might be a good idea to have a meeting, perhaps including the RAS at some time about this.
July 18, 2012 at 11:56 am
The arxiv is great as an archive. It has minimal peer review and editing.
What is really needed here (and ultimately what Peter is asking for) is not a journal but an Editor (or more). That is, someone who does the only useful thing journals currently do: filter out crackpots, send off real papers to be peer reviewed, read the referee’s comments and decide whether or not to publish. I don’t think this is easily automated, more for social and psychological reasons than anything else.
You can call that process a Journal if you like. You can even automate production of monthly publications. But let’s be clear on the main feature that needs reproducing.
The main worry I see is what everyone else says – those without permanent positions have a disincentive to publish via this new process. This would only go away if you get change any perception that there was a difference between where you are publishing – if traditional journals just become the place you can publish if you want to show off your wealth, for instance, and nothing else.
July 19, 2012 at 10:46 am
I think this would be ideal actually.
July 18, 2012 at 3:46 pm
“The obvious problem here is that crackpot A referees the paper from crackpot B and says it is OK. Yes, believe me, this will happen. And as soon as it does, it will become the poster child for those who will have said “I told you so” when claiming that only traditional journals can guarantee quality.”
When this happens, give me a shout and I can probably find you more than a few references to crackpot papers that have already made it into traditional journals. It doesn’t happen a lot admittedly, but it happens, and it means that it’s going to be hard to make a poster child out of the first time this happens.
If it happens a lot, then it might need more interesting trust metrics to prevent in future, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable problem.
July 18, 2012 at 8:20 pm
There is a mathematics journal that works in more or less the way telescoper is suggesting: see http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/
Authors submit a version arxiv and notify the editors to consider it for peer review. After peer review and copy-editing, the definitive version replaces the old version on arxiv, and the journal declares it published by hyperlinking to it. Quite simple and rather elegant. The main cost would be copy-editing.
Even apart from the open access aspect, it would be nice to see a journal that was more interesting and fun to read than, ahem, the ones we have now.
July 19, 2012 at 8:39 pm
I have no special knowledge regarding SIGMA, but browsing through, it looks like a respectable journal.
Assuming an arxiv-overlay journal uses the same referee pool as established journals, would the quality control (and impact factor, etc etc) not be similar?
July 19, 2012 at 11:43 am
I think many of these contributions are missing the point. Digital publishing means that the concept of a “journal” is entirely redundant. Monthly Notices isn’t Monthly anyway, and if it disappeared hardly anyone would Notice…
What we need is a refereed archive. We have the archive bit already (the arXiv). All we need to do is set up a front end to manage the refereeing. Simples.
If the RAS wants to do this for us, fine, but not at £2000 a pop in APC.
I’m getting emails about how much it would cost to set this up – all based on costs of running existing journals, the expense of which is either wasted or simply profit for publishers. It’s time to stop thinking about journals and other outmoded ideas, and think instead about the best way to get science published.
July 22, 2012 at 9:28 pm
[…] aus der Astronomie auf dem Tisch, den Plan der Regierung mit einem eigenen Konzept zu kontern: Zu gründen ist ein Verlags-unabhängiges Open-Access-Journal, das dank Peer Review gewohnter Qualität dieselbe Reputation wie die führenden kommerziellen […]
July 25, 2012 at 3:03 pm
I am afraid that the Arxiv endorsement is opaque and does not work well. What happens if you can’t get your paper on ArXiv for some reason? Then it cannot be refereed? Please leave ArXiv out of the system until they become much more accountable!!!
Last year I endorsed afriend of mine who works at a think tank so he could upload a paper on the famous neutrino result that was refuted recently. His paper was as good as any of the 100 or so other papers already on ArXiv on this subject and certainly much less exotic. It dealt with trying to explain the result in the context of special relativity. In fact I spent a full week studying the paper and equations before agreeing to endorse to make sure the result made sense.
I came to the conclusion the paper had sound arguments and so I endorsed him. He uploaded the paper, and strangely it was rejected!!! Let me repeat, I *endorsed* the author, but I was overturned and the paper rejected. We asked the reasons why and ArXiv refused to give us the reasons. I suspect it was because my friend has no academic affiliation, but this is only a theory.
As an established astronomer myself with ~60 refereed articles, I find the ArXiv system is obviously not working. If you are allowed to endorse, then you should not be arbitrarily overturned, and any such decision cannot be made behind closed curtains.
I now have adopted the policy never to reference an ArXiv paper, although I am forced to post my own papers on there when they are accepted (since ArXiv is the only place for early dissemination). I certainly will not join a scheme to use ArXiv as the archive end for a new journal and refereeing process! I may change my mind if ArXiv makes concerted efforts to change their policy.
p.s ArXiv has also some plain contradictions in its policy on plagiarism. It states clearly that plagirarism is not acceptable. They even have a system that can detect it. Yet when I complained about a article that plagiarises one of my papers (and someone elses), they said they would not do anything about it, and the link to the paper that conatin copied material still exists:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.4363v1
copied from my paper:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005MNRAS.359.1096B
(and others)
July 25, 2012 at 5:37 pm
Interestingly enough ArXiv is moving towards a funding model where institutions pay towards its upkeep. I think this will force them to be more open about their policies, otherwise disgruntled users like me will ask our institutions not to fund them. My employer is already aware of the problems ArXiv has caused me, and these cases will influence our provision of funding.
July 25, 2012 at 5:41 pm
I agree with your request for clear policies. But come on, do you really think arXiv admins would scan the web for criticism or rants about arXiv and then ban the user? Any evidence, even anecdotal?
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[…] useful at a fraction of the cost of a journal subscription . That was the motivation behind the Open Journal of Astrophysics , a project that I and a group of like-minded individuals will be launching very soon. There will be […]
December 22, 2015 at 9:51 am
[…] has taken a lot longer to get to this point than I thought it would when I first proposed the Open Journal of Astrophysics way back in 2012 but better late than […]
January 7, 2016 at 7:51 pm
[…] arXiv-pohjaisesta lehdestä on tutkittu jo vuonna 2007 RIOJA-projektissa, ja kosmologi Peter Coles ehdotti toimeen tarttumista kesällä 2012. Coles on OJA:n päätoimittaja, ja hän kertoo blogissaan […]
September 13, 2018 at 11:06 am
[…] and foremost, if you don’t know what this project is about it is an idea I first floated over five years ago, shortly before I moved to Sussex. Although we got a website together and published a few papers, […]
October 5, 2018 at 2:31 pm
[…] first proposed this idea several years ago and it has taken a while to make it happen, but here we are at […]
October 8, 2018 at 9:01 am
[…] again for submissions! t has taken a lot longer to get to this point than I thought it would when I first proposed the Open Journal of Astrophysics way back in 2012 but better late than […]
July 17, 2022 at 11:53 am
[…] is ten years to the day that I wrote the blog post that first proposed setting up the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It took a bit longer to get going than I’d expected to get it going, but we got there. It […]
November 5, 2022 at 2:35 am
[…] have taken plenty of opportunities to discuss the above problems in discussion forums and also at science meetings. This way scientists may become more aware of the issues with arXiv […]