> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
[0] https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/773059302822316
[1] http://www.lingoa.eu/about/aims/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/marc.vanoostendorp/posts/1020623886...
Are we really surprised? How would you feel if some of your customers demanded you turn your business over to them for zero compensation?
I wish the linguists all the luck in the world starting their new, open-access journal.
Probably the same way encyclopedia companies felt as wikipedia grew. Bad news for them.
The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices.
http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little else.
And that's exactly what you see happening here. The linguists are saying that they'll be able to provide the product for a lesser price, but being nice and offering to let Elsevier continue to compete. If Elsevier refuses, and the linguists go ahead and start their own journal, then the free market has triumphed.
What's happening with #icanhazpdf is that researchers are innovating to find ways to provide the product (access to research papers) at a much lower cost than Elsevier provides it — free, in fact. However, Elsevier, rather than compete with them, seeks to enforce government-granted monopolies on providing this service, known as copyrights, in order to protect their profits, at the cost of providing benefits to society.
High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers. Apparently both authors and readers feel it's worth the money.
And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
This is a very odd situation that I suspect isn't really amenable to normal economic analysis, at least outside of very simplistic models.
The value that journals offer is, over the medium term, due to the editorial staff and the authors that submit articles. Remove those two, and the journal will cease to be "high prestige" and will likely fold. In the short term, however, the value is in the journal's name: you could replace the editors of Lancet with a crop of corn husks and it would still be "high prestige" for quite a while---at least until the third or fourth major screw-up. (Losing the authors is harder, but hold that thought for another paragraph.)
On the other hand, over the long term, the value lies entirely in the readers. No major academic is going to waste their professional capital on a journal that isn't read by their colleagues, and ultimately, an academic's articles need to be read, not just published, for them to advance more than locally.
In the same way, new journals have issues: In the short term, it's hard to get over the name recognition hump; in the medium term, they have to have consistently good editors and authors to attract more than momentary attention. But once they have attracted a readership, they have an inertia that makes other factors less important.
A couple of examples:
* Anyone heard from Software: Practice and Experience lately? It was one of my favorite journals, and was being edited by Douglas Comer the last time I interacted with it. But I haven't seen an issue in more than a decade, mostly because it is (was?) hideously expensive, and haven't seen any references to it, either.
* How about PLOS? Seems to be high prestige now, judging by the number of references I hear on the Science and Nature podcasts.
My personal suspicion is that a better analogy for Elsevier and company is the mining business: extracting as much wealth as possible from academic journals, as cheaply as possible, before the ore runs out and the town dries up and blows away.
> And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
Publishing in a journal with a low impact factor isn't nearly as worthwhile as publishing in one with a higher impact factor, which implies a strong lock-in effect which works on Elsevier's favor. Even if Elsevier weren't around, a new journal would have a hard time getting off the ground.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Graphics_Tools
[1] http://casual-effects.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-journal-of-co...
[2] http://jcgt.org/
> So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism.
As far as we can tell, Galileo was persecuted by the Pope not because of science, but because Galileo was basically an asshole, who abused his friendship with the Pope and then kept venting out against him. The issue was strictly political. See [0] and especially the top comment[1] under the article.
Also, apparently, Galileo was right for the wrong reasons - he lucked into the right theory even though evidence available at the time didn't substantiate his views.
[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
That is very, very true. That PR fuckup carried on to this day and age. Three and a half centuries later, people still blame them for that.
In fact, that'd be almost as reasonable as modern commercial interests arguing against some kind of theory that proposed humans were impacting the climate of the planet...
Good question. I've never thought of astronomy as characterized by a constant stream of progress building mainly on the work of past astronomers; instead, I've seen it as more in line with the model of "technology advances, with ancillary benefits to all sorts of different fields including astronomy". For example, radio telescopes owe a lot to progress in physics, but not very much to progress in astronomy specifically.
If that's the case, "none" is a very plausible answer to your question.
But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.
It would have been surprising if the papacy were able to hold back Kepler and Newton, since they both lived in Protestant lands. That might be a coincidence. But maybe there were potential Keplers and Newtons living in Rome, or Madrid, or Tuscany, or even Paris¹, who were simply intimidated out of doing research.
¹ Even if they were Huguenots, who were still experiencing religious assassinations at the time, despite Henry IV; but especially if they were Catholics whose friends and family might suspect them of Huguenot sympathies.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. For Galileo, his observations that Venus had phases, like the Moon, and that Jupiter had its own moons, and more, were enough to convince him that the Copernican theory was more likely to be correct than the geocentric model. We now know that he interpreted the evidence correctly.
TL;DR: The models that were popular in times of Galileo weren't stories told to poor villagers by the Evil Church; they were precise mathematical tools that could be used to predict in advance the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. They also had an elaborate explanations for what the parts of their models mean. And then comes Galileo with a theory that's inferior, built on arbitrary assumptions, doesn't agree with observation and fails to match the predictive capabilities of established models.
The strength of a model is its ability to predict the future, and therefore no sane, rational person could accept Galileo's model over the common ones based on the evidence they collected and analyzed so far. That's what I mean by "enough evidence to promote one model over another". It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff, and b) mathematical model that spat out better predictions than the previous models did while being also simpler. And only then scientific world moved to accept the new picture - when it became the one that matched available evidence the best (it still took a few hundred years to sort out the kinks though).
People in times of Galileo weren't stupid, the Church wasn't supressing astronomy, and Galileo himself got sacked for being an ass to authority.
I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mass). That's not much of an explanation.
You can make a judgment call about the relative merits of "new theory, doesn't make numeric predictions well" and "very old theory, makes numeric predictions almost flawlessly, additionally predicts things that we know to be false".
But that was Newton, not Galileo. (And the notation of course is more or less modern, except to the extent I've screwed it up.)
The main problem with Copernicus's new theory in Galileo's time, as I understand it, was not that it didn't make numeric predictions well; the problem was that it predicted qualitative phenomena that were "known" to be false, like stellar parallax.
And everything you've said about Newton refers to answering the question of how much stuff is attracted to other stuff, not why it is. He was able to show that the natural motion of everything is circular (unless it's in perfect stasis), and to describe with great precision the form of the circles involved (and how they deform into ellipses), but there's no why anywhere. Newton can't justify the force of gravity varying with the square of distance except by observing that it happens to work in practice. He certainly can't explain why it's not zero -- it could have been zero. (Sure, it's very fair to say he told us why Kepler's laws obtained. But that wasn't the question, the question was "why is stuff attracted to other stuff?")
What, specifically did the Tychonic system predict that was known to be false in the early 17th century? As far as I know, the interpretations of its model were kind of a mess, but the model itself was fine, up to the precision of then-known instruments.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system :
> Tycho admired aspects of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system, but felt that it had problems as concerned physics, astronomical observations of stars, and religion. Regarding the Copernican system Tycho wrote,
>> This innovation expertly and completely circumvents all that is superfluous or discordant in the system of Ptolemy. On no point does it offend the principle of mathematics. Yet it ascribes to the Earth, that hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion, a motion as quick as that of the aethereal torches, and a triple motion at that.
> In regard to physics, Tycho held that the Earth was just too sluggish and heavy to be continuously in motion. According to the accepted Aristotelian physics of the time, the heavens (whose motions and cycles were continuous and unending) were made of "Aether" or "Quintessence"; this substance, not found on Earth, was light, strong, and unchanging, and its natural state was circular motion. By contrast, the Earth (where objects seem to have motion only when moved) and things on it were composed of substances that were heavy and whose natural state was rest
So, the Copernican system was acknowledged to be mathematically superior, and the Ptolemaic system was acknowledged to be a particularly obvious case of special pleading. The Earth was considered exceptional under the Tychonian system because it was too heavy to be constantly in motion -- as a large terrestrial object, its natural state was rest.
Interestingly enough, I remember learning about a Renaissance scientist who did several experiments to the effect that there is no such thing as a "natural state of rest" for terrestrial objects...
Furthermore, the idea that the Earth is exceptional is severely undermined by the moons of Jupiter. From them, you would see exactly what you see from Earth, and you could readily fit a Tychonian model with a sun going around Jupiter -- but why would you? (This is what I was referring to originally, but this particular argument is slightly weaker than I was thinking of.)
I'll also note that, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the Tychonic system wasn't exactly well-established at the time:
> It was chiefly through the influence of the Jesuit scientists that the Roman Catholic Church adopted the Tychonic system, over a period of nine years (from 1611 to 1620), in a process directly prompted by the Galilean telescopic discoveries.
The reason that it was preferred over the Copernican system was that it additionally predicted that parallax of the stars should not be observed. At the time astronomers had looked for parallax as a way to test the Copernican system, and had not observed it. This was the strongest point in favor of the Tychonic system. As it happened, the stars were much further away than astronomers at the time realized, so the parallax was much smaller than they could have detected with the instruments of the time. (In fact, it took more than two centuries before parallax was detected.)
But the point is that I think that if any of us were alive at the time and took careful stock of all the evidence most of us would probably come to the same conclusion that most of the astronomers of time did. Namely that, while interesting, the Copernican system did not have as much evidence supporting it as the Tychonic system did. But if Galileo had built a Foucault pendulum instead, it would have been a very different story!
A more accurate title would have been: "Scientists forced to break the law to access the research they need in order to advance scientific knowledge."
A more provocative but still accurate title would have been: "Scientific progress impeded by corporations extracting economic rents from scientists and taxpayers, to the detriment of humankind."
Because that is what is happening.
Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
Scientists don't love giving up their rights to Elsevier. Elsevier owns many high IF journals in a number of fields, and publishing in high IF journals is part of how you "prove your worth" and get grants. Scientists give up their rights to Elsevier because that's how the "scientific economy" of their field of study is currently structured.
As you say, to do this as a young researcher is career suicide.
The only thing "will and guts" do when all your field's high IF journals are big publishers is give you the boot.
> Gower has said "no"
Gower was a Fields medalist, Royal Society fellow and Shaw selection committee member before saying no, his stand is nice but he's not what I'm talking about.
> how about a few others?
Many have signed the petition and possibly more have actually done the work of trying to set up or raise the profile of open-access journals.
Changing tenure policies is also an important component in getting a culture shift towards open research.
But won't every university you apply to tell you that that isn't the case?
For the most part, I don't think scientists care about the issue, except for being a bit annoyed with Elsevier. Most people don't care about most things that don't affect them directly. Scientists are people too. So rather than invest effort in activism, they mostly focus on their jobs and their families and stuff.
Some fields (like math) seem to be pulling it off, but it takes a group of leaders in the field to coordinate a change in publishing models.
You may be angry but the scientist needs a future.
Couldn't the scientist refuse to peer review non-openly published papers?
Refusing to review non-open work sounds like a good way to burn political capital for those early in their careers.
I'm not affiliated, just a fan of their work.
[0] http://cos.io
(Not affiliated with. Just discovered it recently and found out, that 2 of my papers very cited without my knowledge.)
I'm surprised that we don't have a P2P variant strictly for academia. What a boon it would be to the dissemination of knowledge.
Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.