Rich Seymour’s stochastic statements.

Tonight I was looking at the Public Knowledge Project and it’s Open Journals Initiative software platform (note see the end for the more comprehensive list at DOAJ). Besides the a bit navel gazing but well known and well written First Monday (e-journal about the internet), the best ones I found most interesting and readable of quite a few were Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science, Culture Machine and Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers.

After looking through there for a specifically Materials Science journal (in English, my only real language) along the lines of Philosophical Magazine (arguably the oldest scientific publication ever… 200 years of research folks, yeah… now focusing on condensed matter… philosophize on that!!!), or Materials Science and Engineering A, I gave up. Oh well. There will be one, New Journal of Physics is open access.

And here’s where the story gets funny. A couple of years ago, Nature (the big British weekly science rag err ahem Journal, younger than Phil Mag though *smirk*), started making mini Natures. Science (the journal) did the same thing. Many of the major publishers grew and/or merged and becoming part of multinational publishing houses (like Reed-Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group (owned by Macmillan, in turn owned by a German Company), etc. etc.) So, now we have many of the world’s most well known journals owned by for profit publishing houses. Sure, they are for profit when they publish Hemmingway or science articles, but the whole profit model of magazine subscriptions in Science is… absurd.

Take for example the every other monthly publication TapeOp. In the United States, a subscription to TapeOp is free because it is supported by advertisers. The authors, publisher, editors, everyone involved do it for little to no profit. It’s not a charity, but it’s a labor of love.

Now take for example the aforementioned Nature Materials. A one year subscription costs: $199. A little over $10 an issue… with ads. They haven’t figured out the economics of it. Something is off. Who knows, perhaps they spend too much on glue, or the mathematical typesetting is too hard, the color printing too difficult. I don’t know, and I’m beginning not to care. I must admit one great reason for an inquisitive mind to stay in the .edu or large .com world is that those organizations have journal subscriptions (which cost 10x the personal rate), so you can read what you want, whenever.

So, I grew up in a bookstore that my parents owned, named the Bookshop in Jamestown, NY. I could read any book I could reach and I grew to be pretty tall, even before they went out of business in the mid-nineties. Around that time I got an epix.net account and finally got access to the computer nets beyond the one between two 8086s in my parents store, the BBS’s, AOL, and Prodigy. I got to see what the heck the internet was. lynx? Mosaic? ZOMG!

And now, I have to laugh when I hit an article I can’t read at the start of Nature Materials July 2008 issue, some approx 15 years later:

Nature Materials 7, 512 - 514 (2008)
doi:10.1038/nmat2215

Print and perish?

Joerg Heber1

1. Joerg Heber is at Nature Materials, 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW, UK.
e-mail: j.heber@nature.com

Abstract

Although the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we communicate, science publishing is remarkably hesitant in making full use of the potential offered by new technology.

You could read the article for $18, if you don’t have a subscription. Chances are if you want to read about Zeolite characterisation or Nanoparticle assembly you are associated with some institution with a subscription like I am. But… you know, if you’re in your teens, and maybe you’re growing up in a small town without any big-name resources in it, know that there are a lot of great science journals online that you can read and try to grasp for free. Right Now.

Start your journey here:
Directory of Open Access Journals (currently over 3000 journals in the directory)

posted by Rich at 9:39 pm
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