Talk:Academic journal publishing reform

History of academic publishing

I would love to see a book or article or any good source which gives the history of academic publishing. This article currently is about the reforms which were motivated by electronic publishing. If there were any other great reforms between the founding of the institution of journal publishing and the greater acceptance of electronic publishing then I would love to integrate what information exists on that topic into this article. Blue Rasberry (talk) 05:44, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

• Why is this not just part of the academic publishing article? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 12:25, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Splitting and Wikipedia:Article size discuss this and there are several reasons. Right now this article is 10k and academic publishing is 30k, and I am expecting that this article will get even bigger. Since this new content has a single theme and since 30-50k is the recommended article size, I decided to put it alone. It would be undue for such a large percentage of the main article to be about reform. Also there are a range of articles which ought to link to an article specifically about the reforms. Thoughts on this? Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:16, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

• Your argument about size is only valid if one simply adds up the figures you cite. That is incorrect, however. First of all, there is not really an organized "academic journal publishing reform" under way. there are several movements, such as the open access movement. There are protests, like the CoK one. There are initiatives to provide affordable access to developing countries, like HINARI. There are law proposals, like the Research Works Act. There's OA publishers like PLoS. Putting all that together in this article is synthesis and original research. This article may be 10k, but it does not contain anything that is not already presented elsewhere, sometimes in their own articles (RWA, HINARI, PLoS, CoK). I see no reason to have this article at all. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 15:26, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

I think it is approaching WP:SYNTH to suggest that all of these things are academic journal publishing reform since I do not have sources connecting them all to a kind of movement, but this kind of problem is inherent in many lists on Wikipedia. That is not an excuse, but I do not think that it is radical to suggest that all of these movements are about reforming academic journal publishing. I tried to use the most generic descriptor possible for this. I do not think the issue of reform is closely tied to the nature of academic publishing, and that is another reason why I think this should be in its own article. I think this article has enough content to stand on its own, and also I think it could be developed further. If anyone wants to assert that these programs should not be related to each other under this heading then I think I would support calling an WP:RfC because I feel a little unsure myself. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:09, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

I think you make the case for SYNTH very well. And this is certainly not a list article. Even if it were, the fact that many list articles suffer from this problem does not mean that we should go on like that here, too (WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS). I also don't see much unique content here, either. All these subjects have their own articles. Why cover it separately here once more? --Guillaume2303 (talk) 10:08, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

The reason for having an article here is that all of these programs have a common history. They all are about the changes to publishing which happened as media transitioned from paper to digital, and they all are about how this transition happened in scholarly research, and in all cases there were very specific problems with the transition which were unique to digital academic publishing and which did not happen as other fields transitioned from paper to digital. Although I am synthesizing that all these campaigns are "academic journal publishing reform", in fact, the "history", "motivations for reform", and "motivations against reform" section of this article apply to all campaigns and have been independently described by sources for all these campaigns. I would prefer to move the background sections for each of these campaigns here with each other article linking here so that the story need not be repeated in each article.

The listing of the campaigns themselves could be moved from this article into a list article. Thoughts? Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:15, 10 June 2012 (UTC)

Old reforms

• Washiet, Stefan (27 June 2013). "The beauty of scientific papers - Design trends of the past 350 years". blog.paperpile.com. Retrieved 18 October 2013.

This work describes typography reform starting from the earliest academic journals. I am not sure if its informatin belongs here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:18, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

Is academic journal publishing reform only OA versus non-OA

I think there's more to publishing reform than just OA vs non-OA, like this article suggests. Of course, it is true that there is no academic publishing reform movement, apart from the OA-movement, but that is another matter. Other issues are the perceived quality or lack of quality and impartiality of peer review, for example. These things were already being talked about before the Internet existed and OA publishing as we now know it did not exist. (What was open at the time was publishing, which had no barriers beyond the editorial process, but not reading, for which you -or your library- needed a subscription). Anyway, the article needs some pruning and some updating (by now it's pretty clear that there is no "academic spring", for example, all those movements -as so often- have petered out). --Randykitty (talk) 22:15, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

I hope that this article can cover contemporary academic publishing reform, including events from perhaps 1990-present. No, I do not think this article should be about OA, and I think a lot of the things listed here are bigger than OA even if the article is not shaped that way now. While I do not think there is an organized "Academic spring", there has been continual upheaval from various sectors recently and "Academic spring" is the only term I have heard used in an attempt to name everything. "Open movement" might be another, but that is bigger. I have no idea where to look for sources covering the big picture.

You named peer review. I will include that here and here are others:

1. Quality reforms in establishing peer review
2. Mass adoption of electronic publishing itself
3. Advent of the systematic review, which was something that really could not exist before electronic publishing
4. Tying open data to research;
5. Rise of personal computing in the 90s, which led to a data explosion in the sciences
6. Increasing service to citizen science
7. Addressing the serials crisis
8. Anticipating the semantic web, which is happening in academic publishing as its first wave
9. Globalization and acknowledgement based on new realizations from online communication that a lot of information which seemed objective is actually subjective; for example, unwarranted variation in health care
10. changes in perception of impact factor and alternative metrics of importance
11. Coming of disruptive concepts of property and ownership, including ownership of publications, research, and the products of research themselves. I am not sure anyone is talking about the US Bayh–Dole Act which allowed private ownership of the products of government research, but people talk about such practices generally now and not before.
12. Access to materials out of copyright, such as the out of copyright materials taken by Google Books or by Aaron Swartz in United States v. Aaron Swartz
13. Electronic indexing and search engines for publications, even when they are not electronically published, which is the usual case

All of these things are radically new and all of them could be discussed without raising the issue of open access. I would outline them in this article but I would prefer to use the model of any existing outline. I think perhaps no outline exists, but still, I think all of these are major reforms to academic publishing and although my notes are not orderly I think there are bodies of literature around all of these topics. Blue Rasberry (talk) 03:34, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Expanding coverage to discuss different problems with peer review and the academic publishing process / model

While helping me with another article, Blue Rasberry suggested that some items and references I was using might be a good fit for this article. I agree, so I'm going to put them here in Talk for discussion on how/whether to add them:

• Coordinating multiple co-authors is difficult in popular academic writing tools like Word and LaTeX.
• Published research data becomes quickly unavailable
• Peer-reviewed published experiments and analysis are often difficult to reproduce
• Competition in some research fields encourages withholding important data and code from published work

The section " Problems addressed by academic publishing reform" seems to primarily address business model, sustainability, and openness. Could the above also go there? Perhaps breaking that section into subsections? Or is there another article (Open Data, Peer Review) where these might be better placed? Jace Harker (talk) 20:11, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

A few other places these references/topics might fit:

• Arguments for and against open data
• Open research
• Arguments for open science
• Peer review failures

Maybe one of these? Jace Harker (talk) 20:24, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

References

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Sci-Hub

User:Randykitty recently removed content on Sci-Hub, saying "pirate site, has nothing to do with publishing reform".

I do not agree with that because why wouldn't it? It's a project that "advocates for changes in the way academic journals are created and distributed in the age of the Internet" as "academic journal publishing reform" is defined in the lead and actually it's probably the most effective of the reform initiatives listed in this article so I think it should definitively be listed there. Not featuring it in the article would be biased and would have it miss essential information on the topic.

--Fixuture (talk) 15:08, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

• We have a whole article on Sci-Hub. But I don't agree that it plays a role in publishing reform. It's like saying that torrent sites are reforming film and music distribution. Whether this one-person pirate site will have a lasting effect on academic publishing really remains to be seen and is purely speculative at the moment. --Randykitty (talk) 15:24, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
  • @Randykitty: Well, I'm hoping for some more opinions on that here.

It's like saying that torrent sites are reforming film and music distribution.

But media piracy has had a major impact on film and music distribution - look at things like spotify and how many artists / labels started to publish their music for free download and/or streaming online etc. But those are still different things.

Whether this one-person pirate site will have a lasting effect on academic publishing really remains to be seen and is purely speculative at the moment.

Sci-Hub is basically saying "if you don't make the research openly available, we'll do it" and is hence pressuring publishers to make them openly available themselves. Whether or not it has / will have a lasting effect on academic publishing is not a requirement for the inclusion in the list. However, the project has already been called "transformative" and said to have "chang[ed] how we access knowledge" etc.

--Fixuture (talk) 15:55, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

• The difference is, of course, that things like spotify and Napster did change the way things were done in the music industry. Whether Sci-Hub will do the same for academic publishing is very much up in the air. Last time I checked, subscription journals were still going strong... WP is not the place for speculation. But let's see what other editors here think. --Randykitty (talk) 16:10, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

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