The n-Category Café

I hit these teaser sites a few times a day, and every time it makes me a little more bitter. This bitterness has accumulated over years, so now, if you’ll allow it, I’m going to rant for a few paragraphs.

These esteemed publishing houses are a blight on the physics community. They once served a useful purpose – as a means of disseminating information – but that time has long passed. Their useful role has been overtaken by the net. Now they are nothing but drag. They drain financial resources away from universities by charging libraries large subscription fees. They lock down the information as best they can, often restricting authors from distributing via other channels. And, as John is pointing out, they tease people with search results leading to payment portals – the old bait and switch. This behavior might be justifiable if they were providing or encouraging some sort of content, but they produce absolutely nothing! Yes, they organize the peer review process, but this is a farce. The journals send articles off to be reviewed by harried professors who usually don’t want to read them, and do a lousy job or pass the work on to grad students. Or, worse, the articles are reviewed by people who have a stake in revising or hindering the appearance of the information.

So why the heck are these journals still in business? It’s because the physics community is propping them up! It looks better on a C.V. if an article has been accepted by a journal. That’s it. That’s the only reason these journals still exist. It’s a ridiculous criterion, since the journal peer review process has been shown over and over to be broken. But every postdoc and assistant professor feels this pressure to get her articles into the “best” journal possible, so the tenure and hiring committees will see these stamps of acceptance on her C.V. Heck, even I, a researcher working outside of academia, get advised repeatedly to submit my work to journals if I want it taken seriously. This pressure keeps the articles and money flowing into the journals, and it needs to stop. And, fortunately, I believe it will.

I think this situation will improve with technology. Although the arxiv has been dragging its feet, the technology is in place elsewhere to replace the (non)functionality of official peer review with collaborative filtering. Via this method, articles can be read by people who want to read them, and rated higher or lower by these interested readers. Comments on articles are also useful, as are the informal reviews that take place at conferences. And even if a system like this is not put in place explicitly, it effectively occurs via citations. So these more effective methods will take over, and the journals will die.

But they will not go quietly. You can count on them trying every nasty trick in the book to keep the money coming. At their side will be an old guard of physicists sitting in committees and judging other scientists based on what journals they’ve published in. But there will be some young punks who embrace new ideas and technology and couldn’t care less if a researcher’s work has been transcribed onto an especially exclusive piece of dead tree.

These young punks will win. And when they do, the journals will be a piece of history, and the world will be better for it. I will do my part by writing the best stuff I can and NOT submitting it to exclusive journals. Maybe others aren’t willing to do that yet, because they need to climb the academic ladder the old way. That’s fine. But if you find yourself on a committee reviewing a researcher’s work, keep in mind that the old system of journals and their archaic practices is on the way out – and it will be.

I wrote a similar bit in secret blogging, but I want to empahsize some points. ADMINISTRATORS and TENURE COMMITTEES have to be educated about (1) using citation indices as the only measure of scientific value is dangerous; (2) the arXiv and the blogosphere can provide some refereeing functionality; (3) peer reviewing and refereeing can be a beauty contest and self serving: Just because we are scientists does not mean we are not slaves to fashion.

Having said that, I wonder:

Does anyone have a workable review system that could be used for publically available articles?

How can we protect the potential commercial interests of the author in mathematics and physics if all articles are made public?

Sometime soon, somewhere nearby, n-categories are going to yield commercial products.

Is there a list available of physics journals ranked by subscription cost/article (=subscription cost per year/articles per year)?

If you suspect them of giving different content to Google than to you, Google certainly wants to know. If you’re on Firefox, you can install the “User Agent Switcher” plugin and try switching your user agent string to

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

to see if they’ll give you the hidden content.

I am another researcher who happens to think that the peer review process is working just fine, at least in the mathematical subfield in which I work. I take my refereeing assignments seriously, reading proofs carefully to ensure their correctness (unless I reject the paper outright for other reasons). And I’m forever grateful to those referees who’ve read my papers thoroughly, providing very useful and insightful suggestions. If this process ever goes away - and I hope not - the mathematical literature would undoubtedly become more and more unreliable as more logical mistakes go undiscovered. This would be a disaster for the field, unlike the sciences where results can be verified by experiments (except perhaps in string theory…)

Would someone post concrete examples of this for as many of these sites as you can (like the 150V x-ray example above)? I’m pretty sure that the spam team is simply unaware of these sites. Most of the publishers’ income comes from paper publications, but getting delisted from Google would probably hurt.

If all you’re going to show the user is the paper’s abstract, that’s all you’re allowed to show Googlebot and expect to stay listed.

The content you see is coming out of the Google Scholar program, launched in late 2004 and specifically allowing these publications to cloak with Google’s full cooperation and knowledge. IE, they’re not spamming. It doesn’t make it less annoying, of course – but to be spamming, they’d have to be doing something Google tells them not to do. In this case, Google’s helping them do it.

Our discussion has led to this nice blog post, which contains more illustrations of cloaking by academic publishers:

• Pierre Far, Academic publishers as spammers, BlogSci, August 2, 2007.

Pierre Far has a Ph.D. in bacterial genetics, and now works as a search engine marketer.

Another discussion launched by the one we’re having here:

• Sebastian, Cloaking is alive and doing well in Google, Sphinn, August 3, 2007.

And, an older one about the same issue:

• Danny Sullivan, YADAC: Yet Another Debate About Cloaking happens again, Search Engine Land, March 4, 2007.

These are by people in the search engine industry, not academics, so they present an interestingly different viewpoint.

Recently springerlink.com made lots of its book content available to various universities on a one-month trial basis. You would get one (random) chapter of a desired book. Unsurprisingly, some undergrads set up a data-suck that would get all the chapters and then re-assemble them. Re-distribution has already begun to occur. Academics have not exactly been outspoken in speaking against such theft— indeed, many of them not only approve, but take part in this. Is it any wonder that the publishers treat academics as an enemy?

I just spoke with the guy in charge of Google Scholar about the cloaking. Yes, Google is allowing these publishers to cloak their content. There has been a lot of debate, internally and externally, about this at Google.

There are good arguments that this is, at the moment, providing a useful service. The big problem is that most of this information is only available in the journals. If there was anywhere else to find it, Google would not have allowed the cloaking. There are few people looking for it and few people providing it. For-pay news doesn’t get indexed, for-pay financial info doesn’t get indexed, etc.

The search terms that people use to find academic information are self-selecting. The vast majority of people searching for these terms are people at universities whose libraries are already paying for access. At the moment, there is no way to tell whether a given user has access or not. If they default to not showing the information, most of those searching would not be able to see what they are actually allowed to see.

Google recognizes that their policy unfairly supports these publishers, but feels that the traffic Google drives to their sites simply isn’t a big enough source of income to have any clout with the publishers. If anyone’s going to crack this nut, it will have to be the university libraries.

Google doesn’t get any revenue from the publishers except indirectly through the Google ads that appear beside the search results.

There are some interesting borderline cases between for-pay science papers and other content; Nature is half advertising and half hard science. Google delisted them until Nature provided some way to distinguish between the news/ads and the science.

As far as Google can tell, hardly anyone knows about Google scholar. Again, if they restricted these results to turning up under Google scholar, most people doing searches for these terms would not find the content that’s actually available to them.

Marking the content as “maybe for pay” would typically discourage people from clicking the links, even though, in the majority of cases, they already have access.

Hardly anyone uses the advanced search operators either. A search operator to eliminate for-pay content would be possible; this is one of several ideas they’re tossing around to try to make things better. In the meantime, if you don’t have access to springerlink or simply don’t want to be their patron, add the term

-site:springerlink.org

to your search. Three or four such terms should eliminate the majority of the for-pay hits in your search results. It would be trivial to write up a webpage that automatically includes these terms in every web search.

So Google’s not particularly happy about the situation, but at the moment, this is the compromise they’ve settled on.

Peter Woit reports that the editorial board of K-Theory has done a Topology and resigned en masse.

Hi John,

Here’s a weird tie in to this article. I was sitting on Wiki about 20 minutes ago, when I linked to their piece on New Scientist and noted that you got a mention on their obligatory criticism (it’s the done thing you know).

So I wished to respond somehow, so followed a few more links through ‘tinternet to find an article that you were at least recently active in to just ask a question:

“What is wrong with thinking about breaking the laws of conservation of momentum?”

Ironic the way this question came up on a thread on Academic Spam and that it took no more than 25 minutes to complete a communication loop with mild relevance (relatively speaking) from a subject matter stretched over months.

One eagerly awaits your response, I shall return in a couple of year again having broken all practical sense of conservative ideals on momentum once again ;)

Yours demonstrating the impracticably practicable,

In-Limbo

Elsevier’s starting a new journal, Computer Science Review, and will pay authors EU400 per article.

I believe that this is a self-correcting problem. The conventional Physics and Math journals are doing to their audience (customers) very close to what the RIAA has done with music recording. The RIAA buried their heads in the sand about downloading music legally, sued children and innocent bystanders, and annoyed the hell out of musicians and audiences alike.

By so doing, the conventional pressed bleached wood-pulp journals and the RIAA have doomed themselves to obsolescence, to be replaced by new technologies and new business models. For Physics and Math publishing, this includes open-access publishing, the arXiv, edited on-line encyclopedias such as The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
where I just added 14 sequences on Blandin-Diaz compositional Bernoulli numbers based on the fine paper published in arXiv and referencing John Baez:
Hector Blandin, Rafael Diaz, Compositional Bernoulli numbers, 6 Aug 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA
[RIAA: The Recording Industry Association of America… a trade group that represents the recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of a large number of private corporate entities such as record labels and distributors, who create and distribute about 90% of recorded music sold in the US. It is involved in a series of controversial copyright infringement legal actions on behalf of its members. The RIAA was formed in 1952 primarily to administer the RIAA equalization curve. This is a technical standard of frequency response applied to vinyl records during manufacturing and playback. The RIAA has continued to participate in creating and administering technical standards for later systems of music recording and reproduction, including magnetic tape, cassette tapes, digital audio tapes, CDs and software-based digital technologies. The RIAA also participates in the collection, administration and distribution of music licenses and royalties. The association is responsible for certifying gold and platinum albums and singles in the USA. For more information about sales data see List of best selling albums and List of best selling singles. The RIAA’s stated goals are to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists; to perform research about the music industry; and to monitor and review relevant laws, regulations and policies.]

Into the Great Wide Open
ASSOCIATIONS NOW, August 2007

Is open-access publishing opening the doors to achievement and innovation, or is it opening
By: Interview by Lisa Junker, CAE

Open-access publishing opens a scary chasm between a known public good–open sharing of information–and an untested and seemingly unreliable business model. Patrick Brown of the Public Library of Science argues that publishers (including associations) can, and must, bridge this gap to remain relevant.

http://www.asaecenter.org/PublicationsResources/ANowDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=27572

I’d also make the analogy to science fiction book publishers and magazine publishers, who have had diminishing sales figures for many years. More and more professional science fiction authors bypass the medieval system and publish themselves with POD technology, or via web sites, or via podcasts, or by other means.

The social networking of science and math conferences, musical events, and science fiction conventions are still extremely valuable. They just have less and less to do with ink on paper. Web Spamming is another nail in the coffin.

This has been a very productive discussion and I am sorry to be a latecomer to it on this forum. I’m grateful that a few committed folks have started the Eureka wiki, and I have already posted to it regarding one particular cloaker, Ingenta.

Something that emerged from my very brief research for that article was the hint that Google actually takes payment in exchange for granting permission to a publisher to cloak with impunity. To wit., please read an old 2004 post at the blog of Ingenta’s CTO, Leigh Dodds:

http://www.ldodds.com/blog/archives/000165.html

This post is very instructive in the process of cloaking from a publisher’s perspective. But here’s a little thing that caught my eye: Mr. Dodds describes “play[ing] with the Google frisbee that their marketing department sent me.” The fact that Google’s marketing people are involved suggests to me that baksheesh was paid. What do you think? Is payment to Google for the “right” to cloak common knowledge now? Or am I moving too fast on weak information?

The fact that the cloaking issue has resonated so strongly on this forum and some others should be a warning to Google and its partners in this little game that resentment is becoming loud and organized. Thanks for all the thoughts.

-Carl Willis

Hey, why does this comment (linked from Eureka here) no longer exist?

John’s comment linked to from the front page is also missing!

The Wayback Machine has a copy of the missing comment#12227 by Toby Bartels, discussed above. I think the Eureka wiki entry on cloaking contains all of the information in Toby’s comment.

The issue of ‘cloaking’ by academic publishers is particularly frustrating. This practice involves granting search engine crawlers access to full-text articles, but when users attempt to read these articles, they encounter a ‘doorway page’ demanding a subscription or payment. Worse, sometimes the page has nothing to do with the expected paper. This deceptive tactic, used by publishers like Springer, Reed Elsevier, and even the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), undermines user trust. Although IEEE seemed to have ceased this practice, recent evidence suggests otherwise. It’s important for the academic community and platforms to address this unethical behavior.