I happen to know that our “very own” Dr Rohn is currently in the wilds of Colorado with limited internet access.
So I’ll do her a favor and point you at this lovely story in today’s Nature.
Richard P Grant
Scientist, poet, gadfly
Creator and sustainer of
Occam's Typewriteremail: rpgrant at gmail.com
twitter: @rpg7twit
home: rg-d.com-
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- rpg on A Long December
- Henry on A Long December
- Our House | Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat on Three Little Birds
- rpg on We need medicine
- Henry on We need medicine
- rpg on Sweet home Alabama
- Henry Gee on Sweet home Alabama
- rpg on Sweet home Alabama
- Austin Elliott on Sweet home Alabama
- rpg on The Times They Are A-Changin’
Archives
-
Buy me a coffee:
Categories
- A momentary lapse of reason
- Art
- Birds
- Careers
- Don't try this at home
- ethics
- F1000
- Friday afternoon
- Funding
- Gardening
- Guest posts
- Homeopathy
- Ill-considered rants
- Internet
- Lab ratting
- Literature
- London
- Magirism
- Me
- meta
- Music
- Nature
- Nonsense
- Office life
- Offspring
- Penguins
- People
- Personal
- Photography
- Politics
- Public Engagement
- Rants
- Science
- Science is Vital
- Science-less Sunday
- Scio11
- Shooting
- Shopping lists
- Silliness
- Talks
- The stupid, it burns
- Uncategorized
- Video
- wank
- War stories
- wibbling
- Work
- you
Meta
“The pair-bond imperative
Jennifer Rohn
Abstract
What’s love got to do with it?
After the third time Eve came home late from work, her mother Mary activated the trace. On the small hand-held, she watched her daughter linger at the door of the domed bee farm, standing too close to a fair-haired young man.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).”
Sighs
Oh bugger. Perhaps if you ask Jenny nicely she’ll send you the PDF. I’d suggest leaving random comments which will be nice for her when she reconnects…
I have a question for anyone out there: what happens if Richard or I, institutional subscribers, provide (Graham or anyone else) a PDF of an article that we didn’t write? This passing-around happens all the time. Does anyone seriously pay for one-time access? (Am I a bad girl for writing that?)
About the story: well done, if a little rushed at the end (space constraints). Overtones of Margaret Atwood. Nice to have the science understated.
This passing-around happens all the time
I haven’t a clue what you mean there Heather 😉 I’d better be careful what I say here.
Game of “fair use” anyone?
I think we just have to claim we’re passing pdfs round for educational purposes.
I see Jenny also had a book review, and Raf had a correspondence in this issue, so it was a good one for NN. One of the minor bloggers from the other science Blogging place managed to get a book review published as well, but only Catholics read his stuff anyway.
Heather> I think that is what’s called ‘wrong to do’. As far as I know the sending of pdfs is not approved of even between two people who have access… then again, this was what they taught me in the early days, before the world down loaded every pdf to have on your computer.
I don’t really know the difference between making (paper) copies of a journal in the library and sending a pdf to someone.. oh wait, maybe it’s the reproducablility which means the second one can send the pdf to others as well? (but surely one could take more paper copies?) Ah well, maybe it was always forbidden and still is?!
And to answer your question, I have been found paying for one time access… ms ‘goody two shoes who wants to do Right’ can be used as adjective every once in awhile.
And I agree Heather, it has a certain feel of Atwood (personal favourite). Nice with the colour descriptions of the hair and eyes (schucks, i am a romantic sometimes…). I want to have “the hue of honeycombs held up to the sun, glowing coppery-gold”. And the idea of genetic comparision without any tools/machines makes me think of the “back to the old days”…. although not as sophisticated.
@Asa: first, who were they and what was their relation to the publishing industry?
I completely agree that people should be compensated for their work – and lots of people work in publishing and enable our scientific articles (and sundry para-scientific productions such as Jenny’s) to appear in print.
It’s just that the prices are (in my opinion) so ridiculous for an article. You can purchase whole novels and sometimes textbooks for that much. If they were a couple of dollars and it were easy to pay with a PayPal account, I think it would gain wider acceptance. If you were a company poised to make millions off of that paper, $3 or $30 wouldn’t change much, but if you are any other sort of interested individual – it does. Above all, there should be some sort of relationship to the cost of producing the article. Given all the typesetting that is requested of the authors, I’d assume costs are going down as compared with yesteryear. But paper and shipping probably costs more…
I was particularly partial to the phrase “parting like a broken comb of sticky honey”.
Well said Heather.
—
I’m a huge supporter of self-archiving.
I have a couple of projects well underway already.
—
May I provide a concrete example which was reported about here and here fairly recently in the blogosphere.
Whilst both posts contain a link to the original post by myself, here it is
On a more broader and up to date form, The Borg aka Bora Zivkovic
has quite literally, just posted Open Access, but not really on his blog. Go check.
—
The following most interesting comment came in a few days ago.
Graham
I think PLoS rocks, too. It rocks hard, in fact
_The feedback we’re getting as a result of publishing in PLoS, both positive and negative, is such a great thing. I’ve read the forum comments and they have great points and we discuss the same points in our manuscript’s discussion (except for the fact that ALS research is a living- I’ve turned down jobs making 3X my current salary on more than one occasion, and I just moved into a smaller apartment so that I can afford to keep doing what I love). I’m of the belief that we researchers need to improve patient survival before we’ve accomplished anything
noteworthy._
Lovely. Reminds me of the part of The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess when the founding members of the new colony are all ordered to mate with a specific fellow colonist, and the detailed plan falls apart because they all find it too hilarious for words.
Heather> I agree with you that it is slightly strange why it isn’t easier to pay for the specific article, i.e. paypal or equivalent. And that the cost is somewhat high, $30 for an article when a whole issue of a journal is $20-40 if you subscribe? (I guess there is a huge incitament for subscribing then?! If only there were a few journals that one read and not a heap of them, since it turns expensive fast…)
first, who were they and what was their relation to the publishing industry
They would be firstly the librarians at my old university and then at my other work place, the publishing company (that of course would say that since that’s their work).
I think there is something about that statement that you shouldn’t send pdfs around that bothers me… and yet, I still don’t do it… old habits die hard?!
Thanks for your kind words about my story, all.
@Heather. Re the price of articles: “Above all, there should be some sort of relationship to the cost of producing the article.” Yes, but how do you know that $30 is so far off? Have you ever worked at a journal and produced an article from submission through to fulfilment? I have. It’s bloody hard work and there are numerous highly skilled staff that have to be paid, from the assistant editors who tidy up the submissions (which are usually in a complete state or disarray), through brokering all the peer review which is a right slog, making the decisions, cleaning up the ms and figures, copyediting, typesetting, several rounds of proofreading and html checks for the online version, sorting out the supplementary data, marketing the journals, dealing with customers and subscriptions and libraries. All these people are paid salaries and then there is the infrastructure – the online submission and ms handling systems that need developer time and debugging and support. And most publishing houses make very narrow profit margins indeed – the Elseviers of this world are the exception.
There seems to be a widespread belief amongst scientists that nothing really happens to a ms from submission to appearing in print, or at least nothing worth paying for. I think all authors should do a sabbatical in an editorial office and see how, actually, value is added to articles and how many resources it really takes to produce a readable, legible and clear article.
It would be an interesting analysis. How much does it cost to produce one article, considering overhead and everything?
I think the problem is that people object to paying to read published research – and authors object to their work not being freely available, especially if they’ve already paid page charges.
If the full cost of an article (and let’s remember that publishing houses are business and have a moral responsibility to their shareholders to make a profit) can be covered by the ‘author pays’ model, is there any reason to charge for accessing articles (online at least: if you’re buying a dead tree rag then you should pay for it)?
Perhaps payment on submission and full coverage of the publishing cost would could the amount of crap out there, too.
Well, many subscription journals don’t levy page charges, so you can’t factor that into the general argument.
But when the author pays an amount that covers the costs, I agree that the articles should be free. As happens with OA. (Typical ‘page charges’, as for color figures, often aren’t high enough to cover the entire publication cost, which most people now put at USD3000 for an online-only journal. Of course this figure is much higher for print.)
I’m not in favor of submission charges — to restrictive to poorer countries.
that should be ‘too’ restrictive – I blame sunstroke.
I’d love for someone from Nature to step in and tell us that they can divulge an exemplary cost analysis of the whole process from submission to print on a per-article basis. (Even a per-issue basis).
No, you are quite right, Jennifer, I haven’t the experience you and Asa do within publishing. However, I see the cost, paid in large part by public funds raised by government taxes, via our institutional library subscriptions – both paper and online. Subscriptions that any individual laboratory just can’t afford, to the extent that we have to rely on negotiations for national (not even individual university) licenses and hope we get a bulk rate. While I would agree that it is expensive for publishers to underwrite salaries and infrastructure, I would maintain that once a successful web interface is set up, it doesn’t need so much debugging as all that. That disk storage is not that expensive…. but I don’t really know. It just seems that a $30 article is priced more to discourage individuals from getting one at a time than to make money for the publishing house.
My personal experience has been that nearly every journal to which I have submitted asks for page charges. That those page charges and subscriptions, priced at 100-1000x the cost of purchasing an individual article, are really what cover the salaries and infrastructure. I don’t mind paying these page charges to some extent – I agree with Richard in principle – but I also feel justified in passing out reprints of my article to whomever asks for it directly from me for informational purposes. As do most other scientists. I’m sure publishers have factored that into their cost analyses, if only by vastly overestimating the number of hits coming from a given local or national institution for a given journal bouquet.
And, getting back to my earlier question, how do you feel about providing someone like Graham with a PDF of your article? What if I did it, instead? What difference does it make from a publisher’s point of view?
I must say Heather, I’d have to consider each request on its merits. Can’t speak for Jenny of course.
With regards to Heather’s question, if my experience is not unusual (which my medical librarian contacts have confirmed to be so) 90% of my “Manuscript Request” emails to corresponding/leading authors result in a positive reply and a PDF. 2% of these replies come with a caveat that the PDF is for my viewing only. I’ve never broken that bond of trust.
So, with the remaining 88% of Manuscripts, under “Fair Use” as far as I can understand, I can share some of these from time to time within reason with people who may be interested, in this example, patient support groups/patients and scientists interested in neurodegenerative conditions.
Thoughts please.
I have a question for anyone out there: what happens if Richard or I, institutional subscribers, provide (Graham or anyone else) a PDF of an article that we didn’t write? This passing-around happens all the time. Does anyone seriously pay for one-time access? (Am I a bad girl for writing that?)
IANAL, but the way I understand it, it would probably be an infringement of the economic rights of the copyright holder (and Nature/Macmillan are the copyright holder of the pdf), and possibly against the terms of the licence your institution holds. So Macmillan could wag their finger at you for the infringement, and if it is against the site licence, wag that finger at you too.
There’s exceptions to this: You can make copies of work for non commercial research and private study – so you copying for your own private study is generally OK (eg making a printout of the pdf for filing at home) and there’s a defined range of educational or research uses – eg if I was at an educational establishment and wanted to teach you about lablit, I could handwrite Jenny’s article out and give it to you, but not photocopy it (unless I had a licence from the CLA).
Unrelated thought… does this sort of Nature publication contribute to Jenny’s RAE points?
heh. Depends on one’s definition of ‘peer review’, I guess…
@Jennifer: Can you put some numbers in the table? Your experience in publishing is not a very good argument. (indeed i think it’s a fallacy )
I haven’t work in any editorial, neither other place to be truth, but I don’t have any reason to believe that the editorials are asking the right price. After all, somebody is making money with papers and I’m pretty sure are not the editors.
If publishers need to maintain their income constants, fees*sales = income, there’s a lot of possible fees that solve the equation, they just need to sale more. I think apple has a lot to teach about this.
Sorry Sebastian, do you have any real reason to disbelieve what Jenny says? It’s not an appeal to authority being made here, but a case out of experience. Big difference.
Interesting remarks Scott.
In terms of fair use in the digital age that we live in, it’s worth spinning back to April 2007 to the infamous Shelley Batts v’s Wiley case. The most comprehensive coverage in the blogosphere can be found here c/o Bora.
Now with that in mind, and whilst too IANAL, is the likes of the comment here from ALS patient “Dan” fair use or not?
Richard, I suppose to be a scientist, so I trust in data, not in the opinion of people.
I don’t disbelieve what jenny says, but “bloody hard work” and “numerous highly skilled staff” is a difficult number to compare with $30, a quite objective measure.
So, what bother me is that jenny knows exactly how much cost a paper and don’t want to tell us, or in the other hand she doesn’t know the number and she’s giving just a personal opinion.
Why don’t you go and read what she said?
I agree, I’d like to see a cost analysis. But you’re being grossly unfair.
@Graham – thanks for the Batts links. I’ve definitely done the same thing – take parts of figures and reproduce them in blog posts. Though all the old images in my blog have disappeared, perhaps for that very reason. I definitely see the publisher’s point; if we really wanted to re-*publish* the figures, we should get permission from those to whom copyright belongs – at the very least, the authors. And I was a good girl when I reproduced some very old figures in my Ph.D. thesis – got the publisher’s permission. It’s not so hard.
My not-legally-valid concept of right and wrong is that passing an article (or part thereof) to one person for discussion purposes can be assimilated to private study. Re-publishing it, or part of it, by rendering it accessible to you don’t know how many people via a thesis, a blog post, a newspaper article, can not.
So, my again-not-legal-opinion is that Dan ought to have paraphrased Jim Schnabel’s article for his readers in the forum. Or given Jim a heads-up that he wanted to quote it so extensively (I don’t think a sentence or a paragraph goes beyond fair use, though). Again, the percentage of an article that can be quoted without it being thought of as re-publishing it is a fuzzy limit, as well, given that one can not take out bits of figures and re-publish them. That gets to what constitutes a substantial part.
@Scott: thanks for those links, too (I’ve relinked those that interested me from Graham and you). I take comfort from this phrase: “you must assess if there is any financial impact on the copyright owner because of your use; where impact is not significant, the use may be acceptable.”
@Sebastian – I think it’s quite valid for Jenny to offer an opinion based on experience (or for that matter, based on nothing if she feels like it), especially in someone else’s blog comments. I don’t think any of us actually argues from numbers in this forum.
Well, we’ve certainly gone way off-topic!
Ok, I’m sorry, always do the same: just try to be controversial but finish being rude.
I just try to get some numbers in the money nature makes with papers.
@Heather,
Whilst I don’t have access to the article that “Dan” has cut ‘n pasted from, in Copyright terms, this probably deserves one of these as I thought when I first saw it. I sense that Dan probably unbeknown to him, posted too much of a TA article. IANAL.
Indeed – I myself whilst continuing with my geeky upload/download experiments the latest being “9.65”, got hit for the first time evah with a warning:-
_Your audio file (_Tina Arena – I’m In Chains.mp3) has been removed from Sound Upload due to it possibly infringing copyright laws. You MUST understand that the decision taken is due to various copyright laws. Also if we at Sound Upload do not remove the copyrighted audio then YOU will recieve the fine. However if you believe this decision is wrong then please reply to this email stating why you believe it shouldn’t be removed._
This particular experiment “9.65” was simply to see if I could embed streaming audio to my blog.
I picked the MP3 at random and with hindsight, should have used my own material – of which I have loads. Silly me.
That said, experiment “3.6” for example (as do later ones) still stand.
—
Alas, experiment “9.65” is back on track but in a different guise.
Whilst this was a random section, Tina Arena’s “I’m in Chains” is the now the unintended star.
Ok, so this far down the discussion and I am getting a little lost with regard to the what is really being said , but I would like to draw people’s attention to a recent report done by the RIN, which looked at precisely this question of the cost of scholarly communication.
It is actually very complex, and yes on the outset it does seem that the publishing companies do make tones of money, but actually this is not always the case and really depends on the type of journal they are publishing, whether they publish it in print only or electronic only or as both. I think we also forget that the publishers do have to archive everything, store copies and manage the online databases, which I think we forget actually costs both time and money.
Here are some figures from the report:
Total cost to publish and distribute global scholarly communications: £6.4bn if one includes the cost of per review of £1.9m
Global cost to reading this is £34bn
Global cost to search and print before reading it £16.4bn
Global cost to access these articles is £2.1bn
By the way, no I don’t work for and have never worked for a publishing company, but I was a bench researcher but am now involved in policy and this report.
Thanks, Branwen – I look forward to perusing this.
I don’t have time at the mo to read the reports, but do they give a per-article breakdown?