There has been an awful lot recently written and said about author-pays business models for scholarly publishing and a lot of it has focussed on PLoS ONE. Most recently Kent Andersen has written a piece on Scholarly Kitchen that contains a number of fairly serious misconceptions about the processes of PLoS ONE. This is a shame because I feel this has muddled the much more interesting question that was intended to be the focus of his piece. Nonetheless here I want to give a robust defence of author pays models and of PLoS ONE in particular.

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr

It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review. In the same week that the Lancet fully retract the original Wakefield MMR article (while keeping the retraction behind a login screen – way to go there on public understanding of science), the main stream media went to town on the report of 14 stem cell scientists writing an open letter making the claim that peer review in that area was being dominated by a small group of people blocking the publication of innovative work. …

I have long being sceptical of the costs and value delivered by our traditional methods of peer review. This is really on two fronts, firstly that the costs, where they have been estimated are extremely high, representing a multi-billion dollar subsidy by governments of the scholarly publishing industry. Secondly the value that is delivered through peer review, the critical analysis of claims, informed opinion on the quality of the experiments, is largely lost. At best it is wrapped up in the final version of the paper. At worst it is …

I think it is fair to say that even those of us most enamored of post-publication peer review would agree that its effectiveness remains to be demonstrated in a convincing fashion. Broadly speaking there are two reasons for this; the first is the problem of social norms for commenting. As in there aren’t any. I think it was Michael Nielsen who referred to the “Kabuki Dance of scientific discourse”. It is entirely allowed to stab another member of the research community in the back, or indeed the front, but there …

This post is both a follow up to last week’s post on the cost’s of peer review and a response to Duncan Hull‘s post of nine or so months ago proposing a game of “Fantasy Science Funding“. The game requires you to describe how you would distribute the funding of the BBSRC if you were a benign (or not so benign) dictator. The post and the discussion should be read bearing in mind my standard disclaimer.
Peer review is in crisis. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has their head …

Late last year the Research Information Network held a workshop in London to launch a report, and in many ways more importantly, a detailed economic model of the scholarly publishing industry. The model aims to capture the diversity of the scholarly publishing industry and to isolate costs and approaches to enable the user to ask questions such as “what is the consequence of moving to a 95% author pays model” as well as to simply ask how much money is going in and where it ends up. I’ve been meaning …

A thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement:
I would add that in my opinion Cameron’s points about FriendFeed apply also to Nature Network. I’ve seen lots of examples of highly specific questions being answered on NN in the way Cameron describes for FF…But NN and FF aren’t the same: they both have the same nice feature of discussion of a partiular question or “article at …

I hold no particular candle for traditional peer review. I think it is inefficient, poorly selective, self reinforcing, often poorly done, and above all, far too slow. However I also agree that it is the least worst system we have available to us.  Thus far, no other approaches have worked terribly well, at least in the communication of science research. And as the incumbent for the past fifty years or so in the post of ‘generic filter’ it is owed some respect for seniority alone.
So I am considering writing a …

This post is an opinion piece and not a rigorous objective analysis. It is fair to say that I am on the record as and advocate of the principles behind PLoS ONE and am also in favour of post publication peer review and this should be read in that light. [ed I've also modified this slightly from the original version because I got myself mixed up in an Excel spreadsheet]
To me, anonymous peer review is, and always has been, broken. The central principle of the scientific method is that …

Image via Wikipedia
Once again a range of conversations in different places have collided in my feed reader. Over on Nature Networks, Martin Fenner posted on Researcher ID which lead to a discussion about attribution and in particular Martin’s comment that there was a need to be able to link to comments and the necessity of timestamps. Then DrugMonkey posted a thoughtful blog about the issue of funding body staff introducing ideas from unsuccessful grant proposals they have handled to projects which they have a responsibility in guiding.
Image via Wikipedia Once …