The Research Works Act (RWA): Why scientific publishing needs FOSS methods

,,,“In the age of the internet, the journals have gone digital but, paper or electronic, access to them was and is problematical. One massive hurdle of course is cost and the other hurdle is the ability to access and use them freely and openly (with attribution)... The central issue is similar to the choice between proprietary software like Windows and Apple and software based on GNU/Linux: one is closed but the other is open and free under the GPL... In its wisdom therefore the US government decreed that the results of all scientific research paid for by the American taxpayer... must be be made publicly available... the Research Works Act (RWA). Or H.R. 3699... The basic thrust and intent of the bill is to prevent publicly-funded research being made available for free. In short, to restrict access behind a hideously expensive paywall called bundled subscription... Those paywalls are operated by all the big names in academic publishing: Springer, Wiley, Pearson and above all, Elsevier... it (and the others) returned profits of $1.9 billion on revenues of $5.3 billion based on 2,637 journals. Their profit margin is 42%... Scientists starting organizing boycotts. Tim Gower, a British mathematician (and Fields medalist), is a key name here. His boycott of Elsevier may become an iconic text... So, if the publishers are the problem, what's the solution? Open Access (OA), a concept that that borrowed heavily from the FOSS way of doing things... So, what exactly is Open Access (OA)?... Historically, it has evolved through three definitions, known collectively as the BBB definition: Budapest, Bethesda and Berlin definitions... If this suggests irresistibly variations on the Creative Commons ethos, you wouldn't be too far wrong. This effectively removes the permission barriers and depending on how things are setup, the price barriers too... Just as there are many open sources licenses in software (GPL, MPL, LGPL, BSD, etc) and many packaging systems (apt-get, yum etc) spread across innumerable distros too, there are many variants in OA... The main division is between Gold OA and Green OA... EPrints is a good example of these kinds of repositories... The Open Access directory (OAD) has a list of all the available free and open source repository software...Scientists are aware of the dangers of adopting OA models and letting peer review standards decline so they make special efforts to duplicate the broad methodology of the traditional, closed journals like Elsevier. A subset of peer review though, are the issues of impact factor and citation... OA addresses these too. For example, take a look at Scholastica... It provides a one-stop-shop which ticks all the boxes: fast publication, peer review, integration with arXiv (via their open-sourced arXiv Ruby gem) and many other features promoting the efficient and more democratic publication of research. Scholastica costs to users is committed to never exceed $5... On issues of copyright, arXiv gives authors a number of options, from public domain to Creative Commons licenses. The Science Code Manifesto goes further and insists on open data, source code and citation. It is based on the Panton Principles... Combine open source code with OA publishing on the internet on personal archives and or institutional repositories and you have the perfect storm to sink the most robust commercial scientific journal... Figshare (and others) are deploying altmetrics which, among other things, compensates for the bottleneck of the peer review process and makes impact factor and citation more transparent. Altmetrics effectively crowdsources peer review. That's very important because these metrics have a very real bearing on reputation, scientific careers and grant applications--and this links back to what is wrong with commercial academic publishing... Every software developer using GNU/Linux probably need no introduction to GitHub... Software and coding stand or fall by how good they are. If they're good, they're popular. If they're popular they'll be downloaded, forked, added to, improved and debugged if necessary... That creates what scientists need, what has been called "prestige metrics"... That would made Elsevier redundant at a stroke. All the tools to do this already exist. It's a matter of organization and will to make it happen...”