Another Reason for Open Access

Yet again, Cameron Neylon is daring to ask the unasked questions that *should* be asked:

Many of us have one or two papers in journals that are essentially inaccessible, local society journals or just journals that were never online, and never widely enough distributed for anyone to find. I have a paper in Complex Systems (volume 17, issue 4 since you ask) that is not indexed in Pubmed, only available in a preprint archive and has effectively no citations. Probably because it isn’t in an index and no-one has ever found it. But it describes a nice piece of work that we went through hell to publish because we hoped someone might find it useful.

Now everyone agreed, and this is what the PLoS ONE submission policy says quite clearly, that such a paper cannot be submitted for publication. This is essentially a restatement of the Ingelfinger Rule. But being the contrary person I am I started wondering why. For a commercial publisher with a subscripton business model it is clear that you don’t want to take on content that you can’t exert a copyright over, but for a non-profit with a mission to bring science to wider audience does this really make sense? If the science is currently unaccessible and is of appropriate quality for a given journal and the authors are willing to pay the costs to bring it to a wider public, why is this not allowed?

Why not, indeed? For as Neylon points out:

If an author feels strongly enough that a paper will get to a wider audience in a new journal, if they feel strongly enough that it will benefit from that journal’s peer review process, and they are prepared to pay a fee for that publication, why should they be prevented from doing so? If that publication does bring that science to a wider audience, is not a public service publisher discharging their mission through that publication?

Which is only possible, of course, in open access journals adopting a funder pays approach, since traditional publishers need to be able to point to the uniqueness of their content if they are trying to sell it - after all, why would you want to buy it twice? Open access journals have no such imperative, since they are giving it away, so readers have no expectations that the stuff is unique and never seen before.

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PLoS ONE is (the) One

PLoS ONE celebrates its first anniversary:

The initial success of PLoS ONE is something unprecedented in scientific publishing. It has been achieved because of the commitment and faith of hundreds of people: PLoS staff, editorial and advisory board members, reviewers, authors and particularly readers. And yet this is only a very small step towards an open, interactive and efficient literature that will accelerate scientific progress. Over the coming months, we will take further steps with additional functionality on the site, new publishing ventures launching and established ones taking more advantage of the opportunities afforded by the TOPAZ platform on which PLoS ONE is presented.

PLoS ONE is undoubtedly a bold experiment, and it's good to see it going from strength to strength; whether it can change the way scientific discourse is conducted - opening it up in crucial ways - still remains to be seen. Let's hope so. (Via Open Access News.)

Virtually Not Shocking at All

Now, why is it that I am not surprised by this result of a virtual recreation of the famous Milgram experiment?

The main conclusion of our study is that humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty that they are not real. The specific conclusion of this study is that within the context of the particular experimental conditions described participants became stressed as a result of giving ‘electric shocks’ to the virtual Learner. It could even be said that many showed care for the well-being of the virtual Learner – demonstrated, for example, by their delay in administering the shocks after her failure to answer towards the end of the experiment. To some extent based on previous evidence this was to be expected. In fact, it has even been taken for granted that virtual humans can substitute for real humans when studying the responses of people to a social situation. For example, this was the strategy used in the fMRI study described in [19], where participants passively observed virtual characters gazing at the participants themselves or at other virtual characters. However, no previous experiments have studied what might happen when participants have to actively engage in behaviours that would have consequences for the virtual humans. The evidence of our experiments suggests that presence is maintained and that people do tend to respond to the situation as if it were real.

And people still dismiss Second Life and its ilk as just as "game"....

(Parenthetically, great to see this published on the new PLoS ONE.)