AW has just put Eric Raymond’s new The Art Of Unix Programming — which is very good, though rough in a couple of spots — into dead trees, buying only the commercial paper-printing rights; the book is still available on line at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/ under a Creative Commons license.

I intend to buy a copy, even though I have, as someone suggested above, whacked it into my laptop as wedll. Laptops get sand in them at the beach. And they’re a pain to loan out.

Phil,

I agree to a point. But the truth is that new journals get launched all the time and many of them succeed. _PLoS Biology_ is in some senses just one more, and In my own field(s), I can name at least eight successful launches in recent years, and _PLoS Biology_ has both the editorial staff and an editorial board of extremely high-profile scientists going for it. In addition, many of us in the trenches really want ot see it succeed, and there is every reason to think that it will.

Now, the journal is only one part of the picture. The question is to what extent PLoS Biology will, over time, advance the broader PLoS program. For that all depends on what real advantages it offers to the scientists who publish there. I suspect and hope that what we will see is an ecosystem that looks something like software, with big proprietary houses like Elsevier and Macmillan (MS and Oracle) competing in the same space as a spectrum of more open entities. As in software, the existance of an open option will inevitably change the landscape for everyone in the space. I agree with you that the more open models are the ones that scientists and engineers should favor and promote.

All that said, I’m about to send a manuscript to the Journal of Cell Biology, which is published by Rockefeller University Press and which has taken a stance on these questions that in some respects borders on reactionary. This is because JCB is the specialist journal most suitable for the work that I’m presenting but also because I want the approval-stamp of a top-quality journal on this particular chunk of work as I go a-hunting for a tenure-track position. So the issues you raise are very real.

Alex: Nobody would be happier than I if PLoS succeeds! And I admire their ambition in taking on so many 150-year-old entrenched organizations at the same time. But I fear that they won’t succeed unless the average university professor develops a spine and some scruples regarding public access to his or her output (usually funded by the U.S. taxpayer, of course).

Phil,

You call PLoS ” a quixotic effort to fight every academic journal publisher and all professional societies.”

There’s a lot wrong with what you’ve written here.

PLoS is clearly operating in opposition to most of the for-profit publishers, but its relationship to the academic societies and not-for-profit publishers is much less straightforward than you suggest. For example, PLoS exists in a kind of equilibrium with the National Academy of Sciences. The Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the National Academy, Nicholas Cozzarelli, also sits on the PLoS Board of Directors. Marc Kirschner, another PLoS board member, is chair of the Cell Biology Dept. at Harvard and former President of the American Society of Cell Biologists. These folks are not looking to destroy their professional societies, not least because those societies do the lobbying that keeps NIH/NSF/DOE funding flowing to their labs and institutions.

It is not clear to what extent PLoS will succeed with its obviously ambitious goals. But the effort is neither ridiculous nor futile, as you seem to suggest.

The physics preprint server http://arxiv.org/ is a highly successful model for open scientific publishing. It does not serve as the organ of record for the field, but it is where many working physicists first read the most important new papers in their fields. PLoS has less of a track record but it does have significant financial human and financial resources: an impressive Board http://www.plos.org/about/board.html including former NIH director and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, and $9M from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The Editor of their new flagship journal, PLoS Biology http://biology.plosjournals.org/ is Vivian Segal, who was for the last several years the Editor (the successor to founder Benjamin Lewin) of _Cell_, the journal widely regarded as the most important in modern biology. She shepherded the launch of other very successful journals including _Molecular Cell_ and _Developmental Cell_. Both have rapidly achieved impact factors on par with the most important specialist journals in their respective fields. This track record indicates that Segal knows what she’s doing.

What about self-publishing? Here’s an interesting example of self-publishing (from a non-academic field):

http://www.rustboybook.com

Basically, the author Brian Taylor is in the process of creating a short 3D animated film called Rustboy. The book documents the film-making process. Look at the price:

Phillip, how about Prentice Hall?

http://www.perens.com/Books/

Ok, I’m way behind, but I wanted to respond to the first line in the Comment section: “This is pretty absurd, since reading online is painful.”

This is true if you’re trying to read a scifi novel or whatnot. But I *hate* reading technical manuals in print format. This is because about 90% of the time you’re hunting for one little factoid or code snippet or button explanation. Cmd-F for a keyword will beat the “try and guess if the publisher indexed this or not” pretty much every time.

Also, apps like Preview for OS X are making online reading much more palatable. The antialiasing is actually much better than it used to be (IMHO). I even read Corey Doctorow’s (sp?) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom online when it came out.

I happent to work (thanks to a series of acquisitions) for a huge academic publishing house. You would think the business would be doomed because of Internet self-publishing. However, nobody there is all that worried thanks to the phenomenon Grad Assistant pointed out. Academic reputation-making is strongly linked to journal reputation, and the conservatism of academia guarantees that the current system will change extremely slowly. The reputation of the journal is based on the quality of its content and the reputation of its editors, but our company owns the name. So the scientists can’t just jump ship to an open access internet system even if they want to.

The moral, as if we didn’t know this by now: revolutionary technology will be resisted by entrenched institutions.

I am a member of the Project Management Institute and have a similar story.

They have a standards document called “A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge”. The online version used to be free until a couple of years ago. Thereafter, seeing the potential in selling dead trees and plastic discs, they decided to not make it available to the online public any more. Now members can access a copy that has been “secured” from the ability to print, cut and paste, annotate. Pretty much anything.

The point I am trying to make is that professional societies are not in business to advance the cause of their profession. Only the naive would believe that. The numero uno job of professional societies is to provide continued employment to its employees and executives, and yes, to have a nice vacation in a sunny spot each winter for its board of directors.

I’m dealing right now with a small academic publisher that finds itself lucky enough to publish a high-quality math book, which I want. It is painful and tedious. Their economics are fairly obvious — they think their audience’s demand is predictable, and they optimize to meet it with little leftover inventory. Such an industry thrives on conservative thinking, not in satisfying anyone’s needs. Even when they’re not malicious.

Kent Pitman explains why he disassociated himself from the ACM, a well-known publisher that allegedly fools authors into thinking it’s on their side.
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/PFAQ/acm.html

Completely leaving aside the malicious academic publishers that give others a bad name, there is also the fact that most are inherently conservative. Pre-internet, their markets were clearly bounded and insulated from innovation. Going outside market boundaries usually incurred extra cost.

Grad Assistant, your pricing analysis sounds logical, but how do people use textbooks? Do they want to stare at their computer screen for hours, refusing to meet up with people at the library since they can’t take their textbooks? They can buy a notebook PC for $2000 and maybe find someone who knows the wget unix command to download the html files locally, but they can’t flip through the books, outlining or bookmarking them. No notes to stick in between pages, no flipping through a book in class or during an open-book test. Just a clunky fragile battery-drinking thing to squint at, that will hurt your neck.

Plus, this ignores the publisher’s big competition — used book co-ops. Online and off. People who would go through the trouble to stick with the online version, wouldn’t have kept those books anyway. They’ll undercut the publisher’s price at the first opportunity.

How many copies of Shakespeare’s works do you find at the bookstore? All kinds, pretty bindings, cheap bindings, translated, untranslated… and the meat of it is in the public domain! Are these companies nuts, or are they actually making a profit?

I’m not even too frustrated at the math book publisher I mentioned, since the market is hurting them more than I could. Rant over.