open access

Ewen Callaway reports on the increasing use of the arXiv preprint server by geneticists and biologists: "Geneticists eye the potential of arXiv". With the near-arrival of the PeerJ system, which promises to seamlessly integrate preprints and pre-publication review with ultimate publication, this is a very timely story. Last week I pointed to the new paper on arXiv by Joseph Pickrell and colleagues, and there have been a few other notable ones recently.

But Ginsparg says that pre-publication is more likely to stop scientists from being scooped. In many physics fields, publication on arXiv is what counts for claiming priority, and journal reviewers can use the server to check that discoveries are correctly attributed. An authoring history that accompanies all arXiv papers also allows scientists to arbitrate disputes over priority. In the 21 years since arXiv began, Ginsparg has seen astrophysicists, computer scientists and others go from sceptics to devotees. “Once a community adopts arXiv, it never seems to relinquish it,” he says.

What readers probably don't know is that I have been experimenting quietly with preprints for the last year -- not front-paging, but putting up to make available and allow me to use the bibliographic system. Several of our in-progress manuscripts are online here on the blog and discoverable by Google, as are preprints of some of my published work. I've been motivated to publish preprints of published papers because copyright agreements generally do not allow authors to post final PDF versions, but do allow posting either pre-review or pre-publication manuscripts. The most frequently read preprint here is my 2008 book chapter, "From genes to numbers: effective population sizes in human evolution"

More to the point, I posted one of my own preprints on arXiv last year, regarding shrinking brains: "Selection for smaller brains in Holocene human evolution". I wanted to know how widely a biology preprint would be read, without promoting it myself which would skew the numbers. The results have been interesting. The paper got an initial mention on the physics arXiv blog but little attention otherwise.

That is, until the last few months. I've had a dozen requests from colleagues to cite the paper (which anyone is welcome to do by using the arXiv number). I also had two great interactions with colleagues who had comments and suggestions on the preprint, which I am now incorporating into a revision. So presubmission review actually does work, when the paper comes to the attention of the right people. But without promoting the preprint, that feedback won't happen for a while.

Recent events suggest that many population biologists may be ready to go to the arXiv. I think we should do everything we can to encourage this trend.

PeerJ founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers' Weekly: "Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ ".

First of all, we have no intention of becoming a social network, or any kind of “Facebook for Scientists.” But clearly our membership base does constitute a group of peers who will have various interactions that we can track and encourage. For example, a member might simultaneously be an author, a reviewer, a commenter, and an academic editor—and we will facilitate all these interactions and will provide “reputation” systems that will track and display an individual’s activity in each respect.

I'm interested in the PeerJ model, in which all authors must have paid lifetime memberships, and publication itself is open access with no author charges. Integrating the preprint server directly with the journal also strikes me as a good idea. What remains to be seen is whether the model will get over the hump that inhibits pre-publication and post-publication review.

The New York Times has an article by John Markoff today, pointing to several disputes over the standards for data release with scientific papers. "Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers".

These cases mostly relate to data gathered by corporations about their users or customers, which raises privacy concerns that are similar in some ways to those attending biomedical research. For that reason, I don't think that they are a good comparison with the situation in paleoanthropology, but they do overlap to a great extent with the issues in human genetics. In either case, the article has many elements that are useful to think about:

He added that corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations. “If this trend continues,” he wrote, “we’ll see a small group of scientists with access to private data repositories enjoy an unfair amount of attention in the community at the expense of equally talented researchers whose only flaw is the lack of right ‘connections’ to private data.”

Also, I did not realize this:

The data-sharing policy of the journal Science says, “All data necessary to understand, assess and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science.”

Several paleoanthropology papers have been published in the last few years without meeting this basic standard.

Carole McGranahan describes a memorable case where academics shut down public discussion of their work: "Dialogue with the Public: Adam Yauch and Academic Snobbery". The subject of the story is the recently deceased Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch.

Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academic conference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained. He made it clear we were here to discuss real politics in an academic, dispassionate manner. That is: in discussing politics we were to be apolitical.

A celebrity unrecognized by the academics, asking a simple question.