Publishing: compare and contrast

Remember those compare and contrast questions (UC versus Crohns; DLE versus LP etc.). Well, look at these two quotes from articles in the same edition of  Nature.

The first from the tsunami of papers showing that ‘Something in rotten in the state of Denmark Science’ — essentially that the Mertonian norms for science have been well and truly trampled over.

Journals charge authors to correct others’ mistakes. For one article that we believed contained an invalidating error, our options were to post a comment in an online commenting system or pay a ‘discounted’ submission fee of US$1,716. With another journal from the same publisher, the fee was £1,470 (US$2,100) to publish a letter. Letters from the journal advised that “we are unable to take editorial considerations into account when assessing waiver requests, only the author’s documented ability to pay”. 

The second is about attempts to piggyback on the arXiv server. An earlier article and blog post from Timothy Gowers says more.

Discrete Analysis’[the journal] costs are only $10 per submitted paper, says Gowers; money required to make use of Scholastica, software that was developed at the University of Chicago in Illinois for managing peer review and for setting up journal websites. (The journal also relies on the continued existence of arXiv, whose running costs amount to less than $10 per paper). A grant from the University of Cambridge will cover the cost of the first 500 or so submissions, after which Gower hopes to find additional funding or ask researchers for a submission fee.

Well done the Universities of Cambridge and Cornell (arXiv). For science, the way forward is clear. But for much clinical medicine, including much of my own field, we need to break down the barriers between publication and posting online information that others may find useful. This cannot happen until the financial costs approximate to zero.