Re: Special Issue on VCs

I've spent four decades at medical device innovation and peer review has
never been a factor in the success of my work. It was not a factor before
open access publishing and it hasn't been a factor since.

David's call for papers is exactly in the sweet spot for what we're doing
with blockchain health and verifiable claims. So much so, that I saved the
announcement to show in support of our business plan. Community-driven open
source software and standards, however are not institutionally supported in
a way consistent with peer review in either open access or traditional
publishing.

We now have arXiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv and Wikipedia as
moderated, rather than peer-reviewed publishers playing a role.

I don't know how to solve the peer review problem in general but having an
open access option is certainly an improvement.

Adrian

On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 7:45 PM, Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net>
wrote:

>
> On 2017-08-03 12:16 PM, David Chadwick wrote:
> ...> With the new open access model, the researchers pay for the
> publication,
>
>> usually out of their research grant,
>>
>
> Unless they don't have a research grant. Then they pay $2,000.
>
> This effectively locks out all the people who aren't in academic
> institutions, or large corporations, from contributing their research. This
> must be 99+% of the people in the world.
>
> This will include the exclusion of people who have a health issue, or
> personal issue, or religious issue, or political issue, or financial issue,
> that prevents them from being in an institutional setting. Yet some of
> these people will have things they want to contribute. And perhaps it will
> be something that's important for the larger society to hear about.
>
> With the rise of the Internet, these people now have the data they need to
> research with, in many cases. The "institutional support" model appears to
> assume they don't exist, or at least can be ignored.
>
> I don't mean to say that you don't know this David; you probably do. And
> perhaps from your position from inside a university system, it still seems
> like the best place to publish about Verifiable Claims and Credentials work.
>
> But to me this makes your Call For Papers glaringly ironic. I became
> involved in this group over a decade ago largely because of my experience
> being published in peer-reviewed journals as an outsider. What happened to
> me then didn't seem fair, or in the long term sustainable for society.
> Something else had to evolve. And perhaps Verifiable Claims is part of the
> solution.
>
> But at least fifteen years ago I could publish for nothing. My complaint
> then was that I'd done ten years of work and not gotten paid for it -- but
> at least it went through peer review and got out into the world. But now,
> in what appears to be the ill-named "open access" they'd want me to pay
> $2,000 as well? No thanks.
>
> And I wouldn't even have done the research, probably, if there had been
> this author-pay publishing model then. Or at least I wouldn't have put it
> through peer review. And peer review did improve it.
>
> Anyway: rant over. Except, about the $2,000 and your Call For Papers:
>
> I think it would be more useful if ten people on this list got together
> and invested $2,000 each, to pay a programmer $20,000, to do VC
> implementation of something that replaces the journal that you you're
> asking for the papers to be published in. ;-)
>
> And I'd seriously be happy to be one of the investors, if and when the
> time for that arrives.  :-)
>
> I think there's a need for this. I think that the only humans the
> publishing system really needs are the authors, the peer reviewers, and the
> readers. All the rest can be done by software, if the software can handle
> it. And perhaps the combination of blockchain and Verifiable Claims can.
>
> For anyone interested, here's what I believe is a good article about how
> the science publishing industry evolved:
>
> "Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for
> science?"
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
> business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
>
> Warning: long read.
>
>
> Steven
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> and then everyone can read the
>
>> article free of charge. Organisations that have membership agreements
>> with publishers usually get a waiver or discount on the publication fee.
>> In the case of SCN, the website says the discount can be up to 100%.
>>
>> $2000 may sound a lot but is slightly under the average. A good article
>> on open access publication fees can be found by the University of
>> Cambridge here
>>
>> http://osc.cam.ac.uk/open-access/open-access-policies/paying
>> -open-access/how-much-do-publishers-charge-open-access
>>
>> Note that only one fee is payable regardless of the number of authors,
>> and it usually the institution of the lead author that pays.
>>
>> regards
>>
>> David
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 03/08/2017 18:35, Steven Rowat wrote:
>>
>>> On 2017-08-03 8:39 AM, David Chadwick wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear Group
>>>>
>>>> please find attached a call for papers on VCs and self-sovereignty.
>>>>
>>>> Please consider submitting a paper on your latest R&D work, so that we
>>>> can show the world how well we are progressing
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Interesting, and seems like a good idea.
>>>
>>> Except...please correct me if I'm wrong, but on initial inspection of
>>> that Journal, "Security and Communication Networks", published by
>>> Hindawi, it appears that if an article is accepted, the author will pay
>>> $2,000 to have it published, unless they have a waiver for being in low-
>>> and moderate-income countries.
>>>
>>> https://www.hindawi.com/journals/scn/apc/
>>>
>>> Is this correct?
>>>
>>> Steven
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>


-- 

Adrian Gropper MD

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