The Big Busk

Photographs from London's Big Busk are here.

He ADMITTED to BLOWING THINGS UP as a CHILD!

Oh. Wow. Currently lead item on the Daily Mail Sci & Tech pages:

Open access metablogging

Discussions about Open Access publishing are constantly flaring up in the blogosphere. There is a lot of re-treading old ground as some struggle to catch up. This is particularly the case with criticisms of the author-pays or "article processing charge" (APC) publishing model. Under this model, rather than a library paying £30,000 for a year's subscription to a journal, academics pay around £1,000 upon acceptance of their paper for publication.

Members of the blogosphere tend to be quite young, many think that "open access" is a synonym for PLoS, and most are in real science, rather than publishing. What I am trying to say is that not all that many of them have actually followed the history of open access very closely — myself included, until around a year ago. So it was with great enjoyment that I read the summaries of this discussion from 2001, when this publishing model was first proposed:

Free access - who pays?

Seven years ago, even open-access evangelists were sceptical that it could be done. Now, even at three times the rather optimistic estimates (who said $50 would be enough to break even?), it's very firmly established. The pioneer in the field is running at a profit ("BMC hasn't yet reached the stature to impose fees."), the biggest funding agencies in the world have made it mandatory, and, in the meantime, the PLoS journals have come from nowhere to become one of the biggest brands in the industry.

Now, blogosphere, would you like to take a step back and reconsider some of those statements you've been making?

Peer review in the dock

An updated version of this post is available at Journalology.

A few thoughts on Peer Review In The Dock (this evening, Radio 4) [Note: posted late due to ongoing database issues -- will move to a new host when I get the time.]

1. Nobody has ever questioned whether peer review is really needed: wrong. A lot of people have questioned this, and many experiments have been tried. The most prominent recent example is probably PLoS ONE (no reference to this in the programme). They very rapidly discovered that, yes, a minimum standard is peer review is required when running a journal. Perhaps moving to a non-review model is like communism: you need to have world revolution for it to have any chance of working; going it alone will just lead to your own collapse.
2. Peer-reviewers aren't trained: somewhat misleading. Reviewers, at least in the publishing model that I am familiar with, are actively publishing research scientists of at least medium seniority. Most will, while pursuing their doctorates, have participated in "journal clubs" (where the grad students get together to shred a published paper), and many will also have co-reviewed manuscripts alongside their supervisors (not strictly allowed, but very widespread). What all students certainly are trained to do, even at undergraduate level, is not to take the truth of published work for granted, and to watch for potential flaws. To teach science is to teach scepticism. Which brings me on to the next point...
3. Reviewers aren't all that great at spotting errors: so what? Academics and publishers know this. The system is designed this way. Review is supposed to be a basic filter for sanity and competence; it is only journalists who hear "peer-reviewed" and think it is the definitive stamp of authenticity. Like democracy and trial-by-jury, it is not used because it works, but because it fails less disastrously than the alternatives. (Incidentally, their example of introducing deliberate errors to a paper and seeing who notices them is not entirely fair: most papers are not only reviewed by the journals reviewers, but by the authors' colleagues before they submit the manuscript, and by editors before review.)
4. The last part of the programme was devoted to publication bias. Publication bias is a big problem. But it has little, if anything, to do with peer-review, and everything to do with publisher policies and author dishonesty. The only conceivable connection it has with peer-review is that some people still mistakenly believe that negative results aren't worth publishing at all -- something that journals like BMC Research Notes and PLoS ONE, and initiatives like trial registration are explicitly tackling.

The programme explored what is an interesting issue in academic publishing at the moment (there are more interesting issues, of course), but, I think, from the wrong perspective. While it discussed many very real problems with the system, these problems are all well known and acknowledged; for decades people have explored solutions, and there are many interesting current developments. The makers of the programme seemed mostly unaware of these.

This is, of course, the limitation of having a half-hour national radio programme about a topic like academic publishing.

Late arrivals at the society ball

Humphrey Lyttelton, 1921 - 2008

Humph tells me he has to leave us now as he's been invited to a club night by St Peter, and this is something of a climax for him. He'll drop everything to be taken to heaven by St Michael. He says he can't wait to see the kindly old keeper-of-the-keys' famous entrance and part his Pearly Gates, and I can just imagine St Peter's joy as Humph gets red in the face blowing on his trumpet all evening. There are rumours that God might come and play with his instrument too -- he has needed cheering up lately as the Archangel Gabriel keeps rubbing him up the wrong way, and he was last seen giving Gabriel a good mouthful.

St Michael won't be joining them as he's off to the pub with Mary. He likes nothing more after a long hard day than to rest his staff in the Queen's Head, and once Mary gets the pints out he'll be up all night, and finish off with a stiff one in the early hours. Mary, bless her, never learns to drink in moderation, and I know she'll be feeling a little dicky in the morning.

Samantha will be there, and she tells me she has been baking some of Humph's favourites, and bought the whiskey that he loves. I know that she's very much looking forward to having him try her muffins and liquor out in the Garden of Eden.

Humph, you touched us all, blew us away, and leave us all gushing this weekend. We raise a glass to the legendary Humphrey Lyttelton, and can only play another round of Mornington Crescent.

I'll open with Great Portland Street.

Experiment avoidance: a short history

I've been reading John Gribbin's In Search of Schrödinger's Cat. He casually mentions the atomic (or, rather, 'atomistic') theories of the ancients -- in particular Democritus. Gribbin accuses historians of science and popular writers of attributing too much to Democritus, whose ideas about the world do not resemble modern physics. I've been consuming quite a bit of history of science and pop-physics lately and can't say I've ever been given the impression that Democritus (or any ancient philosopher scientists) founded particle physics. The historians do credit the atomists -- notably Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus -- with being unusually modern in their science. But science is not just a body of knowledge; it is a method for discovering how the world works. It is the atomists' approach to understanding the world that is unusually modern.

Rather than looking at the atomists in terms of modern particle physicists, compare them to the other ancient philosopher scientists. The Athenians generally shunned experimentation: though Aristotle is noted for his taxonomic observations, the Athenians were generally happiest with reason and rational thought, and were unaccomplished empiricists. Those in the Pythogorean tradition valued logic and mathematics, but they turned their study into a cult of mathematical superstitions in which the proles were defended from the subversive facts like irrational numbers and dodecahedrons. The approach to science taken by the atomists was one which valued both the rational (what Democritus called "legitimate thought") and the empirical -- though Democritus was aware of the limitations of the senses, and described the empirical as "bastard thought," noting that it must be applied with care. By advocating an empirical and a reductionist approach, the atomists are the intellectual ancestors of the most exciting and productive modern sciences.

This approach to understanding the world was to a large extent forgotten. The Romans picked over the remains of the Athenians, and they synthesised that with Christianity to produce the received wisdom of a millennium and a half. Religion ascended and the endarkenment closed in. The power of science was rediscovered, eventually, and began once again to free people from superstition. But as Carl Sagan asks: where might humankind be today had it never been forgotten?

In which I predict death and revolution

From the cult of the amateur to the triumph of miscellanea, a revolution in how we interact with information is in its early stages. I don't use the term "revolution" lightly. You could be forgiven for thinking it hyperbolic, because traditional publishers have been slow on the uptake. If you still rely on traditional publishers for your information, you will not have seen much of a revolution. Sure, you can read the newspaper on the internet nowadays, and leave instant feedback on what you're reading. But "revolution" is a bit strong, surely? Well, indeed. But revolutions do not always happen overnight.

Lets go back to Stephen Fry on Room 101. He wants to consign critics to history. And it's happening, or at least, a shift in how criticism occurs is part of the revolution. Under the traditional model, what is good, what is important, and what is true, are largely dictated from on high. We have some experience of bottom up review -- bestseller charts, opinion polls, television ratings figures, and so on -- but it is usually secondary to the power of the critics. It is not my intention here to argue over the merits and pitfalls of the invisible hand of bottom-up criticism, except with regards to how it might be applied to academic publishing and the peer-review system. Because this revolution is happening, whether the publishers like it or not. And just as I believe the invisible hand of economics needs the occasional slap to keep it from making rude gestures, the invisible hand of criticism needs some discipline and manners if it is to be of any use to us. And thus concludes my tortured metaphor for today.

Continue reading under the fold...

Vote for me!

Vote for the Garden of Rest at Arno's Vale for the "Entropy" theme of the next JPEG Magaizne:

• Vote here!

Update: I took a better photo, vote for this shot of Arno's Vale for the Entropy theme of the next JPEG Magazine instead!

• Vote here!

Arno's Vale is a large municipal Victorian cemetery in Bristol, England. Over several decades the cemetery has become seriously overgrown and derelict. The chapels are boarded up and unsafe, and in places the woodland is getting quite thick and mature. Since it was featured on BBC Restoration a few years ago it has recieved some funding, and in places has been tidied up, though much more funding is required to restore the buildings. This was taken in early November 2006.