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Political Geography xxx (2012) 1–4

Contents lists available

Political Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/polgeo

Guest editorial

Scientific communication, open access, and the publishing industry

Introduction

This commentary is prompted by recent pieces in The Guardian(Taylor, 2012) and The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/18744177) that are critical of Elsevier, Springer and otherlarge publishers in STM (the science, technology and medicalfields). Without oversimplifying the argument, which emanatesfrom some different directions, the basic thrust is that authorsshould not have to relinquish their copyrights, as publishers canthen charge a pay-per-view fee that can be as high as $40. This isseen to be 1. exorbitant when the costs of digital transfer are solow; 2. a major contributor to the significant profits enjoyed bythe publishers in question (in his Guardian post, geologist Taylordescribes them as ‘obscene’); 3. adding to the costs of higher educa-tion and 4. routing public funds away from actual research.

This mainstream critique amplifies a longstanding disquietwithin parts of the academy. From the academic blogosphere wefind numerous postings that dismiss for-profit publishing. Here isa representative offering, from a mathematiciand“It is a truthuniversally acknowledged that journals fail to add significant valuein a way that justifies their high prices (we write, typeset, referee,edit, and they do basically nothing except charge an arm anda leg for it” (http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/08/10/negative-value-added-by-journals/)). Indeed, the author suggeststhat commercial publishers actually remove value by wastingauthors’ time requiring weird formats and professional qualitydiagrams.

Some academics (and many of those who post on this issue)favor the creation of (OA) open access journals in which the authormaintains copyright. In addition, some fields seem to be driftingaway from journals, by creating digital repositories in which schol-arly products are held for anyone who wants to use them. This isparticularly true of fields such as astrophysics, which has beendeveloping such a system (ArXiv) since 1991.

OA and its many variants are not a simple alternative to the STMsector, which some estimate to beworth $30 billion annually. At thevery least, OA has some inbuilt complexities, such as the transfer ofthe costs of publication from the user (the i-Tunes model) to theproducer (the graffiti model, in which the producer bears all theupfront expense, with the hope of being rewarded, in somemanner, by someone, at some later date). Authors pay (typicallyfrom $1000–3000) to have their work published. Consequently,suspicions lurk that exclusively OA journals are low-quality exam-ples of vanity publication, and bibliometric research has been doneto explore this issue (the results of which are inconclusive: seeWagner for a comprehensive assessment: 2010).

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Science as networks of communication

These discussions on the alternatives to STM publications can beboth rudimentary and vitriolic. Some of the latter emerges froma simplification of the relationship that exists between science(the production of knowledge) and scientific communication(that which leads ultimately to publication). In much of the scien-tific community (again, definitions will follow), the science isassumed to be a distinct activity that precedes the communication:so the progression is science< communication. Because the publi-cation of results seems to be a minor part of the overall activity, it istherefore easy to assume that it can be replaced by simplerdandever cheaperdprocesses, such as posting material on websitesand so forth.

However, amore critical reading of this relationship reverses theprocessdcommunication< sciencedand in doing so, dramaticallychanges the relative significance of the two activities. Leydesdorff(2001, p. 190) argues that “science is an order emerging fromnetworks of communication”, which of course reflects what weknow from the sociology of science, as it is manifested in the worksof Latour, Harding and others (but which is rarely taught in Collegesof Science). In this view of the world, science is a construction, nota unified and self-evident truth, and is highly dependent upon rela-tions between its producersdand its consumersdfor its form.Naturally enough, then, this reversal of the order also imbuescommunication with significantly more importance to the endproduct.

Reversing the emphasis, to focus upon scientific networks, isimportant as it opens up for us the significance of the communica-tion process that lies at the core of the production of knowledge.The formation of what we recognize as disciplines occurs viaa process of collaboration, refutation, agreement and rejection,none of which can occur without forms of one-to-one and one-to-many communication. These shift continually, as new multidis-ciplinary enterprises emerge and are institutionalized into newfields, such as climate change science.

It is the simplicity, or complexity, of this interaction that under-pins different attitudes to journal publication. In a field such asmathematics, where some of the most virulent reactions tocommercial publishers are to be found, communication can bethought of as representative of a previous scientific eradpre-Enlightenment rather than pre-digitaldwhere the norm is topass around proofs and to vote upon their elegance. To such amedi-eval guild (Johnston uses the apt metaphor of the village), thecontemporary publisher offers little (Johnston, 2005). The vastexpense of digitizing the collective wisdom lodged within tens of

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Guest editorial / Political Geography xxx (2012) 1–42

millions of journal articles, borne by publishers over the pastdecade, amounts to nothing; the same is probably true of electronicsubmission systems and search platforms.

If we go back to the other alternative to journal publication, therepository mentioned above, we find some similar issues. In astro-physics, for instance, an inclusive pre-print ArXiv repository ismaintained. This is another insular field, where a closed disci-plinary turf has been patrolled for decades and ontological dissentis marginalized (see for instance Smolin, 2006). In these contexts,the focus of the discipline can be maintained relatively easily, sothat the complicated questions that arise in some fields about therelative standards of different journals do not occur.

Many other fields display much greater complexity, manifestedin more complex networks of communication. Geopolitics, weknow, lies at the intersection of several fields; urban studies linksto many. We know this intuitively, but digital information transferpermits us to explore this with some precision, as we can see in thefollowing two cases. What is important about both of these

Fig. 1. The linkages between disciplines, based upon clickstream data, from Bollen et al., 20

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examples is that they are undertaken using proprietary searchengines, one offered by Elsevier, the other by Thomson-Reuters.

Fig. 1, for instance, is an analysis of over one billion clicks in2006–7, aggregated to reflect the journals visited by samples ofacademic researchers. It is a precise measure of which fields ofinquiry are literally connected to others and with what strength.

What this reveals is interesting as a guide to current researchbehavior, and perhaps to future funding needs. The authors of thestudy provide a summary of part of their insights:

“Human geography studies connect to geography, plantgenetics, and finally agriculture. A number of clusters are well-connected to both the natural science and social science clus-ters. For example, ecology and biodiversity (5PM) connects thedomains of biology (rim, 5PM) and architecture and design (hub,5PM). Production and manufacturing (12PM) bridge thedomains of physics and engineering (rim, 2PM) and economics(hub, 11PM)” (Bollen et al., 2009, p. 6).

09. An OA publication, permission unnecessary. See original for research methodology.

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Fig. 2. A map of science based on citation links produced by Leydesdorff and Rafols, available from http://www.leydesdorff.net/map06/index.htm.

Guest editorial / Political Geography xxx (2012) 1–4 3

For the record, mathematics journals tend to be connected onlyto other math journals; astrophysics is similarly isolated.

In the second example, Leydesdorff and Rafols display theresults of a factor analysis of co-citation matrices for over 6000science journals citied within other science journals. This revealsa different, but analogous, map of science; again, we see that thereis a testable proposition here, namely that those who are most crit-ical of for-profit journals reside in fields that display the mostmarginal locations, such as mathematics and astrophysics, and toa lesser extent, geology (Fig. 2).

The potential of bibliometrics

Thesediagramsare expressions of the emergingfield of bibliomet-rics.While it is easy tobedistractedby the complexbutelegant graph-ical output, the researchhas a deeper purpose, namely to examine thestructures of knowledge. This has been done in the past in a parochialway, measuring for instance the influence of individualswithin disci-plines, but here the scope is much broader, to explore how ideasmetastasize. Recent studies show the development of nanotech-nology, environmental studies, and transnational collaborations(Frenken, Hardeman, & Hoekman, 2009; Richardson, 2012).

These inductive approaches can seem like crude trawling exer-cises, but there is enormous potential here to transcend the limitsto knowledge acquisition. When Darwin wrote, it was not impos-sible to strive to know something about everything. Now thesuccessful academic is one who knows everything about some-thing, however narrow and arcane that something might appear.With this level of specialization come barriers to anyone attempt-ing to transcend a specialized field, with the result that subfieldstend to become ever smaller. In consequence, the digital footprinthas grown exponentiallydsome 200,000 journals are producedglobally, and there are now over 35 million papers and reviews inexistence (Kähler, 2010).

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In this environment, researchers who need to transcend theselimitations require help, and this is where the STM publisherscome in, developing different types of research support. Some arenot relevant to social scientistsdstreaming video of clinical proce-dures to a smart phone is valuable to a nursing professional but notto us. However, being able to move in an efficient manner fromarticle to citation to article is a valuable resource, and proprietarysearch platforms (Scopus, Thomson-ISI) make this possible. Incontrast, ‘traditional’ search procedures are unable to offer anythinglike the same levels of flexibility, precision or accuracy (Jasco, 2005).

STM can also go a step further, creating meta-journals thatprovide the same information in amore structuredmanner. CurrentResearch on Cities is designed to provide summaries of informationfor those working in the field, but also those in geology or publichealth who would not think of themselves as urban researchers,but whose work is taking them in exactly that direction (Kirby,2012).

Conclusions

The debate on copyright has become even more acrimonious aslegislative efforts to mandate OA have been proposed in both theUK and the US and criticized by the representatives of the STMsector (see Taylor, 2012; Tempest, 2012). As I have pointed outhere, though, the apparent choice that is under debate is somewhatmisleading. The issue of copyright vs. OA does not get to thecomplexities of how scientific communication does, can or shouldoccur. While it is correct that digital information transfer makesmany more things possible, it is not clear that we have thoughtthrough the implications of setting the price point closer to zero.The obvious analogy is the death of the newspaper: if users areunwilling to pay for content (digital or print), we will see thecontinued collapse of those publishers and the value that theyadd (in collecting and verifying information). The same is true in

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Guest editorial / Political Geography xxx (2012) 1–44

the STM field: we can change the pricing structure, but thenwe areleft with the scholarly version of the celestial jukeboxdmillions ofarticles, trillions of words, and no obvious means to make sense ofany of it.

References

Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Hagberg, A., Bettencourt, L., Chute, R., Rodriguez, M. A.,et al. (2009). Clickstream data yields high-resolution maps of science. PLoS ONE,4(3), e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803.

Frenken, K., Hardeman, S., & Hoekman, J. (2009). Spatial scientometrics: towardsa cumulative research program. Journal of Informetrics, 3, 222–232.

Jasco, P. (2005). As we may search – comparison of major features of the Web ofScience, Scopus, and Google Scholar citation-based and citation-enhanced data-bases. Current Science, 89(9), 1537–1547.

Johnston, R. J. (2005). Editorial. Environment and Planning A, 37, 2–8.Kähler, O. (2010). Combining peer review and metrics to assess journals for inclu-

sion in Scopus. Learned Publishing, 23, 336–346. doi:10.1087/20100411.Kirby, A. (2012). Current research on cities and its contribution to urban studies.

Cities, 29(Suppl. 1), S3–S8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2011.12.004.

Please cite this article in press as: Kirby, A., Scientific communication, odoi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.04.001

Leydesdorff, L. (2001). A sociological theory of communication: The self-organizationof the knowledge-based society. Parkland, FL: Universal Publishers.

Leydesdorff, L., & Rafols, I. (n.d.). A global map of science based on the ISI subjectcategories. Available from http://www.leydesdorff.net/map06/texts/index.htm.

Richardson, M. (2012). Citography: the visualization of nineteen thousand journalsthrough their recent citations. Research Trends, 26, 3.

Smolin, L. (2006). The trouble with physics. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Taylor, M. (2012). Academic publishers are enemies of science. http://www.guardian.

co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science.Tempest, D. (2012). So, what is universal access?. http://editorsupdate.elsevier.com/

2012/03/so-what-is-universal-access/?utm_source¼ESJ001&utm_campaign&utm_content&utm_medium¼email&bid¼R4CJF5F:S65G6.

Wagner, A. B. (2010). Open access citation advantage: an annotated bibliography.Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, 60, Available. http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html.

Andrew KirbySocial and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University, Phoenix,

AZ 85069-7100, USAE-mail address: andrew.kirby@asu.edu

pen access, and the publishing industry, Political Geography (2012),