There are major flaws in the current system for publishing scientific research

http://www.onesci.com/OneSci:Community_Portal

The first problem to understand about our current system for publishing research is that, in this system, all scientific discovery and most of the public tax dollars set-aside for research ends-up in the hands of the largest publishing companies. The M.O. of our current system requires researchers to buy back their own published findings. This is why almost all information and public tax money quickly shifts to these companies who have created journals of many research paradigms, practically flooding the market in order to accommodate as much free research as scientists are willing to give away.

Over a month ago I was building a website to video-podcast the recorded lectures from the Research Society on Alcoholism's annual conference. While I was making the RSA Lecture Series website, my mentor/P.I. had me purchase the copyright permissions for the figures and graphs the presenters used on their Powerpoint slides so we could post them online. They weren't cheap; anywhere from $30 – $200 bucks a figure, graph, or table. I thought it was somewhat ridiculous that we were buying back “our” own research. I didn’t realize that publishing companies appropriate the rights to everything. My question is, why do we let them get away with this? Twenty years ago they provided a necessary service – the printing and distribution of research. Now we have the internet, and while they don’t have us in a strangle-hold anymore, we keep signing away the rights to our own research.

To fully grasp how senseless the current strategy for publishing research, I offer this useful analogy: We don’t mind paying taxes to build roads, because we need roads. The Tollway builds roads with their own money, and usually there is an incentive to use them instead of the ones that we’ve already purchased with our tax dollars. So we don’t mind paying the toll. It would be pretty crazy if we spent all this tax money building roads, have our state engineers inspect them for quality, and then just hand them over to the Tollway so they can collect a profit every time someone uses them. This is what we do with our research, though. We use grant money to pay for the subscriptions we need, and for journals that our university doesn’t subscribe to. Essentially, we conduct the research, write the articles, do the peer-review, and hand it all over to them...and then buy it back. It’s important to consider - under this system, much of the funding and all of the research eventually ends up in the hands of the publishing companies. Oh, and the 400 dollar a year price tag on some of these journals? It’s not the ink! TIME magazine costs around 15 dollars for 36 issues, and they actually pay their writers (unlike the Axon).

“In this section, we discuss existing research into red-black trees, vacuum tubes, and courseware [10]. On a similar note, recent work by Takahashi suggests a methodology for providing robust modalities, but does not offer an implementation [9].” - David Phillips and Andrew Kent, Center for Research in Applied Phrenology, Ithaca, New York.

Our peer-reviewed publishing system is built on trust. Trust that authors faithfully carry out their stated experiments, trust that reviewers objectively evaluate said experiments, and trust that publishing companies oversee such processes with an eye toward disseminating legitimate scientific findings. What happens when all three break down?

The excerpt at the top of this article comes from a paper submitted by Philip Davis and Kent Anderson to The Open Information Science Journal. If you find the prose confusing, then you probably went one step further than the publishing company/reviewers – you actually read it. The entire paper, in fact, was constructed using software that creates grammatically correct but nonsensical text. Thus, the complete paper was utter nonsense; a hoax to test the oversight and integrity of an established publishing company. Utter nonsense.

http://onesci.com aims to fix these problems.