Computational Intelligence

It's been a long time since I last blogged about the problems with academic journals. Several of my old posts described the behaviour of the giant academic publisher Elsevier, specifically trying to buy a law in the US Congress that would virtually ban researchers publishing in open-access journals. This resulted in an enormous backlash against Elsevier, including a boycott that now has more than 14,000 names, culminating in the proposed legislation being dropped.

Unfortunately, Elsevier is back to their old bad behaviour: they have been sending notices to researchers and academic network sites demanding the removal from the web of papers that the researchers' had published in Elsevier journals. While Elsevier may be within their legal rights to do so (since they demand that authors sign over copyright to Elsevier), preventing people from self-archiving papers that they wrote is highly
detrimental to science. In other words, Elsevier gets the research papers for free (submitted by the authors), they get the quality control for free (done by volunteer reviewers), and the administration of journals for free (done by volunteer editors). Then, they do some basic formatting and proof-reading, demand that the authors surrender all rights to the article, and publish it at an enormous profit.

Some publishers like the IEEE work the same way but allow for self-archiving, that is, they allow authors to post papers they have authored on their own websites for other researchers to access. The IEEE seems to be doing quite well out of this practice, but then the high offices of the IEEE are held by engineers and academics rather than businessmen. Does Elsevier really think that they can get away with this kind of bully-boy behaviour?

There are a couple of Elsevier journals that I've published several papers in, and I still have research that I was going to submit to them. But now I think that It's time for me to find some alternative journals to submit my work to. I'm currently reviewing one article for an Elsevier journal, and I took that task on because a friend asked me to, but after that, I won't review for any Elsevier journals. And I will not, under any circumstances, serve on the editorial board of any Elsevier journals.

The outline of chapter 6 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 6 is entitled "Fuzzy Inference and Defuzzification" and covers the basic principles of fuzzy inference and defuzzification of fuzzy values into crisp values.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations
Chapter 4: Crisp Rule Based Systems
Chaper 5: Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzification


Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

The outline of chapter 5 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 5 is entitled "Fuzzy Sets and Fuzzification" and covers the basic principles of fuzzy sets, fuzzy membership functions and fuzzification of crisp data.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations
Chapter 4: Crisp Rule Based Systems

Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

The outline of chapter 4 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online here. Chapter 4 is entitled "Crisp Rule Based Systems" and covers rule based production systems.

Previous posts about other chapters are:

Chapter 1: Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems
Chapter 2: Simple and Linear Transformations
Chapter 3: Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformations

Please make any comments in the comments section of this post, or email contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

The outline of Chapter 3 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online. Chapter 3 is entitled "Non-Linear Transformations, Fourier and Wavelet Transformation" . My previous post about the outline of Chapter 1, "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems", is here while the post about Chapter 2, "Simple and Linear Transformations", is here.

If you have any comments or suggestions about this chapter outline, please make them in the comments on this blog, or email me at contactATmike.watts.net.nz.

The outline of Chapter 2 of the open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems" is now available online. Chapter 2 is entitled "Simple and Linear Transformations" and is intended to be a brief overview of some of the data processing techniques that can be used to prepare data before it is modeled with computational intelligence techniques. My previous post about the outline of Chapter 1, "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems", is here.

As always, you comments and suggestions are requested and valued.

Following on from my post last week about the updated outline for my open-source textbook "Intelligent Information Systems", I've made the outline of Chapter 1 "Introduction to Intelligent Information Systems" available online.

As always, comments and suggestions are most welcome!

In an earlier post, I described how I'm working on an open source textbook about Intelligent Information Systems.

While progress has been slower than I would have liked (mainly due to my relocating permanently to my native New Zealand), I have been able to digest the suggestions made in the comments on my previous post. As a result, I've made the second outline of this textbook available here.

I've also investigated several different licensing schemes, and it looks like I'll be going with one of the Creative Commons licenses. I'm looking at making the LaTeX source and PDF files freely available online, while retaining the print rights.

Any comments on the outline, or my licensing plan, will be gratefully received!

The following quote was in an email I received from the editor of a certain prestigious general science journal:

"Your manuscript is now undergoing an initial screening to determine whether it will be sent for in-depth review. We will notify the corresponding author of our decision as soon as possible."

That really annoyed me. It annoyed me because it is not the job of the editor to screen submissions. Sure, it is appropriate for them to check that the paper is formatted correctly, that there aren't big sections of it missing, and that it fits the theme of the journal (which is not the case with general science journals like the journal this paper was submitted to). The kind of screening this editor is talking about it a kind of pre-peer review, where the editor is determining whether the paper is worthy of being considered by their august publication. It is, in fact, a rather extreme form of academic arrogance.

Having a paper rejected by peer review is one thing, but being rejected because one person doesn't think it's worthy enough? So many of my colleagues have had so many perfectly good papers rejected by editors without going to peer review. The purpose of peer review is to find errors in the science (and have no doubt about it, computational intelligence is a science). If there are no errors in the science - that is, there are no discernible errors in methodology or interpretation of results - then the paper should be published. Even a rejection is useful, as it allows the authors to improve their research. But editorial rejections eliminate even that, they make the entire process of submitting to that journal a waste of time.

As I've said many times before, the solution is to go to open access journals. Peer review will help catch the errors, and the people reading the papers (and there will be a lot more of them reading open access papers than subscription-only papers) will find the errors the peer reviewers missed. But arrogant editors from expensive subscription-only journals will soon find themselves presiding over a shrinking author base.

In my previous posts on academic journals (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) I've discussed the major problem with academic journals in the context of the huge cost of accessing the content that the journals receive for free, as well as the importance of open-access journals. This post is concerned with another problem that is becoming apparent with journals: the declining acceptance rate for papers submitted to journals, in attempts to foster an image of exclusivity and quality.

A recent editorial by David Wardle describes a quantitative analysis he performed that compared the acceptance rates of four top-ranked ecological journals with the large open-access journal PLoS One, along with the citation rate of papers published in each. What he found was that the four traditional journals accepted less than 20% of the paper submitted to them, while PLoS One accepted around 69%. However, papers that are published in PLoS One are cited more than papers published in one of the traditional journals. His argument was that the traditional journals rejected papers that were of good scientific quality (that is, they described good work) but were not "worthy" of publication in such "august" journals, with the editors using the excuse that limited page space meant that there wasn't room to print the papers, even though they were quite good. He then goes on to explain that this exclusivity was motivated by a desire to increase the perception of quality of the journals. That is, the editors are trying to foster the impression that the journals must be really good, because they're really picky about which papers they publish.

But, the ultimate measure of the quality of a paper is how often it is cited, as that reflects how useful it is to other scientists, and papers published in the less-exclusive open-access journals are cited more. Thus, the concept that journals with low acceptance rates publish better papers is fatally flawed: these journals are rejecting papers that are scientifically sound and are useful to other scientists.

This leads me to think that the only reason the top journals are the top journals are because people think they are. If someone wants an authoritative citation to back up a statement they make in a paper, they will cite a paper in Nature or Science if they can, because these are the top journals (this doesn't happen much in computational intelligence, because very few papers in this field are published in Nature or Science). But the conclusion of Wardle's study is that acceptance rate is not a reliable metric of the quality of a journal. If anything, it is a measure of the snobbery of a journal.

The purpose of peer review (and of reviewers) is as a crap-filter for papers, to keep work that is incorrectly done or poorly presented from entering the literature. But with exclusive journals, the peer reviewers seem to be spending more time deciding which papers are significant enough to be published in the journal, rather than trying to identify flaws in the work. The whole thing reminds me of the reason the great physicist Richard Feynman quit the US National Academy of Science: because they spent most of their time deciding who was "worthy" of joining the Academy.

Not so long ago, we had to consider the quality of journals because it wasn't feasible to track the impact of a single paper. Now, with tools like Google Scholar, we can track the citation histories of individual papers. In short, the journal in which a paper is published is no longer that important: the usefulness, the contribution of the paper is what is important. By the same token, the quality of an academic is not measured by which institution they work for, but by their contributions. Unfortunately, the bean-counters who make the hiring and promotion decisions, and who make decisions on who gets competitive research funding, haven't grasped this concept yet.

Exclusive journals do not make a good contribution to science, as they keep too much useful material out of the public eye for too long: peer-reviewed open-access journals, with their more liberal acceptance rates, are more important then ever in this situation.

Continuing my series of posts on open access journals (see here and here), this article by Simon Owens in U.S. News is an excellent and detailed review of the debate. The article compares open access journals to e-books: while e-books have existed for a long time, it is only in the last five years that they have really taken off, after reaching a tipping point. Owens argues that open access journals have reached that tipping point, and the academic journal publishing business (known for the huge profits they extract from university libraries) is on the verge of serious disruption.

I tend to agree with his assessment, open access journals have been flying largely under the radar for a long time, but I get the sense that they are becoming more accepted among the top researchers: when more top researchers publish in open-access journals, they will gain credibility.

The old publishing model is being destroyed by greed: journals are just too expensive, and suck too much money out of universities that should be spent funding research and paying people's salaries. Open access is the future of scientific publishing.

Following up from my earlier post, this article in The Economist gives a pretty good overview of the recent UK and EU move towards requiring the outputs of publicly-funded research being published as open access. The article also gives a lot of context about the different open access publishing models - the "gold" model practiced by PLoS, where authors pay a fee to publish; and the "green" model that the USA's NIH demands, whereby papers are published in traditional journals, but the journals must allow authors to publish their papers in an open repository like PubMed after one year.

So, when are we going to start seeing one of these models applied to computational intelligence journals? I'd be especially pleased if the IEEE were to adopt one of these models, as they lock every single paper they publish up behind a paywall, seemingly for all of time.

All taxpayer-funded research in the UK must now be published as open access papers, according to this article in the BBC. The British government will be providing £50m in subsidies for researchers to pay the fees necessary to have their work available as open access.

This is a victory for open access. But, the victory is not complete. Firstly, the £50m is coming out of general research funding, it's not new money. In other words, there will be less research done because of this, as there will be less money available to fund it. Secondly, the money is going to the established academic publishers, who are just going to use it to further pad their profits. Finally, as the article states, many journals will still not accept articles that have the relevant data available from open data repositories.

I still think that eventually, open access journals will over-whelm the old publishers. But they can only do this if the top researchers contribute quality research articles to them. Meanwhile, I personally think that the next step is for reviewers (and editors) to start demanding payment for the labour they provide to the publishers. It is we reviewers and editors who provide the quality control for the journals, it's time we got paid for it.

Would anyone be willing to sign up for a boycott of all publishers, until reviewers and editors are paid?

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