Online Publication ?

Rules with respect to publishing in journals
  1. You can only publish things which respect the 'form'. Actually the form is often more important than the message (try to avoid readability, a lot of Greek letters can help you)
  2. You can only publish marginal increments to existing work
  3. You can only publish in recognized areas of research, preferably through aligning yourself with the big guys in the field
  4. You must refer to other research, which is often kindly provided by the reviewers
  5. You must fit you research to a certain length, even if you need more to convey the necessary background (e.g: in multi-disciplinary research)
  6. Feasibility and empirical testing is not important at all. Merely some good arguments suffice.
For a journal, research is only valid if it is recognized by a number of different reviewers, which form the common restrictor (based on their scientific interests). Such a system does not advance science it merely helps people without ideas or creativity to do pseudo-research by allowing them to publish marginal increments to existing work. If books were reviewed by scientific reviewers, not a single one of them would make it on the market. Sadly enough, more often than not the scientific reviews do not even relay to the content of a manuscript, but rather to non-functional aspects that might make look the reviewer 'professional'.

For certain conferences you can only submit an abstract after registering (and paying) for the conference, which nicely illustrates the priorities :) These days it seems even so that for some journals you must pay an 'article processing charge' before it even gets reviewed.

The process of publishing something:
  1. the journal ownes your text afterwards, so you cannot publish your own text online or at other places
  2. you need to pay the journal to get it published [in color, in full length, with appendices...]
  3. the publisher will make sure that your article cannot be read if the reader does not pay for it
  4. and of course, they will provide the all-adored 'peer-review system' which will guarantee your later success in your academic career
This system has a very high vacuum property. The journals basically earn money on two fronts and in return offer a very elusive 'high quality review'.

As a scientist I feel that
  1. it takes to much time to fit creative ideas into the required form, thereby satisfying the common man/reviewer. If I would want to satisfy the common man then I should have gone into politics.
  2. science is broken down from a holistic given to little pieces of information which can only be bought from people who doesn't even understand it.
This leads me to conclude that I mainly publish online. This guarantees that
  1. I convey my research as I see fit
  2. Nobody pays for it
  3. Everybody can find it easily
  4. I keep the copyright over my work 
  5. I personally have a much better 'peer' review system through the feedback from readers
Another very important reason for publication online is that many research is state funded through universities. This implies that money comes from the tax-payer, as such the tax-payer should be able to have easy access to the conducted research .

The barriers:
  1. most scientist are still too uptight to publish online. Despite the fact that they might agree with me, they don't act against these 'established' values because they need money.
  2. funding sources tend to require a peer-review system to decide who gets money to do what. This makes them look 'correct' and 'scientifically sound'. However, most of the time when their is money, it has a certain purpose, so it is a bit strange that they don't actively specify what research is necessary, or install some kind of goal-driven internal review system. Such an explicit management in connection with funding sources will not only lead to more efficient use of resources, but also to accountability on the researchers end.
For a list of my online published papers please go to http://werner.yellowcouch.org/Papers/

Past experiences with certain journals & Some quotes from the holy 'Guidelines for authors'

PLOS Computational Biology: Worst (conflict of interest)

An article submitted to this journal (which has a ridiculous low impact factor anyway) originally passed the frontline-editor (who checks the form) and was then immediately rejected by the editor. A quick look around revealed that this editor himself was conducting similar research, so I wrote a letter to ask whether this conflict of interest is normal and of course during this process we also fixed some of the valid comments she had on the work. A consequent resubmission to this journal was then ignored and after a third inquiry they asked me to resubmit it, which I did. But this time the article did not even pass the frontline-editor. So I'm done with this journal. If anybody is interested in publishing with these morons, go ahead. In any case, an article won't be forthcoming from my side anymore.

Electrophoresis: Average

'Authors are permitted to place this material on their homepage when they are setting up a link to the full-text version of the article in Wiley Interscience' -> My goodness, _permitted_. This should rather read: 'Authors allow journals to publish their material...' This journal also manages to charge 500 EUR for color pictures !

BMC Bioinformatics: Good

Article-processing charges: Are you aware that BMC Biology has an article processing charge of 900EUR (US$1540) per article accepted for publication? This is substantial, however the overall feeling from working with this journal was rewarding and positive.

Gene Regulation & Systems Biology: Libertas Academus Press: Good

Not many comments; expensive but still very quick in response and good reviewers. A drawback which we figured out after the facts is that the journal is not indexed in pubmed (which is odd since their guidelines stated that it would be published there).

Genomic Proteomic Technology: Bad

All articles will be edited to conform to Genomic Proteomic Technology style. Statements that, in our opinion, are contrary to the editorial objectives of the journal or that are of a purely promotional nature will be amended. [it is of course not clear what those 'objectives' are]. This journal never responded to an article we submitted.

Elseviers Image & Vision Computing: Worst

'Image and Vision computing' is a journal with a retarded editorial staff. After submitting an article they put me on hold for 10 months without even assigning reviewers. Their comments were most of the time that it was 'difficult to find one'. However, communication with the magazine was at least challenging. Many emails went unanswered and aside from their promises to get it done 'as quickly as possible', still nothing has been done. If you want to publish: don't do it here. The people I was involved with was mainly Keith D. Baker (keith.baker@reading.ac.uk). In the end I had to retract the article so that I could submit it elsewhere. Of course other people had done similar things by that time.

IEEE Signal Processing: Very Bad

A club of self promoting inbred reviewers. Twice I submitted an article. The first article was rejected because it was too easy to read and too accessible according to the comments I got back (Interestingly, this article has been extremely popular. During the past 6 years it was hit on average 963 hits per week). The second article was rejected because I did not refer sufficiently to previous work published by IEEE.

Springer Verlag

Springer sent me an email: 'Dear Springer Author, Springer is pleased to introduce the new Online Journal Archives database... Now, access to the previously hard to find works of countless scientists and authors are just a few mouse clicks away. We offer a total of 1.8 million archive records comprising approximately 1,200 journals.'  [what exactly are they saying here ? That they actually made finding information hard ?]