GRE閱讀之熱門背景素材介紹

　　科學(xué)出版的開放存取已逐漸被人們所接受.四月初，英國研究理事會—一個由政府向?qū)W術(shù)研究者提供資金機構(gòu)-改變了它的一項規(guī)則：即該機構(gòu)提供資助的一些研究成果是否可以自由出版。從今后，這些成果將必須在期刊上自由，免費發(fā)表—最好是結(jié)果出來后立即出版，但是出版時間最遲不能超過一年。今年二月，白宮科學(xué)和技術(shù)政策辦公室也要求聯(lián)邦機構(gòu)做出與之相類似的計劃。
　　A week before that, a bill which would require free access to government-financed research after six months had begun to wend its way through Congress.The European Union is moving in the same direction.So are charities.And SCOAP3, a consortium of particle-physics laboratories, libraries and funding agencies, is pressing all 12 of the field's leading journals to make the 7,000 articles they publish each year free to read.For scientific publishers, it seems, the party may soon be over.
　　在此前一周，國會也通過了一項法案—即政府資助研究產(chǎn)生成果六個月后，可以自由出版，雖然投票通過的過程有些曲折。同時，歐盟也正在同樣方向的指導(dǎo)下做著類似的工作。慈善機構(gòu)同樣如此。而且，一個由眾多粒子物理實驗室，圖書館和資助機構(gòu)組成的聯(lián)合體-SCOAP3已經(jīng)向該領(lǐng)域的12個先鋒期刊提出如下要求：即他們每年出版的7,000篇文章都能免費閱讀。對科學(xué)出版社們來說，這似乎預(yù)示著獨享的快樂聚會可能就快結(jié)束了。
　　It has, they would have to admit, been a good bash.The current enterprise—selling the results of other people's work, submitted free of charge and vetted for nothing by third parties in a process called peer review, has been immensely profitable.Elsevier, a Dutch firm that is the world's biggest journal publisher, had a margin last year of 38% on revenues of 2.1 billion.Springer, a German firm that is the second-biggest journal publisher, made 36% on sales of 875m in 2011.
　　不過，他們將不得不承認，這是一個很好的嘗試?，F(xiàn)在的企業(yè)—銷售他人的工作成果，不要承認任何費用，而且不要接受被稱為同行檢查的第三方審查，已經(jīng)是極有利潤可圖了。荷蘭的愛思唯爾是全球最大的雜志出版商，去年在這個方面的利潤達到了總收入的38%。而第二大出版商—德國的施普林格，就其最近一年—2011年可查的數(shù)據(jù)來看，出版研究成果的收入達到了當(dāng)年銷售收入—8.75億歐元的36%。
　　Such firms are now, though, faced with competitors set up explicitly to cover only their costs.Some rely on charity, but many have a proper business model: academics pay a fee to be published.So, on the principle of if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, commercial publishers, too, are setting up open-access subsidiaries.Open for business.The biggest is BioMed Central, part of Springer.It was founded in 2000 and in February it published its 150,000th paper and also launched its 250th periodical, catchily entitled theJournal of Venomous Animals and Toxins Including Tropical Diseases.
　　但是，現(xiàn)在這些公司也面臨著僅為賺取投資成本而起家的競爭對手的挑戰(zhàn)。有些企業(yè)倚重的卻是慈善出版物，但是，它們大多都有一個合適的商業(yè)模式：學(xué)者都要支付一定的費用才能出版他們的研究成果。因此，本著如果你不能打敗他們，那就加入他們的原則，商業(yè)出版社也開始設(shè)立可以開放存取的子公司。開業(yè)了.影響最大的是生物醫(yī)學(xué)中心，它隸屬于斯林普格，創(chuàng)建于2000年。今年二月，它出版了它的十五萬篇文章，也出版了它的第250期期刊，它的題目很吸引人—有毒動物，及包含熱帶疾病的毒素。
　　Days later Nature Publishing Group, which owns Nature and 81 other journals, and which itself belongs to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another German firm, bought a majority stake in Frontiers, a Swiss open-access platform with 30 titles in 14 scientific fields.In combination, NPG and Frontiers publish 46 open-access journals, and 7,300 free papers a year.In the past year Elsevier has more than doubled the number of open-access journals it publishes, to 39.And even in those that usually charge readers, paying a publication fee makes a paper available free immediately.
　　幾天以后，擁有自然雜志和其它81種雜志的自然出版集團-它本身隸屬于另一家德國公司：格奧爾格-馮-霍爾茨布林克出版集團，購買了前鋒—一家擁有14個科研領(lǐng)域30種期刊的瑞士開放存取平臺—的多數(shù)股權(quán)。聯(lián)姻后，自然集團和前鋒每年能夠出版46個開放存取期刊，及7,300篇文章。去年，艾思維爾把它出版的開放存取期刊的數(shù)量增加了一倍以上，達到了39個。甚至那些通常收費的出版商，在支付出版費用后，也能夠立刻免費讀到這些文章。
　　Outsell, a Californian consultancy, estimates that open-access journals generated 172m in 2012.That was just 2.8% of the total revenue journals brought their publishers, but it was up by 34% from 2011 and is expected to reach 336m in 2015. The number of open-access papers is forecast to grow from 194,000 to 352,000 in the same period.Open-access publishers are also looking at new ways of doing business.
　　據(jù)一家加州咨詢公司—奧特舒爾估計，去年開放存取雜志產(chǎn)生了1.72億美元的收入。而這僅僅占了出版商全部雜志收入的2.8%，但是相比于2011年，已經(jīng)增加了34%，估計到2015年，全部開放存取雜志的收入會達到3.36億美元。屆時，開放存取文章的數(shù)量將會從19.4萬篇增加到35.2萬篇。開放存取出版商也在探索這方面的新方式。
　　Frontiers, for example, does not try to judge a paper's significance during peer review, only its accuracy—an approach also adopted by the Public Library of Science, a non-commercial organisation based in San Francisco that was one of the pioneers of open-access publishing. It thus accepts 80-90% of submissions.Instead, a Frontiers paper's merit is gauged after publication, using measures like the number of downloads.Frontiers also doubles as a social network for researchers to share news, job offers and information about conferences and events.
　　比如，前鋒并不注重一篇文章在同行眼光中的重要性，而只專注于它的準確性—這也是公共科學(xué)圖書館所采取的方法，因此，前鋒獲得了所提交研究論文中80-90%的出版權(quán)。相反，前鋒文章的一個優(yōu)點是，在出版后，通過類似下載數(shù)量的衡量方式來對文章進行評判。作為一個為研究者提供新聞，工作計劃和有關(guān)會議和事件信息分享的社交網(wǎng)站，前鋒雜志的下載量也增加了一倍。
　　This network currently has around 70,000 members.PeerJ, founded last year, makes an even more dramatic departure from tradition.Rather than being charged publication fees, authors pay a one-off membership fee, which ranges from 99 to 298, depending on how many papers they want to publish each year.All co-authors must be members. The firm also deals neatly with the question of peer review. Members must review at least one paper a year.
　　這個網(wǎng)站現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)有約七萬左右的會員。而去年創(chuàng)建的皮爾杰則開發(fā)了一個更加異于傳統(tǒng)的運作模式。文章的作者并不需要支付出版費用，而只要支付一次性會員費用，從99美元到298美元不等，這取決于每年他們打算出版的文章數(shù)量。所有的合作者必須都是會員。這家公司也很好地處理了同行評審的問題。它規(guī)定，會員每年必須評審一篇文章。
　　Non-commercial open-access publishers, though, are fighting back.The Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have set up eLife, a peer-reviewed journal that does not charge publication fees.And in January Jean-Pierre Demailly, of the University of Grenoble, in France, and a handful of fellow mathematicians launched the Episciences Project.This aims to show that researchers themselves can turn out refereed papers cheaply, bypassing traditional purveyors.
　　但是，非商業(yè)性的開放存取出版商們也開始了反擊。一家名叫威康信托基金會英國的醫(yī)療慈善機構(gòu)，運作多家德國研究機構(gòu)的馬普學(xué)會及一家稱為霍華德休斯醫(yī)學(xué)研究所的美國慈善機構(gòu)共同設(shè)立了開放存取期刊—網(wǎng)絡(luò)生活，這個期刊不收取出版費用，但是還能進行同行評審。今年一月，法國格勒諾布爾大學(xué)的皮埃爾-德馬里和少數(shù)幾個屈指可數(shù)的數(shù)學(xué)家們創(chuàng)建了科學(xué)至上期刊。這旨在表明，不需要傳統(tǒng)意義上的傳播者，研究者自己能夠出版經(jīng)過評審的文章，而且成本低廉。
　　Episciences will piggyback on ArXiv, an online repository beloved of physicists and mathematicians—who often post work there as preprints before submitting it to journals.ArXiv is hosted by Cornell University at a cost of $830,000 a year.Tacking on an epijournal, so that refereed papers would sit alongside the preprints, should not add much to that.Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central's boss, though, points out that Episciences's publishing model may have its drawbacks.
　　科學(xué)至上將與數(shù)學(xué)預(yù)印本網(wǎng)庫在線網(wǎng)絡(luò)資料庫合作，這是一個物理學(xué)家和數(shù)學(xué)家們衷愛的網(wǎng)絡(luò)平臺，他們在向期刊投稿前往往會把預(yù)印本提前上傳到這里。ArXiv的運營商是美國康奈爾大學(xué)，每年的運營成本為83萬美元。連接到一個預(yù)印雜志上，這樣就會同時看到經(jīng)過評審的論文和它的預(yù)印本，這樣也無法在論文上增加太多了。但是，斯林普格生物醫(yī)學(xué)中心的老板馬修-科克爾指出，科學(xué)至上期刊的出版模式可能也有不足之處。
　　Academics who bypass publishers become publishers themselves.And that will be harder to do as the operation grows.Who pays for lunch?Other aspects of open-access publishing also draw polite scepticism from incumbents.The promiscuous approach of Frontiers and PLoS, for example, is at odds with the rejection by publications like Nature and its American counterpart, Science, of over 90% of submitted manuscripts.It is this selectivity that gives these journals their prestige.
　　繞過出版商的學(xué)者們自己成為了出版者，當(dāng)業(yè)務(wù)越來越多時，他們也會越來越難做。誰來買單?開放存取其它方面的影響也遭到了在職人員理性的懷疑。比如，前鋒和科學(xué)公共圖書館方式的混雜操作受到了類似《自然》和它的美國同仁《科學(xué)》的質(zhì)疑，而且拒絕了它們90%以上的文稿，也正是這種專一性樹立起了《自然》們的權(quán)威性。
　　At the moment, publication in Nature, Science and a handful of similar journals is like a sprinkling of fairy dust.Everyone knows how tough it is to get in, so papers that do so are assumed to be special.This will be hard for open-access publications to emulate.The rejected papers all have to be scrutinised, though—and even though peer review is free, this involves staff time and other costs.According to Nature, the cost per published paper is 40,000.
　　現(xiàn)在，在自然，科學(xué)和少數(shù)幾個類似的雜志上可以發(fā)表文章，就好比點點星塵那么稀少而珍貴。每個人都知道它們的門檻有多高，所以能夠被刊印的文章被認為是非常特別的。而這一點是開放存取出版很難效仿的。被退稿的文章都必須經(jīng)過審查，盡管，即使同行審查是免費的，而工作人員的時間和其它成本也是非常高昂的。根據(jù)自然雜志的數(shù)據(jù)，每篇發(fā)表文章的成本為四萬美元。
　　If Nature is to stay in business in anything like its current form, someone will have to pay that.Whether anyone will want to, remains to be seen.Budgets are tight, and pressure for access to be open is growing.Intangible blessings of the sort bestowed by prestigious journals can vanish rapidly.Where the game will end is anybody's guess.
　　如果自然雜志處在類似它現(xiàn)在形式的任何產(chǎn)業(yè)里，總是會有人不得不買單的。無論是否有人愿意，這還有待觀察。預(yù)算緊張，加上要求開放的壓力越來越大。這種著名雜志賦予的無形的資產(chǎn)會很快消失。游戲什么時候結(jié)束，誰也說不準。

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