 I'm the co-director of the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition and I'm also in the Psychology Department with David and I think of myself as a bit of an academic curmudgeon because I tend to like to shake things up in the field because I think a lot of the field is broken and is breaking more all the time, the way we do science in particular and the way peer review works. And I'm going to start with a little bit of a story and this goes back to the mid-90s and it actually isn't about academics, it's about politics. I used to go, my wife and I used to go to a long weekend every winter break with a group of very high level people within the Clinton administration that were mimicking Renaissance weekend if any of you remember what Renaissance weekend was but they weren't invited quite to that but they were next echelon and we were the only academics that ever went to this and one of the years I remember very distinctly having a discussion about getting the next Democratic president elected and what the mechanisms were going to be and my wife and I said, well there's this thing called the Internet now and the Internet's going to change the way you all do politics and the way you campaign because you're going to be able to reach and communicate with people and disseminate information in different modalities than you ever have before and NATO one looked at us like we were crazy and we actually had a raging but friendly argument for like the rest of the weekend about the impact of the Internet and whether it would really fundamentally affect their lives or politics in any way. And I think we're about at that point in academics whether we like it or not the way the Internet and the way information is disseminated within academics is going to fundamentally change it already has but it's going to change a lot more and there's nothing science magazine, nature magazine or from National Academy can do about it. It's partially democratization but it's also just market forces and a variety of other things are going to lead to that the least of course is squeezed university budgets and also further congressional oversight on academics to the point where they're going to force open access to everyone anyway because it's a taxpayer's research. And so my attitude is if you're going to publish why not publish an open access because the way people are going to consume information in the future is going to be taking typing into Google and finding out where the information is and if you're open access and it's well indexed they're going to find your research and that's your colleagues too it's not just the public whereas for instance I recently had to find a paper from the 1960s the American Psychological Association owns the copyright it turns out that Carnegie Mellon for good reason does not pay for articles that far back or whatever for this journal and they wanted like 15 bucks for this 1960s article now this is ridiculous I mean come on this is a dissemination of information therefore I did not read nor cite the article okay so I think first of all it's an imperative you really want 20 years from now people to care about any of your work it should be in some kind of form in which you can equally we can actually easily and I also I think that ultimately it's a better way to get that information because are we are already completely inundated with information in the curate the nominal curation of journals is really just a nominal curation of journals we can agree that there's both good and bad papers and quote-unquote high quality journals and they take supposedly second-tier journals I mean not the sham journals that are where they're asking you you know come publish with us and pay us whatever it is but we can agree that there's second-tier journals nominally that have very good articles sometimes much better let me see and I think that you asked about the science article by John Bohan and it's entitled who's afraid of peer review he basically sent out I don't know how many of you've heard of it he sent out this paper that was a sham paper it's not the first time this has been done it was done the 60s by psychologists it's been done since then it's all these open access journals that are these for-profit ones not things like PLS or frontiers and lo and behold it got accepted at most of them well this is not a surprise because anyone who has half a brain in their head knows that these journals exist and that's how they work and they existed before the web also there's a journal called psychological research you might have heard of published out of Germany that was always pay-for-play okay so but he acted a high and mighty in science wrote this very self-serving article about why this is such a terrible thing and how we should appear review now I have to tell you knowing some people that have edited science for different points and talk to them and knowing something about the internal process sometimes they look at the name of the author because it's not double-blind and they go oh that's going in because they've got the Nobel Prize and the most egregious version of that there was a paper published by a Nobel Prize winner Linda Buck that had to be retracted because all the data was faked by her postdoc whether she knew that or not who knows but the fact is is that everyone in the field had said that that data was too good to be true from the day it was published yet science thought it was wonderful okay it clearly did not undergo normal peer review so I'm very skeptical that for-profit journals and journals that are closed access are going to survive in the long run the current model they're going to change or they will die I think some journals like science and other journals that are published by society should be ashamed of themselves for not going access open access right now because their societies we own them I'm a triple-as member why should I have to pay or why should my university ever have to pay for access to that or the public have to pay for that given the mission that society I know society say they need the revenue well society's don't exist just for the revenue okay so I really feel that really strong and there's a last reason which David alluded to which has to do with speed of publication so I'll tell you one last story I have a friend at Brown University who's a physicist and two weeks ago he did not win the Nobel Prize it was one of the three guys that didn't win the prize for the Higgs Boson but was on the other paper okay now most people that know these papers tell me and I have no way of evaluating this that it was at least as good if not better quantitatively than the papers that won the Nobel Prize but it came out three months later Jerry tells me was purely an accident of the publication vagaries because no one knew so all these papers got submitted about the same time they all went through the process but the journal that his appeared in had a slightly longer lag in publishing things and it ultimately may have cost him the Nobel Prize because if his paper had been out first well what are they gonna do so I think that's really important to remember that sometimes also spinning your wheels going back and forth in a traditional publishing model which is David said in psychology can take years and then even after it's accepted it can some take to years to actually appear in print believe it or not and I know that there's other fields like that if you can get things efficiently out there and you think it's high quality and you should keep the quality high but it's out there and disseminate then you can go and you can do better and more work than you could possibly do by wasting your time arguing or public spending your wheels on something else I think that's really important