Free Global Virtual Scientific Library

Several readers wrote in with news of the momentum gathering behind free access to government-funded research. A petition "to create a freely available virtual scientific library available to the entire globe" garnered more than 20,000 signatures, including several Nobel prize winners and 750 education, research, and cultural organizations from around the world. The European Commission responded by committing more than $100 million towards support for open access journals and for the building of infrastructure needed to house institutional repositories able to store the millions of academic articles written each year. In the article Michael Geist discusses the open access movement and its critics.

Shouldn't it already be this way?

[morgan_greywolf]

Is there really any reason why government-funded research shouldn't be made available to the masses? After all, wasn't it the masses who paid for the research?

Re:And we'll call it...

[qbzzt]

Like Wikipedia, except for requiring proven education to get a grant or to review articles. Don't get me wrong, I love Wikipedia - but I hope my doctor doesn't rely on it when prescribing medication.

Democracy

[RealProgrammer]

"will last until the people discover they can vote themselves free bread."

Having grown fat on free bread, the people will now vote themselves free information.

Just saying.

Re:And we'll call it...

[Mirk]

No, this is not at all like Wikipedia. It's about peer-reviewed research, created by professionals in the field, and it's about taking this publicly funded work out of the hands of private publishers and giving to back to the people who paid for it.

This is overdue

[Denial93]

Scientific literature is now mainly published in digital form and all the infrastructure that paper copies require is increasingly obsolete. Now we still live in the ruins of the time when printing mattered: we have rivalling databases who charge money from "publishers" (just a guy with Office and Outlook Express, in some cases) who in turn charges money from authors. In many cases, having published at a particular journal before or knowing who's probably going to review you has entirely too much influence on what gets accepted. People still insist on distributing their papers as read-only PDFs. The whole system ceases to make sense as a market, and it never made sense as an infrastructure. If all of this luggage was finally done away with and replaced with a state-funded, largely automated, high capacity system that was available from anywhere, lots of highly competent people would have more time to devote to research. The difference such a system would make for scholars is akin to the difference that Wikipedia makes for laymen.

I know what's suggested here wouldn't be quite that, but it'd be the second to last step before we arrive at a system where free application and publication, anonymous worldwide peer review and free access to all publications speed up research considerably.

However, the advantage of this would be greatest for backwater scientific communities in second- and third-world countries. I could see a couple of legislators not want the Russian anthropologists, Kenyan mathematicians or Peruvian veterinarians to catch up on the guys in "their" universities...

Long time coming

[kidcharles]

I have been thinking about this for a long time. At my public university (in the US) I have heard librarians say that some journals have subscription fees of 10's of thousands of dollars a year. Multiply that by the enormous number of journals that the university library has to subscribe to each year and you are talking 10's of millions of dollars a year. Also, of course the access is restricted to students and faculty of the university; the general public cannot get web access to these journals. Given that the vast majority of the research published is funded by government agencies, this is outrageous. The fees have gotten so bad that the library has had to pick and choose. Just this year my online access to the journal Review of Scientific Instruments was limited to just the last 5 years or so, rather than the entire archive, due to fees. The kicker is that there are paper copies in the physical library that I can go photocopy, but I can't access the articles online because my university can't afford it. There must be reform regarding the publishing of scientific work funded by government agencies. My only concern is that the quality of peer-review must remain intact, but I see no reason for that to change since those who review papers don't get paid anyway.

Dumbassery

[spun]

When you give someone bread, you have less bread. When you give someone information, you still have it.

The article talks about government funded research. Why shouldn't the people who paid for it have access to it? Why should publishing companies, who often require transfer of copyright and cash payments from authors in order to publish, continue to get fat off public money?

People who think that the public is not entitled to what it pays for, while some random company that adds nothing of value is, are dumbasses. Just saying.

Re:Library purpose

[timeOday]

It is true that the current system of evaluating research quality is based on paper counts and citation counts, rather than any real measure of quality (of which there aren't any, at least none that a bean counter could grok).

I think citation counts are actually the best system available. Look at it this way, the WWW is under intense pressure from web spammers, and the best known way to select usable information is google's Page Rank, which is basically citations. Heh, maybe sometime soon researchers will be evaluated by their online publications' PageRank, just like web spammers are. "I'm the number one hit for post-arthroscopy subcutaneous emphysema! Tenure is mine!!!"

Re: Not So.

[turkeyfish]

This is hardly likely, except in a miniscule fraction of research libraries. Although there are reams of papers whose finding are essentially worthless, often what is worthless to one investigator is often of value to another. This is the case because research papers seldom contain a single relevant "finding". Often papes contain important and valuable data, but the interpretations or methods used to analyze it are faulty or poorly chosen.

A much, much bigger problem is that the average Joe has no interest in reading ANY technical publications (on line or otherwise) and for many who try they really don't have a clue as to what it means. Just look at how the science of climate change is covered in the news and in print. The entire science is predicated largely on the solution of differential equations and numerical analysis. Just how many readers are really in a position to read and properly interpret such results? The percentage is extremely small.

I have published "obscure papers" myself. I would love it if they were more widely available, read, and appreciated, but regardless of whether people would find them "useless" or "valuable" it seems unlikely that these will be even read, except by a few experts.

What about peer review?

[symes]

I'm all for greater access to academic publications. However, there is a problem which might be aggrevated. Good publications rely on good reviewers, the better the reviewers the better the output. Currently, the continuuing increase in academic publications is putting more and more pressure on reviewers and it is increasingly common for prospective reviewers to either ignore or refuse requests. If this Virtual Scientific Library increases capacity further then this may well undermine the integrity of peer reviewed research.

Moreover, my concern is that a Virtual Scientific Library will will not emphasise where (i.e. which journal) a paper was published and therefore the rigour of the review process. Instead we'll end up with average research on an equal footing with research that deserves maximum respect.

So, yes to a Virtual Scientific Library but can we have it based on Slashcode please but with moderation linked to expertise?

Re:Shouldn't it already be this way?

[notwrong]

On the other side of the coin, I would think the journals provide some level of oversight as to what actually gets published. Meaning i wouldnt want any fool publishing his/her theories on the world. The government would have to compensate in this role and have specialists performing this function for every discipline.

on another note, should the government regulate what is worthy of publication and who is worthy.

Specialists already provide the oversight about what is actually published. That's precisely what "peer-review" means. Amazing as it may seem, the privately-controlled, for-profit publishers get experts in the field to review every article for free. The reason that most journals have a low crackpot ratio is more due to the peer-review than vigilant editorship IMO.

The editors/editorial boards do have a role, in that they make the initial decision about what is sent out for peer review (particularly for journals with low acceptance rates like Nature or Science). They also make the final call about whether something is printed given the reviews it receives, which can often be mixed. I see no reason that some experts couldn't volunteer to perform this function, or even public servants if the state was providing funding. People working in the field effectively already fulfil this role for peer-reviewed conferences.