Why Johnny Can't Speak: a Cost of Paywalled Research 189
theodp writes "That there's no easy way for her to get timely, affordable access to taxpayer-funded research that could help her patients leaves speech-language pathologist Cortney Grove, well, speechless. 'Cortney's frustration,' writes the EFF's Adi Kamdar, 'is not uncommon. Much of the research that guides health-related progress is funded by taxpayer dollars through government grants, and yet those who need this information most-practitioners and their patients-cannot afford to access it.' She says, 'In my field we are charged with using scientific evidence to make clinical decisions. Unfortunately, the most pertinent evidence is locked up in the world of academic publishing and I cannot access it without paying upwards of $40 an article. My current research project is not centered around one article, but rather a body of work on a given topic. Accessing all the articles I would like to read will cost me nearly a thousand dollars. So, the sad state of affairs is that I may have to wait 7-10 years for someone to read the information, integrate it with their clinical opinions (biases, agendas, and financial motivations) and publish it in a format I can buy on Amazon. By then, how will my clinical knowledge and skills have changed? How will my clients be served in the meantime? What would I do with the first-hand information that I will not be able to do with the processed, commercialized product that emerges from it in a decade?'"
Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
It is, technically. By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless. See, once again our shitty co(r)p-y(a)-right system fucks us; They make it so if you assemble a collection of works together into a database, that now counts as a unique and copyrightable work unto itself. So... although the study is 'free' to the public... the "doesn't have to drive 500 miles to a library in the boon docks and find it on a shelf" convenience is what they charge for access.
What we need is a 'google' of science/medical studies. Unfortunately our government's archaic and purposefully not updated methods of publication mean that if you want to get a digital copy... you have to contribute the labor to re-digitalization. Of course, you can get a digital copy... for a small additional processing fee. -_-
Paywalls ... strangulation of scientific progresse (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not taxpayer-funded research should be accissible to the taxpayers for FREE is a matter to be acertained, but the fact is that it is no longer possible for anyone, including the professional researchers, to know where to find the result of the various facet of related research on a given field.
It is as if we are back to the pre-Internet days.
Before Internet, it was a Herculean task to find out if there had been a research carried out on any particular subject, simply because there was no one central database.
When Internet first arrived, the situation was greatly improved - although there were still no centralized database for all research results, at the very least we could search for it online.
Now ?
Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Paywall does not only representing GREED that is retarding the progress of the human society, it is actually STRANGLING the progress of scientific research.
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Not only the research papers are hidden behind paywalled, most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that? CAS Scifinder and STN (subscription based services) will get me more granular results than Google Scholar, but I find plenty of paywalled results when I use Google Scholar or PubMed. What is being blocked?
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Socializing costs, privatizing profits. That's how money is made in science (and banking and almost everything else) these days.
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Socializing costs, privatizing profits. That's how money is made in science (and banking and almost everything else) these days.
And sports stadium funding (at least in the US; that's all I know about). In that case though, they socialize the costs and the risk, and privatize the profits.
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most of them don't even appear on search queries anymore
I seriously challenge this point, although I'm no more a fan of paywalls than you are. Abstracts are always available and searchable.
Re: Paywalls ... strangulation of scientific progr (Score:2)
Actually, no: for general research, there was Readers' guide to periodical literature, and for specific topics (such as particle physics) there were similar catalog-format databases. You buy the database, you get the periodicals, and you use interlibrary loan.
Information was much freer back then.
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Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
You know about PubMed, right? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed [nih.gov]
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless.
What???
The Policy implements Division G, Title II, Section 218 of PL 110-161 (Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008) which states: SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. The Public Access Policy ensures that the public has access to the published results of NIH-funded research. It requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The Policy requires that these final peer-reviewed manuscripts be accessible to the public on PubMed Central to help advance science and improve human health.
NIH/ NSF sponsored research published since 2008 is available on Pubmed for free 12 months after it is first published. Most of the rest you can rent from DeepDyve.com for about a buck an article.
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so everybody should be able to parse pubmed, download any new articles, archive and serve them for free ?
or would you get oritzed ?
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The PMC Open Access Subset some or all openaccess content is a part of the total collection of articles in PMC. Articles in the PMC Open Access Subset are still protected by copyright, but are made available under a Creative Commons or similar license that generally allows more liberal redistribution and reuse than a traditional copyrighted work. Note, however, that the license terms are not identical for all of the articles in this subset. Please refer to the license statement in each article for specific terms of use. We also provide a search-by-license feature, described below, which enables finding articles with specific reuse rights.
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so everybody should be able to parse pubmed, download any new articles, archive and serve them for free ? or would you get oritzed ?
NIH grants free access, not a complete copyright waiver, so most articles aren't available for bulk download. You can search by license type for the ones that are.
But you want to create a free mirror of a free public service? OK, but since the articles are already publicly available and searchable by date, author, words in title, abstract, or text, patent #, pharmacological action, chemical structure, molecular weight, # of hydrogen bond donors/acceptors, DNA/RNA sequence, amino acid sequence, and about
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I would like to see the time period for free access go to zero, as fast as it can by government edict.
After all, they started at 12 months in 2008 - why not decrease the wait time from 2008 by one month per year = now 7 months to zero.
That will give journals time to adjust.
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. Of course, you can get a digital copy... for a small additional processing fee. -_-
And by small... you mean $2.50 a page to be paid to the outsourced digitization provider?
(Otherwise known as $50 for a 20-page article)
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How much of such fees go to the authors? 0%. Zero. Nothing. Nada.
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How much of such fees go to the authors? 0%. Zero. Nothing. Nada.
Of course.... the work is actually free... the $2.50 per page is just a "nominal" service fee charged by the outside provider for the service of providing the searchable digitized archive of the material, and allowing you to print or copy the material.
By the way, the clerk of court around here does a similar thing with their digitized legal records --- you can view all you want, but as soon as you want to have a copy made, or print out
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What we need is a 'google' of science/medical studies. Unfortunately our government's archaic and purposefully not updated methods of publication mean that if you want to get a digital copy... you have to contribute the labor to re-digitalization. Of course, you can get a digital copy... for a small additional processing fee. -_-
LOL, +5 "insightful" is the new +5, ignorant.
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It is, technically. By technically I mean, it was published once, in a 'free' publication, sent to a few libraries, and thus the public access requirement was met. But since you'll never find it there because it isn't indexed, searchable, or in any way known... it's effectively useless.
That thing about US government works being public domain, should apply to academia. I don't know much about the rule - where's the line drawn? Do NASA lock up their papers?
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Knowledge is like a road, even though taxpayers funded the building of it, tourists from other countries aren't forbidden to drive on it.
Luckily, there are some hackers out there who understand this, and work hard to unlock journal articles and books so that the whole world can read them.
Re:Simple (Score:5, Informative)
you mean like adam schwarz? that didn't end well.
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There comes a time when the success of the end goal is more important than the rewards from being known as a champion of the cause. Adam thought it was right to be martyred, he thought copying Rosa Parks' method [wikipedia.org] would bring social change. But change doesn't come from a single person. It comes from unavoidable facts on the ground. To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to hav
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To make universal knowledge a reality, it is first necessary to have all books and journals available in torrents and file sharing sites everywhere. When we can all download knowledge as easily as the latest hollywood blockbuster, only *then* can the politicians be convinced to change the laws to agree with what people already expect by that time.
<sarcasm>Yes, because that's exactly what happened with movies and music.</sarcasm>
And what the hell are "unavoidable facts on the ground". Sounds like you're talking dog shit.
Re: Simple (Score:2)
While change doesn't necessarily come from one person, a single person making a public stand can be sufficient for others to gain courage to do the same. Even it doesn't, it can be enough to get people talking in public and that is a good thing
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Politicians don't really care if a society can flourish. They sought power either because they have some kind of ideology they want to ram down everyone's throats, o
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I knew a researcher from a place around Eastern Europe way. He claimed he had access to a university alumni forum where almost any paper could be requested, and an aluimni working at an institution with access would post the request within hours.
They are light years ahead of us over there.
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This is what /r/scholar on Reddit does.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Informative)
i'm pretty sure that ms. parks didn't cause a spontaneous movement. rather, the movement was ready to go, and they chose rosa to make an iconic stand.
Re: Simple (Score:3)
IIRC, by her own statement, Rosa didn't set out to defy authority. She had had an extremely bad day at work, she was tired, and her bad day just ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back.
You are correct that the whole thing had been building, and finally overflowed.
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No. It should be accessible to all.
Knowledge is like a road, even though taxpayers funded the building of it, tourists from other countries aren't forbidden to drive on it.
Luckily, there are some hackers out there who understand this, and work hard to unlock journal articles and books so that the whole world can read them.
It's the new "classified for national security" strategy. It's one thing to keep people from profiting for their efforts, but it's another thing from profiting what was already paid for.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Simple (Score:5, Interesting)
It's probably incredibly sad, but I think I probably have more pirated research papers than I do music, movies, or other content.
"Back in the day," piracy was the single most common way to distribute scientific research. In fact, I still have three filing cabinets full of articles I xeroxed either from a library or from a fellow researcher. We call it fair use. The modern system is much better - higher quality type and images, fewer dead trees, and no more $0.10/page xerox fees. All NIH funded research is available for free no more than 1 year after publication. see http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4382101&cid=45249551 [slashdot.org]
Honestly, every time I see one of these "paywalled research is hurting patients" bits on /. I wonder how the submitter, supposedly a health-care expert, has managed to stay ignorant of the 10-year-old requirement for archiving in PubMed Central and the resulting massive trove of free books and journals at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ [nih.gov]
Re: Simple (Score:2, Informative)
There is a lot of research outside of the NIH. Not everything gets published in PubMed.
Surprisingly the US isn't the only country in the world, and surprisingly the NIH doesn't fund the entire global research. Even more surprising is that other countries not only exist but do their own research. Shocking I know.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
Taxpayer-funded research should be accessible by taxpayers.
Seems publishers would have no problem with that if taxpayers are also prepared to pay the cost of publication.
One of my clients is a "legacy" academic journal publisher. They actually offer an open access publication option for researchers where researchers can pay the publishing costs and have their article available freely online. It's priced lower than the open access journals, by the way. Seems they don't get many takers, though.
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As learned from the traditional book/eBook publisher, the biggest cost of publication is not the printing, it is the correcting, the formating, and the setting in a correct format. *all* of that is handled during the review, or for the format by the maker of the article. They don't even have to provide advance in money tow rite the article, since the article are given for free. The biggest hur
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Indeed. Charging the public again for research the public funded is theft, plain and simple. So is patenting publicly funded research (unless there is a perpetual free license for everybody) or keeping it secret.
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Then fund science properly. At the moment the half assed public funding of science means that scientists are highly encouraged to patent their work so that their institutions can profit off it to continue operating. Governments encourage it too, because then they have an excuse to cut funding. Most scientists I've met aren't really interested in patenting and the hassles it involves. They'd all love to submit to open access journals too, but the high publication cost is often not covered by grants (alth
Elmer Fudd speaks dialect (Score:2)
arXiv is not peer reviewed (Score:3)
should it not be as simple as a wiki?
There does exist a site for uploading preprints called arXiv. The difference is that preprints aren't peer reviewed and thus aren't quite as citable in publications that strongly prefer "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy".
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There does exist a site for uploading preprints called arXiv. The difference is that preprints aren't peer reviewed and thus aren't quite as citable in publications that strongly prefer "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy".
Actually, in my experience this is not the problem, you can cite whatever you want. Considering this article [frontiersin.org], such reputation for fact-checking and accuracy does not really exist anyway (i.e. the higher the ranking of a journal, the higher the probability that articles have to be retracted). The real problem is, articles that do not appear in a journal count less or nothing on the authors curriculum, unless you are a genius like Grisha Perelman, who, AFAIK, published the proof of the Poincare conjecture on
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I'm not sure what journal you're submitting to, but most of the papers I've submitted have had reviewers comment disdainfully about peer reviewed conference abstract citations, never mind non-peer reviewed sources. A non-peer reviewed reference is useless and will generally be removed. That includes textbooks.
I once cited one of Fourier's original papers (which I had to find) because a reviewer scoffed at a textbook cite.
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publications that strongly prefer "published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy"
the real reviews, in my experience, happen here, and on wikipedia, etc, where i can join in.
Except I took that wording directly from Wikipedia's guideline on identifying reliable sources [wikipedia.org]. Citing a preprint or other self-published article is fine only if the article's authors have had articles in the same field published in traditional journals.
NIH has addressed this (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know the NSF's exact rule, but for the last few years every grant proposal has been required to include a Data Dissemination Plan.
Re:NIH has addressed this (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right. The journal that Cortney Grove gave as an example, Topics in Language Disorders http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/default.aspx [lww.com] , does provide free access to papers funded by NIH, Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/_layouts/oaks.journals/nih.aspx [lww.com]
I feel for her. I've been in the same situation as her and I've made the same arguments. Years ago it was even worse.
That said, I think she's exaggerating the situation somewhat. I think she should have a talk with a good reference librarian in her field.
(I do similar research, not in speech pathology but often in visual pathology, orthopedic handicaps, etc. She may have different needs, but I track down a lot of papers, with varying degrees of success.)
You might want to have access to 100 journals, but nobody reads 100 journals cover to cover. I read a half dozen core journals every week, and I got access to a good database and a few journals through a couple of professional organizations. The New York Public Library has a few good databases online free to its cardholders, and the EBSCO Academic (or whatever they call it) has some good journals too. Every week or so I come across a journal that isn't included, so I email the author, or ask my friends. It used to be easy to get into an academic library, but now that universities are monetizing, it's getting difficult (but not impossible). The public library has all kinds of arrangements for ordering papers from other libraries.
I think I know what Grove is doing. She's reading journal articles, looking at 200 footnotes, and she wants to read the ones that look interesting. I've done it myself. It's the sign (or maybe the vice) of a good scholar.
Just to get an idea of the kind of articles we're talking about, here's one of the free articles in
http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/Fulltext/2013/01000/Morphological_Awareness_Intervention_in_School_Age.4.aspx?WT.mc_id=HPxADx20100319xMP [lww.com]
But there's a lot of redundancy. I used to collect a dozen articles, read them, and they all seemed to be saying about the same thing. A review article in the New England Journal of Medicine is about the same as a review article in The Lancet. If you've read one, you don't have to read the other (or the other six). If you can't read it in Topics in Language Disorders, you can probably read it in another dozen journals.
So (since she's not doing research in an academic institution) she probably doesn't need 100 articles. She needs a professor or librarian or somebody to steer her through the literature and give her a half dozen articles that she should read.
It's also an exaggeration to say that her clients won't get the benefit of the latest research. A practicing clinical speech therapist doesn't have to follow the basic research and theoretical arguments in the academic journals (although it's nice, and it's the sign of a good practitioner). You should be treating people according to consensus statements and guidelines. A lot of the latest stuff turns out to be wrong.
You should find everything you need for clinical practice in a half a dozen core journals and a few professional meetings. If you want to be up to date, you have to take continuing education -- no way out of it. And the people who give continuing education courses can guide you through the literature.
But if she takes the current research that seriously, she should have some academic affiliation, which would also give her library access. Admittedly, some charge exorbitant fees. But some universities used to give free library access to their alumnae, and even if they do charge
Re:NIH has addressed this (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I think she's exaggerating the situation somewhat. I think she should have a talk with a good reference librarian in her field.
There's another approach as well, though it's probably more for researchers than practitioners: just ask the authors to send you a copy of the article. It's not like they get royalties from the publisher, so they don't care whether you pay or not. They just want to get their research out there. Plus, every researcher who reads it is someone who might cite it, which they do care about.
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Most academics don't have the time or knowledge to maintain a web site. But they're happy to send you things when you e-mail and ask. I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people interested in a couple of papers. It's great to see people interested and the contacts have led to some good discussions, let me see my work being applied in completely new ways in very different fields, and even a few improvements that were or will be contributed back to the publicly available code.
Medical field journals usually do
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Even when you have to sign over the copyrights, they almost always grant you the right to give out copies to anyone who asks, as long as you only do it on an individual basis, not in bulk. Anyway, that's been true for every journal I've ever published in.
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True. The OP was talking about posting on a web page though. Even if you do sign over copyright the standard practice of most publishers may be to ignore personal web pages, so long as it's not too blatant, but it's not fun to be the one the publishing industry decides to make an example of (cough) Swartz (cough).
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Nope. Doesn't appear to.
Here's an example paper which I picked at random from the journal : Differentiating Speech Delay From Disorder: Does it Matter? [lww.com]. There's a paywall on the jour
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PubMed doesn't index all journals. They don't index Topics in Language Disorders. (You can get the index list of PubMed titles in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/advanced [nih.gov] ).
Here's a list of free articles in Topics in Language Disorders.
http://journals.lww.com/topicsinlanguagedisorders/pages/viewallmostpopulararticles.aspx?WT.mc_id=HPxADx20100319xMP [lww.com]
It is annoying. Some of the interesting ones are free, but some of the interesting ones are not.
I agree with you, of course. Knowledge should be free. Of cours
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In Canada you only have to go to a library and you have access to anything that any library in the country (and some outside it) have. It doesn't have to be a big library either. The library in my home town of 800 people is hooked into the interlibrary loan system and I used it when I was in high school (decades ago) to get papers and books for science fair projects. It takes a little more organization than clicking through papers Wikipedia style, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's the way
Corporations (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was going to post, without citation, quotes of Andrew Ryan. Then I thought, "That is exactly what the parasite wants of me."
So I wait, to see which way the wind is blowing, and which side my bread is buttered on.
Could US Attorney Carmen Ortiz Help Her? (Score:2, Insightful)
JSTOR an Entitlement For US DoJ's Ortiz & Holder [slashdot.org]: "If Aaron Swartz downloaded JSTOR documents without paying for them, it would presumably be considered a crime by the USDOJ. But if U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz or U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder did the same? Rather than a crime, it would be considered their entitlement, a perk of an elite education that's paid for by their alma maters."
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No, no, no: Swartz was able to download JSTOR articles at all because, as a research fellow at MIT, he had the exact same kind of access agreement. All he did was scrape stuff from the JSTOR site using that access. The submitter was wrong to write that portion of the summary.
...and at any rate, (most) NIH-funded research must become publicly accessible via PubMed Central within 12 months of publication [nih.gov], so this, too, is something of a non-story. Paywalls aren't quite as thorough (or elite) as we sometimes t
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Re:Could US Attorney Carmen Ortiz Help Her? (Score:4, Informative)
Under MIT's Open Campus Policy, the library he was at, and all other places on campus are open to the public.
So the argument of trespass is suspect at best.
I believe the intent... (Score:5, Informative)
I believe the intent... is that all healthcare practitioners do not have private practices, but are instead employed by large healthcare conglomerates like Connecticut Life, United Healthcare, etc., and that those conglomerates have online access to the journals from their networks.
As long as you do not hang out your own shingle, and remain a wage-slave to a large corporation, you will have no problem accessing the necessary publications.
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In any case the example used in the submission is silly. The speech pathologists is complaining that the articles to do the job costs $1000. I make less than
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In any case the example used in the submission is silly. The speech pathologists is complaining that the articles to do the job costs $1000. I make less than a speech pathologist and I easily spend $1000 a year making sure that I am up to date so that I can keep my job. It is like a few percent of my income. Expenses have to be put in context. If you are billing $100 a patient to medicare, and seeing 10-15 patients a day, it is out of line to expect some of that to be used for professional development?
Depends. What if she only wants to access articles which are applicable to her private practice, and which don't suck? If the article, which she can't read until she pays for it, fails to meet either of those criteria, does she get a refund?
Preprint federally funded research should be available online for little or not cost.
No cost; the cost has already been borne by the tax paying public who paid for the research; what's happening with these journals is that the researcher is double-dipping: once at the public trough, and a second time at the journal trough.
But an alleged professional whining that they get charged for a valuable product when they charge large amounts for their services, that is just silly.
As is calling publicly funded
Libraries (Score:3)
Nothing yet. I ended up emailing a professor of mine from school, and I'm waiting to hear back from her, while at the same time asking her, "Is there a more reasonable way for me to do this?"
Some people told me to go to the local medical school library and download the articles from there. I don't know if it's feasible for me to go to a library of a school I don't go to! And at the moment, I don't really know any students who I could ask.
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States,
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
/Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
Re:Libraries (Score:5, Informative)
That should have been the entire article right there.
Almost all specialty libraries I've heard of offer visitor access or special (paid) access to professionals in affiliated fields.
It sounds like this Doctor didn't put a lot of effort into trying to find a way around the pay wall.
I just checked the websites of Medical School libraries in my State and neighboring States, /Though one requires an annual membership and charges extortionist prices for photocopying articles.
they almost all have a way for people unaffiliated with the school to gain onsite access.
I've been through that in New York City. Most of the medical school libraries in Manhattan don't allow public access. One of them offered to let me use their library for about $2,000 a year. It's a real problem.
If you actually tried to do it, rather than just looking at their web site, I think you'd find it was difficult to impossible. Unless you happened to find a small friendly library that had everything you needed.
If you don't like the game, change the rules (Score:3)
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't. When enough people do this the present journals will change their policies or be left out of the market.
Right now your trying to be the tail that wagged the dog. Stop being the tail and start realizing that there are far more academics than journals and organize a new journal. With the Internet it is absurdly easy to communicate with like kind peers and set up a self publishing site for very little money.
At some point you have to realize that the journals need the academics more than the academics need the journals. A small number of professional journals are holding up millions of academics. Stop being the tail, start being the dog.
Re:If you don't like the game, change the rules (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't like the fact that the current journals charge the rates that they do you have to take your research to a new journal that doesn't.
What is the incentive for me to do this if I am an academic who is trying to get tenure or move to a better position at another university or compete for grants? The major ammunition in the CV of anyone trying to do these things is publications in big name journals.
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That attitude is why the journals continue to extort large amounts of money. Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige the problem will continue.
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Who makes the hiring decisions? If it's other academics who also feel the same way about the paid journals.... there's your problem.
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Actual research is a wholly unintended side effect of academia. Only naive fools even attempt real research and inevitably fail.
Come tomorrow, I guess I should stop by the Department Chair's office and let him know that he should revoke my endowed scholar position, let alone the positions of my colleagues, as we're all apparently fools.
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Until academics are willing to put common sense ahead of prestige
Never. Going. To. Happen.
Already.Has.Happened.
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Over 13000 scientists joined a boycott of Elsevier last year. Also back in 2010 the University of California threatened a boycott of Nature journals over their subscription prices and managed to haggle them down.
There's another way... (Score:3)
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Firstly, this is not a US-specific problem. Elsevier for example, is Dutch, while the Nature publishing group is UK-based.
Secondly, the problem is not inability to publish in non-paywalled sources like hosting your own website. The problem is that in order to obtain significant recognition of your work even in a narrow field, the journal makes a huge difference. This is why journals such as Nature, Science, and Cell have impact factors in the mid-30s.
Despite the discussion here , every academic knows these
C'mon! Paid scientific articles are OVER! (Score:2)
solutions (Score:2)
go to a library, or look up the articles and e-Mail the authors for reprints.
Academic co-dependency (Score:4, Insightful)
The proprietary publishers have established an elaborate co-dependency relationship with academics. Academics depend on journal editorships and citations for promotion. Editors get many perks and prestige as a result of being an editor, but the selection of who becomes the editor is up to the publisher. Reviewers get pre-publication access to results. Yes, the reviewers are supposed to hold the information in confidence, but does pre-publication access help them in thinking about which directions to take in their own work? Absolutely. An extensive web of co-dependence has evolved between the proprietary publishers and the academic community.
Academics generally do not receive royalties from journal articles, but they do from book publications. Who publishes those books? The same publishers that publish the proprietary journals. Who selects which authors will be invited to publish books? The publishers.
Elite institutions and large university systems negotiate discounted and preferred subscription agreements giving their researchers free access to a wide range of journals, which in turn makes it more attractive for academic "stars" to go to those institutions. The faculty at those schools benefit from these favorable access agreements. Are we surprised that University of California faculty voted against open access?
It is also not just speech and language research. The majority of work in fields like cancer research is also published in paywalled journals. Cancer patients may not be able to wait a year before articles appear in open access archives.
The vast majority of academic work is supported by public funding, and charitable foundations support most of what is not government supported. High time to require open access. The academics are not going to do it themselves.
Why should this be different? (Score:2)
Why should this be different than any other medical research. The US medical system is built on companies, hospitals, etc., profiting on people being sick. Why would research and research publications be any different?
If you want this to change, you need to change the system. It is possible for healthcare to serve the common good instead of the shareholder and still return a yield on investment. It did exactly that until the 1980s.
There is a solution! (Score:2)
All other posts so far seem to focus on the obvious, i.e. journals are pay-walled, too expensive, researchers/reviewers do all the work, etc, but why is nobody looking for a (legal) solution to the problem? In fact, there is a solution which is really simple and will leave all parties satisfied.
Researchers do some research and want it published. They want to publish it in a known and respected journal. Let's say the journal is owned by Elsevier, because I know for a fact that my solution will work with this
E-Mail The Authors (Score:3)
I agree, BUT... (Score:2)
But more seriously, aside from the "public funding" angle of this, how
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She does explain that the problem is there's no guarantee that any of this information will be useful ("Topics in Language Disorders, for example, has a $122 subscription for four issues. But there's no guarantee that the articles I'll get in the four issues next year will be useful for me-and that's just one journal!"), and goes on to suggest she'd consider shelling out thousands for unfettered access, but that's not an option ("Even if I had to pay an acceptable yearly fee-if for $300 a month I could acce
Having worked for a Springer journal, (Score:5, Informative)
as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expenses, and that academics provide the important parts of the service, essentially for free in the cases of most journals. It's not like putting out a magazine; we didn't even have copy or layout editors for our journal, the most inexpensive components of editorial labor. It paid the university department that hosted the journal a mere thousands (single digits) per year. There were two "paid" staffers—myself and one other person, The rest of the "editorial board" consisted of faculty of our and another several universities doing the work for free, under the auspices of the "professional duties" of the academics involved (not as paid by Springer, as paid by their respective institutions). Peer reviewers—free. Editorial labor (copy, layout to production files according to specs, submissions queue, even rough line editing, style work)—graduate students looking for a title to add to their emerging CVs.
Essentially Springer's total cost for putting out the journal amounted to the several thousand (again, single digit thousands, split between myself and one other individual) that they (usually belatedly) paid our department annually for the entire journal in its substance, plus printing/distribution (a pittance given the circulation size of academic journals and the cost per print subscription—not to mention the increasing number of electronic-only subscriptions). They had one liason that handled our entire "account," and the level of labor involved allowed this person to be "over" several _dozen_ journals as just a single person. That's as much a labor footprint, in its entirety, as our journal actually had inside the "publisher."
And for this, they held onto the reprint/reuse rights with an iron fist, requiring even authors and PIs to pay $$$ to post significant excerpts on their own blogs.
Seeing the direction the wind has been blowing over the last half-decade, the department decided (and rightfully so) that it's basically a scam, that academic publishing as we know it need not exist any longer, and wound down both the print journal and the relationship with Springer several years ago, instead self-publishing the journal (which is easy these days) to much higher revenue for the department, and the ability to sensibly manage rights in the interest of academic production and values, rather than in the interest of Springer's oinking at the trough on the backs of academics.
Oh, and many university libraries (particularly in urban areas) do not admit just anyone off the street; you must generally hold an ID that grants access to the library (often student or faculty, plus a paid option for the general public, either monthly or annually, that can vary from somewhat affordable to somewhat expensive). Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacks—and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
As an academic, I have the same frustration. We bemoan the state of science in this society, yet under the existing publishing model we essentially insure that only a rarefied few scientists and the very wealthy elite have access to science at all. $30-$60 is not a small amount for the average person—and that is the cost to read _one_ article, usually very narrowly focused, and of unclear utility until they've already paid the money, that is borderline unreadable for the layperson (or for the magazine author hoping to make sense of science _for_ the layperson) anyway. Why, exactly, would we expect anyone to know any science at all beyond university walls, under this arrangement?
Two further things— (Score:2)
"irritating," not "irritable," my apologies for the misuse of the word (it's late where I am); and I should note that the department had to change the name of the journal and all of its graphics as they brought it entirely in-house and severed the Springer relationship, since Springer held the rights to everything, including all past issues, meaning that the new journal is just that—a clean slate, post-Springer (and good riddance).
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Having worked for a Springer journal as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expense
Mark Lieberman, a linguist and advocate for open access publishing, disagrees [upenn.edu]:
There are some non-trivial anti-open-access arguments. For example, there are non-zero costs associated with editing and managing a journal, which are on the order of $1,000 per published paper.
...
I've gotten versions of this order-of-magnitude number from several different types of sources, ranging from Matt Cockerill at BioMedCentral to Steven Bird at ACL. There remains a fair amount of labor beyond basic editorial and refereeing activities: copy editing, format hacking, permissions clearance, web site administration, bookkeeping, general secretarial and administrative functions. If you can get all of that done by volunteers -- or if you don't do it at all -- then the costs obviously go down. But note that we're not talking about a lot of money -- for a small journal, it's far below the cost of hiring even one professional employee.
Here's an example where I know some of the details. In 2012, Computational Linguistics published about 24 articles -- at $1000 each, that would be $24,000. In fact, through 2010 the ACL paid MIT Press $45-50k per year for copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, web hosting, marketing, handling of rights & permissions. In 2011, MIT Press introduced a LaTeX-aware copy editor, and reduced their changes to about $28k/year. In addition to these costs, there used to be a part time editorial assistant, typically a grad student, who was paid $15k/year. I believe that in 2011 that position was eliminated in favor of the OJS web-based manuscript management system; but not all journals can count on their editor being able or willing to install and maintain such a software package on a volunteer basis. So the out-of-pocket costs in 2012 were either $28k or $43k, which in either case is greater than 24*$1k. (In fact, CL does not charge author fees, but rather funds the enterprise from membership dues.)
24 articles/year seems like a small number to me, but even a journal that published ten times that number of articles would still end up with costs of $100/article under this system. You don't need to charge a lot per download to pay for that (assuming >1 person wants to read each article), but if you give them away for free you need to find the money somewhere else.
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Re: Having worked for a Springer journal, (Score:2)
I did all that while copyediting for a publisher, order of magnitude 2000 pp/year, start to finish plus artwork, page layout, proofing problems, sometimes ghostwriting, for a total of about $50k. A typical journal article is 12 pages, so you're looking at the equivalent of 166 articles for $300 each. Maybe I was way underpaid?
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Not to mention that for many people, yes, it is a significant professional hardship to lose a day or two of work to be trekking into foreign territory and sitting amongst the stacksâ"and that this hardship is made much more irritable by the fact that the very same articles are sitting there online, in 2013, yet can't be accessed at reasonable cost.
Imagine the horror of having to look things up in a card catalog. Research requires work. There shouldn't be an expectation of entitlement that everything is available with the twitch of a finger. The only thing to be concerned about is the trend toward tossing out old copies of journals in favor of electronic versions restricted to students and faculty.
Re:Ever hear of the university library? (Score:5, Informative)
A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Lots of universities simply can't afford all the journals they ought to have.
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A good science/engineering university library subscribes to hundreds of technical journals and keeps them in stacks going back decades.
Oh, but who has time to go there, find a place to park and then run around the stacks...?
Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for your career instead of always whining about how things should be made better just for you. The journals charge money because they incur substantial expenses for providing an important service.
I went through that bullshit of trying to get access to university libraries.
First of all (at least in New York City), university libraries aren't open to the public. They charge their own students a $2,000 library fee so they don't let outsiders in for free.
Second, even when I did pull strings to get special accommodations to use a library on a guest basis, it was basically a day's work to look things up in the stacks when everybody else is getting them in 5 minutes online (as I do now with access to some
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university libraries aren't open to the public.
I'd start with New York City's public library system. Find a librarian to help you get access to the various electronic databases, which includes Academic Search Premier and a bunch of others. If you need a specific journal article, print out the abstract or citation that you found on line, and bring it with you to the library. You can often find similar and/or more up to date articles for free with the help of the librarian. If access to the article isn't available through the public library, you might be
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Ah, yes. The METRO cards. It worked, but I had to go to the NYPL in person to fill out the card, and then take the card to the cooperating library (usually Columbia U. medical library) and use their collection. Technically I was supposed to only read a maximum of four journals or something, but once I got in to the library I could use the stacks just like any other reader.
Actually the public university libraries aren't always open to the public, even though they're paid for by public taxes. I used to live a
She will have to find out more than this. (Score:2)
She will have to find out:
1) Which libraries have _print_ as opposed to _electronic only_ subscriptions, and
2) Amongst those that do not (I'm guessing the majority), which allow access to electronic resources by non-students/non-faculty (this kind of access is expressly forbidden, at any cost, by many subscription packages offered to universities).
Even if she is able to identify a library that offers non-affiliated individuals access, she will have to pony up whatever the cost of access for the public to th
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Does inter-library loan no longer work the way it used to - libraries which don't have access to a journal get a photocopy of a specific article requested delivered from libraries that do?
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I actually don't know. I have the luxury of having institutional access to a full range of print and electronic subscriptions. But even if they do, think about what you're asking a busy professional to do.
People are suggesting that she should just pony up $thousands annually, that she should dedicate days to travel and research, as apart from patients or family, when there's no necessary technical reason to do so, and now, with ILL, that she should stick to a research project about a case or two for the man
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