Should All Research Papers Be Free? (nytimes.com) 191
An anonymous reader points us to an article at The New York Times: There's a battle raging over whether all academic research papers should be made free to all. These academic papers are typically locked behind paywalls, and only those who have access to the university network and pay a premium subscription fee get to read these papers. "Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research," said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. "The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis" that is possible when articles aren't "sitting on various siloed databases."
Public money, public papers (Score:5, Insightful)
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
Every One (Score:3, Interesting)
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
Most? Almost every one in the country. Schools are funded by tuition and tuition is primary sponsored by MASSIVE government loans that basically allow schools to set tuition for students at any price, on government credit. Part of the school budget should be used to fund journals.
Re:Every One (Score:5, Insightful)
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
Most? Almost every one in the country. Schools are funded by tuition and tuition is primary sponsored by MASSIVE government loans that basically allow schools to set tuition for students at any price, on government credit. Part of the school budget should be used to fund journals.
If federal funds helped to pay for the paper, why isn't it publicly available? We (the people) have already paid for the work to be done, we should be able to see the results.
Re:Every One (Score:5, Informative)
If federal funds helped to pay for the paper, why isn't it publicly available? We (the people) have already paid for the work to be done, we should be able to see the results.
Agreed. (I'm a researcher; thanks for the pay!)
In the field of medicine, in the US, federal guidelines now state that any publications based on research funded by the NIH must be publicly available. The journals capitulated, and now make special arrangements if you tick a box during submission saying that you have received NIH funding.
In physics and astronomy, worldwide, almost every paper that is published in a journal is also published by the authors on the free preprint server arxiv.org . The journals don't like researchers making their preprints freely available, but any journal that forbade it would quickly find that no one submitted papers to them any more.
Generally, researchers want their work to be freely available, because they want people to read it. The only obstacle is the journals, and they're losing ground.
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As a biologist frustrated with publication turnaround times, I took some time to encourage a collaborator to submit one of our manuscripts to bioRxiv this morning.
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Good luck with that (really).
The problem with unlike physics, biologists appear to think it doesn't count (and so do the journals) so people will cheerfully try to reproduce your work and publish first. For some unfathomable reason that "counts" more than being the first on the archive.
Until the journals, reviewers and editors fix that attitude, it's never going to take off to the extent that it has in physics.
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gross
Free...but we need a system (Score:3)
The new "pay to publish" system does not do this. Instead there is a financial incentive to accept any paper th
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The older system was "peer review" (different than the current review by a class of Peers) where people like Newton would publish their work as "open letters" that would then be re-printed by journals. The older system that that replaced was where the publishers controlled what got published, and it sucked. That's why Newton and the others were doing it differently.
Now the situation is the same as in Newton's day, but the publishers controlling everything is being called "Peer review" and making it availabl
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Public Access requirement (Score:5, Informative)
Most US Federal funding sources require that articles about research they support be available for public access by 12 months after publication. The MIT libraries have a good summary [mit.edu] of the various rules. This includes the biggest funding sources for biomedical research: NIH and DoD.
What seems puzzling about the current situation is that because of features unique to academic publishing (the need for researchers to publish to advance their careers, the sources of funding) there is a fairly straightforward way to pay for open access (at least from within academia).
Under the traditional system, university libraries pay publishers for access to journals. The libraries, in turn, get at least part of their money from "indirect cost" charges from research grants. For those not familiar with that term, it is like a tax that a university (or other research organization) levies on research grants to pay for things that are needed to do research, but not a direct line-item cost included in the grant. For example, the salaries of researchers and research supplies are direct costs. Access to the university library and use of the building that the research is conducted in (and its utilities and maintenance) are indirect costs. Equipment or centralized services (e.g. statistical consulting) may be direct or indirect costs depending on university and the specific grant. Typical indirect cost rates are about 50%, so that if an investigator gets a grant for $200,000 of direct costs, the granting institution will pay the university an additional $100,000 to cover indirect costs.
Another way to route the money would be for publishers to make journals open access, but charge researches to publish articles. Publishing costs would become a direct cost line item on research grants, but the indirect cost rate would decrease since libraries would no longer be paying for access. For the system as a whole, the ultimate origin (granting agencies) and terminus (publishers) of publication costs would remain the same. I suspect there would also be major changes in how the money was distributed between researchers and institutions. For example, one worry about an open access system is that although it would make it easier for less well funded laboratories (either in less prestigious institutions or headed by junior researchers) to do work, there would be a bigger barrier for them to publish because it would cost a lot more than it does now. It would also require more of a commitment from universities to support publication of research that is not funded by grants (e.g. a lot of clinical research).
So my conclusion is that although open access is a viable alternative, changing completely to that model would involve a lot of disruption and would inevitably create winners and losers (both academically and financially) compared to the current model. Resistance on the part of the potential losers and inertia are what is slowing down or holding back the switch.
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...the indirect cost rate would decrease...
Indirect rates are already opaque and only vaguely justified, so I really doubt that any change in actual costs would be reflected in the indirect rates. Savings in the library's budget will be offset by an increase in administrative overhead somewhere else. Indirects are more like a tax than anything else, and will only go down if the ability of the university's faculty to acquire grants is harmed too much by their current rates.
What will happen in your situation is that indirects will remain the same and
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As to your right to property - most places have contracts you have to sign before doing research as a student, saying that you can't make money off of your research there, etc. You may have signed over your right to property in this instance when you agreed to work in a lab. I'm not saying that's right - it can lead to some unfortunate situations, like yours - but I understand why they did it.
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You are correct that there are journals that both charge to publish (typically called "page fees") and also charge a subscription. In general, those fees are a lot lower than the publication charges at journals that do not charge for subscriptions.
As far as the selectivity, I don't see that as an intrinsic feature of the open access model, but more a reflection of the fact that right now, open access journals are newer. Since it usually takes time to build up the positive feedback loop that gives a journal
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The thing is that most federal agencies require "public" data sharing for any grants >500k. The reality is that nobody does it.
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hell no! (Score:3)
It depends on what you mean by free. If you mean free to read. Yes definitely. If you mean free to publish in. No definitely not.
What I want is far fewer papers to read. People should stop publishing shit and salami science and instead publish definitive accomplishments. Journals serve an enormous purpose when they provide editorial control to reject crap and solicit review articles and collections of alike articles from many people in the same field. The latter encourages reading broadly, and brings
Is the paper a specified deliverable? FOIA? (Score:2)
So here is the thing. If the paper is a deliverable of the Federal contract... meaning that it is something sent to the Federal Government as part of the research grant, then yes absolutely the Federal government should be making those papers available to the public.
Notice I said it was on the Federal government to provide access. Has anyone submitted a FOIA request to the sponsoring agencies for research papers? Those papers could then be put online by whomever.
Fact Check... Re:Public money, public papers (Score:2)
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them.
Actually, most publicly funded research is now required to be published in publicly accessible ways:
Granted, those came in to existence in the past decade or so, which leaves a lot of old papers not covered and subject to the whims of the publisher. Regardless, pretty well every existing research grant in the US from the federal government is now subject to those terms. The big for-profit publishers (think Nature and others) ha
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It's not just a moral obligation to make the fruit of public research publicly available, for researchers it is rapidly becoming a matter of survival. As far as I'm concerned, if a research paper is siloed behind a paywall, it doesn't exist. While that's a bit of a black and white attitude that makes some research unavailable to me, the trend is, there's such a huge flood of papers that are freely available that any paywalled bits tend to be covered or soon will be. Sure, there are still lots of disciplines
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Not only are many research papers federally funded (at least in part) but many are also funded at the state level. My father's work at Ohio State University is in large part behind paywalls.
Uh (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes.
Next question.
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Exactly.
This practice of holding knowledge + data "hostage" is extremely short-sighted.
Open up EVERYTHING so others can
a) access it, and
b) duplicate the data
Play the long-term "advancement of civilization" game, not the short-term greed game.
iIs, Betteridge's law of headlines correct? (Score:3)
Sir you are in violation of Betteridge's Law.
Serious question - why not just publish to public? (Score:2)
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lack of peer review
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Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.
http://www.natureworldnews.com... [natureworldnews.com]
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Give the world access, and the papers will be peer reviewed.
Re:Serious question - why not just publish to publ (Score:5, Insightful)
Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.
Non sequitur.
You can't dismiss peer review just because some for-profit publishers failed to ensure it was done.
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Sure you can. The "seal of approval" has been diluted. It's like diluting any trademark. Once that trust has been betrayed, then it is rightfully difficult to regain it. It doesn't matter if it's journalism or "science".
The time for separate gatekeepers is at an end. Each contributing entity can publish and vet their own work. We don't have the overhead of dead tree publishing anymore and should jettison the other vestiges of such dinosaurs.
Science is ultimately about reproducible results. Results are defin
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Sure you can. The "seal of approval" has been diluted. It's like diluting any trademark. Once that trust has been betrayed, then it is rightfully difficult to regain it. It doesn't matter if it's journalism or "science".
It is not the process of peer-review that suffers the dilution. It is the journal that suffers it, for not engaging in proper peer-review in the first place. That was my point.
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Define "Proper Peer Review". I can see no more "perfect" review than having the publication made public so that it CAN be reviewed by anyone, and not self appointed gatekeepers of the results.
When I see publications saying "We did the research, and no you can't see it, but here is what it means ... trust us", my Spidey Sense goes off. THAT is not science, it is religion.
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Scientists are their own worst enemy.
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lack of peer review
Perhaps the solution for Journals then is to actually ensure peer review is happening, and instead of going for exclusivity on all papers being published, focus on the very best papers for the field the journal is attempting to cover. So you're paying the journal good money to review and select exceptionally good papers, from what might end up being a sea of low quality or in many cases, lunatic fringe, papers.
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Spam, basically. Journals serve to reduce the amount of bad research / falsified research. It's an uphill battle now, with reviewers, editors, and journals charging. Open access journals typically charge significantly more to publish in.
Note, I'm not defending anyone here. Journals charge a lot, but editors and reviewers work for free (it's an expected responsibility, so you typically can do it during regular working hours).
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Mostly they're defending against bad resarch. As someone who has done lots of reviews, I'd say that figuring out maliciously falsified stuff is much, much harder than rejecting plain awful crap. I've encountered one paper once where I reason to suspect some dubious data, but it could have been down to a terrible experimental setup rather than falsification---the experiments were terrible.
It does happen, but peer review is more to check things are running OK if everyone is being reasonably honest (most peopl
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What pisses me off is that it is not reciprocated with my papers with some shockling bad reviews.
I know what you mean. I'm nostly on the outside now, so I get asked to review but don't submit. I still review because that's how the system works. I do always try to be fair, but I reject I think most of the papers that cross my desk.
One thing I almost never do is ask for more experiemnts. That's often the sign of a cowardly reviewer: not sure what to say so ask for more experiments by default! One venue I rev
Re:Serious question - why not just publish to publ (Score:5, Informative)
In part, this is what preprint servers like arxiv [arxiv.org] and bioarxiv [biorxiv.org] are for.
However, there are deeper-rooted, cultural issues at play here. Academics are rated on their job performance (for keeping your position, finding tenure-track positions, and later attaining tenure) based upon their peer-reviewed publications. Traditionally, this has meant going through the private, paywalled journals.Likewise, getting grants requires publications in peer-reviewed journals, rather than just posting online.
Now, posting in open access journals (like the PLOS family of journals, PeerJ, etc.) helps here, since at the least the access isn't paywalled. But now the academic / lab itself has to pay a much larger publication fee. (Often on the order of $1500 per article.) Moreover, many of said tenure review panels and grant review committees judge you not just on whether you've published, but where. Impact factor matters, and that again tends to steer people towards glammy, paywalled journals like New England Journal of Medicine (which just made a big kerfluffle about research parasites), Nature, Science, etc.)
So, there's a lot going on here. And even the scientists who want to just post preprints and move on are facing tremendous pressures.
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Re:Serious question - why not just publish to publ (Score:4, Informative)
In order to be published, they have to sign over either the copyright or exclusive rights. Which generally includes even giving their students copies of their own papers.
Reputation, distribution and availability (Score:5, Informative)
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists.
4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
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My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
Valid points, all. Some more thoughts on each:
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
Arxiv.org is pretty well standardized at this point. So are DOIs. As for the reputation of the cited medium, well, that's a chicken-and-egg problem, but there are signs of increasing fertility among the open-access chickens.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
Again, chicken-and-egg. Big, reputable journals attract and publish big, reputable work, which boosts and maintains their size and reputation. But sucking away resources for the profit of the journal owners adds significant friction to scient
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There are things like ResearchGate, where you can post your published works and other researchers in your field can see them, regardless of whether they are on an institutional network or not, but posting something solely there, or on arxiv, does nothing to increase the visibility of your work as a researcher, which is the primary purpose of publishing in the first place. Plus, mainstream publishers have something of a duty to maintain their archives, as you allude to. ResearchGate
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Easy - a lot of
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The main problem is not that there are rules against it, but simply that if you don't publish in an accepted, refereed journal--it doesn't count. Nobody will read you, nobody will cite you, and most of all you won't get any credit for being published, without which a research scientist has no career, and probably no job.
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Available to Tax Payers at least (Score:4, Insightful)
Anything that is funded by tax money should be available to the citizens who pay that tax free of charge, at the very least.
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Anything that is funded by tax money should be available to the citizens who pay that tax free of charge, at the very least.
That has a certain appeal. But since things like education funding are part of the federal government's discretionary spending budget and thus funded by income tax, that would leave only about half of the citizens allowed to see those documents (since the other half of the population pays no or negative income taxes).
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No, actually, payroll taxes and sales taxes do NOT fund the federal discretionary spending budget. When people talk about "taxpayer funded" spending at universities (here, we're talking about the sort of research that produces the papers in question) they are talking about stuff that comes out of the discretionary budget. Period. This isn't mandated spending (like Social Security, Medicare, etc).
Bother to understand how this actually works before you wag your finger at someone. Coward.
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If knowledge is available to taxpayers, then it should be available to anyone. Anything less is petty apartheid.
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"...should be available to the citizens who pay that tax...."
So the bottom half of US citizens (who pay no federal income tax) shouldn't get to see them? :)
There is no such thing as a free lunch. (Score:2)
Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?
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Hosting can be paid for with ads or a small fee for ad-haters, just like the rest of low-cost/cheap content on the internet.
The issue no one is discussing is why do only these journals have exclusive rights to publish these papers? Who gave them this right since they didn't pay for the content? If they don't have exclusive rights, anyone can upload the paper to the internet, like the Russian lady did.
It's quite ridiculous the journal industry makes $10 billion/year while the authors/scientists who publish a
Worked for XXX... now lanl.arXiv.org (Score:2)
Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?
Oh who oh who would do such a thing? [arxiv.org]
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Who will pay to publish and host these papers?
I'd be willing to do it.
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Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers?
That becomes less of a problem as time goes by and the cost of moving information approaches zero. For universities, it will soon be a smaller budget component than keeping the lights on and heating the classrooms, even if they have to bear the entire cost themselves. The cost of publication will be a rounding error next to salaries.
Free??? (Score:2)
If they used public funding they aren't free, THEY ARE ALLREADY PAID FOR!! Quit double-dipping, wasn't the free cheese enough??
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Quit double-dipping
While I like open access, who do you think is double dipping?
And those paywalls are durable (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently did a paper on Albert Michelson [wikipedia.org] -- who died in 1931, so all of his papers have actually been in the public domain for more than a decade.
Despite this, I had to do some hunting to find copies that weren't paywalled, even back into the 1880s. Props where due, though -- the Harvard University library collection is excellent, high-resolution, and wide open.
Should isn't the same as can (Score:5, Insightful)
In principle yes they should be free, especially if the research received grant money from taxpayers. However should != can. There are a few problems to resolve before that is possible.
1) How do you pay for the hosting, publishing, editing, etc? Those things aren't free so someone, somewhere has to pay for them.
2) Who is responsible for quality control and coordinating peer review when applicable?
3) Who defends against plagiarism and fraud? (particularly the well funded kind)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate of research (mostly) being widely disseminated for the lowest possible cost but there are some serious logistic and funding issues to work out first. The publishing companies are causing a lot of problems but they do provide some value which would have to be replicated in some fashion to make scientific papers freely available as a practical matter.
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1) Universities
2) Universities
3) Universities
Seriously, why the fuck is this even an issue?
Ah, because profit.
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1) How do you pay for the hosting, publishing, editing, etc? Those things aren't free so someone, somewhere has to pay for them.
Publication fees. How many of you realize that journals are charging both ends - the authors for publishing and the readers for reading. Universities, through organizations such as SCOPUS
2) Who is responsible for quality control and coordinating peer review when applicable?
The editors, same people that do the job today. Typically these are academics who provide this as part of their service and get payed nominal fee.
3) Who defends against plagiarism and fraud? (particularly the well funded kind)
Who does that now? Not the journals. This typically picked up during the peer review process or post-publication.
Trading one publisher for another (Score:2)
Publication fees.
That's no improvement on what we have now. You are merely trading one publisher for another. What possible expectation could we have that the new publisher will behave any better than the old?
How many of you realize that journals are charging both ends - the authors for publishing and the readers for reading.
I would say most professionals who read these journals are aware of this to at least some degree. It's a part of the anger many academics have towards these journals.
The editors, same people that do the job today. Typically these are academics who provide this as part of their service and get payed nominal fee.
Some journals work that way but many do not. And even when it does work as you describe you still have the problem of funding if you take the publishe
Decoupled journals (Score:2)
Why do all of those have to be a function of the journal?
There are existing preservation networks that will serve information for free (eg, Archive.org). Much of the editing should really be costs borne by the author -- some authors require little to no editing, while other times I'm asked to peer review stuff that's absolute crap.** Maybe you do something so that you can help out people w/ editing if they can't afford it so you don't create bias ... but being able to explain your work is in many ways as
Make them Ad supported (Score:2)
blame academics (Score:2)
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Spot the guy with a huge chip on his shoulder.
Your hated academics inventing peer review is what made modern science, and brought it out of the alchemical dark ages with people writing cryptic symbols in code in obscure codexes and turned it into a system for sharing new discoveries an building on the work of others.
(yeah yeah simplified, there's plenty of holes to pick, but it's not broadly speaking wrong)
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Where did I say anything about the merit of peer review?
If you knew anything about the history of commercial academic publishing, you'd realise that youwere taking digs at peer review. I apologise, I assumed you actually had the first clue that you knew what you were talking about. It would appear that I was deeply mistasken.
What I did was point out that European academics (overwhelmingly government employees)
In the UK, academics are almost all employed by the university not the government. It is I believe
Government should pay for these things (Score:2)
Universities and librarians should decide what journals are worth funding, but the government should fund the journals directly with the requirement of open access.
As a youngish researcher I say fuck yes! (Score:2)
It hurts me to see research papers from the beginning of last century still behind paywalls - I am looking at you, Nature Publishing Group (honestly, all are equally guilty). I was a pioneer in advocating publication in open access journals at the place I got my PhD from, and I actually god my supervisor to join the editorial board of one of the better OA journals.
Require all PhD theses to be published (Score:2)
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Making degree granting institutions publish them to the net free make a lot of sense.
Some require that. In Germany it seems you literally have to publish it with an ISBN number and everything. Not sure if that's across the whole place or some institutions.
In the UK students are free to publish their thesis online. For certain subjects there are online archives, such as arXiv and the BMVA thesis archive.
If the research is tax payer funded (Score:2)
It should be released for free as in Libre.
Public Paid? (Score:2)
Any research that was funded in part by our taxes should be freely available. Otherwise the researchers and their universities should stop taking our money and start footing the bill.
The answer should be quite simple (Score:2)
If the research is in any way being funded by tax payers' money, then it should be made freely available. Private entities can spend their money how they wish and do with their knowledge what they wish, but the same should not be allowed if there's tax money directly involved.
Pharm industry does not want meds to be available (Score:2)
Absolutely Not! (Score:2)
If the research is free, the first functional AI will be able to find it, read it, and become smarter.
Do you want skynet? Because that's how you get skynet.
A possible solution (Score:2)
So the real value comes from publishing a significant paper -- i.e. one that is frequently cited, or is even so significant that it ISN'T cited (people doing CRISPR presumably don't bother to cite the original papers any more). Since so many papers are published, publishing in a prestigious journal increases the chance you'll be read and cited.
Those journals (and lesser journals, and bottom-feeding paper-spammers as well) make money by controlling access -- the more prestigious the more money (presumably)
Not all but (Score:2)
And for history... (Score:2)
I write a lot about the history of tech, old computers and radars and such. Most of that is recorded in older journals, like the IEEE and ACM. They continue to charge $30 or more per copy for papers from the 1950s.
For instance, J. Presper Eckert wrote a paper on early storage mechanisms in the early 1950s. About half of them were never used in production, and the other half stopped being used in the 1970s at the latest. That paper has exactly zero commercial value, yet they still charge $30 for it.
Wankers.
$30-$35 an article? (Score:2)
Yes, paywalls hurt science (Score:2)
A friend of mine was doing a PhD thesis. Paywalled content was simply ignored, as if it didn't exist. Sad but true.
Thankfully most authors offered alternative ways of getting articles.
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The reason this is a good rule of thumb is that when news sources have any proof of something, they don't pose it as a question. Suppose a headline asks, "Is Donald Trump considering gender reassignment surgery?" If they had any proof that the Donald was having a sex change operation, they'd write it this way: "Donald Trump Getting Sex Change Operation!!!" The fact that they can't phrase it that way means they can't prove this and makes "no" a safe (non-refutable) answer.
Let's call this the "weak" versi
Re:This is a real problem (Score:4, Interesting)
There is absolutely no reason for "scientifc journals" to perform this hold-up on scientific papers. Especially when you consider that scientists doing the reviews are not paid most of the time! The whole scientific community should really learn from the IT open-source movement.
The worst part of it is there might be an easy to use solution and nobody seems to care! It is called "Self journal of science" and is available here: http://www.sjscience.org/ [sjscience.org]
Think about "Github, but for scientfic papers!"
It features the possibility for any scientist to publish a paper (in Latex because this is what scientists use). The document can be viewed online and each paragraph can be discussed online, using a revision system where pears can review your article (think about a star-based system on steroids, for scientists).
Disclaimer: I know the developers who work on this project. They definitively need some help to spread the word, and more than anything, I know they need papers published on the website. If you happen to know scientists who might be interested, please let them know the "Self Journal of Science" exists! These guys are really trying to make things change and they need your help!
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using a revision system where pears can review your article
I think you're comparing apples to oranges there.
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That's the funniest thing I've heard in years.
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It's funny because you believe the nonsense you posted.
As for your current post, I'm simply stunned that you believe that nonsense as well. It's not funny, it's just sad...
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This is the only valid reason... the others don't apply if you didn't pay for the research.
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If you aren't interested in sharing then you can't really call it science. Eventually, every esoteric experiment should be repeatable by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. It might take 200 years, or 1000, but eventually all of the most important breakthroughs should eventually trickle down to the High School Science fair.
You can't alter any field unless you allow ideas to propagate.
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> Those who decry the cost of publication
The commercial value of a paper is likely used up entirely in the first three months after publication. There is, of course, exceptions to the rule, but they likely represent less than 1% of all papers, more likely 0.001%. After some point, giving them away for free is less expensive than running the paywall.
The same is true for the music industry. Producing a new single is not cheap, you have to pay a lot of people in the food chain. Yet the value of the song bur