Tearing Down Science's Citation Paywall, One Link at a Time (wired.com) 50
Citations play an incredibly important role in academia. To scientists, citations are currency. Citations establish credibility, and determine the impact of a given paper, researcher, and institution. However, the system of how citations work is crippled with a problem. Over the last few decades, only researchers with subscriptions to two proprietary databases, Web of Science and Scopus, have been able to track citation records and measure the influence of a given article or scientific idea. This isn't just a problem for scientists trying to get their resumes noticed; a citation trail tells the general public how it knows what it knows, each link a breadcrumb back to a foundational idea about how the world works, reads an article on Wired. The article adds: On Thursday, a coalition of open data advocates, universities, and 29 journal publishers announced the Initiative for Open Citations with a commitment to make citation data easily available to anyone at no cost (alternative source). "This is the first time we have something at this scale open to the public with no copyright restrictions," says Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, a founding member of the initiative. "Our long-term vision is to create a clearinghouse of data that can be used by anyone, not just scientists, and not just institutions that can afford licenses." Here's how it works: When a researcher publishes a paper, the journal registers it with Crossref, a nonprofit you can think of as a database linking millions of articles. The journal also bundles those links with unique identifying metadata like author, title, page number of print edition, and who funded the research. All of the major publishers started doing this when Crossref launched in 2000. But most of them held the reference data -- the information detailing who cited whom and where -- under strict copyright restrictions. Accessing it meant paying tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to the companies that own Web of Science or Scopus. Historically, just 1 percent of publications using Crossref made references freely available. Six months after the Initiative for Open Citations started convincing publishers to open up their licensing agreements, that figure is approaching 40 percent, with around 14 million citation links already indexed and ready for anyone to use. The group hopes to maintain a similar trajectory through the year.
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> Can anyone remember when Science was about Scientia, Knowledge?
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First you get the citations, then you get the grant money, then you get the Tenure.
[citation needed]
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Journal publishers act as a gateway in most fields, but not in Physics, where most papers are freely available as preprints on Arxiv.org. The reason Physics is different is that Arxiv was established in 1991, long before journal publishers saw online preprints as a threat, and by the time they recognized the problem, online preprints were already established as the norm in the Physics community. But in other fields, they were able to stifle the move to open publishing by embargoing any papers that violate
Sad (Score:1)
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Instead of doing real science it is a popularity contest.
How do we determine what is "real science"?
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How do you convince that your code works? You have someone else to review it.
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If you can convince couple unaffiliated people in your field that this is decent-enough idea - then it is real science.
That is just normal peer review, which is the lowest bar. How do you decide which researchers receive funding, or who gets tenure?
How do you convince that your code works? You have someone else to review it.
Nonsense. You see if code works by testing it. You review code to ensure quality (readability, maintainability) not correctness.
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Testing only finds the problems you've already thought of. Peer review can (but is not assured to) find the problems and situations you haven't.
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Testing only finds the problems you've already thought of. Peer review can (but is not assured to) find the problems and situations you haven't.
Which would be more reliable:
1. Code that has been tested, but not reviewed.
2. Code that has been reviewed, but not tested.
#1 would be a thousand times more likely to work.
In most cases, #2 would not even compile.
My experience is that code review is important for code that can be read, understood, and maintained by people other than the author. But it is not effective at ensuring proper functioning.
Scientific peer review is similar. It helps ensure that a paper is readable and understandable. It does N
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You missed the point completely. Testing doesn't mean the code works, or is correct. It means that a predefined set of tests passed. There's still LOTS of room for the code to be very broken. Statements like "You see if code works by testing it" are dangerous- testing it doesn't mean it works. It just means it doesn't fail in obvious ways.
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"Real" science:
a) Fits all currently available data, within a margin of error (and the margin of error needs to be specified.)
b) Is falsifiable. That is, it must always accept the possibility that some new data will come in tomorrow that breaks the theory. That is why religion can never be science -- "God did it" is always an acceptable answer no matter what happens and therefore the "theory" is not falsifiable. That doesn't imply that there is no God or anything that extreme -- just that God's existence
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Well, I have to disagree. People look at citation to get a quick and dirty idea of how popular a paper or a researcher is.
But that is only really used as a first initial filter. Most universities look at impact. And citations can be used as a proxy for impact, but really impact is what people are looking at.
Citation patterns are quite important to understand the structure of a field. And be able to mine the work automatically. So I am quite happy to see an effort to make these data more public.
I feel like I'm missing something. (Score:3)
...convincing publishers to open up their licensing agreements, that figure is approaching 40 percent...
“It’s not that much actual work to do it, it’s just about flipping a switch and getting publishers to agree to releasing this data,”
But when the publishers see what the Initiative for Open Citations is doing, won't the publishers just terminate the licensing agreement because they are potentially cutting into the publishers' profits?
How about Google Scholar? (Score:3)
Google Scholar counts citations too and it is free. [google.com]
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Google Scholar counts citations too and it is free. [google.com]
Totally agree, google scholar, also Researchgate. From the article: "This is the first time we have something at this scale open to the public with no copyright restrictions". Hm.. Sceptical.
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Publishers are the problem (Score:3)
Once we fix this problem, we can start fixing other problems. Such as reproducibility - if you don't have inbread editors it will be possible to publish confirmation or refutation of findings instead of "novel" research. If you don't have a paywall, non-academics will be able to access this mostly government funded research and actually flag bogus or wrong studies. If you don't have unaccountable editors deferring to the list of approved peer editors, then you will have critical questioning of the work instead of groupthink. Anyways, we should also always publish names of peer reviewers - they should too be held accountable for published work.
What's taking so long? (Score:3)
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I'm pretty sure nobody said that sharing information can't be done. The problem is that companies want to make money and are quite happy to slow progress (scientifically, culturally, or basically any other metric) in order to retain their profits (and often just their right to profits even if they aren't actually making any, such as sitting on ancient copyrights for no reason than "because its ours!")
Ironically, the article linked is behind an adwall (Score:1)
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archive.is gets past many adwalls, including whatever Wired is using. GGBlocker [google.com] automatically redirects Wired links (among others) to archive.is for me whenever they pop up...you can view the archived article here [archive.is] ad-free, whether you have an ad blocker active or not.
Aaron Swartz - JSTOR (Score:3)
Died making this easier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
JSTOR is still available, I got it years ago.
If his name is fuzzy he founded Reddit.com
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Forgot Link
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
Anyone else seeing a lowest common denominator? (Score:1)