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Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All
houghi writes "The register reports how the Dutch open up their research to the rest of the world.
It goes on to tell that commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science are not happy with it.
Will other countries and universities follow, or will they stick to the idea that knowledge is a commodity?"
like i said, giving up all of these smarts is the best thing for the world. screw those journals.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
... I always thought that medical and scientific research is free to the world. Perhaps I was thinking of the good ol' days.
I'm all up for the Dutch research talked of, and I hope that this trend does continue. There is only one thing worse than capitalism - capitalism of knowledge.
Anonymous Coward
I personally belief that freeing knowledge will be a first step to a much better world. "Beware for he who wishes to keep knowledge from you, because in his heart, he wants to control you." - Brother Lal, Peacekeepers (from the game Alpha Centauri, not the most credible quotes but there you are)
When knowledge is a commodity, you'll see a vast upsurge in new knowledge. Well, at least when Google starts to index all the available knowledge, of course.
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!" - Return to Zork
The corporations have no rights to have the sole access to research that was funded by the taxpayers.
Of course, this raises the question whether anyone from countries other than Netherlands should be able to get it for free (gratis) -- but, the free (as in unhindered) exchange of ideas is pretty much what the ideals of science are about.
If a corporation wants a monopoly for knowledge, no one forbids it from paying for the research.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This was bound to happen one day.
In the 'old days', the only way to spread your work to all your peers was through the estabjournals.
The publishers of those journals could ask a premium price for this service.
With the advent of the Internet, this barrier has fallen.
Publishers should find new ways of keeping their subscribers.
As long as the research released has gone through the same peer review as typical academic papers/journals, I can only see great benefits coming from this.
If not, and the open source nature of research spreads, it could be that the info can only ever be treated like the current internet's information, and, as such, be treated be extreme caution. With the potential effect of almost diluting the information to be unusable.
Enough of the fucking Doctor Evil posts...
The Dutch should be singled out as a great example of the scientific and engineering devolopment entity that made the Renaissance possible. Without the open participation and sharing of knowledge social and cultural progress would be at a standstill.
If you don't believe me, think where we would be without the Guttenburg printing press or how much information was flowing on the internet when it first came out and was an open community of academians and researchers.
When commercial jet airlines first developed, the BOAC had a plane called the Comet. It was the first plane to experience problems with metal fatigue and stress cracks. The industry at that time was very involved in finding solutions to problems and making better planes. As the direct result of this, the companies involved would share any and all information available in terms of problems and solutions in order to develop the entire industry rather than attempt to promote their own agendas.
This is a significant, albeit old, example of the synergy that can exist when information is shared freely rather than traded as a commodity. Unfortunately US industry, judicial, and legislation seem to have forgotten some of these lessons.
These Dutch aren't so "Freaky Deaky" but truely a credit and an example. Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause. The contrast makes me ill.
At least not in the sense that bread and bricks are.
:-D
Knowledge is a public good. If I consume (that is aquire) knowledge, I don't take anything away from anyone else wanting to use the same knowledge. Now try that with bread.
Also, especially know in the digital age, spreading knowledge and therefor acquireing knowledge has zero or near zero marginal costs. If knowledge is out in the open it is free to be consumed by anyone without any additional costs.
Again, try that with bread.
So knowledge is not something that is comparable to other products like bread or bricks, it's fundamentaly different. Now what follows off that difference is of course up for debate, but at least try to understand the issue at hand.
This is not all research papers, but only research papers already available for free to everyone. [..] Let's not forget that most scientific papers are not available for free.
I am working at one of the involved universities, and since a few years ago we do have an official policy of never signing over any copyrights to publishers in preparation of this move.
In reality things don't work that way: since the university still judges our productivity by tracking publications, we do sign any form we have to to get our stuff into the important journals. Both the university and the big publishers have been ignoring this inconsistency for some years. As you may have noted, I am posting AC because I am terrified of publisher's copyright lawyers.
This way of measuring productivity is simply wrong: I never directly use the library anymore. I depend completely on Google Scholar. On my computer Google Scholar includes the university subscriptions to publishers, of course, but publications of the last 5 years are usually also available for free.
Most of my publications are freely available online, and they are representative of the things I have been doing over the last decade. They are also the things that get referenced most often. One usually writes two or three versions of essentially the same story in a period of 2-4 years, and the best one ends up in an article (and will never be read, and rarely referenced).
You are mumbling nonsenses. One cannot stockpile knowledge. By sharing knowledge, you do not loose it. You cannot look at particular knowledge you are interested in on the knowledge market, excercise it completely and reject to buy for the reason of poor quality as with commodity goods.
Only peer review can assure quality of some specific knowledge, that's the academic principle for longer more than two millenia. With knowledge, sharing with others is a fundamental condition for top quality.
There you are, staring at me again.
It is a self evident truth that sharing knowledge improves human development. In a few hundred years historians will judge those who once believed in intellectual property as we look upon alchemists and witch burners today. I personally find it hard to believe, at the start of the 21st century, that there are so many foolish people around who still
accept intellectual property as a concept.
"the university still judges our productivity by tracking publications" - You have hit the nail on the head, institutional prestige and reputation has been determined like this for centuries. I don't think Guttenberg put the Monks out of bussiness overnight and even though the "ballpoint" was available in the 60's my teachers only aproved of fountain or cartridge pens. Ten, (perhaps less), years ago the large majority of academics did not know this type of thing was even possible.
It's now obvious to most academics that EVENTUALLY the web will take over from journals but for many reasons, (both good and bad), cultural things like this take time to adapt. I find it interesting that the "hard" sciences (physics, maths, etc) are well ahead of other fields when it comes to open web publishing, perhaps this comes down to the medium being a computer network.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
By now, OCW has over 900 MIT classes available, and is an amazing success. I hope that the Dutch will succeed in a similar fashion.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The barrier to a better system is that many of the established "high prestige" journals are the culprits who are skimming money from universities in this way, and getting in the way of open communication among researchers. What's needed is for the top reviewers and submitters to emigrate en masse to more responsible academic publishers. Yeah, unlikely - unless something major like this goes down and kick-starts the process.
And the first multinational (VOC trading company), for which I duly apologize...
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A. Heinlein, " Life Line "
[Have nothing to add to this]
Being a researcher myself I have to point out some serious limitations on Freedom of information granted by libraries:
...
.pdf file with a scanned image of the article. You may read it, print it, but there it stops. Therefore you cannot (without cracking the copyright protection, which is illegal) do a full-text search on most articles. Some publishers provide a search engine, which works *only* for their own material, and which provides at best a pale shadow of the functionality of e.g. Google.
... and a tragedy from a knowledge-dissemination point of view.
... is commercial publication the best way to ensure availability of scientific information? And is it a reasonable way?
... i.e. the articles
... This was probably true before the advent of the Internet (printing and publishing was difficult, costly, labour intensive etc.), but if they add anything of significance *now*, it escapes me.
1) All periodicals are copyrighted and priced. Libraries pay for a subscription and the right to make the infomation accessible. Right now they (even the best scientific libraries such as the British Library) face soaring subscription costs and fixed budgets. Now imagine the situation for second-tier libraries
The point is that availability and dissemination is much lower than it would have been had all the content been available on the Web, and searcheable through e.g. Google.
2) In order to protect copyright, most articles are copy-protected. I.E. what you get from a library is either a printed copy or a
This sort of copy protection is perfectly reasonable from a commercial point of view
Having said this
Personally I do not think so, for the following reasons:
1) The articles published are by and large generated by publicly funded research institutions and universities.
2) The articles are all labouriously peer-reviewed, practically at zero cost to the publishers, by researchers working for publicly funded research institutions and universities.
3) The publisher obtains the copyrights from the author (again at zero cost)
4) The publisher produces paper prints and electronic copies of the articles
5) The publisher charges the public, publicly funded research institutions and universities premium prices for their valuable intellectual property
This would have been reasonable if the publishers provided a large added-value to the articles
So in summary, I believe that:
- that putting the results of publicly funded research in the public domain is a reasonable thing to do
- the Dutch initiative is a good way to start
This already sort of happens with pre-prints.
Servers like arXiv.org and at cern.ch
already contains huge
amounts of online material that can be search
and download.
Every major experiment has its own editorial board
as well so a lot of those papers have had some kind
of peer review process applied to them.
It is hard to find scientists willing to review
papers. Top scientists have their work cut out.
Getting grants, doing research and teaching.
Revewing papers unless it is a special paper is
something that is avoided at all costs.
Conferences proceedings are almost obsolete
as well since you can always find the talk
given on the conference's website, the paper
submitted to the publisher etc.
It is those pre-print servers and online information available to the
public which are putting the squeeze in publishing
companies. Libraries are doubting whether it is
useful to keep paper copies of papers and if the
expense is cost effective. It is the same old
story.. library's budgets are cut and the journal
prices are increased.
Publishing books is hard work and time consuming.
Most probably not cost effective to be done
yourself if you take into account how much your
time is worth.
It is easy enough to create something on pdf with
latex which gives you professional presentation
and stick it on your website
but the distribution of such thing would be
very limited.
I like books they are portatble and I can
annotate things on the margin.. laptops
are still too big to be as portable as book.
Cheers,
A.
The problem with arXiv.org is that the utter crap is right next to the brilliant, and there is far too much of the former. It makes it a complete waste of time to browse the archive. It is only useful as a more permanent repository.
Top scientists are usually editors of journals or series. They do their bit with regards to the peer review process. Young scientists can do most of the actual peer reviewing, this is not a problem as there are more of them, and it's not clear who is more afraid of novelty, whether it's old or young scientists.
Since the equilibrium has been disturbed we are in a time of change, and so lots of things are in a state of flux. I think journals will continue, they have the peer-review in place and that is the only thing that distinguishes science from crap. They will just become cheaper and more easily available, not the other way around.
I think research could be done in a collaborative/open-source model of posting articles with commentary following. The hard parts are making sure the posts are real and not made up and ensuring adequate review prior to publication, but the sites could be set up to have wiki's editable by peer review faculty and comments open to the general scientific community.
Have you been reading any of this? The whole point is that peer reviewers work for free, for the prestige of appearing on the journals' list of editors. Let's review.
Researchers write the articles for free. Reviewers review the articles for free. Publishers take the results of this work and make mega, mega fucking dollars from it, for doing pretty much nothing at all.
It's a racket. Do you understand?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca