Slashdot Mirror
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
Seems like they should've thought twice taking the dare with /. (already down)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
The currency of science is citations: the more you are cited, the more you are worth. Academics therefore have a natural incentive to have their work be more accessible.
That is partly balanced by the fact that papers published in well-marketed journals with recognizable brand names will be cited more frequently. But they still have to be well-known, which is why even expensive journals tolerate "illegal" copies of scientific papers (this is similar to software companies tolerating some piracy and low-cost versions in order to keep low-cost competitors from entering the market).
On balance, I think academic publishers are going to lose this one for the most part. In the end, they don't offer any value, since all the hard work is already volunteer work. All the academic publishers do is marketing, printing, type setting, and mailing to libraries, and none of those are essential for academic journals anymore. Some journals will probably continue to be proprietary and expensive, but most will probably not be.
This is not all research papers, but only research papers already available for free to everyone. I quote:
DAREnet harvests all digital available material from the local repositories, making it searchable. But it limits the harvest to those objects that are full content available to everyone. Tollgated objects (e.g. publications at publishers who only allow access through expensive licenses) can only be found in the local repository.
Let's not forget that most scientific papers are not available for free.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
If 3\4 of the posters had RTFA they would have seen that it is about the cost of PUBLISHING research not disclosing Intellectual Property free of charge. Most Universities around the world and a lot of corporations do this for "free" anyway. The article said nothing about patents or copyright or anything remotely on that topic. This article should be used as an idiot filter for future postings on IP.
Research wants to be free, but Mp3 players want to be levied.
Disclaimer, I'm a researcher.
In the old days if you wanted to read a particular paper in a journal your library didn't carry you had to contact one of the authors and ask for a reprint of the article, which you would receive by snail-mail a few weeks later.
Now you just look it up on Google, most of the time it's there, or the author will send you a PDF a few hours later.
The main contribution of journals to research is no longer diffusion, now people usually don't go to the library to read a journal. They receive a summary of the month's issue by email and then go and consult it online. Clearly this could be replaced by informal web publication just as easily.
However the editorial board work is still essential. They make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly and that each paper looks nice in the end. This is not so easily replaced, even though the editors do a volunteer job.
What is definitely not clear is why journal should be allowed to charge scientist huge premiums for the privilege of having those same scientist work for them for free.
Over the next few years we should see the reactive journal boards realize this, and propose a very cheap online-only service. The IEEE is already thinking about this very hard. When others realize this works fine, the era of expensive printed journal will simply come to an end.
Next will be the issue of books. Scientists are already realizing that it is now extremely cheap to self-publish. Even a top-quality, 500 pages book costs less than $40 to print in small quantities. Yet publishing houses typically sell them $200 a piece or more. Then they go out of print but since the publisher has the copyright everybody is screwed.
For conferences, self-publishing is now more cost effective, and authors get to keep their copyright. Soon the era of expensive conference proceedings will also come to an end.
The last remaining bastion will be reference books or textbooks. These will remain in print for the next few years, because people appreciate having a nice book in hand rather than reading hundreds of pages online, but as the cost, speed and quality of desktop printers improve, we should see a new era of freely available, high-quality online textbooks. There are lots of them online already, ready for printing.
All of this will be good for science. No one will be able to claim in a paper they didn't know about so and so's work and don't have access to it. It will be increasingly easy to do dilettante science without the backing of a huge academic institution.
People will be able to follow a field of science extremely easily. Cross-fertilization will become the obvious way to make progress.
I can't wait, and I want to make that happen.
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.
As you can see, the hard part of the labor (writing, reviewing, refereeing) is not done by anyone at the publisher-- various universities pay the salaries of those folks and they pay again for the journal in dead-tree form.
So you can see that there may be some objection to the arrangement. In the old days, the journal staff actually typset things and dead-trees were the only game in town, but most of the typesetting is done by the author.
The choice is hard for some people that really need to publish in the expensive journals to get tenure, recognition, grants, etc. But for people who already have tenure, some are resistant to the journal extortion. Some may have a policy like mine- I do not submit to expensive journals or agree to referee for expensive journals, now that I have the advantage of tenure.
There have been some successes of editorial boards that resigned wholesale, then started a free/inexpensive journal. Hopefully this becomes more common.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
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.
This may have been intended as flamebait, but there are probably a lot of Dutch inventions that the author isn't aware of. The Dutch had the first stock exchange to trade continuously; Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutchman, built the first submarine; and I'm sure I don't need to say too much about Christiaan Huygens. And without Coenraad Johannes Van Houten we wouldn't have cocoa powder - think of that when you're chewing on your next Mars Bar :P. (Also maybe next time you won't assume that all the important things were invented in America...)
One good turn - gets all the covers.
HD Trailers
It's already happening; thus all the eprints installations, the RDN and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.
The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.
I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"
Also, the Dutch revolution (separation from Spain and the empire) was an early model for the american revolution.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.
But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
-- Brandon
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Technoli
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.
This doesn't seem to be a movement to release more or less research. It's just a way to publish research without having to get published in academic journals.
Journals are very expensive and act as a filter for what is published in them.
It sounds like they are just cutting out the journals which act as a middleman.
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
"However the editorial board work is still essential"
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style. Say a researcher at uni UofX creates a paper on say quantum transportation: then just send it round the Internet2 to all the other faculties of quantum transportation around the world and have at least 25% of all those people peer-review it.
That way, you have instant distribution to all places that need it (maybe force 'em to have a webserver open to the public with all the publications) and peer review by the people who can do it. Hell, you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, and make that kind of cross-peer-review mandatory nfor a stamp of credibility (and make participation in that peer-review process a job requirement for being attached to a university.)
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
IANAL, but what are the exemptions to copyright for educational purposes? If an academic publication is purely for educational purposes, as many of these scientific articles are, can't they be widely redistributed for education? Perhaps, the context is important, but it seems as though it could be suited for free educational redistribution.
Secondly, what is the need for peer-review only? Why can't papers be published with peer comments like slashdot?
In the US, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that NIH-funded researchers will now be required to submit final copies of their published manuscripts to PubMed Central providing free access. For folks in the health sciences, this will have a substantial impact (and journals will adjust their copyright rules to permit it if they want to get submissions from folks successful enough to get NIH funding.)
This is very good news if this pattern catches on... Many times I've wanted to read papers which were referenced on other papers, and I couldn't because they were in paid-subscription sites such as ScienceDirect, IEEE, or ACM...
I don't want to have to subscribe to that many associations if I just want to read a paper or another ocasionally, science research should be free for all!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Elsevier isn't happy 'cause they've made lotsa money sucking at the academic tit.
:)
I hope that this will nudge more medical journals in the direction of freely available. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (http://www.cmaj.ca/) is currently the only major open access journal (CMAJ March 1, 2005; 172 (5).) (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/172/5/621). The British Medical Journal experimented with the idea for a while but decided to close up again... perhaps they'll now reconsider.
If you read the CMAJ article above... you'll know that Nature Publishing Group is okay with authors making the final version of their articles available six months post-publication. Things are moving in the right direction.
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