Slashdot Mirror
Open Access For Research Gaining Steam
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports
that open access to research is gaining steam as more than 20,000
people, including Nobel Prize winners, have signed a petition calling
for greater access to publicly-funded research. While publishers are
fighting open access, a growing number of funding agencies and
universities are making it a mandatory requirement."
Proof that cowboyneal doesn't read slashdot! (apart from the polls)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It's just like this story on Slashdot this morning. Even links to the same story on BBC.
Open Access For Research Gaining Steam
First steam, maybe they'll get electricity soon?
Have you read my journal today?
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important. The classic example is the law journal where a misplaced comma cost millions, but it's also important in scientific journals where someone should be asking "does this sentence make sense?"
On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding? And why should there be gatekeepers of knowledge, or perceived knowledge? My grandfather had a paper that was rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine because he'd done the research before one of the editors, who came out with his own substantially similar paper later. Information should not be subjected to politics--especially information that saves lives. Restricting information increases corruption.
Given the five or so posts pointing out this was a dupe from this morning, who voted for this on FireHose? The status for this article was red indicating many people want this story on the main page. If anything, this shows we should probably give the editors a break... they made only one mistake based on the mistakes of a large number of readers.
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In Wikipedia anybody and their dog can edit. In contrast, in peer-reviewed journals it's the editors who select the competent referees. Your comparison is not fair: there is definitely a bunch of loonies who would love to referee the papers, but they never get invited.
Nobody said that the publisher has to be handsomely paid to have an unpaid editors and unpaid reviewer that they have now.
On another note, many researchers have partial funding from agencies which are not taxpayer funded, like Howard Hughes, American Cancer Society, Alzheimer's Foundation, etc. This is also very common for postdoctoral fellow or graduate student fellowships. So just because a particular area of research got a dime of taxpayer money, does that automatically mean it should all be open access? It's not often easy to figure out the final contribution from multiple funding sources to a specific project.
Most journals actually provide free access to articles after a certain time frame (like six months, or a year). Additionally, most articles that have broad interest are typically well publicized by news outlets (the applicable conclusions from the research, at least). Frankly, I don't think most of Joe. Q. Public gives a damn about the details of 99% of the research articles published, or could even understand it. As a biologist, I'm not sure I could understand most physics papers, for example. This whole bruhaha seems more about some principle that important to some vocal minority than a genuine public concern. In the end, important taxpayer funded research finds the light of day at the appropriate juncture.
Personally, as someone who is proud of his work and wants it to be widely known, open access is great. Practically, I don't think it's THAT big a deal. And I think most journals are doing enough to publicize the broad picture.
You haven't even read the article, have you? The gripe isn't about how the "closed" journals should be made available for free. The "closed" journals aren't even considered here. If you spent a few seconds skimming through the article you would realize that what is being demanded here is that the papers which are produced by public research institutions, papers which are funded by public money, should be made freely available and that their access should not be restricted and much less the exclusive property of private publishers. Do you understand your miss-interpretation here? No one is demanding that the private publishers offer their publications for free. The demand is that papers written by public research institutions should be made available to the general public as soon as they are made available to those private publishers.
Of course the private publishers are against it. Until now they had the monopoly and complete control on scientific publications and their content's distribution. As soon as the gross of it's content can be made available to the general public they start to get forced out of the loop. Heck, as soon as someone creates a central public repository of scientific publications where anyone and everyone can access, which will reinforce the peer-review process (which is naturally hindered by the way the old style scientific publications work), the publishers, as they currently are, will become totally irrelevant.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.