Slashdot Mirror
Jimmy Wales Backs UK Government Bid To Free Academic Data
judgecorp writes "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is helping a UK government bid to make the results of Government funded research available freely online. The move taps into a popular protest at the restrictions which academic publishers place on the availability of research. From the article: 'Almost 11,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of journals owned by the huge academic publisher Elsevier. Subscriptions to the thousands of research journals can cost a big university library millions of pounds each year – costs that have started to bite as budgets are squeezed. Harvard University, frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions, recently encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.'"
Jimmy Wales? The guy where people paid millions every year so they'd get rid of him for the next eleven or so months again?
No, that's just Wales.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
But research funding in UK universities - given to them by the government - is to a large part determined by the researchers and academics recent publishing record in high impact journals, i.e. those run by people like Elsevier. The government analysis of how well your university research departments are performing (and therefore how much money they will give you in the next round of funding) is dependent on you showing you've published lots of journal articles in hiigh impact journals.
You can publish all you want in open educational archives but until these are considered high impact and valued by the government, then academics will continue to have to deal with the paid for journals. The government needs to make sure that as well as promoting open access of government research - which will be great - that they also acknowledge the value of research being presented in open access archives.
I'd really prefer to publish all my work in open access archives but I know that if I want to look good in my university and make my cv look good for when I have to look for the next fixed term contract, then I need to be publishing in the paid for journals. This is slowly starting to change, but it would be great if the government made a much stronger formal recognition of the value of open resources with respect to funding criteria.
frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions
Yeah, sounds like a "solution". Shift fees from the University budget (i.e. library) of subscribing for journals unto the researchers and labs paying the open access publication fees from their own research budgets (we're talking thousands of dollars per publication here).
I am a researcher, and I also hate the unfair fees publishers require for journal subscriptions, but I will never submit an article to an "open access" journal.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Not.
You can go to a German or Dutch site and see it almost as soon as it is prepared but on the British site you have to wait 7 hours.
AND you are not allowed to show it to anyone too neither, unless you have paid AGAIN for a copyright.
This.
The only true way out of this situation is for there to be established open access journals that are also high impact. Some journals allow the authors to elect to use an open access option for additional cost. Whether the charges are at the right level I really don't know, but it's definitely an option. However, if you're publishing in a traditional high-impact journal that has the open access option, please use it!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If the government really wanted tax-funded information to be free, they would just declare that it was public domain. Society would find a way to disseminate that information at zero cost to the taxpayer.
Instead, this looks like a bureaucratic project designed to take years and absorb lots of taxpayer's money, while giving the illusion of making information nominally "free" but retaining control, and giving Jimmy a high-profile ego-stroke in the hope that he may moderate his objection to internet censorship.
Paid Q&A/Research
The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository.
It looks like they want the info published in the high impact journals, but also in the national archive. This sidesteps the whole "looking bad on a CV or research grant application" problem. Unless there's some licensing issue with the big journals, but you'd imagine the government could deal with that. Maybe.
So the government wants you to publish your stuff in open journals, but they wont fund your research unless you publish in closed journals.
Did I mention how much I love the government?
Journals need quality research or they stop being quality journals. If the government mandates a price ceiling for access to government-funded research (as opposed to mandating free access), I think you'd find more and more publishers agreeing to come in under the price ceiling in the face of seeing multi-million dollar research projects publishing their results in competitor x's journal. You can't expect journals to publish for free, and the quality of open-access journals isn't up to par with the paid journals, but you might be able to get some of both worlds if you can stop journals from taking egregious markups.
Jesus wept, in two years we'll all be commuting to moon meetings in fusion powered flying cars.
Trust a government to over-complicate things. But some racks, install a Wiki, job done.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The main reason to publish your article in a pay-for journal is to get peer review. Which is why the key phrase is "published in a peer-reviewed journal". You're paying for the trust.
You could establish a system of trusted peer reviews that didn't depend on paid journals quite readily. You could even make it difficult to fake by employing cryptographic signatures. What's more, an online system wouldn't have to stop at the board of reviewers employed by the journal - any interested party could add their own review, taking into account that a more widely trusted reviewer in the field would carry more weight. You could even add cryptographically signed "debunkings".
Trust is the main commodity that journals trade in, but it's mostly a facade produced by glossy printing - who actually checks our the credentials of peer reviewers?
There are peered open journals, and peers for pay journals are not paid. Pay journals are relying on legacy rent.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
how about the people giving the funding follow what the fuck the research has been up to? that's easiest to do if they're forced to publish the results openly.
the logic behind with the force to publish on prestigious journal is that the journal would do the quality checking for the funder, that the funder wouldn't need to bother with checking what they're funding then because the journal magically does that with magic peer review. this system doesn't quite work though and all important research would stand on it's own anyways - 3rd parties need to do duplicate the research results anyhow for real peer review and the peer review done for journals seems to be pretty much never on that level - and indeed recently there has been a lot of talk about how a lot of such stuff published in high quality journals can't even be reproduced, making a lot of certain types of medical research questionable.
so, if major sources of funding would just stop requiring publication in a journal but instead required full publication of results - good, bad, failed, and so forth, even the badly done of questionable scientific quality - things would get a lot better. the unsounds, badly done research being published would matter too for the simple reason as to work as a guide who to give funding to next year! basically just post the shit on slashdot or equivalent, that's how a lot of cs is done anyways in practice - peer review is the release.
as it is now the journals could just double up their pricing if they felt like it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.