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Should All Research Papers Be Free? (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an article at The New York Times: There's a battle raging over whether all academic research papers should be made free to all. These academic papers are typically locked behind paywalls, and only those who have access to the university network and pay a premium subscription fee get to read these papers. "Realistically only scientists at really big, well-funded universities in the developed world have full access to published research," said Michael Eisen, a professor of genetics, genomics and development at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime champion of open access. "The current system slows science by slowing communication of work, slows it by limiting the number of people who can access information and quashes the ability to do the kind of data analysis" that is possible when articles aren't "sitting on various siloed databases."
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
Yes.
Next question.
This is something I see every day in graduate work at a small university. The truth is that open access would change the scientific world entirely in a lot of fields.
I'm not in academia, but I've published a bunch of (mostly IT security) research to be freely read by the public under my own copyright or the copyright of a company that's hired me. My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet? (e.g. are there rules in their contract that says they can only publish through so-and-so service, who has the copyright of academic research, etc.)
Aaron Swartz thought so.
...all the ones paid for totally or in part by government money or grants. If you take something I fucking paid for and hide away where I can't access it, you should be charged with felony theft.
Several reasons:
1) Hosting & distributing a paper is not free. Somebody pays for the network, the electricity, and the physical hardware required.
2) Not everybody is interested in sharing. We should certainly encourage people to share freely, but forcing people to share something against their will is a dangerous precedent.
3) It's a non-issue, if the people in favor of free access start publishing exclusively in open-access journals, and exhorting their fellow scientists to do so. Build the culture you want by winning hearts and minds, not by clubbing people with regulations.
They can call it "Aaron's Law". Fix the CFAA and academic publishing in one swoop. All they would have to do is require that journals make a copy of research papers available for free 12 months after publication. The big universities would still buy subscriptions, but the public who isn't on the "publish or perish" treadmill would still get the benefits.
And maybe he will say No. Wha?
I can't tell you why though, I didn't have access to his paper.
Yes, if my tax dollars supported the research.
Yes, if it applies to medicine, food, psychology, and hello kitty.
No if it applies to advanced weaponry, torture, and none of my money supported the research.
Yes, if it defines an industry standard.
Yes, if it is classified as any level below 'Top Secret' [ Maybe a citizen could get a cleareance for general watchdogging... ].
NO, if is a cookbook, self-help, hwo-to craft book, or anything from the About web site.
Anything that is funded by tax money should be available to the citizens who pay that tax free of charge, at the very least.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
lack of peer review
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Spam, basically. Journals serve to reduce the amount of bad research / falsified research. It's an uphill battle now, with reviewers, editors, and journals charging. Open access journals typically charge significantly more to publish in.
Note, I'm not defending anyone here. Journals charge a lot, but editors and reviewers work for free (it's an expected responsibility, so you typically can do it during regular working hours).
Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?
In part, this is what preprint servers like arxiv and bioarxiv are for.
However, there are deeper-rooted, cultural issues at play here. Academics are rated on their job performance (for keeping your position, finding tenure-track positions, and later attaining tenure) based upon their peer-reviewed publications. Traditionally, this has meant going through the private, paywalled journals.Likewise, getting grants requires publications in peer-reviewed journals, rather than just posting online.
Now, posting in open access journals (like the PLOS family of journals, PeerJ, etc.) helps here, since at the least the access isn't paywalled. But now the academic / lab itself has to pay a much larger publication fee. (Often on the order of $1500 per article.) Moreover, many of said tenure review panels and grant review committees judge you not just on whether you've published, but where. Impact factor matters, and that again tends to steer people towards glammy, paywalled journals like New England Journal of Medicine (which just made a big kerfluffle about research parasites), Nature, Science, etc.)
So, there's a lot going on here. And even the scientists who want to just post preprints and move on are facing tremendous pressures.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.
http://www.natureworldnews.com...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Give the world access, and the papers will be peer reviewed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
One reason I can think of is that journals offer a sort of legitimacy, both through peer review and having to uphold their own reputation. There's no reason this couldn't be done with open papers as well, but there would have to be some sort of organization to the process.
horror vacui
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them. Swartz died over this.
Most? Almost every one in the country. Schools are funded by tuition and tuition is primary sponsored by MASSIVE government loans that basically allow schools to set tuition for students at any price, on government credit. Part of the school budget should be used to fund journals.
If they used public funding they aren't free, THEY ARE ALLREADY PAID FOR!! Quit double-dipping, wasn't the free cheese enough??
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If all papers were required to be freely accessible, we'd cut down on crap psuedoscience. People like Seralini or Wakefield wouldn't be able to pollute the scientific sphere with bad science. At least, not for long, since their papers would be openly accessible, and anyone who did allow them to be published, would likely quickly retract them or face having their reputation completely demolished.
Why a random site on the internet? Why not arXiv.org?
I recently did a paper on Albert Michelson -- who died in 1931, so all of his papers have actually been in the public domain for more than a decade.
Despite this, I had to do some hunting to find copies that weren't paywalled, even back into the 1880s. Props where due, though -- the Harvard University library collection is excellent, high-resolution, and wide open.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Peer Review also retards science and can result in some serious politicing. It incentivizes science that doesn't question existing beliefs too deeply, and it allows politics from unprofessional peers. For example, I have heard of people having a seminal paper rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine (decades ago; this doesn't necessarily reflect on them now) so that one of the peers could emergency publish their competing research to get out ahead of it.
It's also blatantly not merit based in most cases. If you really did peer review, you would NEVER let the peers know *who* had published the original work. Science should stand or fall on its own, not on the basis of whether someone with a big name endorses it.
In order to be published, they have to sign over either the copyright or exclusive rights. Which generally includes even giving their students copies of their own papers.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Because that egalitariam mindset is antithetical to good science. Good science consist of making outlandish claims and then saying anyone who disagrees with you is a faggot and anti-science. You can prove they are anti-science because they do not have enough money to subscribe to the costly scientifical papers that all good scientist subscribe to.
Scientist are the priests of the olden days. You can not dare to question them:
1) because their minds are soo highly attuned to the physical universe that mere non-scientists could not possibly understand what they are thinking about. We must take it upon faith that all their scientifical conclusions indeed do reflect the will of the universe (as they must because they are Scientists)
2) they are performing this science for the benifit of the unwashed masses.
The demand for explanations and publically available research denies science. Denial of science is heresy. You must accept science.
Give the world access, and the papers will be peer reviewed.
Doesn't work that way for software, won't work that way for science.
If you want to improve the quality of science, change the publications from "peer review" to a few different levels: "math checked" (I used your data set, your conclusions are reasonable); "experiment confirmed" (I followed your methodology, your conclusions are reasonable); and "test pending" (no obvious flaws, but has not yet been analyzed. Maybe a cost issue.). This would be costly, but journals are already expensive with little added worth, so increasing the cost and adding real value seems an acceptable path.
In principle yes they should be free, especially if the research received grant money from taxpayers. However should != can. There are a few problems to resolve before that is possible.
1) How do you pay for the hosting, publishing, editing, etc? Those things aren't free so someone, somewhere has to pay for them.
2) Who is responsible for quality control and coordinating peer review when applicable?
3) Who defends against plagiarism and fraud? (particularly the well funded kind)
Don't get me wrong, I'm a strong advocate of research (mostly) being widely disseminated for the lowest possible cost but there are some serious logistic and funding issues to work out first. The publishing companies are causing a lot of problems but they do provide some value which would have to be replicated in some fashion to make scientific papers freely available as a practical matter.
Archival access and as the other comments indicate, peer review. Peer review is critical because it is hard for the average reader to read the paper critically in detail, questioning every assumption or experimental design detail. Despite peer review, a significant number of papers have flaws, but it would be much worse without it. Some papers have fairly short shelf lives, but for the social sciences or mathematics, a paper can be cited for decades, even if it is fairly obscure when it comes out. If Visiting Professor Jim publishes it on his own page, then when he moves on, it is hard to find. Similarly, when Full Professor Kim retires, her own page dies and it becomes hard to find.
My feeling is that it is something that is field dependent and should be guided by the costs of research vs. publication. In the biosciences, the cost of research is such that a $3-5k publication fee is a round off to the cost, and so open access should be the norm. For theoretical mathematics, where the costs are a researchers time and access to journals, it is much less clear cut as you have the trade off of a barrier to publishing vs. a barrier to reading. The former will quiet the output from liberal arts colleges and regional universities, the latter hurts the access that those same groups have. Similarly, some social science research does not require huge grants to do (analyzing Civil War journals available in some college's archives or literary analysis) while other research requiring lots of data may be expensive.
Academic researchers are evaluated for tenure based upon how much grant money they bring in which depends upon the numbers of papers they publish in respected journals, how much peer reviewed papers they publish in top end journals, and their teaching. If they don't do well enough in all of these, they are laid off. So they have a stong financial incentive to publish in respected peer reviewed journals. Sometimes they prepublish on arxiv.org
Make everyone read a 5 paragraph paper from the advertiser before they can download the paper. You need to offset the cost of peer review and hosting.
My serious question is: what is to prevent individual researchers from just publishing what they have as a PDF or WordPress article on a random site on the Internet?
Several things and this is by no means an exhaustive list.
1) It's hard to cite articles not published in the standard fashion. Citations matter for professional reputation and advancement in academia.
2) Being published in professional journals (especially key ones for their field) is a big part of their ability to get tenure and grants. (publish or perish)
3) Journals are distributed to interested parties. Just putting a PDF on a web server doesn't mean interested parties will know it exists.
4) Continued availability - journals are maintained by libraries and publishing companies so future researchers can find them. Easy for a URL to just vanish.
Most publishers provide services that cost them money, like proofing, and copy-editing, etc. In addition, they are the "gate-keepers" of scientific material in that they arrange for pre-publication peer review, etc.
That said, the public has a right to see what they've paid for through their research dollars. And it's becoming increasingly clear that pre-publication peer review is not as good as post-publication peer review, which is aided by having the paper be open access.
The best path forward is probably for publishers to continue doing what they're doing, but for all researchers to also deposit their work in a pre-print server (e.g., bioRxiv) with the final, shiny publisher's version reserved for subscribers of the journals.
This system of commercial publishing of academic research is nothing new; it arose in Europe and at Europe's public universities long ago. And it continues because academics, publishers, and European governments are so cozy with each other.
I went to University of Phoenix for my undergrad degree. Once I graduated, they gave me life time access to their library, which includes most scientific articles. I think all Universities should extend this privilege to all who receive degrees.
YES
Easy - a lot of the journals demand exclusivity. And those are usually the journals you want to be published in (publish or die - your "worth" as a professor is often based on how often you appear in highly regarded journals which affects grants and job/tenure prospects).
It's why sites like ArXiV are called "preprint" - they put their papers up, but they haven't been reviewed or published yet. In the process of publishing there will be revisions to the text, etc., to which the final version of the paper is to appear only in the journal. Depending on the journal, they may allow self-publishing sometime later.
As for public - I'm not even going to say federal grants or anything. I'm going to say - if any taxpayer dollars went into the research, then it must be made publicly available.
Doesn't matter if it's a grant, or if it's a researcher at a publicly funded university operating on a shoestring (no grants, for example). The latter happens usually on an early stage test where you see a pattern and do a very small test to validate that it's not just randomness. You know the studies - the ones where the sample size is ridiculously small to be useful or other problems. Those are often used to bootstrap the research grants.
It depends on what you mean by free. If you mean free to read. Yes definitely. If you mean free to publish in. No definitely not.
What I want is far fewer papers to read. People should stop publishing shit and salami science and instead publish definitive accomplishments. Journals serve an enormous purpose when they provide editorial control to reject crap and solicit review articles and collections of alike articles from many people in the same field. The latter encourages reading broadly, and brings you things you might not have found by following citations or even searches.
I view the entry fee that I have to pay to publish worth it if it pays for editorial filtration. As much as I hate getting a rejection letter personally I'm glad for the process.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Research funded by taxpayer dollars should of course be freely accessible to all. The whole point of taxpayer money is to pay for things that we all use and need. If university research is deemed worthy of taxpayer money, it is because it is studying something that is important to all of us.
So, yes, taxpayer-funded research results should be shared for free with whomever wants them, and taxpayer-funded patents should be licensed for free to anyone who wants to use them.
lack of peer review
Perhaps the solution for Journals then is to actually ensure peer review is happening, and instead of going for exclusivity on all papers being published, focus on the very best papers for the field the journal is attempting to cover. So you're paying the journal good money to review and select exceptionally good papers, from what might end up being a sea of low quality or in many cases, lunatic fringe, papers.
I should have more free beer
If you need a paper and it is not freely downloadable, just email the author for a copy.
It can be tougher to get older papers.
Universities and librarians should decide what journals are worth funding, but the government should fund the journals directly with the requirement of open access.
Most US Federal funding sources require that articles about research they support be available for public access by 12 months after publication. The MIT libraries have a good summary of the various rules. This includes the biggest funding sources for biomedical research: NIH and DoD.
What seems puzzling about the current situation is that because of features unique to academic publishing (the need for researchers to publish to advance their careers, the sources of funding) there is a fairly straightforward way to pay for open access (at least from within academia).
Under the traditional system, university libraries pay publishers for access to journals. The libraries, in turn, get at least part of their money from "indirect cost" charges from research grants. For those not familiar with that term, it is like a tax that a university (or other research organization) levies on research grants to pay for things that are needed to do research, but not a direct line-item cost included in the grant. For example, the salaries of researchers and research supplies are direct costs. Access to the university library and use of the building that the research is conducted in (and its utilities and maintenance) are indirect costs. Equipment or centralized services (e.g. statistical consulting) may be direct or indirect costs depending on university and the specific grant. Typical indirect cost rates are about 50%, so that if an investigator gets a grant for $200,000 of direct costs, the granting institution will pay the university an additional $100,000 to cover indirect costs.
Another way to route the money would be for publishers to make journals open access, but charge researches to publish articles. Publishing costs would become a direct cost line item on research grants, but the indirect cost rate would decrease since libraries would no longer be paying for access. For the system as a whole, the ultimate origin (granting agencies) and terminus (publishers) of publication costs would remain the same. I suspect there would also be major changes in how the money was distributed between researchers and institutions. For example, one worry about an open access system is that although it would make it easier for less well funded laboratories (either in less prestigious institutions or headed by junior researchers) to do work, there would be a bigger barrier for them to publish because it would cost a lot more than it does now. It would also require more of a commitment from universities to support publication of research that is not funded by grants (e.g. a lot of clinical research).
So my conclusion is that although open access is a viable alternative, changing completely to that model would involve a lot of disruption and would inevitably create winners and losers (both academically and financially) compared to the current model. Resistance on the part of the potential losers and inertia are what is slowing down or holding back the switch.
So here is the thing. If the paper is a deliverable of the Federal contract... meaning that it is something sent to the Federal Government as part of the research grant, then yes absolutely the Federal government should be making those papers available to the public.
Notice I said it was on the Federal government to provide access. Has anyone submitted a FOIA request to the sponsoring agencies for research papers? Those papers could then be put online by whomever.
Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.
A lot of people who complain about peer review don't understand what it does.
The purpose of peer review is to provide a FIRST hurdle for the paper. It's a filter that gets rid of the obvious crap and says that the paper probably meets some minimum standard. There are plenty of papers that pass peer review that are wrong for some reason or another, but this does not imply that peer review is broken.
Peer review is also built upon trust. It does not necessarily detect people who falsify things (either as part of the peer review process, or in the paper itself). Other processes are supposed to catch falsification. For example, followup experiments are supposed to catch data falsification. The fact that not enough followup experiments are performed is not the fault of peer review - its mostly a funding/prestige problem.
If it wasn't for journals with impact ratings, there would be no way for people to know what to read. You can't just throw crap up and expect people to sort it out. Do you have any idea how many papers are published worldwide in a field every year? And that's with the current peer review filter. If you just dumped everything up on the internet somewhere with no filter, it would become a complete mess real fast (or a popularity contest like some kind of scientific reddit). As it is, the journals do serve a purpose in that the more prestigious ones generally publish the more generally interesting papers, while less prestigious ones publish the more specific papers (and often lower quality papers).
Also, many fields do use free repositories with no peer review like arxiv. It's not so big in bio sciences because the publishers there are crazy and often prohibit use of arxiv, but in lots of fields all the papers go up there for free reading the instant they are sent in for peer review (then updated when they are accepted for publication).
Who's paying for it? If the research is funded with taxpayer dollars, then it is not "free", the taxpayer has already paid for it, and should definitely have full access.
Asking for taxpayers to have access to work that they have funded is not asking for "free" material.
Otherwise, it is up to the researcher / person who funded the research.
It hurts me to see research papers from the beginning of last century still behind paywalls - I am looking at you, Nature Publishing Group (honestly, all are equally guilty). I was a pioneer in advocating publication in open access journals at the place I got my PhD from, and I actually god my supervisor to join the editorial board of one of the better OA journals.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The main problem is not that there are rules against it, but simply that if you don't publish in an accepted, refereed journal--it doesn't count. Nobody will read you, nobody will cite you, and most of all you won't get any credit for being published, without which a research scientist has no career, and probably no job.
Every human activity has a cost. Nothing is free in this world.
Who will pay to publish and host these papers? Advertisement? How well did that turn out for the Internet?
Oh who oh who would do such a thing?
Peer Review isn't all that it is cracked up to be. THE only real review is when peers can actually review the work. Just being published behind a paywall doesn't mean it is reviewed, by anyone.
Non sequitur.
You can't dismiss peer review just because some for-profit publishers failed to ensure it was done.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
The idea behind a PhD is that it is a piece of research of approved quality that is worthy of the degree granted. The theses sit in the institution's library - which is the traditional definition of publication. Making degree granting institutions publish them to the net free make a lot of sense.
Research is all about credit. And credit means funding nowadays.
So, until credit and funding are decoupled, the answer is not going to happen, people are self centered greedy bastards.
Mostly they're defending against bad resarch. As someone who has done lots of reviews, I'd say that figuring out maliciously falsified stuff is much, much harder than rejecting plain awful crap. I've encountered one paper once where I reason to suspect some dubious data, but it could have been down to a terrible experimental setup rather than falsification---the experiments were terrible.
It does happen, but peer review is more to check things are running OK if everyone is being reasonably honest (most people are).
Of course peer review is massively strained now because of the publish-or-perish things mean that people are hurling vast quantities of crap at the system and it canne take much more o it!
I've seen plenty of shit research in good journals, not falisfies or anything, just ill conceived and badly done.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
so that one of the peers could emergency publish their competing research to get out ahead of it.
Welcome to humanity.
This links to the NYT, where most articles are paywalled.
It should be released for free as in Libre.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
Any research that was funded in part by our taxes should be freely available. Otherwise the researchers and their universities should stop taking our money and start footing the bill.
Yes.
Most academic papers are published with financial support from federal funding agencies. Too bad publishing academic papers is a private industry with a profit motive to keep you from accessing them.
Actually, most publicly funded research is now required to be published in publicly accessible ways:
Granted, those came in to existence in the past decade or so, which leaves a lot of old papers not covered and subject to the whims of the publisher. Regardless, pretty well every existing research grant in the US from the federal government is now subject to those terms. The big for-profit publishers (think Nature and others) have made accommodations to allow for researchers to publish in their journals while still meeting the open access requirements.
Swartz died over this.
No, he didn't. He was over zealous, afraid, and likely fraught with unmanaged mental health problems. He was trying to make a name for himself and then didn't know what to do once he accomplished that. Regardless his goal was not to free all the data, if it had been he could have used other means that would not have landed him so quickly in so much trouble.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
This debate has been going on for years. Those who decry the cost of publication and try to evade it have all discovered the same thing: even with volunteer reviewers, vetting, formatting, and maintaining papers securely online is expensive. Most of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals, for example, now charge authors $2250-2900 per article. Oxford University Press generally charges even more, and still claims to be losing money. Often, authors are hit with additional "excess" page charges beyond that fee, because their paper has expanded due to additional data demanded by reviewers. If a typical 5-year $200,000/year grant results in 12 papers, that means 3-4% of the funds are devoted just to publishing the papers. As a scientist myself, I was initially excited about the open-access idea, but I'm no longer convinced that it's any better or less expensive than the old system of private publishers. It just means the costs have been shifted from subscribers (mostly university libraries) to scientists and their laboratories, who in general can ill-afford it. "Taxpayers" already have access to all articles through PubMed within a year after publication, and they have access to the abstract (summary) immediately, which is usually as much information as they can use. Still, you wonder who is going to pay $30 just to look at one article and whether the journals wouldn't make more money if they charged $2, or something low enough so that buying it might actually be worthwhile.
You can dismiss everything behind a paywall as not peer reviewed however.
Why do all of those have to be a function of the journal?
There are existing preservation networks that will serve information for free (eg, Archive.org). Much of the editing should really be costs borne by the author -- some authors require little to no editing, while other times I'm asked to peer review stuff that's absolute crap.** Maybe you do something so that you can help out people w/ editing if they can't afford it so you don't create bias ... but being able to explain your work is in many ways as important as doing the research.
There was an article years ago about how putting all of these things together made it difficult to innovate: Decoupling the scholarly journal.
Publishers talk about all of their costs ... but I've yet to see a for-profit publisher who's actually given a breakdown of what their costs are. I wouldn't be surprised if they're spending more money to keep people out (the costs of maintaining the paywall system) than actual costs related to serving the articles.
** One was *so* bad that I said I doubted that the co-authors had actually read it, as most of them were native English speakers. The journal editor said no, that would never happen that someone would just insert other author's name without their permission. Then I pointed out papers by those other authors that I would've expected to have seen cited, even if just to explain the difference between those other projects ... and he accepted that maybe he should have a talk with the submitter.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Sure you can. The "seal of approval" has been diluted. It's like diluting any trademark. Once that trust has been betrayed, then it is rightfully difficult to regain it. It doesn't matter if it's journalism or "science".
The time for separate gatekeepers is at an end. Each contributing entity can publish and vet their own work. We don't have the overhead of dead tree publishing anymore and should jettison the other vestiges of such dinosaurs.
Science is ultimately about reproducible results. Results are definitive regardless of what some self-appointed talking head wants you to think.
"I am alive and well and here to tell you you're full of shit" THAT is a result. '-pppp
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If the research is in any way being funded by tax payers' money, then it should be made freely available. Private entities can spend their money how they wish and do with their knowledge what they wish, but the same should not be allowed if there's tax money directly involved.
-SR
Sure you can. The "seal of approval" has been diluted. It's like diluting any trademark. Once that trust has been betrayed, then it is rightfully difficult to regain it. It doesn't matter if it's journalism or "science".
It is not the process of peer-review that suffers the dilution. It is the journal that suffers it, for not engaging in proper peer-review in the first place. That was my point.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In principle, Oracle, SAS, SPSS, and numerous other software products should be free, as they started out as taxpayer-funded projects as well. Instead, they remain under proprietary licenses, with companies milking them for all that they're worth with outrageous licensing fees.
Most meds developed by research institutes are funded with public research dollars. However, once a medicine becomes effective at treating a disease, more extensive testing is done to validate it and the side effects on a broader population. This is where pharms enter the picture and get in make money. They buy the work from the research institute and write patents on the chemical process to obtain exclusivity. If you want to do research, best stick with problems faced by poor people without resources to cure their problems, e.g. parasites found in the South.
Define "Proper Peer Review". I can see no more "perfect" review than having the publication made public so that it CAN be reviewed by anyone, and not self appointed gatekeepers of the results.
When I see publications saying "We did the research, and no you can't see it, but here is what it means ... trust us", my Spidey Sense goes off. THAT is not science, it is religion.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If the research is free, the first functional AI will be able to find it, read it, and become smarter.
Do you want skynet? Because that's how you get skynet.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
So the real value comes from publishing a significant paper -- i.e. one that is frequently cited, or is even so significant that it ISN'T cited (people doing CRISPR presumably don't bother to cite the original papers any more). Since so many papers are published, publishing in a prestigious journal increases the chance you'll be read and cited.
Those journals (and lesser journals, and bottom-feeding paper-spammers as well) make money by controlling access -- the more prestigious the more money (presumably) and by selling ads.
But AAAS, Elsevier, Springer et al could probably make just as much money by simply providing the prestige without the publication! Imagine that they kept the infrastructure of review. Scientists could pay to submit papers which would be subject to review and comment. Ones that were "accepted" could be featured on the web site etc. Troll papers would be discouraged by having to pay a fee and then not pass review (and therefore not appear on the web site).
ArXiv, PLoS etc don't have the same impact as an article in Nature. Why not remove the conflict?
I agree that the papers should all be freely available but we need a system to make this work properly. The old system where it was free to publish but you had to pay for the journal got the financial incentives in line with the scientific aims: if your journal published the leading articles in the field then institutes would line up to pay for it so the incentive was to select excellent papers.
The new "pay to publish" system does not do this. Instead there is a financial incentive to accept any paper they can because the more they accept the more money they collect so the financial incentive is the exact opposite of what you want. Either we need a system where there are no financial incentives (in which case private publishing companies are probably not going to be interested) or we need to make them work in the right direction because the current system is probably going to start showing cracks in the long term as publishers get caught between financial and scientific motivations pulling in opposite directions.
Fair use allows distribution of individual papers in educational settings.
That depends on the journal. Some journals do good peer review most of the time, some don't. It's often not readily obvious to someone outside that field whether it's a good journal, but just because peer review is done poorly in some places doesn't mean it's done poorly everywhere.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
There's a couple reasons. First, as i_ate_god pointed out below, is that proper peer review would be nearly impossible. Second, when you have to publish in order to keep your job (or get a better one), self-publishing is such a big risk that you can't do it unless you're already well-established or there's a large shift in the community. Lastly, it's a lot harder to keep track of the field if there are a bunch more websites, etc. that you have to keep an eye on instead of just checking the journals' websites every week or so.
I don't think copyright is actually an issue at most institutions - the IP is shared between the PI and institution, and sometimes other senior scientists, but publications are only copyrighted once a journal has them, generally speaking.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
No you can't. It's not publicly reviewed, but peer review could have happened.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Sir you are in violation of Betteridge's Law.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If the school received any public funding, then yes, they should.
...
Until you convince the people who hire, fire and sit on my promotions panel that throwing a random PDF on a website is just as good as publishing it in a fancy journal with a pretty masthead and an expensive subscription, I'm not going to play. I intend to remain gainfully employed, tyvm.
All federally-funded research (even if it's only partially fed-funded) should be released in-full (after rigorous peer-review) with a CC:BY license, and made available in perpetuity on a central website maintained by Library of Congress.
The term 'federally-funded' of course implies USA, but the rest of the world should follow an identical model.
Publication metrics. Typically at universities you are handed goals for publication that say "n publications in A* journals" (or something along those lines). Fail to meet these goals and your job security becomes even more tenuous than usual. Typically the "A*" journals are the old, established, very expensive ones. So the desire to eat means your results end up behind a paywall.
Now clearly it should not be this way. Academics do their work with public funds. They also work as reviewers for said journals for free, so that time is effectively paid for by the public money as well. Journals used to provide the service of collating, printing and distributing the dead-tree versions of the papers, but these days you almost always just download the papers off the web (unless you're trying to find something really old and/or obscure, in which case... good luck with that). So the journals now serve no real purpose other than giving admins something to measure performance by.
We really should just replace the whole mess (after all, that is literally what the web was invented for), but that will take time and effort, and who has either to spare?
Peer review is not great. but it does filter 99% of the bullshit. And that matters. Already i can't keep up, while if i needed to read every nut jobs free energy theory every week it would be impossible. Even after peer review there is a lot of shit, but that is a nice big gain to S/N ratio.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
No its not. Some of the worst science published is in Nature and Science. These are consider the "good journals". Yet they simply are not good journals by any resonable metric of retracted studies, bullshit and otherwise just bad science that is peddled up and sold on a good story.
Scientists are their own worst enemy.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I write a lot about the history of tech, old computers and radars and such. Most of that is recorded in older journals, like the IEEE and ACM. They continue to charge $30 or more per copy for papers from the 1950s.
For instance, J. Presper Eckert wrote a paper on early storage mechanisms in the early 1950s. About half of them were never used in production, and the other half stopped being used in the 1970s at the latest. That paper has exactly zero commercial value, yet they still charge $30 for it.
Wankers.
last year i reviewed over 30 papers. I had 6 in one week at one point. What pisses me off is that it is not reciprocated with my papers with some shockling bad reviews. One even scooped me after continusly rejecting a paper for over a year.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I am an researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK, regularly rated as one of the top 10 research universities in the world. Yet I regularly find papers that I am unable to access due to the fact that the university doesn't subscribe to the relevant journal. Sometimes I purchase the paper, sometimes I find it via another route (eg emailing the author), and sometimes I think its not worth the effort, but without actually reading the paper who knows?
Which academics do for the journals for free. All the journal does is try to find suckers... I mean, academics in the field who are willing to donate their time.
One even scooped me after continusly rejecting a paper for over a year.
I've been lucky so far (touch wood) but a collaborator of mine had that happen to him a few years back. As far as I can tell the jerk who stonewalled his idea is still a "respected" member of the field, too, which is disheartening.
Who exactly made the decision that the going rate for a single scientific journal article was $30-35? That seems to be way too high. And who actually pays for that? Does anybody? Is there any data on how many of these exorbitant, highway robbery fees are actually paid? I seem to recall back in the 80s and 90s when doing research papers in the library, before things were online, students would keep a library copy card handy with maybe $25 or $50 on it to cover copying of journal articles needed for research. Because the copier would charge something like 5 or 10 cents per page. Students would readily pay this because it was easily explainable since you were getting a hard copy on paper. Now, with notebook computers and the like, you don't need to pay for copies, and you can print PDFs at home on your own printer (where you budget to buy paper by the ream. But even back in the 80s and 90s, part of that copying fee of 5 to 10 cents per page was for the copyright royalty fees to the publishers (the library still has to subscribe to the journal). I think if publishers would find a way to make their journals available for 50 cents to $1 per article, and also find a way for students and faculty to keep a small account somewhere for this, as opposed to having a separate account for every journal, they would see that more people are more than willing to pay a relatively modest fee for access to these journals. But I'm not sure if we can go back to that, either. Publishers may very well have burned all the bridges by extorting us with completely unreasonable fees in the interest of making their stock go up a quarter of a point. Ain't capitalism great?
A friend of mine was doing a PhD thesis. Paywalled content was simply ignored, as if it didn't exist. Sad but true.
Thankfully most authors offered alternative ways of getting articles.
What pisses me off is that it is not reciprocated with my papers with some shockling bad reviews.
I know what you mean. I'm nostly on the outside now, so I get asked to review but don't submit. I still review because that's how the system works. I do always try to be fair, but I reject I think most of the papers that cross my desk.
One thing I almost never do is ask for more experiemnts. That's often the sign of a cowardly reviewer: not sure what to say so ask for more experiments by default! One venue I review for provides a mechanism for the reviewers to discuss, and I defended a paper against requests for more reviews.
One even scooped me after continusly rejecting a paper for over a year.
I've only heard rumours of that until now. You have my deepest sympathy that sucks, and it basically fraudulent.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
YES
Publication fees.
That's no improvement on what we have now. You are merely trading one publisher for another. What possible expectation could we have that the new publisher will behave any better than the old?
How many of you realize that journals are charging both ends - the authors for publishing and the readers for reading.
I would say most professionals who read these journals are aware of this to at least some degree. It's a part of the anger many academics have towards these journals.
The editors, same people that do the job today. Typically these are academics who provide this as part of their service and get payed nominal fee.
Some journals work that way but many do not. And even when it does work as you describe you still have the problem of funding if you take the publishers out of the equation. Hard to pay someone to do a job when the organization that handles the funds is taken out of the process.
Who does that now? Not the journals. This typically picked up during the peer review process or post-publication.
Bet me. Go ahead and plagiarize something from Nature. I assure you that it won't be anyone doing peer review that contacts you. More likely it will be someone from a legal department. Not all journals are peer reviewed and even those that are aren't well equipped to catch fraud or plagiarism. No, to properly deal with that you need people whose job it is to deal with those issues (read lawyers) and that costs money which gets back to the original problem of funding.
Why do all of those have to be a function of the journal?
They don't but the functions still have to happen in some form or fashion and there are issues yet to be universally worked out in a standard way. Right now the publishers do a lot of this stuff but if you want to take the publishers out of the picture you need to figure out how to distribute that work and pay for it in a way that still makes sense, both economically and logistically.
Publishers talk about all of their costs ... but I've yet to see a for-profit publisher who's actually given a breakdown of what their costs are.
Here you go. RELX (formerly Reed Elsevier PLC) is a publicly traded company and as such their financial statements are available. They publish The Lancet, Cell, Gray's Anatomy, and more through their Elsevier division. For the record, Elsevier has profit margins that would make Apple blush (around 37% NET) which explains a lot of this discussion.
next question please
Yes, fair use makes exceptions for small numbers of copies etc. in education.
But here's the thing: fair use can be brought up as a defense at trial -- but first you have to go to the (very large) expense of getting to trial in the first place.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
First, I said it depends on the journal, and that some do good peer review most of the time. Nature and Science have some bad science - like every journal, and no publishing model will really change that without great expense - but they also do have some really good science. When they have bad science, it's often because someone falsified data (hard to check without spending a lot of money) or there's an exciting story, especially if it's controversial. That's human nature, and since scientists are humans I'm not sure how you plan on fixing that. Both of those journals do, in fact, do good peer review most of the time. Their failures are larger, partly because they're considered good journals and people pay more attention to them.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
Because you won't get tenure - ever - based on something that was 'published' randomly on the Internet. And yes, that's just how academia works.
Good luck using your three stages to check the LHC articles.
They really don't. I have some papers with bigger groups in those journals, i have even peer reviewed for them twice. They really don't even care about the science. They care about "impact factor" and that means science with sex appeal and even sometimes fairly shit stuff because it gets cited a lot. Even when all those citations are pointing what shit that paper was, it still looks good for impact factors.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Back in the old days, you needed to put information on dead trees and transport those dead trees to the people. Companies were willing to do that, for a fee.
Some research-fields are small, so doing a magazine-run (and editing) for a handful of people costs a lot of money. So the subscription fee is (sometimes) high.
Nowadays, the distribution need not cost much.
But the "editing" and "quality control" are parts that are still difficult in the internet-age.
In the US, there is movement to ensure that the product of (unclassified) federal research is made freely available to the public.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/library/publicaccesspolicy