Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
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 federal funds helped to pay for the paper, why isn't it publicly available? We (the people) have already paid for the work to be done, we should be able to see the results.
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.
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.
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.