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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.
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...
lack of peer review
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
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.
Amen to that!
There is absolutely no reason for "scientifc journals" to perform this hold-up on scientific papers. Especially when you consider that scientists doing the reviews are not paid most of the time! The whole scientific community should really learn from the IT open-source movement.
The worst part of it is there might be an easy to use solution and nobody seems to care! It is called "Self journal of science" and is available here: http://www.sjscience.org/
Think about "Github, but for scientfic papers!"
It features the possibility for any scientist to publish a paper (in Latex because this is what scientists use). The document can be viewed online and each paragraph can be discussed online, using a revision system where pears can review your article (think about a star-based system on steroids, for scientists).
Disclaimer: I know the developers who work on this project. They definitively need some help to spread the word, and more than anything, I know they need papers published on the website. If you happen to know scientists who might be interested, please let them know the "Self Journal of Science" exists! These guys are really trying to make things change and they need your help!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sir you are in violation of Betteridge's Law.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.