Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Tearing Down Science's Citation Paywall, One Link at a Time (wired.com)

Posted by msmash on from the citation-needed dept.

Citations play an incredibly important role in academia. To scientists, citations are currency. Citations establish credibility, and determine the impact of a given paper, researcher, and institution. However, the system of how citations work is crippled with a problem. Over the last few decades, only researchers with subscriptions to two proprietary databases, Web of Science and Scopus, have been able to track citation records and measure the influence of a given article or scientific idea. This isn't just a problem for scientists trying to get their resumes noticed; a citation trail tells the general public how it knows what it knows, each link a breadcrumb back to a foundational idea about how the world works, reads an article on Wired. The article adds: On Thursday, a coalition of open data advocates, universities, and 29 journal publishers announced the Initiative for Open Citations with a commitment to make citation data easily available to anyone at no cost (alternative source). "This is the first time we have something at this scale open to the public with no copyright restrictions," says Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, a founding member of the initiative. "Our long-term vision is to create a clearinghouse of data that can be used by anyone, not just scientists, and not just institutions that can afford licenses." Here's how it works: When a researcher publishes a paper, the journal registers it with Crossref, a nonprofit you can think of as a database linking millions of articles. The journal also bundles those links with unique identifying metadata like author, title, page number of print edition, and who funded the research. All of the major publishers started doing this when Crossref launched in 2000. But most of them held the reference data -- the information detailing who cited whom and where -- under strict copyright restrictions. Accessing it meant paying tens of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to the companies that own Web of Science or Scopus. Historically, just 1 percent of publications using Crossref made references freely available. Six months after the Initiative for Open Citations started convincing publishers to open up their licensing agreements, that figure is approaching 40 percent, with around 14 million citation links already indexed and ready for anyone to use. The group hopes to maintain a similar trajectory through the year.

50 comments

  1. First you get the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    First you get the citations, then you get the grant money, then you get the Tenure.

    1. Re:First you get the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't want any of those things.

      Can anyone remember when Science was about Scientia, Knowledge?

    2. Re:First you get the money by OhSoLaMeow · · Score: 1

      First you get the citations, then you get the grant money, then you get the Tenure.

      [citation needed]

      --
      They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
    3. Re:First you get the money by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > Can anyone remember when Science was about Scientia, Knowledge?

      /sarcasm Sorry that is last millennium thinking. Today it is about hoarding information, hiding the data + code so you can't reproduce the experiment(s), provide no _reference implementation_ to independently verify the algorithm, exploiting eyeballs behind paywalls, beating the competition to market regardless if your shit actually works *cough Theranos cough, Litigate not Innovate *cough Patent Trolls cough*, and selling proprietary drugs where you can be sued up the ass for using them without a license *cough Monsanto cough*, textbooks with DRM because "sharing knowledge is bad, Mmkay, because I'm not getting my cut", all to make a quick buck.

      /cynical What? You wanted copyright to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," Ha!

      Sharing of Information has been corrupted and perverted by Greed and Lawyers. What's this concept of sharing? You WILL pay.

      The first step would be to kill all the fucking lawyers.
      The second step would be to repeal all this Imaginary Property bullshit laws.

      But this will never happen because society is a bunch of retards. They would rather watch some one else's Unreality shit show then actually do something because their life is devoid of any actual meaning.

      Welcome to the 21st century -- where Information is Hoarded for Profit.

    4. Re:First you get the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The first thing we do, let's kill all the scientists.

  2. More open science, please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's great that people are tackling issue of openness in science since it's not often talked about. Now if only there was a way to dismantle Elsevier and other scumbag publishers that would be swell

    1. Re:More open science, please by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Journal publishers act as a gateway in most fields, but not in Physics, where most papers are freely available as preprints on Arxiv.org. The reason Physics is different is that Arxiv was established in 1991, long before journal publishers saw online preprints as a threat, and by the time they recognized the problem, online preprints were already established as the norm in the Physics community. But in other fields, they were able to stifle the move to open publishing by embargoing any papers that violated their no-preprint policies.

      Bill Gates has recently said that his foundation will require open publishing of research that they fund. That is a big positive step, since his foundation is an important source of funding for biomedical research.

  3. Sad by 110010001000 · · Score: 0

    This is really what academia has turned out to be: citations. Instead of doing real science it is a popularity contest. Reminds me of Facebook and trying to get "likes". Mod me up if you agree.

    1. Re:Sad by Gilgaron · · Score: 1

      It is because research builds on previous research. You cite your sources instead of rebuilding the whole of knowledge each time you want to eek forward a little.

    2. Re:Sad by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Eek forward? Did you see a mouse or something? Anyhow, citation needed.

    3. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Citation needed? Ok, here's one:

      If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.

      -- Attributed to Isaac Newton

    4. Re:Sad by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Instead of doing real science it is a popularity contest.

      How do we determine what is "real science"?

    5. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Too bad he didn't include Leibniz in the set of Giants.

      But I have to agree with the GP, it really is a popularity contest. And it's not about building up knowledge on existing knowledge. It's about getting publications out as quickly and as numerous as possible, and then citing your own work over and over and over.

    6. Re:Sad by sinij · · Score: 1

      If you can convince couple unaffiliated people in your field that this is decent-enough idea - then it is real science.

      How do you convince that your code works? You have someone else to review it.

    7. Re:Sad by godrik · · Score: 2

      Well, I have to disagree. People look at citation to get a quick and dirty idea of how popular a paper or a researcher is.
      But that is only really used as a first initial filter. Most universities look at impact. And citations can be used as a proxy for impact, but really impact is what people are looking at.
      Citation patterns are quite important to understand the structure of a field. And be able to mine the work automatically. So I am quite happy to see an effort to make these data more public.

    8. Re:Sad by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      How does code review convince anyone the code works? It just means someone else looked at it, but didn't try to run it.

    9. Re: Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Start by trying to disprove your theory rather than trying to prove it.

    10. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Facts do not support your nor OP's assertion. That MAY happen at some levels, but if it was systemic - as you claim - nothing would ever get done. We'd be stuck in caves banging rocks together and wondering why the sky is angry at us.

      The fact that we are even having this conversation - on the internet, over large geographic distances, via electronic devices that fit on our backpacks (or pockets, or even wrists maybe?), in near real time (few minutes apart) - proves that science works.

    11. Re: Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "We'd be stuck in caves banging rocks together and wondering why the sky is angry at us."
      Citation?

    12. Re:Sad by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      Eh, another person who thinks that tech is science...

    13. Re:Sad by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      If you can convince couple unaffiliated people in your field that this is decent-enough idea - then it is real science.

      That is just normal peer review, which is the lowest bar. How do you decide which researchers receive funding, or who gets tenure?

      How do you convince that your code works? You have someone else to review it.

      Nonsense. You see if code works by testing it. You review code to ensure quality (readability, maintainability) not correctness.

    14. Re:Sad by AuMatar · · Score: 1

      Testing only finds the problems you've already thought of. Peer review can (but is not assured to) find the problems and situations you haven't.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
    15. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Advances in tech depend on advances in science, or are you one of those people that believe that it's only science if it has not practical application?

      capcha: followed

    16. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Progress only happens because young naive fools discover stuff and invent things before they're old enough and wise enough to know they shouldn't have done it.

    17. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...and another fool who doesn't

    18. Re:Sad by Altrag · · Score: 2

      "Real" science:

      a) Fits all currently available data, within a margin of error (and the margin of error needs to be specified.)

      b) Is falsifiable. That is, it must always accept the possibility that some new data will come in tomorrow that breaks the theory. That is why religion can never be science -- "God did it" is always an acceptable answer no matter what happens and therefore the "theory" is not falsifiable. That doesn't imply that there is no God or anything that extreme -- just that God's existence (or non-) is something that can't be simply talked about scientifically at all.

      c) Makes inferences/predictions about future events. This somewhat relates to (b) in that a prediction that doesn't come true immediately breaks the theory. That said, the predictions can sometimes have very long time frames. The Higgs boson for example was predicted in the 60s and only shown to be true (with high confidence) a few years ago -- a good 50 year gap give or take. Climate change theories are looking like similar or even longer predictive time scales (but much worse for the world if the predictions end up being true!)

      That's really all there is to it. The citation idea mostly goes towards fulfilling (a) -- "all available data" is often a huge huge quantity of stuff to work with, so its often easier to work with an existing theory that already deals with most of the data and then tweak it a bit to encompass a bit of extra data and make new predictions rather than starting from scratch every single time.

    19. Re:Sad by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      Testing only finds the problems you've already thought of. Peer review can (but is not assured to) find the problems and situations you haven't.

      Which would be more reliable:
      1. Code that has been tested, but not reviewed.
      2. Code that has been reviewed, but not tested.
      #1 would be a thousand times more likely to work.
      In most cases, #2 would not even compile.

      My experience is that code review is important for code that can be read, understood, and maintained by people other than the author. But it is not effective at ensuring proper functioning.

      Scientific peer review is similar. It helps ensure that a paper is readable and understandable. It does NOT mean that the data is valid or that the conclusions are correct. That requires replication, which is far less common.

    20. Re:Sad by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      2.2 Who did it first? Newton or Leibniz?

      Because of the mass of Newton's surviving papers, it has now been established beyond doubt that Newton was the first to arrive at the calculus. He first developed his theory of "fluxions" in 1665-66. By the middle of 1665, Newton was able to set down the standard differential algorithms in the generality with which they were to be expounded by Leibniz two decades later. Further, this demonstrates that Newton could not have plagiarised anything from Leibniz precisely because of the fact that around 1665-66, Leibniz, at the age of twenty, still knew nothing of mathematics.

      Source

      --
      I come here for the love
    21. Re:Sad by AuMatar · · Score: 1

      You missed the point completely. Testing doesn't mean the code works, or is correct. It means that a predefined set of tests passed. There's still LOTS of room for the code to be very broken. Statements like "You see if code works by testing it" are dangerous- testing it doesn't mean it works. It just means it doesn't fail in obvious ways.

      --
      I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
  4. I feel like I'm missing something. by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    ...convincing publishers to open up their licensing agreements, that figure is approaching 40 percent...

    “It’s not that much actual work to do it, it’s just about flipping a switch and getting publishers to agree to releasing this data,”

    But when the publishers see what the Initiative for Open Citations is doing, won't the publishers just terminate the licensing agreement because they are potentially cutting into the publishers' profits?

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  5. How about Google Scholar? by Yergle143 · · Score: 2

    Google Scholar counts citations too and it is free.

    1. Re:How about Google Scholar? by geek42 · · Score: 2

      Google Scholar counts citations too and it is free.

      Totally agree, google scholar, also Researchgate. From the article: "This is the first time we have something at this scale open to the public with no copyright restrictions". Hm.. Sceptical.

    2. Re:How about Google Scholar? by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 1

      Free as in beer, not as in speech.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

  6. Publishers are the problem by sinij · · Score: 2

    Most scientific journals are published by for-profit organizations that in turn lock down submissions they publish with copyright. These publishers don't provide grant money to do research, they don't pay peer reviewers who are volunteers, they may pay something to the editor. This setup made sense back in the era of dead trees and snail mail. This makes no sense today with Internet.

    Once we fix this problem, we can start fixing other problems. Such as reproducibility - if you don't have inbread editors it will be possible to publish confirmation or refutation of findings instead of "novel" research. If you don't have a paywall, non-academics will be able to access this mostly government funded research and actually flag bogus or wrong studies. If you don't have unaccountable editors deferring to the list of approved peer editors, then you will have critical questioning of the work instead of groupthink. Anyways, we should also always publish names of peer reviewers - they should too be held accountable for published work.

    1. Re:Publishers are the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I have an inbread editor I'd think the yeast they could do is stop loafing around and pass out a crumb or two to the public.

      AC

      (captcha 'broaden' that I just read as 'breaden'. *snort*)

    2. Re:Publishers are the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anyways, we should also always publish names of peer reviewers - they should too be held accountable for published work.

      Disagree with this one. Currently, the names of the referees are usually kept secret, even to the authors of the paper being reviewed (at least that's what the journals under the "Nature" and "Physical Review" groups do, I don't have experience with others). If you break the anonymity of this arrangement, the referee might stop doing their job properly, because they might be afraid of how the paper authors might react to this. The public outcry due to a referee that didn't catch a mistake, would usually be far less than the "political crisis" that could result from giving a critical review of a paper by someone you've worked with in the past and might want to work with again. In other words, breaking anonymity would incentivize less critical reviews.

  7. What's taking so long? by Solandri · · Score: 2

    It's only been 28 years since Tim Berners-Lee proposed a method of information storage and retrieval for exactly this purpose. His work was done in the wake of the Fleischmann-Pons Cold Fusion announcement in 1989, which saw scientists sending faxes of faxes of faxes of the draft journal paper to each other so they could try to replicate their experiment. He figured there had to be a better way. His proposal grew into the World Wide Web, as seemingly everyone adopted and embraced it except scientists publishing papers - the very people Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. In the intervening 28 years, we've even seen a new company whose sole purpose is to provide people with real-time spot-rankings of citation links created under that proposal, grow into one of the most powerful in the world - Google.

    1. Re:What's taking so long? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1990: WWW invented
      1993: Eternal September begins

      There's your problem.

    2. Re:What's taking so long? by Altrag · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure nobody said that sharing information can't be done. The problem is that companies want to make money and are quite happy to slow progress (scientifically, culturally, or basically any other metric) in order to retain their profits (and often just their right to profits even if they aren't actually making any, such as sitting on ancient copyrights for no reason than "because its ours!")

    3. Re:What's taking so long? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The Web was developed at CERN, at particle physics lab. Physicists adopted it very quickly for circulating papers.

      Paper preprints are circulated online via the arXiv. That started operation in 1991, although it was slightly slow at having a Web site, which didn't happen until 1993.

      In particle physics, citations are tracked via INSPIRE-HEP, the successor (since 2012) of SPIRES-HEP. That database dates back to the 70's. They were somewhat faster at getting on the Web, and managed in December 1991 to be the first web site outside of Europe.

    4. Re:What's taking so long? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Regarding your note on Google: other people have been inspired by them too.

  8. I ego therefore I am by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The problem is scientists should be detached from their works, science is not about being right, it's about proving theories wrong.

    I can't wait until we just brute force science and we can end this already.

    1. Re:I ego therefore I am by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Guess whose science dick just grew ten inches!

  9. Ironically, the article linked is behind an adwall by ScienceMan · · Score: 1

    The article linked by this story blocks its contents unless you turn off ad-blockers or agree to pay a fee. So much for open citations!

  10. Re:Ironically, the article linked is behind an adw by ncc74656 · · Score: 2

    The article linked by this story blocks its contents unless you turn off ad-blockers or agree to pay a fee.

    archive.is gets past many adwalls, including whatever Wired is using. GGBlocker automatically redirects Wired links (among others) to archive.is for me whenever they pop up...you can view the archived article here ad-free, whether you have an ad blocker active or not.

    --
    20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
  11. Aaron Swartz - JSTOR by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 2

    Died making this easier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    JSTOR is still available, I got it years ago.

    If his name is fuzzy he founded Reddit.com

    1. Re:Aaron Swartz - JSTOR by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

      Forgot Link

      https://science.slashdot.org/s...

  12. Anyone else seeing a lowest common denominator? by tailgunner_050 · · Score: 1

    Copyright is clearly the underlying problem. If you take it out of the equation in one place the greedy will find another way to introduce somewhere else, its what they do.