Slashdot Mirror
Paywalls Block Scientific Progress. Research Should Be Open To Everyone (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Academic and scientific research needs to be accessible to all. The world's most pressing problems like clean water or food security deserve to have as many people as possible solving their complexities. Yet our current academic research system has no interest in harnessing our collective intelligence. Scientific progress is currently thwarted by one thing: paywalls. Paywalls, which restrict access to content without a paid subscription, represent a common practice used by academic publishers to block access to scientific research for those who have not paid. This keeps $25.5bn flowing from higher education and science into for-profit publisher bank accounts.
My recent documentary, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, uncovered that the largest academic publisher, Elsevier, regularly has a profit margin between 35-40%, which is greater than Google's. With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages â" things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have. Furthermore, university librarians are regularly required to sign non-disclosure agreements on their contract-pricing specifics with the largest for-profit publishers. Each contract is tailored specifically to that university based upon a variety of factors: history, endowment, current enrolment. This thwarts any collective discussion around price structures, and gives publishers all the power.
My recent documentary, Paywall: The Business of Scholarship, uncovered that the largest academic publisher, Elsevier, regularly has a profit margin between 35-40%, which is greater than Google's. With financial capacity comes power, lobbyists, and the ability to manipulate markets for strategic advantages â" things that underfunded universities and libraries in poorer countries do not have. Furthermore, university librarians are regularly required to sign non-disclosure agreements on their contract-pricing specifics with the largest for-profit publishers. Each contract is tailored specifically to that university based upon a variety of factors: history, endowment, current enrolment. This thwarts any collective discussion around price structures, and gives publishers all the power.
Corrupt System!
So what? Journals are inexpensive and have a long and permanent positive impact on researchers and society. Just you try and say such a thing about Google without laughing yourself out of the room. Yes, precocious high schoolers are blocked out of the really good articles and it's not a good thing, but comparing to google? Get serious
WTF?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
If it's behind a paywall, it's not really science. The scientific method requires peer review.
Impose a fee on Universities and other places that harbor research staff sufficient to support a small staff of editors and the like to coordinate and distribute papers.
The very same researchers, etc. commit to reviewing studies for free.
Papers are submitter, the paid staff categorizes and sends out for review, reviews classify not only if they are publish worthy, but also their normal review process.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
for the rescue!
Hopefully, like The Pirate Bay and others blazing the trail before them, they can continue to fight evil and make the world a better place.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever? Private publishing outfits can still hide their resources behind paywalls if they wish, but informed citizens will ignore them and go directly for the multiple open websites that offer the full text of such publicly funded research. Is that too much to ask?
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People have an overwhelming sense of entitlement. If you want to access these papers then you should pay the publishers for a copy. Demanding free access literally steals money from researchers. This copyright infringement culture is going to destroy civilization.
Anyone know whether this is a worldwide problem, or only with US published studies/sites? Because it frustrates me with places like hospitals in the US, that every link down to the vending machines has to turn an individual profit, instead of looking at it as a whole.
and they don't take kindly to being cut out.
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This strikes me as a hit piece from UC. Not that I'm against it mind you, I absolutely agree with the assertion that paywalls are detrimental to science.
However it strikes me as convenient this coming out right at the same time as UC is boycotting Elsevier:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open
Whether it's NASA or SpaceX there's a helluva lot of useful research on rockets that is never going to find its way into a whitepaper. Academia and open research have its place but those throwing out hyperbole like "all research should be free for the good of mankind" is off on a RMS-like crusade against proprietary research. Managing some kind of curated scientific journal is a lot of work that requires money, it's not just putting up arXiv and have everyone have a go at publishing their junk. If you want access to neatly compiled data on say the bleeding edge of cancer research it's not unreasonable there's a price.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are always some fuckers that want to restrict access and get rich on it. It is an utter disgrace.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The author is just whining. If researchers wanted their research to be available to the public they would just post it on their own web pages. Problem solved. However --- there is a reason they don't do that. They don't get 'tenure credit' or improved ability to get grants by just posting their papers on their web pages. There is a hierarchy of journals that are difficult to get published in because of competition and selection by editors. Getting published in those journals counts a lot more than publishing in arxiv or their own web pages - there is a high value to publish in "Nature." The author does not bother to discuss that at all.
However Professor Schmitt's publishing practice is consistent with his views, he appears to avoid scholarly publications and primarily publishes in "Huffington Post" and "Forbes".
Gee, msmash, thanks for the slashvertisement.
Can we not start a pressure group to push federal lawmakers into passing a law dictating that all publicly funded research automatically be made available freely with no paywalls whatsoever?
Would it be acceptable to region-lock tax-funded publications, offering them without charge to domestic viewers but putting foreign viewers behind a paywall? Consider that, for example, a French citizen living in France likely did not contribute to research funded by U.S. tax dollars. Compare what BBC has done with iPlayer and the like.
Present the story and let people figure it out, don't try to turn them into a herd of sheep by telling them what you think they should think.
This is the problem with not only specific Slashdot editors, but the media as a whole. Present the damn story and leave your thoughts out of the headline.
This is probably an unpopular opinion here, but I don't think it's a black and white issue. The benefit of for-profit journals is their incentive to publish high quality research. The business model most people propose for open access is to pay the publishers on a per-paper basis. That incentivizes quantity over quality, and we already have a quality problem as is.
No problems in this world remaining are answered now by heaving around objects, none whatsoever, without an idea to precede that, to say how it answers that particular (previously unsolved) problem. Paywalls are gross and on fire and serve only to perpetuate whatever could have been solved faster with more minds on it. Whilst cancer is an issue, paywalls cause cancer, contributing to the system causes (a much tinier amount) of cancer - no hyperbole. Bulldozing all paywalls would save x amount of lives per still-at-large disease, and dropping them makes us *ping* into better standards of common and collected knowledge with a lump-sum payout to all the universities and many others. Past that, where you can replace "cancer" with any given pressing issue (fuel finity, goshawful economic distribution, isolation of marginalised groups, mass media... not even a finite list!!) summing all those together to see what making knowledge free gives us in terms of real poly/omnifaceted utility in one swoop... PAST THAT: learning has never been solely about solving problems, but raising literacy in general so that we can build more meaningful connections whilst surviving, racing hovercars, and finding cooler questions, finding whole new aspects of reality to explore by connecting previously unconnected insights. *This* endeavour: constant, collective, and irreplacable is *especially* benefited by (Universally) Free Knowledge, much more so than niche predefined tasks which are more viable for specialists to invest in. Polymaths are generally useful, and, basically people are better the more diversely they have glanced... this is particularly the style of learning paywalls harm, and we shouldn't be barring anyone at wiki-grade knowledge just because they're poor. Exchange rates play here too. Free Knowledge would open everything to everyone, beginning with raising the mean, median, and nearly all percentiles of human intelligence, capability, wisdom, and literacy with which to send it on. (Percentiles not directly lifted in these measures would be benefited in many other ways along with everyone else.) The *one* thing holding us back from all that benefit, which would hit straight away a bit and soar... all those cancery-solve-me problems and the "woah" unknowns from sticking formerly separate ideas together, *plus* the huge number of people newly invited and encouraged, empowered, to read what's better than what they viably may at present... No, it's not researchers and labs who are getting moneymoneymoney from $40 journal articles, it's... the company who post it to the internet? Surely that's the music industry isn't it? The same triceratopses. Zero researchers rely on royalties from pay-per-view payperviews - and good!! That would be absurd and lend to a terrible academic demagoguery if people act rationally. Researchers are invested in kudos from "respected journals" (whilst paywalls aren't respectful to the public, to knowledge itself, cancer-survivors, nor the researchers who sought to provide max benefit not just for a few), so... I don't think it's a case we ask Nature to change (heh), but knowledge workers politely letting journals rot unless they add value instead of creating scarcity (of access and journal-space). We don't quite have it yet, the alternative, but how could we all want researchers to keep paying tax siphoned off to a letterpress, besides the increase in public literacy by inviting everyone to everything. How about not asking for a specially secured circle for the men with hats and honorifics, but public peer-reviews with ratings based on proven reputation? A reddit-like built purely for academia would be a swell start, hey? Keep it sensible and proper, let the great stuff shine with proportion as opposed to "Yes, you're in Nature now, and no, you're not." And let the good times roll. Super-peer review, super-inviting to readers and researchers, meta-communities right there and discussion made straight away oh my, a big pile of statsy data somewhere and streams of the hottest graphs and images, oh oh my "Open Source Press" my corpus is ready!! wiki.khalidaaishah.ink
As a reader of journals I wish there was fewer to read. If we could just charge more for publishing and/or reading then people might possibly publish less or publish things that are more informative.
So that's the counter argument to paywalls.
The problem that a lot of people see, that isn't the actual problem here. Publishing test is now close to free. So you can't say the cost of publishing is justified by the cost of materials.
Before we might have thought that was the important value in charging. But it turns out it's the deterrence and filtering effect that are worth paying for not the paper. THere is also the value of archical retention which has gotten to be a higher risk in the age of computers. Printed materials last decades to centuries whereas digital materials often can't be read after a decade. I can't say the published are assuredly doing a good job on archiving but presumably they are trying rather than depending on the whim of Wordperect, or Troff, or Microxosft word 2.0 being readable 5 years hence.
Better search engines don't help. There's almost nothing a search engine can do to distinguish a good article from a bad one. The only thing they can do is score the articles by citations or journal reputation. And a higher priced journal generally gets less crap submitted to it, hence the reputation builds.
So I have no problem with reasonable fees. I'd pay even more if we could somehow filter out more of the crap.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
One word.... education. You desperately need one, for the first time.
It's not only copyright that slows progress, throw in all IP law to that conversation.
Most papers I have seen are difficult to replicate. And even if you were able to do so, there are patents. So paywall may be one of the issues but not the only one.
All Knowledge should be freely available. Including (arguably) all exclusive research journals as well,
Money and materialism is slowing down our potential tremendously,
Everything and everyone should all work together,
Share resources,
And manifest a better world free of division, separation by class, and with better societal morality, Live as if you will never day,
Live for our descendants. Make their world the one we wish we lived in, at any cost, money should be no object,
For the love of money withholds our absolution.
Stop the uselessness, And we will live to see the technological singularity in our faces.
Earth is a quantum representation of the universe,
Each being is a part of a static pulse network,
We are all truly one,
As above so below.
If the ten most prestigious universities in America put their heads together (not counting the football teams), this system of extortion could be ended almost overnight. They merely have to collectively announce that these kinds of journals will have their tenure clout progressively de-weighted in the realm of future academic promotions.
tenure_clout = institutional_ubiquity ^ (k/alpha) * traditional_clout;
institutional_ubiquity is a value between 0 and 1, which approximates the number of institutions of higher learning where faculty and students have cost-free access to the journal in question (any stable, approximate metric will do; you don't have to scour the world down to the last accredited college in Uganda or the Australian outback—though you can if the spirit moves you).
k is an integer, initialized to zero for the coming academic year, which increments annually.
alpha is a constant of moderation, probably somewhere around five. If your gated journal has ubiquity 0.5, then in five years it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5; in ten years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^2 = 0.25 = conservation status "critically endangered"; in twenty years, it will be tenure-weighted by a factor of 0.5^4 = 6% = conservation status "zoo specimens only".
This immediately bequeaths a nail-studded bargaining club to the underfunded libraries of poorer countries, because Elsevier will be in a blind panic to keep their ubiquity scores well above 0.5 for the foreseeable future (about a decade) to milk what's left of the cow—a cow that's now thoroughly sterilized, never to breed again. Elsevier's predicament in this Brave New World: without viable tenure_clout you receive nothing of impact to publish; with nothing of impact to publish, the lemming compulsion of all these institutions to blindly pony up instantly withers on the wine.
This small problem in extirpation design is easily solved, by Bitcoin ^ (1/10), by which I mean a mere Satoshi fingernail clipping could architect the whole scheme in under ten minutes, 99% bug free, and binding for perpetuity.
That this is so translates as follows (for those of you whose Japanese is the least bit rusty): what we're really dealing with here is institutional capture, or this would have been done already, and elite America universities would not be voluntarily donating blood to Dutch pirates, as they continue to do. Maybe they don't mind paying Elsevier these giants royalties, for the same reason that Apple customers everywhere reach exactly the same conclusion: it's not so much the product you're paying for, as the exclusivity the arrangement creates. From the perspective of the Ivy League, exclusivity generally maps to a feature, not a bug.
Now you might need to choose a larger alpha for narrower specialties so as not to unduly punish academics presently in the tenure pipeline, who were not notified in advance that the rules were in aggressive flux. This is why a piracy shakeout leveraged around standards of academic promotion needs to be clairvoyantly tuned to take on the order of ten to twenty years. (Not a big deal: one Satoshi Fingernail Clawback, coming up.)
If these same universities bond together on an economic footing, it would smack of collusion, and also open the alliance up to divide and conquer (if the end game boils down to nothing more than getting the largest subscription discount, the first to move can be enticed with the largest reward).
Elsevier would have a much harder legal-grievance row to hoe sticking their beak into tenure-committee standards of merit.
I have seen the game-theoretic matrix, and it tilts heavily toward the formerly Philandric Ivy League, yet somehow Elsevier continues to run the table on pocket sevens.
But now the fix is in, as outlined above, and there's nothing remaining to do but make it so.
Because most of it is done by private industries and they sit on the medical reports that don't fit their bottom line requirements. Oddly enough the claims that research is faulty by looking at the research papers are ALL using medical research for their reporting statistics.
So unless this includes medical research done by, for example, Monsato, GSK or Exxon-Mobil, et al, there's really fuck all here to talk about, and your point is only true insofar as capitalism demands the results be corrupt, the system being problematic here would be capitalism, not science.
But I don't hear you complain about that...
No one is forced to publish in these journals. The fault is in the academics own actions who value such publications over other sources for determination of value. If you want to fix the problem get academics at all levels to terminate their future career path on principal (so you had better figure out how to fund their research (a gofundme page?)). In the long run you might win. In the short term you have ended the careers of thousands and thousands of researches, unless you are willing to put up your own money to mitigate that impact. It is a nasty world, but there is no way forward without the original poster being willing to pay, and pay big.
When I was a graduate student in 1973, scientists were already talking about a better model for publication, potentially bypassing for-profit publishers. Half a century later, we still have basically the same system. There are of course alternative journals that follow an open-access model, but many if not most laboratories can't afford to publish in them, at least not consistently. Before my retirement last year, I published my very last paper in an open-access journal, and it cost me about $3500 in open-access fees. It's very difficult to compare costs of open-access journals, which are paid by researchers, with those of paywall journals, which are paid by libraries. But I am not convinced there are any big savings to be had by switching to an open-access model.
Getting rid of paywalls may partially solve the problem of predatory publishing. No profit, no business. Of course, idiots will still need to publish their junk, driving demand up. So even if the trade becomes unprofitable, these idiots will very well just start their own publication.
The fight goes on.
google is much less evil :)
East Anglia were hit by FOIA request spamming from deniers to deny the climate department time to fill in all the requests and therefore fail "the law", and almost all the requests came from outside the UK, so unpaid for work to boot: UK taxpayers footed the bill.
The article is about how paywalls block scientific progress. Unless you're going to claim there is no scientific progress by private companies, in which case, there should be no patents from them either, then the privately funded research should be open access too.
Indeed since currently it's possible to game the system by trying 20 times and then by accident get the result you wanted that reality refused to give you, and only publishing the one fluke that gave you your desired response, and since all the reports of faulty research have been in the medical and private funded research areas, not government funded public research, by refusing to let private research be open too you have made a mockery of this process and turned taxpayers into funders of private solutions.
Who will have to pay to replace the money from the paywalls? Taxpayers.
Or were you being histrionic and simple minded by proclaiming a universal when you merely meant a possible?
Open Access to scientific research is important for a multitude of reasons. For example, education professionals around the world are currently rallying to make their work more (scientific) evidence-informed. The trouble is, they aren't affiliated with universities or other institutions that can provide them with access to the research that is held behind paywalls. Another example is journalists & science writers: We need public access to public research so that a multitude of people can do their jobs more cheaply & better. There's so many up-sides to Open Access publishing &, as far as I've heard so far, no reason to continue with the exorbitant costs that publishers are currently imposing on tax payers, universities, etc..
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
it should be public intellectual property.
And I shouldn't have to pay to publish my research.
Conferences are already exorbitant. Journals are one of the only ways that less-well-funded (or non-funded) researchers can get their work out there. Maybe some of you would prefer scientists start our Patreon accounts to help pay to publish? ;-)
Reading from OP comment: OP just got to college and has access to scientific journals at his college library, oh and he thinks he's way better than lowly high-schoolers.
U.S. citizens living outside the U.S. would retain access. But that's because of an unusual tax situation: the United States is one of the few countries that taxes expats' income earned anywhere in the world.