The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who paid Elsevier page fees to publish it. Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even Elsevier's very name is a theft: they are attempting to free-ride on the goodwill of the Elzevir family of Renaissance publishers, who have no connection with them.)
Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
Last week linguists issued Elsevier an ultimatum, demanding fair open access for the journal Lingua [0,1]:
> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
Elsevier are the scum of the earth. They're the ones who set up vanity journals on Merck's behalf so they could pass off ad copy for Vioxx as "published research" and get it to market.
Why is it parasitic again? These journals are providing a service. You may not agree with the cost of that service and are free (both authors and reader) to get that service somewhere else.
It's parasitic because they're charging authors and readers. If publishing is a service to the author, then the author is paying to have their work seen, so it should be open access. If publishing is a service to the readers (as with book publishing), the author should get a share of each copy sold to a reader. Charging both parties is only a viable business model because there's no alternative—which is exactly what these linguists hope to fix.
The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices.
http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little else.
Earning profits is good for society. It demonstrates that the seller is providing a needed product. And it triggers others to innovate, to find ways to provide that product too, and get in on the racket. This innovation then drives down costs.
And that's exactly what you see happening here. The linguists are saying that they'll be able to provide the product for a lesser price, but being nice and offering to let Elsevier continue to compete. If Elsevier refuses, and the linguists go ahead and start their own journal, then the free market has triumphed.
Profits are neither good nor bad. Providing a needed product is good for society. Reducing the cost of the product is also good, because it allows us to produce more of it. Therefore, for the benefit of society, profits must be kept to the minimum necessary to incentivize production. And that's what happens in a free market: competition drives down profits. Any profits are a signal that the market is not very free, and large profits are a signal that the market is very nonfree.
What's happening with #icanhazpdf is that researchers are innovating to find ways to provide the product (access to research papers) at a much lower cost than Elsevier provides it — free, in fact. However, Elsevier, rather than compete with them, seeks to enforce government-granted monopolies on providing this service, known as copyrights, in order to protect their profits, at the cost of providing benefits to society.
If they weren't making a lot of profit, would you be OK with the situation? I'm just trying to understand why people think the situation is unfair.
High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers. Apparently both authors and readers feel it's worth the money.
And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
"High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers."
This is a very odd situation that I suspect isn't really amenable to normal economic analysis, at least outside of very simplistic models.
The value that journals offer is, over the medium term, due to the editorial staff and the authors that submit articles. Remove those two, and the journal will cease to be "high prestige" and will likely fold. In the short term, however, the value is in the journal's name: you could replace the editors of Lancet with a crop of corn husks and it would still be "high prestige" for quite a while---at least until the third or fourth major screw-up. (Losing the authors is harder, but hold that thought for another paragraph.)
On the other hand, over the long term, the value lies entirely in the readers. No major academic is going to waste their professional capital on a journal that isn't read by their colleagues, and ultimately, an academic's articles need to be read, not just published, for them to advance more than locally.
In the same way, new journals have issues: In the short term, it's hard to get over the name recognition hump; in the medium term, they have to have consistently good editors and authors to attract more than momentary attention. But once they have attracted a readership, they have an inertia that makes other factors less important.
A couple of examples:
* Anyone heard from Software: Practice and Experience lately? It was one of my favorite journals, and was being edited by Douglas Comer the last time I interacted with it. But I haven't seen an issue in more than a decade, mostly because it is (was?) hideously expensive, and haven't seen any references to it, either.
* How about PLOS? Seems to be high prestige now, judging by the number of references I hear on the Science and Nature podcasts.
My personal suspicion is that a better analogy for Elsevier and company is the mining business: extracting as much wealth as possible from academic journals, as cheaply as possible, before the ore runs out and the town dries up and blows away.
If they weren't making a profit, they wouldn't act the same way; for example, if they weren't making a profit, they wouldn't have any incentive to publish vanity journals.
> And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
Publishing in a journal with a low impact factor isn't nearly as worthwhile as publishing in one with a higher impact factor, which implies a strong lock-in effect which works on Elsevier's favor. Even if Elsevier weren't around, a new journal would have a hard time getting off the ground.
"Customers"? Or maybe unpaid employees, since it's typically the editorial board issuing the ultimatum? Or are they suppliers, except that they're suppliers who pay to provide Elsevier products?
It's not the first time it happened, the entire editorial board of Topology[0] resigned and went on to create the Journal of Topology back in 2006~2007, and over way less than the Lingua demands: Topology's editor just wanted better (lower) pricing policies. Same story for the Journal of Logic Programming (in 2000), the Journal of Algorithms (in 2003) or the International Journal of Solids and Structures (in 2005).
Agree completely with the idea of your comment, but I have to nitpick on one thing:
> So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism.
As far as we can tell, Galileo was persecuted by the Pope not because of science, but because Galileo was basically an asshole, who abused his friendship with the Pope and then kept venting out against him. The issue was strictly political. See [0] and especially the top comment[1] under the article.
Also, apparently, Galileo was right for the wrong reasons - he lucked into the right theory even though evidence available at the time didn't substantiate his views.
While everything you say is true (as far as I know) it's still the case that being an asshole and complaining about your friends is not an adequate justification for life imprisonment. In fact, even the Church at the time knew that, which is why they used heliocentrism as an excuse, which has to be one of the worst institutional decisions ever.
Hindsight's 20/20. Jailing some scientist trying to promote some radical new theory is a different matter when you're looking at it from their perspective.
In fact, that'd be almost as reasonable as modern commercial interests arguing against some kind of theory that proposed humans were impacting the climate of the planet...
"Arguing against" is always okay. It's okay to be wrong. What's not okay is squelching conflicting opinions with violence so that neither you nor anybody else has a chance to stop being wrong. How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII? How many scholars or potential scholars in other fields suffered a chilling effect from seeing that proposing new scientific theories could bring the Inquisition down upon their head?
> How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?
Good question. I've never thought of astronomy as characterized by a constant stream of progress building mainly on the work of past astronomers; instead, I've seen it as more in line with the model of "technology advances, with ancillary benefits to all sorts of different fields including astronomy". For example, radio telescopes owe a lot to progress in physics, but not very much to progress in astronomy specifically.
If that's the case, "none" is a very plausible answer to your question.
Oh, you meant Pope Urban VIII. Urban VII lived like a hundred years earlier.
But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.
Oh! Of course you're right; I mixed up my popes. Thank you for the correction!
It would have been surprising if the papacy were able to hold back Kepler and Newton, since they both lived in Protestant lands. That might be a coincidence. But maybe there were potential Keplers and Newtons living in Rome, or Madrid, or Tuscany, or even Paris¹, who were simply intimidated out of doing research.
¹ Even if they were Huguenots, who were still experiencing religious assassinations at the time, despite Henry IV; but especially if they were Catholics whose friends and family might suspect them of Huguenot sympathies.
A better book by Kuhn about this stuff is The Copernican Revolution. It's original and penetrating history of science without having to read "paradigm" in every paragraph.
Galileo definitely did not luck into the right theory. He was one of the most important scientists of all time, and his heraldry of the empirical scientific method and the results it produced are anything but a product of chance.
Please consult the various citations under links and references provided in this entire subthread, which claim otherwise. Galileo was an important scientist and his model did turn out to be a step in the right direction, but historical record suggests that he didn't have enough evidence to promote his model back at the time.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. For Galileo, his observations that Venus had phases, like the Moon, and that Jupiter had its own moons, and more, were enough to convince him that the Copernican theory was more likely to be correct than the geocentric model. We now know that he interpreted the evidence correctly.
The three links, especially the LW comment, go into details of what exactly this is supposed to mean.
TL;DR: The models that were popular in times of Galileo weren't stories told to poor villagers by the Evil Church; they were precise mathematical tools that could be used to predict in advance the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. They also had an elaborate explanations for what the parts of their models mean. And then comes Galileo with a theory that's inferior, built on arbitrary assumptions, doesn't agree with observation and fails to match the predictive capabilities of established models.
The strength of a model is its ability to predict the future, and therefore no sane, rational person could accept Galileo's model over the common ones based on the evidence they collected and analyzed so far. That's what I mean by "enough evidence to promote one model over another". It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff, and b) mathematical model that spat out better predictions than the previous models did while being also simpler. And only then scientific world moved to accept the new picture - when it became the one that matched available evidence the best (it still took a few hundred years to sort out the kinks though).
People in times of Galileo weren't stupid, the Church wasn't supressing astronomy, and Galileo himself got sacked for being an ass to authority.
Your version of the history and relationships among ideas at the time in physics and astronomy is hopelessly garbled. I respectfully suggest you read Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution. Your comments about people not being stupid, the Church's motivations, etc., if intended as a reply to me, are strawmen.
I'll add that to my ever-growing ToRead list. Since you seem to have read Kuhn, could you elaborate in which parts he disagrees with the sources referenced upthread?
> It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff
I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mass). That's not much of an explanation.
You can make a judgment call about the relative merits of "new theory, doesn't make numeric predictions well" and "very old theory, makes numeric predictions almost flawlessly, additionally predicts things that we know to be false".
"Because it's stuff" is considerably better than "because it's Quintessence", and "stuff is attracted to other stuff with a force F⃗ = GD̂m₁m₂/D², which accelerates it by a vector m/F⃗, whose integral is its velocity vector, whose integral ∫∫(GD̂(t)m₂/D²(t))dt² is its displacement, and the Sun has a whole hell of a lot of stuff in it, from which we can derive Kepler's Three Laws as follows…" is really a dramatically better explanation than "the natural motion of Quintessence is eternally circular".
But that was Newton, not Galileo. (And the notation of course is more or less modern, except to the extent I've screwed it up.)
The main problem with Copernicus's new theory in Galileo's time, as I understand it, was not that it didn't make numeric predictions well; the problem was that it predicted qualitative phenomena that were "known" to be false, like stellar parallax.
Not so, though. If you read the page about the Tychonic system, you saw that the objection to Copernicus was not "that theory requires stellar parallax, but there is no stellar parallax". It was "If that theory is true, then the fact that there is no stellar parallax implies that the stars are very far away". The Copernicans rightly responded "so what?" But the Tychonians trusted their guts, which told them that that was a priori impossible.
And everything you've said about Newton refers to answering the question of how much stuff is attracted to other stuff, not why it is. He was able to show that the natural motion of everything is circular (unless it's in perfect stasis), and to describe with great precision the form of the circles involved (and how they deform into ellipses), but there's no why anywhere. Newton can't justify the force of gravity varying with the square of distance except by observing that it happens to work in practice. He certainly can't explain why it's not zero -- it could have been zero. (Sure, it's very fair to say he told us why Kepler's laws obtained. But that wasn't the question, the question was "why is stuff attracted to other stuff?")
"...additionally predicts things that we know to be false."
What, specifically did the Tychonic system predict that was known to be false in the early 17th century? As far as I know, the interpretations of its model were kind of a mess, but the model itself was fine, up to the precision of then-known instruments.
> Tycho admired aspects of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system, but felt that it had problems as concerned physics, astronomical observations of stars, and religion. Regarding the Copernican system Tycho wrote,
>> This innovation expertly and completely circumvents all that is superfluous or discordant in the system of Ptolemy. On no point does it offend the principle of mathematics. Yet it ascribes to the Earth, that hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion, a motion as quick as that of the aethereal torches, and a triple motion at that.
> In regard to physics, Tycho held that the Earth was just too sluggish and heavy to be continuously in motion. According to the accepted Aristotelian physics of the time, the heavens (whose motions and cycles were continuous and unending) were made of "Aether" or "Quintessence"; this substance, not found on Earth, was light, strong, and unchanging, and its natural state was circular motion. By contrast, the Earth (where objects seem to have motion only when moved) and things on it were composed of substances that were heavy and whose natural state was rest
So, the Copernican system was acknowledged to be mathematically superior, and the Ptolemaic system was acknowledged to be a particularly obvious case of special pleading. The Earth was considered exceptional under the Tychonian system because it was too heavy to be constantly in motion -- as a large terrestrial object, its natural state was rest.
Interestingly enough, I remember learning about a Renaissance scientist who did several experiments to the effect that there is no such thing as a "natural state of rest" for terrestrial objects...
Furthermore, the idea that the Earth is exceptional is severely undermined by the moons of Jupiter. From them, you would see exactly what you see from Earth, and you could readily fit a Tychonian model with a sun going around Jupiter -- but why would you? (This is what I was referring to originally, but this particular argument is slightly weaker than I was thinking of.)
I'll also note that, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the Tychonic system wasn't exactly well-established at the time:
> It was chiefly through the influence of the Jesuit scientists that the Roman Catholic Church adopted the Tychonic system, over a period of nine years (from 1611 to 1620), in a process directly prompted by the Galilean telescopic discoveries.
The model that most scientists at the time favored (including those in the Church) was the Tychonic system. In the Tychonic system the planets all revolved around the Sun, but the Sun then revolved around the stationary Earth. This had the advantage of correctly predicting things like the phases of Venus.
The reason that it was preferred over the Copernican system was that it additionally predicted that parallax of the stars should not be observed. At the time astronomers had looked for parallax as a way to test the Copernican system, and had not observed it. This was the strongest point in favor of the Tychonic system. As it happened, the stars were much further away than astronomers at the time realized, so the parallax was much smaller than they could have detected with the instruments of the time. (In fact, it took more than two centuries before parallax was detected.)
But the point is that I think that if any of us were alive at the time and took careful stock of all the evidence most of us would probably come to the same conclusion that most of the astronomers of time did. Namely that, while interesting, the Copernican system did not have as much evidence supporting it as the Tychonic system did. But if Galileo had built a Foucault pendulum instead, it would have been a very different story!
The title of this story alone is problematic, not just its contents, because its a sign of how wrong the conventional wisdom is on this. It accuses scientists of breaking the law with secret code-words.
A more accurate title would have been: "Scientists forced to break the law to access the research they need in order to advance scientific knowledge."
A more provocative but still accurate title would have been: "Scientific progress impeded by corporations extracting economic rents from scientists and taxpayers, to the detriment of humankind."
Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as much to blame as the publisher.
Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
> Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as much to blame as the publisher.
Scientists don't love giving up their rights to Elsevier. Elsevier owns many high IF journals in a number of fields, and publishing in high IF journals is part of how you "prove your worth" and get grants. Scientists give up their rights to Elsevier because that's how the "scientific economy" of their field of study is currently structured.
Professors are "expected" to be published in these journals in large Universities. They basically will never advance their career without be published in a "major journal."
Early career academics are a slave to the system for career advancement; late career (successful) academics are too complacent to want to change. The only way the parent's idea will take root is if established academicians vote with their own writing, and go on a mission to convince others in their sphere of influence.
As you say, to do this as a young researcher is career suicide.
If they have the will and the guts they'll do it or is Elsevier going to cream off taxpayers' money for ever and a day? Gower has said "no" http://thecostofknowledge.com/ - how about a few others?
> If they have the will and the guts they'll do it
The only thing "will and guts" do when all your field's high IF journals are big publishers is give you the boot.
> Gower has said "no"
Gower was a Fields medalist, Royal Society fellow and Shaw selection committee member before saying no, his stand is nice but he's not what I'm talking about.
> how about a few others?
Many have signed the petition and possibly more have actually done the work of trying to set up or raise the profile of open-access journals.
Things would change very fast if consideration for funding and tenure was based strictly on openly published papers. My understanding of current policies is that they basically force scientists in several different areas to produce content for free for Elsevier if they want to have a career at all.
Random guess, but it seems that 50% of journals in the fields I've been in are owned by Elsevier, even if it doesn't appear to be at first. And yes, a publication in an Elsevier or Springer journal rather than a new open-access one can make a difference of prestige that could change which university I work for in the next 4 years, for example.
> And yes, a publication in an Elsevier or Springer journal rather than a new open-access one can make a difference of prestige that could change which university I work for in the next 4 years, for example.
But won't every university you apply to tell you that that isn't the case?
One problem with that is that, as I understand it (I'm not an academic), not citing a relevant paper makes you look ignorant and can lead to accusations of plagiarism or attempts to steal credit; more subtly, it can lead to the reviewer whose paper you didn't cite recommending that your paper not be published. So it's not about being competitive, exactly; it's more about being cooperative. If you don't cooperate, other researchers won't cooperate with you, and your career will founder.
For the most part, I don't think scientists care about the issue, except for being a bit annoyed with Elsevier. Most people don't care about most things that don't affect them directly. Scientists are people too. So rather than invest effort in activism, they mostly focus on their jobs and their families and stuff.
No, everyone hates it. But that is the equilibrium that we're in. Everyone wishes we were in a different equilibrium with open-access online journals, but that's the tricky thing about equilibria -- nobody wants to unilaterally deviate from the status quo.
Some fields (like math) seem to be pulling it off, but it takes a group of leaders in the field to coordinate a change in publishing models.
I think this is happening, if slowly. The impact of open publications is generally known to be much higher. It's only a matter of time until this is accepted as fact by everyone, even the conservative older types who believe that anonymous peer review is a helpful institution.
I'm not a working scientist, so I can't speak to whether or not this is a sufficient platform to bypass journals, but I thought I'd put in a plug for the Center for Open Science. [0]
I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me.
I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.
I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.
I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.
When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard copy...
Several professors I know publish all their papers on their university/government lab hosted website and have never received any take down notices. When you use Google scholar to search for one of their papers there is a link directly to the pdf hosted by them. Many professors feel that the papers are theirs to redistribute as they wish even if copyright says otherwise. But I do understand why some authors might feel wary of this.
It depends on the publisher copyright agreement. With many closed journals, the researcher is free to post a preprint on a personal site or to something like arXiv, but not to post the final version with the journal's "value-added" layout and such.
I think that that certain US government grant money prevents full copyright assignment. These professors are probably fully within their rights to self host copies of their work. This is why I said sometimes legal and sometimes a grey area..
Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such.
I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time.
Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint.
The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'.
When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could.
Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
I concur. I owe my whole career to piracy[0]. Now that I earn money I am happy to buy stuff I need and give back to society, creators, etc. But to a teenager from a middle-class family of a developing country, piracy was strictly about access to otherwise unavailable educational material.
It's an open secret that Adobe and Microsoft had a model of non-enforcing piracy for private use, and I think it's pretty good. It's totally fair to charge business licenses, but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race.
Greed is trying to capture all the value you create. Don't do it. Let others have some, and then they'll happily let you have some of theirs.
> but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race.
Although I doubt Adobe and Microsoft did this out of altruism: By allowing piracy of their software for private use, it became widely used, and at work people wanted to continue using the software they knew -- this time paying for it.
Not only that, but in the case of MSVC/Visual Studio you have a talent feedback loop as well as a financial one. They need people to be pirating it or they'll have no windows developers in the future.
Visual Studio 2015 Professional is available in the meantime for free (as beer) under the name "Visual Studio Community 2015" for private developers and small companies:
They did the great move some years ago by first releasing the compiler part (MS VC++ 2000-something Toolkit) and then later the entire IDE. Having just the compiler part was enough to hook it up to Code::Blocks and ditch the pirated VC++ 6.0 I used before. Another great move was that the released free compiler part allowed for commercial use; some of my friends from amateur gamedev community used that to sell their productions. Such simple moves enabled teenagers to follow their passions, for many of whom it turned into jobs - Polish professional gamedev scene now has many names I recognize from the fun times of amateur creation.
Wasn't the C++ compiler already released as part of the Windows SDK or was that (including the C++ compiler in the Windows SDK) a step that Microsoft didn't take until later on?
I recall it was post-VC++ 6.0. It was big news for us hobby game developers back then, because we finally had another choice than between pirating VC++ 6.0 or dealing with DJGCC and Dev-C++.
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress.
Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.
But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.
They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.
The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
>Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet.
I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet.
Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know.
People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions.
I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so.
Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download.
Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
> I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so.
Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard.
[0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan.
Some libraries also have copying services. I've been trying track down a paper for the Tanimoto similarity. Quoting Wikipedia, "many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference", where [4] is: Tanimoto, T. (17 Nov 1957). "An Elementary Mathematical theory of Classification and Prediction". Internal IBM Technical Report 1957 (8?).
Worldcat says that 10 page report is on a few library shelves. One of them provides scanning services, for about 50 cents per page, and $7 minimum. I should get it in the mail soon.
If the same fees were to apply to your ACM articles, it would cost about $10(!).
I can't claim to know across the world, but in much of Europe you can get a 'visitor' subscription to university libraries for some nominal fee (50 euros or so in my nearest library; hell, enrolling in a Belgian university as a student costs 70 euros per year, which gives you access to the library, e-journals, email, Eduroam, the whole shebang).
I get a little irked every time this topic comes up, and people go on and on about the $30 for every paper. Nobody pays that. Who pays sticker for a car? Yes yes publishers are evil, down with the system, bring out the pitchforks - in the mean time, nobody except a very tiny but very vocal minority in the research community gives a shit. If you'd ask 100 people in the offices around me which one they'd prefer: all journals in the world 'open access' and no more big publishers, or a less crap coffee machine in the staff room, 95 of them would go for the coffee machine.
Maybe people would like to pay if it wasn't $30 but, say, 30 cents. The high price is mentioned not because people pay it regularly, but because of its absurdity.
Regarding the people in the offices around you, I am sorry for you.
The $30 isnt so much a fee as it is a stupid tax. If you are too stupid to go to a library, you have to pay the tax...
What's more, you might be amazed at the lengths librarians will go to help you. Just because it's not on the shelf doesn't mean they don't have access to it or won't get access to it. real science journals are a special case too, they take a lot of space, they get very little actual use, the librarians want them to be read, they'll go above and beyond for a reader.
Are you saying, "if you are too stupid to move out of Argentina"? I think many of us here would take exception to that. And we actually do have a National Library with a few million volumes; it's just that its selection of IBM Internal Technical Reports is relatively thin.
My friend who lives in Lahore, like 6 million other people, is not so lucky; his National Library has only some 0.2 million books, and it's a couple of hours away by car. Unlike many of his countrymen, at least he has a car and doesn't live in a part of the country where "Islamist" highwaymen might kidnap you off the highway for ransom.
Maybe you think he's stupid for not moving to the US. But I assure you that it is not as easy as all that. I haven't seen my parents in five years, and I miss them.
Could you elaborate? I haven't seen any differences in the Swedish library system compared to the US one, and my experiences with the German libraries have also been good.
My brief visits to France, England, Japan, and Brazil have left me deeply unimpressed with their public library systems. Here in Argentina there are bookstores everywhere but they sell almost exclusively fiction (including astrology, psychology, revisionist history, etc.; maybe "matters of opinion" is a more charitable term) and the library system is a poor shadow of what I'm used to even in the poor parts of the US. And of course Micronesia's library system was a joke when I was there, but it doesn't count as "developed".
Based on your clarification, it appears that your comments are opinion based on a couple of brief personal experiences. From your original comment I assumed you were making a broader and more definite statement. Thank you for correcting my assumption.
Regarding the English library system, as JupiterMoon pointed out, the British library provides interlibrary loan services, which is the topic at hand. In fact, I've used it from Sweden.
Interlibrary loan services are wonderful. They were a lifesaver when I lived in a small town of 40,000 people 400 km away from the nearest "city" (of 120,000 people). But they are not a substitute for being able to browse the stacks; it's like the difference between using a web browser and a command-line anonymous FTP client.
> Many universities, including Harvard, have successfully adopted off-campus shelving as a way to meet both their shelving and preservation needs.* Such shelving costs a tenth of what on-campus shelving costs, and it provides nearly ideal conditions for the long-term preservation of library materials. The principal disadvantage of off-campus shelving is that readers cannot browse the material at these facilities.
Perhaps it's more like using gopher than a web brower. ;)
The library is the heart of a university, of course, and generally the best libraries are university libraries. But public libraries are also important — not only for reasons like Stanford's sad policy (and when I visited UPenn one night, they wouldn't even let me into the library because I wasn't a student there, even though I was accompanied by a student) but also because they exist in places where universities don't.
My disappointment in the library systems of other countries that I've visited is composed of two parts: first, there are many fewer and poorer public libraries than in the US; second, there are many fewer and poorer universities than in the US, which limits the available university libraries sharply.
It wouldn't surprise me if Sweden were better than the US in this regard. Sweden has an excellent welfare state, a world-class university system, and if I'm not mistaken, a centuries-long tradition of universal literacy.
But much of the developed world does not have this advantage; Germany, Norway, Benelux, Finland, Switzerland, Canada, Iceland, Israel, and possibly Austria share these attributes, but the US and UK do not have a reasonable welfare state, and Ireland, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Japan do not have the long tradition of universal literacy, although of course their educated elites have been literate for over a millennium, producing a rich literature¹. Countries outside this group (except possibly Singapore and Taiwan) do not even have a world-class university system.
That means that in Brazil, mainland China, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Brunei, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi, Oman, Czech, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and even Hungary, Russia, and Greece, you won't even find the kind of university where you're thinking to look for a good library, let alone the kind of university library you're thinking of. Maybe they have good public libraries (I hear Estonia's public library system is particularly good) but generally I expect not. But these are surely developed countries.
¹ Yes, before a century or two ago the educated elite of Australia and New Zealand lived in England, so perhaps that's a bit of a stretch.
I feel like you have switched contexts, without enough notice.
These comments started because of an article about scientists working around copyright restrictions. This thread started off as a complaint about the cost of getting access to foundational papers in a research field. I pointed out a cheaper mechanism for getting access, via the local library.
Hence, I thought that's what you were talking about, which is why my examples were to research libraries in the US.
I'm going to go back to your original statement, which is "I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!"
I think most people are aware that the US is a wealthy country, and therefore expect that the US library system should be above the world average. That is what you elaborated on now.
But your original statement suggested that the library quality in the US was appreciably above what one would expect for a country as rich as the US.
Yet you listed a number of countries which are comparable in wealth to the US, and which have comparable library systems. (Germany, the Nordic countries, etc.)
Therefore, it doesn't seem like the US's library system is better than what most people would expect.
Had you said "The US has a good library system", I would not have asked for clarification. But you said people in the US don't know just how good it is, even when compared to countries on a similar economic level. Which doesn't appear to be the case.
Oh yes I know about the "haz PDF" option, I was talking about the "legitimate" one (best case scenario under the UCC copyright is life + 25, we lost Peter Landin in 2009, so there's absolutely no chance this stuff is in the public domain)
And the things is (at least where i leave) that Uni pays the fees for the access. The money for the fees come from the govern (and EU). The same govern that also finances the research.
Basically the govern pays twice (if not more) the same thing.
Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees.
It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
How is it a monopoly situation? There are multiple journals out there where scientists can publish their work. They could also start their own journal (open-access if they like) without many barriers.
This is a two-sided market, where the publishers are the middlemen between scientists publishing their results and readers of the papers.
You argue that the side scientists - publisher is a free market. I consider this as dubious because of, say, impact factors, but for the sake of argumentation, I'll accept it for now.
But the really interesting side of the market is not scientist - publisher, but publisher - reader (this is what the original article is all about). And this is part of the two-sided market clearly is a monopoly, since there is no competition between publishers for a given paper, but there is only one publisher that is allowed to sell access to a paper (thanks to the copyright laws).
TLDR: Thanks to the copyright laws one side of the two-sided market is a monopoly.
Ah, I cant criticise a marketstructure that is coinincidental for flaws because there are prices. I should criticise one market participant over another due to reasons. Got it.
Scientific journals used to haven an important role in distributing and coordinating scientific work. A large part of that reason is gone in the age of near instantaneous and free distribution.
The coordination of the process could be done cheaply and pay for a bunch more PhDs instead of a useless middleman.
> Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees.
The market price is
- say 30 $, if you want to get a legal copy
- about 0 $, if you can accept the moral and legal dilemma
Let the market decide...
---
Seriously, because of the copyright laws the market is strongly skewed. I really can't understand how one can believe in free markets and copyright at the same time.
I wasn't complaining about page fees, which are indeed subject to the laws of the market. I was complaining about fees charged for getting copies of the papers, which are governed by government-granted monopolies on producing copies of each paper, known as "copyrights". Those fees are not subject to the laws of supply and demand; the publisher can set them as high or low as it wishes, because you cannot simply go to a different publisher to get the paper if you think the price is too high. Consequently, the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics does not apply, or even come close.
When two different providers of an identical service are charging you amounts that vary by a factor of 5000, you can see that the market is failing to promote public welfare, and so markets are not a good way to organize that part of society.
It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their time dealing with crap like this.
I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles.
This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.
The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).
That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
> … it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles.
I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access world like on arXiv.org.
Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function. Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way one decides who to promote.
At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e.
1. Count the citations.
2. Make a list.
3. Profit.
You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better system.
Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?
Members of the editorial board of scientific journals are not paid. So nothing prevents having a completely free and open access journal, which is peer reviewed. As a matter of fact, such journals already exist in some fields (e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research[1], which is the best journal in machine learning).
Yes, but the editorial board is not the only cost component of a journal. I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
I'll admit my comment was influenced by some proposed models (e.g. in the UK), arguing for the allocation of taxpayer resources to "buy" open access for research.
> I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with good reputation on it, that's an even better piece of evidence. If a paper has interesting content, it will be shared in the community. Also, Google isn't just ranking by a explicit measures, but mostly by PageRank, i.e. a measure how how well a certain item is woven into the network of links (plus possibly hundreds of heuristics). PageRank could likely be applied to a publication system as well. In that case the network links could be co-authorships, associations with accredited universities, and perhaps other things. And let us not forget that the vast majority of researchers are actually truth seeking and concerned about the impact they make on the world. Things might become a little bit noisier, but at the same time the feedback-loops become shorter, as we're seeing it in the machine learning field.
exgrv's commment, the way I read it, was arguing for something less radical: "simply" insourcing the work of the journal publishers, and having it done by scientists (maybe allocating more resources to scientists so that the workload remains sane).
What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to establish relevance, such a model is much less effective at gauging quality (which is the problem, if you want to use bibliometric scores as a way to establish whose careers are to advance). In other term, the outcome of a search for "cloud computing" is certainly pertinent with the subject. That is not how you would choose which cloud service to use.
Of course, it may well be possible that the human judgment component is codifiable in a few hundred/thousand of heustics (sounds like a hard problem, but it's not my field), thus allowing the construction of a good model.
Intuitively I think, the problem is much simpler compared to web search because it's a much smaller graph and each node gets checked against reality in some sense, while on the market and on Google things mostly only get compared with the competition under very obfuscated circumstances with extremely weak feedback loops. PageRank is probably unnecessary for most areas as they are small enough so that specialists can easily keep track of new publications. It could just be a useful tool for listing a lot of publications, but, as I said, measures like citation, review count and reputation of the institution are probably pretty good on their own. It was perhaps misleading that I've mentioned PageRank at all, it was just an idea that I had at the time I wrote the comment.
Fundamentally, we're talking about the dissemination of knowledge. Yes, it is copyright infringement, but calling this "piracy" immediately associates this act with both theft and brutal disregard for the law.[0] That is not what is happening here.
With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy".
> "I don't think it can be equated very easily to theft. Theft is when you take something and the owner loses possession. But in copyright infringement, you don't take anything from other people," Elbakya says. "Many university researchers need access to these papers because subscriptions are very expensive."
Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?
This is 2015. The idea that we need to make sure a company is steeped in ill-gotten profit so that information can be disseminated is absolutely laughable.
The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
Grasping at straws is a strange way to say rolling in money. The Journals are relics for sure, but with the internet their costs went down, and they make a ton of money financed by tax-funded research.
An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting movies, TV shows or music.
>It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there
I actually think this would be fairly trivial.
For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then, anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely download plugins.
This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement ("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and distributes the task of hosting the files.
Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.
This is an excellent argument for piracy as a learning tool and against the current trend in copyright law (see TPP, etc.). I really see no difference between this and someone pirating content with the intent to learn (like my teenage self). I wish our society did more to encourage the extremely few people who actually want to learn, want to better themselves, and have something to contribute to society instead of criminalizing their activities. It'd be one thing if the government provided alternatives, but at least in the US, you won't even get taught basic math properly in many schools, let alone anything that might actually stimulate minds. Is it any wonder then that the government does so much to protect the "intellectual property" (whatever that means) rights of corporations but does nothing to protect the IP rights to scientific research, including research paid for? Even a simple law, requiring government funded research to be publicly, freely available would go a long way, assuming it actually was freely available, not 'freely available for $50 / paper' or whatever the lawmakers want to redefine 'freely' to mean.
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands.
Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
If I were making a secure file request/dropoff operation, I would host a chat room on a TOR hidden service where you could ask for the material in question, and a separate file server where you could upload the file. There would be a client that encrypts the file client-side and uploads it to the service and a client that downloads and decrypts. The uploader would post a link with the key to the forum after uploading. Once the file is downloaded, it's deleted. The two services would share no data with each other and appear as two completely separate services. Of course, then you run into the problem of having to moderate the thing, since you don't want to become a facilitator of child pornography etc.
The opposing argument to Open and Free is that the main argument is that they need money for journals because they are peer reviewed. Peer reviews cost money. The integrity of the journal and science cost money. Therefore we are befitting science by having a pay wall.
So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say they are doing us a service.
Again Open (access) and Free (publication) are largely orthogonal. For instance PLOS journals are Open Access but not Free Publication, the publication fees funding edition and review.
Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Now there is the option of being Free as in Beer but I really believe with the Internet we can have free and open. IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
> Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other.
Orthogonal means independent, not opposing. You can have free and open, you can have free and closed, you can have non-free and open and you can have non-free and closed.
> IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
Be as it may, even with mostly volunteers running a peer-reviewed journal has costs, so unless governments start journal grants of sorts...
That's the origin, the simile is that orthogonal lines represent completely disjoint sets and are uncorrelated, so one can be changed without impacting the other. It's kinda weird, but there you are.
I don't see any problem with having Elsevier manage publications that prevent people from copying their content. Just as long as that content is also available elsewhere for free, if it's publicly funded research.
I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that.
A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around.
In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.
For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact.
Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.
I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself.
I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work.
Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process.
> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed.
- Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in contrast to grant proposal for which we are sometimes paid)
- I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view section, not that much for the academic papers at the end)
- Copy editors never did anything useful to my papers. In CS, we usually submit a nice latex file and they do not really do any work on the layout (it might be different in other fields, where people submit crappy MS Word files).
... so, let's say that the added value of the publisher (even for PLOS) is marginal...
- Biomedicine primarily uses word, and it's a major area of publishing. I'd also contest that many latex files end up "nice" - I've read more than my share of incoherently organized and formatted latex.
- Some of us like printed journals. I subscribe to at least three.
> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free.
I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues.
You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.
Printing is a separate concern to modern publishing - if people want to read paper versions of academic work, they can foot the bill. Academic editors often work free for scientific publishers, and very few journals employ copy editors (though some do). Typesetting for the internet can be automated.
Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the publishers need to be replaced by more efficient ones. See for example Scholastica, who provide the entire journal infrastructure for $10/article. Or the PeerJ, charge just $99/year to publish with them.
Agree, but the publishers will only take those reduced profits if they feel threatened. So start with motivating scientists to choose open access journals if you want to do it the legal way. I don't understand why scientists first pick a journal that takes their rights to their paper away and then offer it for free via "secret codes". Seems to me they are supporting the current, closed system.
> I don't understand why scientists first pick a journal that takes their rights to their paper away and then offer it for free via "secret codes". Seems to me they are supporting the current, closed system.
The reason is that a scientist not doing this would (rightly or wrongly) have fewer publications in the 'best' journals as considered by the rest of their field and by impact and citation measurements, would therefore be less well known and well cited, and would struggle more to succeed. This is wrong and bad and so on, but it's probably widely true.
> but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free
The reviewers work for free. Printing is almost free, and dispensable - nobody actually uses the printed journals and everyone prefers to print out PDFs themselves.
What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist?
Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.
They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals, if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending their conferences.
They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something that is not necessarily an academic skill set.
They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field" and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues - popularity and quality.
Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far more weight because of the associated journals.
Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in addition to targeted searches of the literature.
I upload my papers through Researchgate. I know that it may not be legal to do so, but it is password protected, and hasn't been challenged by too many publishers. Sharing this way makes great sense for the author. You want people to read your paper, and it gives a way to do so. You must create an account, but many papers that would otherwise be blocked can be found this way.
The other trick I recommend people try if they frequently have trouble finding papers is to try EndNote. It is a little expensive, but I found it to be great at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources with my school's access.
I was expecting the secret codeword to be 'preprint'. When I was in academia not too long ago, I would often ask authors for the preprint of this or that paper, and they'd usually send it back promptly.
I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?
If each academic research institution can run its own website, there is no particular reason they could not publish every last research report they produce themselves, and use a common, open-source program to handle the draft commentary, editing, and peer review.
A government publication house would overly centralize things, and would organize research by geography and politics rather than subject matter. Science is a worldwide endeavor, and ought to be insulated from political influence as much as we are able to do so.
And we certainly don't need any more juicy nexus points, dripping with extractable rents, throbbing and pulsating for the benefit of the leeches.
One academic publications office per university or independent lab would certainly cost a bit more in overhead, but nowhere near as much as what is currently lost to the publisher conglomerates for both publication and access.
The aggregation function of the journals could be fulfilled by a nomination and community moderation process among the researchers and students of any particular discipline.
Publishing via university web site would also allow linking to related files, such as the raw data, conference video, audio, or transcripts, executable simulator or demonstration programs, and related research, all with permanent, canonical URLs.
While I am not an academic, I notice that many of the journal-curated publications (that I can read for free) have only static diagrams, whereas if you go to the researcher's web site, you can see animated illustrations, executable programs, and lecture slide decks or videos. When the mission of science is to not only advance the frontiers of human knowledge, but also explain what you did and to disseminate the new knowledge to others, a plain old PDF locked up behind a paywall might not be the best way to do that.
> What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services?
The lowly human desires - prestige, career advancement, money, power. Achieving publications with highly ranked journal is necessary for keeping contracts with university and for grant money coming in your direction. And so lots of researchers get complacent and try not to think too hard about the current system. Changing it for better one may require legal action by the government. Compulsory free copy of publicly funded research paper would be great start.
The obvious solution would be for countries to pass laws that force any publicly funded research to be published for free download in addition to whatever fancy journal the researches submits them to.
It's funny to see something of the outside view. I suspect people reading this on HN are much more likely to understand "I can haz", as well as easily relate to the scientists' point of view.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting
it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other."
... would be the actual quote in its entirety, which describes an inherent conflict between the value of information and the cost of distribution, not "information freedom" as being a law of nature in and of itself.
Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.