If you really want to free research you should do this:
Investigate whether there is an inverse correlation between the freeness of the journal a paper is published in and its popularity (number of citations?). You should control for the reputation of the journal since that could throw off the results.
If you find such a correlation and get it publicized, perhaps that would encourage more researchers to submit to free journals.
Impact factor (# of citations per article in journal) tends to be lower for free journals, since a.) the threshold for publication tends to be lower, and b.) the established journals still have prestige, which largely remains the currency on which scientific reputations and tenure are built. Because most of the big journals don't allow you to retain publication rights after publishing with them, anyone who does big-impact research worthy of publication in those journals faces an exclusive choice between prestige, exposure, and selectivity, or opening their work to the public at the cost of "devaluing" their work. It's a real dilemma--one which publishers are trying to exploit for all they can.
The picture is changing (look at the amazing success of the Arxiv), but I think for-profit, paywalled journals are going to be alive and kicking for quite a while.
Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.
Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?
I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld.
I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it.
The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast.
I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.
Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.
Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition?
This is only one article, amongst thousands of which we do not care of. We do not care of them because they have nothing to do with the field we have chosen to focus on, be that computer science, medicine, history, physics, law, or artificial intelligence. I would rather the money goes into research, than to provide some randomer with the pleasure of reading something they hardly can understand anyway.
I did not read the peer reviewed journal, I do not care to read it, I know little about medicine besides what I was taught in school. The terminology used is different, one word contains entire concepts, there is an entirely different way of thinking in that field, and frankly, it adds no value to me personally. If it did and I could afford it, I would buy it. £30 is what one spends on a Saturday night!
Now if we wished to live in a paranoid world where we do not trust the experts in their field and wish to validate everything our self, then that is a personal choice of perspective.
One can well choose to spend his entire life to learn of every field in this earth. Most people, if not the vast majority of people, if not 99% of people, sooner or later, focus on one field, and perhaps focus further on that field, especially if such field is medicine, or computer science, or law. That is how we work, that is the best system we have found of operating.
I personally do not see anything wrong with the way the system currently works, not wrong in such a way as to justify throwing it out entirely. If you are a doctor, you subscribe, if you are not, then buy the one article you want to read, if you do not want to buy it, then you do not need it.
> Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition?
Why should there be grant money set aside to cover research?
I don't think I'm alone in finding that it's frustrating to have tax payer funded research be hidden behind paywalls that other tax payer funded institutions can access but the general public cannot. We're paying for both sides and not getting the goods.
Those who are interested in the goods however, subsidise those goods. You, or the tax paying public is not interested in those goods, but only the results. Just bare in mind this is only one article. There are thousands of other articles which you personally, let alone the tax paying public cares nothing of.
Knowledge is useful only to those who know how to make use of it.
But my opinion is not wanted, thus, you have your opinion and hold it dearly beside any questions of reason or logics because perhaps I should say if you had such understanding then you would have the liberty to suggest a better system.
Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review?
Because we're already paying for it in journal subscriptions , memberships, and publication fees paid by public institutions. We might as well pay something other than a for-profit organization. Elsevier, for example, does something like $600 million in pre-tax profit per year.
That profit comes, in part, from your tax dollars via research grants and public education funding.
Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students.
Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.
A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld.
If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from.
There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.
>Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.
That's entirely false. If there was a single distribution point that charged a nominal fee, that would be one thing, but to do any significant research you need at least 5 such £30 monthly subscriptions, and no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.
>If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students.
I'd like to meet the professionals that buy these papers. I get the distinct impression it's mostly professors, students, and universities paying these outrageous fees.
Personally, I'm a professional now and if I needed a paper relevant to my work I would buy it. But I don't need it. Very few professionals need any sort of academic papers, especially in CS. We've got the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Github to this very site to get information about trends, and we offer it for free because we know that hiding information is more trouble than it's worth (and it's much easier for us to work when those around us freely share.)
no school subscribes to all journals a student might want.
I went to a crappy (but huge) state university and they did indeed subscribe to ALL of the journals. My family has a good number of academics and this seems to be the case at any large university, regardless of quality.
I went to a ~3000 student private liberal arts college and we subscribed to a handful. 90% of what I needed was out of reach. I suspect there are some economies of scale, but those economies are completely artificial; there's no reason the per-student rate should be different for a small college than a large one.
Well, I suppose there is one: most of the cost is administrative overhead in actually collecting the bill, so it's easier if you've got one bill for 40k as opposed to one bill for 3k
I was a student (now graduated). And I was not alone in lacking needed resources. I had numerous friends in other departments who complained of lacking needed journal articles.
Desirable and necessary resources are different. The entirety of the night in regards to hacker news however has been quite revealing.
This place is no less a waste of time than telly. Your insistence simply proves so. Anyone who has been in a university just knows that they had access to the journals they needed, but perhaps not some they might have wanted to.
Yet regardless, neither helps us in our endeavour. Whether the person publishes all the journal articles, I care little. This is no longer a community. No longer are etiquettes and the culture of the site enforced, it is a play ground instead where populism wins.
That is fine, that is how things have been working. You go there first and leave when so it becomes. Yet I thought naively perhaps that this time it would be different.
It is not. Only in the physical world is it different, only in the physical world do we have the freedom, for in that sphere, nature has had the advantage of many years.
Not even the best and brightest can come even close to it. Though maybe I am just naive to suggest that PG is either of those in regards to the internet. He is of a different generation, of a different age too, in his 40s or 50s, chasing money or whatever he chases.
This is our net to make. Ours to learn the mistakes and implement their solutions.
That's a bit of a retreat from where your argument was.
But yes, I'm sorry HN is becoming such an echo chamber with no regard for honest discourse. In a lot of ways I prefer Reddit, since there's no pretension that the downvotes are anything other than a mindless disagree.
Honestly, I think that pg probably has it backwards, and that comments should be flag-only while posts should have downvotes. Of course, any system is vulnerable to abuse given enough time.
On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficient papers to get the top grades.
Second, I do not know what profession you are in, computer science is very different from medicine. To start with, the latter requires actual physical stuff, you know, people you can experiment with, or monkeys, and substances, like bleach, and an actual physical space, rather than simply a computer and some time.
I understand that my opinion is in the minority. I understand too that most of you bright smart angels are trying to find loopholes in my reasoning or arguments. I am not however pleased at all with having the entire people of reason and intelligence set against like leaches.
This is a discussion. Not of an adversarial kind, but of a collaborative nature, where people of reason and intelligence try to arrive at a conclusion, rather than win one over. If I gather this wrong, then that is my bad. My intention however was to suggest as to how things taking in consideration practical matters, matters of principle, matters of a complex nature and combined by my own self, derives at simply copying a journal article and putting it on your web page to be no different than my buying the application you sell and putting it on my web page for free for all others to use as they please.
If reason is dead in this place and what counts is the "I am right", then that is fine.
>On your first point. I was a student and during that time I had access to all the papers I needed, sufficent papers to get the top grades.
Where did you go to school? From my experience yours is most atypical.
I don't sell applications. I configure and make slight modifications to free applications, or applications my employer pays for (and in my experience the ones that charge have negative value from my perspective, while the free ones save me hours of time.) So feel free to copy my code and documentation and put it all online. Those that aren't available online are only closed because I felt my clients/employers wouldn't appreciate their free availability. You would be giving me a great 'out' to give back to the community.
But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition.
While I didn't downvote him, I agree with the downvoters. His substantive claims about how the research/peer review system works -- upon which is entire argument is based -- are factually incorrect.
(I really wanted to write a reasoned rebuttal, but the more I read your posts here the less I can figure out exactly what you've intended to say. Maybe some of this disagreement is due to a misunderstanding over writing.)
There are quite literally thousands of relevant journals for a college to subscribe to, and institutional access is fantastically expensive. In fact, the cost of journal access here in the US has expanded year over year far faster than inflation or any other information resource, and now consumes the majority of library budgets at many colleges.
That "free access" you were talking about for students? Physical Review alone runs from $17,000 to $32,000 annually. Now imagine maintaining a few hundred of those subscriptions.
On the other side of things, I have published in Physical Review Letters, and was disillusioned with the editorial/peer review process. You're hopelessly constrained for length, but asked to remove key sentences while expanding abbreviations. Because it's extremely difficult to explain your work in such a short space, your reviewers can focus on details you know deserve explanation but simply can't include for brevity--or worse, misunderstand your research entirely.
Let's face it: this is only a problem for dead-tree publishers. We could double the page limits for online articles at negligible cost, and I would argue, decreased difficulty for reviewers and referees.
Some people have raised more political concerns about the review process, but I don't understand those as fully.
[edit] I should make it clear that I greatly value the work being done by APS and journals in organizing, qualifying, and sharing high-value correspondence. I simply believe there may be a space for open-access journals as well.
I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.
You mean the same one that google uses for, amongst other things, to measure authority?
I am fine with kicking the old system into oblivion. I am not fine with doing so before suggesting a new system however. I simply do not see how, in this chaotic internet where everyone has an opinion and is able to communicate it to the entire world, we can differentiate between objective solid stuff, and mere speculation.
If we are for freedom, then lets us have such freedom. Let us not frown at wikileaks if they publish deep and damaging secrets, let us not be defensive when our own content is concerned and copied, let us so too resist any attempts of the real law, say the law of defamation to apply to the internet, let us be cool with bittorrent and the way it distributes freely our content.
If that is the internet we wish, then fine, let us be the pioneers and disrupt all older notions.
If the above is extreme however, then let us be impartial and judge where the line ought to be not from a selfish perspective, not from an emotional or ideological perspective, but from a rational, detached, without favour or fear perspective.
That is the choice of our generation, but I submit, we can have only one of them. We can not be hypocrites when our own interests are concerned and guard them ferociously, yet fight to undermine the interests of others.
Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.
>>
No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher.
Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?
>>
Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site.
I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year.
This isn't news, nor is it necessarily even exciting. There are thousands upon thousands of chemicals that destroy HIV (bleach is a good example), the tricky bit is working within the confines of the human body. Delivery, dosing, etc, etc, etc. As far as drug efficacy is concerned, those issues far outweigh anything else.
Unless you are a drug researcher, ignore news of this sort, when you start seeing drug trials then you can start paying attention.
The catch is, I guess, that the chemical here is a protein. We already have TRIM5a in our bodies, it's just not the right allele. Unlike the antiviral action of bleach, this is a mechanism that already works within the bodies of other primates (rhesus monkeys).
Among other possible developments, this might prove the killer application for gene therapy, which has made steady progress in recent years:
Ah, precisely, the lab is not the human body. The fact that you can kill HIV with X in the lab is meaningless. Bleach does a quite adequate job of that. However, we care about in vivo efficacy, and that's qualitatively a different problem. For every thousand drugs that seem promising in isolation in a petri dish (e.g. killing cancer cells and not damaging human tissue) perhaps only a handful make it to human trials, and then not all of those prove effective (or completely safe).
If every new substance that killed HIV or cancer in the lab made the news then you would not have time to read about anything else, there are more than you could imagine. Substances at the "kills X in the lab" stage are generally only of concern to researchers, because the chances that they'll turn into a "cure" are extremely low.
Buying a lottery ticket isn't news. Winning the lottery is. This sort of thing is the former, not the latter.
I am sorry, perhaps you are allergic to monkeys, but I did mention them, and I did mention that bleach was not tried on monkeys and succeeded. Monkeys that is, not labs.
This is a protein that monkeys produce naturally, humans too, except HIV has evolved a resistance to the human version. There has been no research involving giving any animal this protein (even monkeys) and seeing results.
This doesn't represent any great progress toward a "cure". You can't administer proteins orally because they will be broken down by the immune system. If people start injecting monkey proteins into their bloodstream their immune systems are pretty likely to freak out, so they'd have to go on immuno-suppressive therapy, which rather defeats the point and may be far too dangerous to attempt with HIV in play. As likely as not, if this research is to come to anything (sans magical ultimate control over human genetics and immune reaction) it'll come from development of a drug that mimics the active site of this protein.
In short, we have not the slightest clue today whether this track of research will produce results in the form of effective treatments for HIV infection or whether it will come to nothing.
Is a $225K microscope supposed to be expensive or inexpensive for achieving this? Seems weird to mention that in the introduction. Why not include that they work in a $10M research building?
Because we have not heard of a $225K microscope before - thus the microscope must be well good - but have heard of $10M research building and actually expect the latter.
I'm sure the vast majority of the readers of this article have also not heard of a $10K, $100K or $700K microscope either which is why it's incongruous to have the price in the first sentence of the article without any context.
Here are many other microscopes the prices of which you may not have heard. Is it enlightening?
There are only seven microscopes there which are more expensive.
This is journalism of course, but there is no need to discredit everything simply because you can word it in such a way as to make it sound stupid.
Personally, once the sum for the microscope was mentioned I was able to judge that the research is quite serious, has the latest technology and advantages of the latest technology and thus give me more confidence in their findings. Is it such a bad thing to use facts to make a story credible?
The point is that there are a range of microscope prices. The one they used falls somewhere in the spectrum of prices of lab microscopes I'd expect scientists to be using routinely. Mentioning it in the lead sentence of the article makes it seem notable for some reason. Maybe it is, but it's impossible to know without any context.
Aside from its price, does it have some unusual capability that enabled them to make this discovery? That is the kind of fact which would make the article more informative. When it's possible to image molecules with a device you can build for under $100, knowing the cost of the equipment someone used isn't very useful. It's analogous to an argument from authority.
I understand finely why your criticism might be a valid point, however, when all comments take the same shade that your criticism does, we start looking for the trees and miss the forest.
If you can build something for $100, yet the same thing they used costed $250,000 to build, ok let us even say for good measure it costed $25,000 and the rest was inflated, compared to $100 it must be a well awesome product, way superior than what you could build, ten times, 25 times, and if we are to trust the actual figure, 250 times better than what you could built.
The point of the article is most probably that it is the latest technology anyway. I mean, it is fine to look out for these flaws, but something much grater happened there, they actually discovered something. If all we get from comments is flaws flaws and the opposite down voted, then this community simply is not working.
Readers of a peer-reviewed article are, I think, willing to stipulate that the authors of the article are using adequate equipment. Probably most of the researchers of submitted articles which the reviewers criticize or reject use the same equipment.
The price of the equipment is not a factor in the credibility of the work. It does not make it more or less credible or flawed in any way. It is unusual to see the price of the lab equipment mentioned - that's all.
No. But Virology is and its inclusion there is deferred until the third paragraph. If the point you are trying to make is that you are a representative audience member for this article and you find it more compelling that they used expensive equipment than that their result was featured on the cover of a peer-reviewed journal, I think we can agree that the the writer of the Loyola Medicine press release has taken the full measure of his readership.
Cute, but one way of thinking of it is that "the human version doesn't kill HIV". The other way of thinking about it is, "HIV has already evolved to avoid it".
Ohh right cool, geeks feeling awkward when sex is compared to pleasure?
Dude, sex is pleasure, indeed it is one of the highest pleasure!
It is not just poor African orphans who get aids. In fact the reason why so much effort is put into it is because it is not just poor African orphans in a far away land. It is you and me and anyone else who could potentially get aids in a drunken night in a club, or park, or maybe even after weeks of flirting with a girl and in a fit of a moment stuff happen.
I suppose however you can not beat crying, but think of the children.
I say it again, what on earth is wrong with HN. Actually, I'll do an Ask HN.
Ok, this is a reply to mquander on this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628106 (unfortunately I do not know how to link directly to the post and the reason why I am not replyin there is because I can not.
I would not like to see this community as a place where I can validate or discredit the thoughts I already hold. I am only 22 and wish much to grow. In those areas where I might not provisionally want to grow, I write a diary, it is a fine way to speculate about the knowledge one has in his own space.
Perhaps this is desire speaking more than reason, but in this place more than other I have found people who are of my intellectual level, who are inquisitive, naturally curious to learn about such matters, such as to use the easy example, what matter is made of.
So when I suggested, what is wrong with people who engage in orgy sex being protected from HIV, I was not making a point of the kind which seems that people might make, that is of the intention to suggest that it is fine to have orgy sex. I am not fine neither however with orphan kids in Africa being held somehow as angels for whom we must all fight, and ignore the reality which lurks in our street. Sex should be free for all. I do not see how that can possibly be a frowned upon proposition. I do not see why we should be free to put on a hierarchical scale the position that children would occupy with that of sex orgies. I do not see either on a purely theoretical, philosophical, rational or logical manner why such children should attract our sympathy more than the 18 year old naive girl or boy who simply made a mistake. Are we all the sudden putting life on a hierarchical scale?
But of course with all the mighty brains that might lurk these pages, such matters deserve no consideration. Down voting is much easier, than inquiring, counter arguing, suggesting alternative views. It is simply easier to censor dissenting views which one hardly understands than put one self in that child like curious position of wishing to learn such as asking well why must it not be like this, well why do you think so.
I personally know my opinions, I know my thoughts, I know my reasoning and perception. That is not why I frequent these pages. I come here to learn of other's rational reasoning, to learn of the way others rationally perceive things, to be in that cutting edge, where reason and logic reigns supreme, where emotions is not taken in consideration, where one discusses rather than asserts their authority, where the community discusses in the free spirit of reason.
We have a great thing here. It currently is outside of the mainstream eyes, yet influences the "opinion makers" for the opinion makers are people of our intelligence. Yet, this is becoming a community of assertions, a community where are found those fallacies men of intelligence know to guard, such as marketers cheating the system, in uniform, each of them starting their title with Why is this so, not quite asking, instead, following it with their opinions, opinions which I have to guard against calling them bluff due to their physical presence in the community. Their vocal and crowd reputation might be free to set the agenda and culture, and challenge us to keep it so free, keep it so unguarded, argue against any cultural impositions.
I have used this net thing since Google was born. There is often birth and death. PG foresaw this day, and this day is here. A great shame and loss for in these pages the mighty and brilliant are contained. yet the might of PG could not withstand the fortunes of nature, or maybe, just maybe, PG made grave mistakes, for man is chaotic, and if man wishes reason, man devises a system, a system which is utterly lacking in these pages, where irrationality most certainly must rain supreme, unless rational men act to tame it.
I've unfortunately revealed myself for the inappropriate person that I am... Whilst it is not fair, it the rules that those with influence make as they hold the communal metric of quality and content value.
Here's a good Wikipedia article on the protein. The gene for this protein is in humans, it just doesn't target HIV in humans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM5alpha
http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf
(I intend to do this regularly; see bio.)