Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.
Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?
You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.
That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?
To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."
This is the single best tip I've read about anything in the past six months[1]. Here's why:
In 2012, I graduated from dental school in debt up to my EYEBALLS[2], and look, I can NOT afford the per article fee required for me to form my own opinions on important dental topics like implantology, oral surgery, adhesive bonding, high strength porcelains. I've had to rely on reading literally tens of thousands of forum posts[3] by dentists to sort out the totally-wrong from the quite-valuable information, to see if the "thought-leaders" (the well-known dentists who are paid to write articles) are supported by fact.
I sent a letter to the dean of my dental school about being able to read primary lit articles like I could in school, here's a quote from the letter: "As you are undoubtedly aware, one of the School’s objectives in its mission statement is a devotion of “time and resources to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge.” Considering this goal, it is frustrating for the School of Dentistry to espouse the value of scientific research yet deny alumni access to the primary literature." I received a very polite non-answer and no action in the two years since I sent it. Ef that.
I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.
So, sillysaurus3, you finally gave me the tools to round out my collection of dental primary literature articles in Pages 2.7.3 (per the second footnote of this post, you will note that I can not afford to upgrade to Papers 3). Because of your post, I can become a better dentist, faster, with fewer errors.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
[1] And I became a father four months ago.
[2] Seriously, my student loan payments are 2.7x my house payment. 35% of my after tax income is student loan payments. It's... sad.
[3] DentalTown.com ... the good, the bad, and the ugly in dentistry. Just don't go on their political forums. Good God, what a bunch of fools.
I worked with a fantastic implantology startup (http://bioimplant.at) up until a few months ago, and it was illuminating to discover just how much of the implant industry is a racket.
Most surprising of all was the casual ignorance of the majority of 'dentists'/'implantologists' on the DentalTown implants forum. I'd certainly never want any of them in the vicinity of my mouth.
As for these institutions trumpeting their devotion to the 'dissemination of new knowledge', get in touch with Dr Pirker at BioImplant, and ask for his point of view on the subject...
> I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.
I so hope you replied enclosing your previous correspondence as your reason to decline.
No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles.
Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics.
The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright.
Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access.
I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
That's just one piece to "fair use". In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
* the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
* the nature of the copyrighted work;
* the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
* the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It doesn't have to pass all those tests but it likely will need to pass more than just one of them.
Fair Use is an affirmative defense. That is: it's not a right to use copyrighted works, but, in the event infringement is alleged, it may be invoked as a defense.
Specifically the language of US statute is "the factors to be considered shall include". Which can be read as also allowing other considerations. Though I don't know offhand of specific legal gloss or caselaw demonstrating otherwise. The Wikipedia article you cite has that specific claim flagged as "citation required" at this time.
It can be, but it being educational certainly doesn't make it fair use. If this was the case, no text book, teacher's curriculum book or documentary could be copyrighted. I doubt publishers who work in the education realm would be happy with this (and I'm not just talking about cartel level college text books here, but Kindergarten curriculum all the way on up).
This has been litigated in a number of "copy shop" cases (the most important involving UT and Elsiver if I'm not mistaken, but I can't look it up just now) and this is almost certainly not fair use.
Circumventing the fee is in no way fair to the corporation trying to charge the fee, especially when the corporation expressly wants to force each of those people to pay the fee. I can't rip off a book for my personal education. Same with an academic article.
No matter how much we wish the world was different, that's how the law is currently set up.
Bad example... people can and do buy books, and let anyone who comes over to their place read them. They even let complete strangers take the books home for a short time, you just have to fill out a form to get a card from them first.
The fact that digital copies are rather easier to loan out, and the fact that you don't much care if you get the copy back, shouldn't make /r/scholar illegal. It might, but it shouldn't.
Without going this far, I personally think civil disobedience is ok in that case. How can you change the law, if the law is absolute? (I've noticed that this is a rather controversial opinion though.)
> Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
>Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
Thanks for the link. This resource has saved my hide more than once during my time as a university student.
Also, to anyone with access to scientific literature: We welcome you to "pay it forward" and fulfill some requests on <a href="https://reddit.com/r/scholar>/r/scholar</a> yourself.
"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."
Thank you for bringing this up -- this is a HUGE point. Publishers getting 12 months exclusivity really hurts in our connected era. The fact that this provision exists suggests to me that publishers have all their value crammed into the first days, weeks and months of a paper's reporting. After that, might as well give it away.
Thus the kudos for the Gates Foundation. Access now versus 1 year from now is a big deal for our interconnected era.
Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade.
The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods.
Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move.
Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.
That's a step, but that's just NIH and isn't instant access. I'd like to see instant access for all government funded research (which would count NSF, DOE, NASA all public universities, etc etc).
The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.
Slightly offtopic, but isn't it a bit ironic that NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NIH (Not Invented Here) both make perfect sense in this thread!
The Gates Foundation is pushing for a lot less NIH syndrome and a lot more reuse I hope.
I'm a little nervous about forceful approaches though. There are outcomes that come from a culture of compliance, and there are outcomes that come from more organic dynamics. I think the latter will usually produce better results.
IE, I would prefer that the scientific community just take publications less seriously if the underlying data in not available similarly to how they would treat publications that are not peer reviewed.
The goal is to improve science. But if the actual publications and researchers are motivated by Gates-compliance or Government-compliance, that could get derailed.
Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers.
This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits.
However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead.
A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.
If there was an agreement between some major funding agencies to insist on that, not just US Govt but UK and Europe too then it would probably be enough to switch everything over. It'd get my vote.
It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat people who are already effectively giving their work away. Yes, journal economics and so on, etc., but something's got to give here.
$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of-open-acces... So it's interesting to see the (at least short-term) winners in the rise of APC-based open access are still the same big publishers, at least for now.
The thing with math (and abstract CS) is that it's generally purely logic. In principal you should be able to write (at least verify) an entire article with no outside references as it is all logical deductions, it's armchair science in that sense (no negative connotations meant).
But if you're going to write an article on say quantum computing or confocal microscopy, to name random things, you are going to need outside references to experimental work, history, best practices, open debates, etc. And that is usually where the errors slip in, how many people actually check the sources properly?
They're also usually pretty terrible when it comes to modern science things, but I suppose that can be attributed to a small group of people actually knowing about those things in the first place.
This is for a very narrow definition of maths. Also it's rare that a paper is completely comprehensive. Some proofs are usually defered to other papers.
Wikipedia - and encyclopedias in general - are good sources for established works, not the cutting edge. I think this applies to computer science as well. The CS material on Wikipedia that you would expect to find in an undergrad curriculum is excellent. But the treatment for the research areas I am familiar with is not good. That, however, is to be expected - we're still figuring it out!
I think the open data approach, where readers do not pay, but authors do, shows who really is the customer in the academic publishing business: the authors who must publish to advance in their career.
It used to be that the reader, as someone who needs reliable information in a field, payed a journal so that the people could work for guaranteeing the quality of the articles.
Now the authors pay the journals to rubber stamp their articles with an often cargo-culted peer review, so that they can keep receiving grants.
I am all for giving free access to information; but if you want reliable information in a competitive field such as academia, where people have all incentives to cut corners, cook data, embellish results etc., you have to pay someone to do it.
$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.
> $5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive
This is not true, $5k is a lot of money. It is certainly more than what traveling to a conference cost! I'm in France, and even going to California for a week, including plane tickets, accommodation, food, and conference registration is less than $5k. The thing is we are sometimes told to target journals rather than conferences because "there is no more budget this year" for instance. If we had to pay $5k to publish in journals we would just be told not to publish in these journals.
It depends on the country. In many countries funding agencies will just not give you $5K to pay for open access fees. Conferences that involve intercontinental travel are already prohibitive for many academics, by the way, and more than two people going is quite a luxury. In my university, the most normal thing to do if we get several papers at a conference is that a single person goes and presents them all, and many research groups don't do conferences in other continents (or only when they have some international coauthor that can go).
I totally agree, I'm just saying that often the cost for conferences is also high/comparable. Here $5k is intended for a major journal. Similarly is for conferences, I remember traveling from Italy to the US only for ACM CCS (one of the top conferences in security). For "standard" conferences the budget was "standard" :) Again, I won't repeat it enough, I'm not saying is good paying for openness.
But those are not the fees the Gates foundation are going to pay. They are talking about the somewhat lower fees payable to open-access journals. E.g., some $2000 for PLOS journals, if I remember correctly.
What you describe appears to be the opt-in open-access option provided by commercial academic publishers such as Springer or Elsevier. If you ask me, this option is probably there so that they can say they accommodate open access; they don't really expect many researchers to pay them.
Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication.
Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost.
My discipline is conference-heavy; all the copyediting and layout generally falls to assorted grad students and other underlings at whichever institution hosts the particular conference that year.
The major publishers (who need to get involved to have the proceedings indexed and "counted") get everything ready to publish online (well, they do slap a cover on the thing and get an ISBN) after the review process and technical process is done, and still try charge for access to the articles.
> I believe copyediting and layout is paid, however.
I've published in Nature Physics, Physical Review Letters, PRA ... and we did 99% of the copyediting and layout (with LaTeX and unpaid, of course). The editor would correct a few typos, modify the layout slightly (1h of work tops) and that was that.
Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays".
The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.
When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.
This year; it was IEEE, which counts as "traditional" for my field. Computer science is different from most other science and engineering though, since most of our conferences and journals are run through our professional organizations (ACM and IEEE), not a for-profit company.
Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers are open access, so you end up paying one more time…
I'm insisting here on the fact that publishers attempt to melt the notion of "open access" and "gold open access" with author processing charges, but this is manipulative propaganda (and sadly it works, lobbies at EU and in the US succeed in convincing politics and funding agencies that they have to pay to publish in "open access").
Conflating OA with APCs isn't a nefarious PR campaign by the paywall publishers (disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one). It's the only way that anyone has shown is a sustainable model (so far). PLoS is the prime non-profit example, Hindawi is a for-profit OA example, and there are countless others that all focus on APCs being the mechanism to sustain OA publication (some call them different things, like PeerJ's membership model). Granted, I'm sure you can find examples of individual societies choosing to provide a high quality OA journal without the use of APCs, but that's the exception, not the rule. But overall the meteoric rise (and financial success) of non-profit PLoS seems like the biggest contributor to "OA = APCs".
I really think what you say here is deeply ideological. As I explained in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8657030), there exist ways to have high quality OA venues at a fraction of the cost per publication that are demanded by gold/APCs OA publishers. You can read more about these models by googling for Diamond Open Access and Platinum Open Access (and see very successful and large scale exemples such as SciELO and revues.org).
I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.
Sorry for the messed up formatting, I used a star in the parenthesis and at the beginning of the second paragraph to mark a footnote. I can't edit it anymore.
To me, $1000 per article sounds insanely low. PLoS is a non-profit founded for the purpose of publishing open-access journals. They charge between $1350 and $2900, depending on the journal, and only one journal is less than $2200. Another open-access publisher, BMC charges over $1900 for most of its journals. Do you think that PLoS and BMC are very inefficient? Are there _any_ large-scale open-access publishers that charge less than $1000? I don't count low-volume journals where the administration work is done by professors on donated time that would be valued at more than the cost of hiring a professional.
First I would like to show the fallacy of your reasoning: we're discussing the unreasonableness of the current price of APCs for open access publications, and you are justifying its reasonableness by giving the current prices.
Now I think you are thinking about this the wrong way. Nobody is denying that publication has a cost. But take all the money that universities around the world spend in subscriptions, add all the money that is paid in APCs. With that kind of money you could laaaaargely support many publishing platforms and professional librarians and technicians to manage, improve and maintains articles metadata and the platforms.
The remaining amount of money (which would be most of it in my opinion) could be used to actually fund research and higher education.
But let's be even wilder! Consider that, rather than being owned by a publisher who's main job is making money, each journal is owned by its editorial board (i.e., the scientific committee composed by the researchers who actually do the peer reviewing work for this journal as part of their researcher work (they're not paid for this task in addition to their salaries)). Now with relatively cheap¹ technical platforms (such as arXiv, HAL, revues.org, easychair, sciencesconf, SciELO, …), we would have everything we have now² for almost free. And publishers could act as contractor (and would be in competition against each other for quality and price) when we want professional editing and paper prints of some journal volumes. If in addition to that the papers use free content copyleft licenses such as CC-BY-SA, then when any university choose to spend a little money to get a professional edition of some papers everyone benefits.
¹ These platforms are not that cheap in fact, but they cost nothing compared to the current cumulated spending in subscriptions etc.
² Many publications todays are actually not professionally edited, publishers actually take the camera-ready version of the authors and just put the PDF online. So their job mainly consist in hosting PDFs, yet they get a freaking awful lot of money for that.
I agree with you that incumbent commercial publishers are sucking up a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Where I disagree is on the specific numbers. It's not about the publishing platform or physical printing but the administration of journal's operations. The editorial board and the referees work for "free" (which actually means paid for by someone else, usually universities), but the management and administration does not.
I point to PLoS as essentially the model you're asking for. It's a non-profit publisher started by open-access advocates working as researchers. There are no investors making a profit and they're mission is to spread open-access as a model, and they end up charging $2200+ per article for most of their journals. If that's the number they came up with, then I'm led to believe that that's what it costs to publish a journal, at least in the biosciences. As I said, there are small journals that operate for free, but if you look at large-scale open-access operations, started by idealists, I don't think you're going to find any that sustainably gets by with article charges less than around $1500.
For comparison, when I looked at Elsevier's finances, it seemed that they're charging roughly $5000 per article and half of that goes to their operations and half is profit. So their costs are roughly the same as PLoS, but they charge twice as much in order to make a substantial profit.
As for why I felt the need to correct you, I think it's because I think in general people ignore the real monetary costs associated with open-access publishing. I believe that author-pays open-access is the way of the future, but getting there will mean that researchers will have to find ways to pay these fees when they haven't had to pay before. In principle, this just involves redirecting money from subscriptions to pay author charges and there'd even be money left over, but actually performing that switch across thousands of institutions is not simple. Too often I run into the attitude that for-profit publishing is charging money for a trivial job, and so people wonder why it hasn't been replaced. However, the truth is that they're performing an important and real task with real costs, while also over-charging for it, and that's not going to be replaced overnight.
I guess this varies a lot across domains, but in computer science for instance, most of the management and administration is done by researchers too, using platforms such as EasyChair for example. So there isn't any cost here either. At the end when all the work is done, the publisher receives the work and only has to put its stamp on it. Okay I may be exaggerating: last time I published in a Springer journal they did two additional things to my paper: they changed the page number color from black to blue, and they changed all the internal references to other section from "Sec. n" to "Sect. n"… Clearly that must have cost the $3500 in APCs that they asked to make the paper open access.
Of course neither me nor my lab could afford that so I just went with the regular way, signed their fucking copyright release form while cursing a lot against them, and in the end didn't really care because in my field (cryptology), most of the papers are on the IACR ePrint Archive even before they are published (including mine) and they are updated there when they change.
So, my personal experience and my research on the subject (I have done a lot of work on open access, see http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html which is only available in French for now) say that no, the publishers work is most of the time not that important: for instance in my case if the conference or journal just published a list of links to the accepted versions of the paper on the IACR ePrint archive, the cost of publishing would decrease drastically and the quality of the publication would not change at all.
We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free.
As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced, not that the prices should be zero, as you somehow concluded.
"Go publish it on your blog."
See, I've actually done that. I can tell you what happens. A large subset of people don't believe something has been published unless it's in the scientific literature. People end up writing papers which say things like "the first comparison between X and Y". I write to them pointing out several previous blog publications which report the analysis, to be told that they knew about one of them, but didn't consider it sufficiently academic to count as a real publication.
Publishers make their profits because a lot of people, including those who hire or fund academics, believe that a publisher's imprimatur is essential to being a publication.
This is not completely invalid. Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.
So if you publish on your blog, it's not likely that people will know about your work.
If you want to advance career in science that has a strong academic orientation, then it's very hard to do so by only publishing blog posts.
Therefore, if you don't like it, change the system. Which is what this debate has been about for the last 15+ years.
Just a remark: actually Google Scholar indexes everything that resembles a publication. For instance it indexes PDF linked from the "research" page of my personal website: if you search for "rauzy ARMv7-M" for instance [1] you'll find a preprint paper that is publicly only available on that web page.
"resembles a publication" is an interesting concept, though point taken that it indexes more than just articles published in a journal.
One paper I'm thinking of compared implementations of two different algorithms, and showed that for chemical data VF2 was several times faster than the Ullman algorithm for subgraph isomorphism. A couple of years earlier, two of the free software projects in the field did the same analysis, with the same conclusion. Both published their results on their respective blogs/wiki, and changed the internals to use VF2.
These don't resemble a publication in a way that Google Scholar can discern.
It's a bit annoying to me in that the scientific literature is supposed to be "self-correcting", in the sense that I could publish a followup paper highlighting some of the pre-history. But the journal I'm thinking of is an OA journal, with no letters to the editor or similar section. The only way to update the literature is to pay ~$1,000 for a full-sized paper, or convince some other journal (... or arxiv? Hmm...) to publish a correction piece.
> Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.
Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?
I have considered it. However, I work in cheminformatics, which doesn't really fall under "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics". I don't see an appropriate place for my work.
For example, under Quantitative Biology you'll notice a lack of pharmaceutical chemistry, toxicology, or pesticides, which are closely related areas to the types of work I do.
Searching out of curiosity, I found http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 as an example of something in my field. It's under the catch-all "Computer Science > Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science", so that's a possibility.
There is some toxicology under metabolomics, but that focused on expression data, not structure-based prediction. There's another tox paper filed under "Mathematics > Statistics Theory", again based on gene expressions.
There's no history of people using arxiv.org in my field. If people don't like to cite blog publications, I don't know if they would like to cite preprints. Something to find out the hard, slow way, I guess.
This is important, but what would be interesting is whether they will pay open access fees on top of your grant, or let you pay open access fees with your grant. The first option would obviously be preferable, especially since you can easily be publishing work after using up your direct grant money.
Essentially it's the same thing, it's just about who is responsible for what part of the budgeting. E.g. You get $100k of which $4k can only be used towards publishing expenses vs you get $100k and promise to publish open access and figure out the alotment on your own.
This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading research papers?
I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wanted to reference was behind a paywall, to the point that I lost all interest in even trying to gain access. I'm sure my own laziness plays a role, but I feel like the restricted access trained me to think research papers are for academics and scientists and it's not worth the effort to try reading them.
Now I'm a professional Software Engineer and I can count the number of research papers I've read on my hands. I wonder how much better off the next generation of knowledge workers will be as access becomes more open.
I find that the practice of reading any given stream of data without some directed filtering on my own part is relatively low.
But once you do find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful.
I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years, and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful.
The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg...
Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1) Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which posts its data reports online.
The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having).
What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest, follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations. Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally available, which are very useful.
Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including, ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist and libertarian organizations).
Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are greatly wanting.
When I did my MSc dissertation on methods to improve OCR error correction, and had to pick a set of OCR engines to test, it was illuminating to see just how badly e.g. gocr and ocrad fared vs. Tesseract (which started out closed source) and commercial products (this was years ago so the situation may have changed).
In that field it was clear that even relatively basic methods from the literature had not yet made it into open source "organically" and it was first the open sourcing of Tesseract that appeared to start to make some of the algorithms more widespread.
There are many niches like that, but you can also easily spend the entirety of your software engineering career never touching on areas where the research papers will be particularly critical to you.
It also depends on whether there are many "bridges". E.g. in areas like distributed computing that are hot fields in the tech industry, a lot of the research gets jumped on pretty quickly by people that implement the algorithms presented and/or nicely digests it into blog posts for us, and for most people it's then sufficient to "just" track that, unless you want to be at the true cutting edge of the field.
I like reading research papers, but frankly it is mostly for my own curiosity rather than because it's a necessity.
I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work.
For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious)
I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat.
Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical.
I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.
It's not a perfect solution but it sure does head in the right direction. If the perception can be changed so that "serious" science with big donors is always published openly and only rinky-dink "school" science is published behind paywalls because it's just "publish or perish" schlock it will be a huge win.
Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel that with proper management, and digital distribution, that a project like this could 'disrupt' conventional journals.
The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it cheaper (PeerJ, PLoS One, etc) and struggle for many years to build up the prestige.
I believe that the prestige of a journal is mainly defined by the members of the editorial board. So if you can convince members of the editorial board of prestigious journals to resign and join your new open access journal, it can very rapidly become very prestigious.
That is what happened in machine learning in 2001, when forty editors of the journal 'Machine Learning', published by Springer, resigned to join the open access 'Journal of Machine Learning Research', which was created in 2000. Today, JMLR is much more prestigious than Machine Learning (impact factor of 3.42 v.s. 1.46 in 2012).
eLife is one of the few journals that pays peer reviewers.
There's a huge divide between different types of peer review right now. There's the typical peer review you get in a prestigious "traditional" journal, which includes a review of the scientific method and also the "importance" of the work (is it a new/original work, does it move the field forward, are the results groundbreaking, etc etc). Then you have what's becoming the norm for OA megajournals, which has been pioneered by PLoS One, which focuses exclusively on the methodology (ie is it good science, regardless of "importance"). To put it bluntly, that's an easier and cheaper way to review a paper. I'm not at all arguing it's the wrong way, there's a solid case that pre-publication peer review should be methodology-focused and we should let post-publication review of some sort sort out the "importance" factor of a paper later.
So in these two types of peer review, the "traditional" version that assesses for importance will likely lead to a higher chance of a higher impact factor for your journal, since you're assessing articles based on their impact on the field (theoretically leading to more citations in the long term). Couple that type of peer review with open access (like eLife is doing) and you get a really good formula for producing a high impact journal after only a year or two. But getting that type of peer review done, particularly if you're in a hurry, as you are when launching a brand new high-cost journal, is hard and expensive. So eLife has chosen to fund all the aspects of the process, including paying the reviewers. So that's one way of throwing money at the problem of going from zero to high impact in a short timeframe.
I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like platform using PGP. You could then use a graph model to quantitatively determine reputation based on who reviews which article.
The biggest problem is how to get the people doing the hiring to care about your new magic metric. You could devise some amazing algorithm to calculate a researcher's impact, but if nobody on a tenure committee thinks it's a valid way to rank researchers then it's not going to go anywhere. This is where you hit the most inertia in the industry. The people making hiring decisions look at which journals you publish in and they care about the journal's impact factor and historical prestige. It's the fast/lazy way to judge a candidate. It's going to be hard for a technical solution to the problem to address that sociological problem.
There are no "review fees" (we review papers for free) and most editors (who select reviewers and select the papers) are not paid. So, basically, the cost is the cost of a website.
At any rate, to 'disrupt' conventional journals, you need to convince the big names to be the editors/reviewers (which is often hard!), in order to give some credibility to your new journal.
The current system rewards people who publish in the high-impact journals, which means they get the "coolest" papers, which means they remain high impact. The ones at the top now are not generally open access.
Alternatively, someone didn't pay someone else to make their website look better than that.
I'm not sure anybody in the process looked at that and said to themselves "yup, that looks good". Which is also a problem, but one for which the "show desktop version" checkbox is a good solution.
Since the prestige of journals in many fields is significantly affected by the names on its editorial board. What if the Gates foundation earmarks funds to work on lobbying and even pay significant consulting fees for top editors to move to open access journals operated by PLoS or other non-profits.
(A highly successful example in the machine learning field is detailed in a comment by exgrv here.)
The foundation could also purchase a few smaller publishers which own good journals in a number of fields, especially fields which immediate access is important to human well-being. Then, turn all those journals into open-access with no or minimal author fees.
Bottom line: These strategies together will create big incentives for researchers to flock towards those journals since immediate and open access is a boon to citation counts and impact factor. Other journals will feel the heat and need to compete (like by reducing prices or time to open access) to gain back their market share.
If the foundation spends enough efforts, it could also out-lobbying congress and/or funding agencies to change its policy on open access, as the size of Elsevier and other publishers are significantly smaller than the Gates foundation and the public perception among those with any opinion on this definitely sides with open access policy.
This is really great, but to play devil's advocate, does this hurt the authors? That is, does this mean that they can't publish in Cell or another reputable journal, and would this discourage them from taking funding from the Gates Foundation?
As an article in The Winnower said, science is not disinterested and there are egos involved. "We got published in Cell" or "Our paper is in Science" still speaks prestige.
Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article OA all you have to do is pay $5k.
At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-Choic...). The more prestigious the journal the more the fee is typically. Also, high fees are common in hard sciences (where everything is grant funded, like from Gates, NIH, etc) but the fees are typically much lower in social sciences and humanities where there aren't typically publication fees built into research grants. I don't think we (Sage) publish anything that can command the $5k like Cell and Nature, which is basically the price point where OA fees top out.
So the authors will still want the prestige of the top-tier journals (at least while hiring decisions are still made with that metric), and one byproduct of mandates like these is more APCs flowing to the big publishers.
That's what I thought at first, but the language from the original post seemed ambiguous—that it could only be published in Open Access Journals, and I also couldn't find OA costs for Cell or Science. I did find this page from Elsevier, though, and it looks like it ranges from $500 to $5,000: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option...
Thanks for the first-hand knowledge about Sage. Presumably, though, at a one-time price of $1,500–$5,000, publishers e.g. Elsevier weren't making much from keeping them closed-access in the first place, were they?
Not sure if the trend of more APCs going from grant funders to publishers is a good one, but probably better that the grant funders pay than those who can't afford access.
Not sure what you mean by "weren't making much from keeping them closed-access". Paywall publishers earn the bulk of their revenue from charging academic libraries subscriptions to the journal content. This subscription revenue can only exist if the content is not freely available to all. So there's definitely a big pile of cash that keeping articles closed access brings in. The worry about having OA articles isn't that you might miss out on the $30 pay per view charge that you or me run into when we hit the paywall, that's almost inconsequential from a revenue standpoint. It's the worry that they won't be able to charge a library a yearly subscription fee.
Well, there's some price point at which if everyone paid the OA fee (effectively making your entire journal open access) then the revenue would about equal the revenue you get from traditional paywall subscriptions for that journal, and the publisher wouldn't care one way or the other.
In reality it's almost impossible these days to figure out what the paywall revenue from a single journal title is anymore, since everything is bundled in huge packages. But yeah, more or less the fees are based on what the publishers think authors will pay based on the prestige offered by the journal. There are people trying to change the typical price point of OA publishing (PeerJ's $99/author fee comes to mind), but there's A LOT of intertia in academia.
Not in the medium term. The paywalled articles' days are counted already -- in physics, putting the paper into arxiv is the standard practice, and it doesn't hurt anybody.
It might just mean that they publish in the same places and just check a box that says "our funding agency mandates open access" when filling out the copyright license/transfer paperwork.
This is the best part. It's not even funny how I have to extract data points from plots of articles if I want to use them. Even from recent ones. Most often the raw measurement data is not even available even in the form of plots.
Back in the bad old days, biomolecular crystallographers would tend to hold their data for as long as they could, in order to publish more about data that only they had. (To be fair, it might have taken 10 years to get the protein / DNA / virus / etc. to crystallize.) The publications would be scores of pages because they wanted to describe all of the details, and hence the credit.
They would, for example, only publish the backbone structure of a protein as a drawing, and not as 3D coordinates. In response, people would input the 2D coordinates into software that would try to reconstruct the 3D structure. (This was possible because the publication would often be as a split stereoscopic image.)
Finally, in the mid-1990s, the major journals put their feet down and said they would only publish of the coordinates were deposited in a public data collection, which would be released no later than a year of publication.
So yes, the people funding the science, and the people publishing the science, who sometimes have to force the people doing the science to actually be more open.
I love what they are trying to do. The entire scientific publishing industry is messed up and can use any help it can get. I wrote a blog about how terrible the scientific publishing system is sometime back.
The entire academic publishing industry is messed up. There's just as much of a cost issue with arts and humanities journals.
After health care, journal publishing fees are one of the biggest and most regressive 'free market' choke-point costs ever levied on human civilisation.
The question is what is the volume of papers published by the foundation's funding, and is it enough impetus to cause a shift of mentality across the academia?
Also, what will be the cost of this endeavor? It will certainly help to lower the price for open publishing among journals.
Hopefully this will put into question the hesitance of government funding agencies to stop subsidizing ancient publishing conglormerates.
The post you link seems a bit confused about, for example, why it's important to publish a finding only once. (Hint: So lazy people can't keep regurgitating their old results to seem productive in the eyes of grant-givers.) It also says the Gates decision goes too far, and then suggests something even farther: that the paper would need to be written twice, separately, for public and commercial consumption.
"Would this change undermine the business academic journals are in? The answer is only if they add no value above the raw knowledge an academic could make available themselves."
And the argument is that they are not adding nearly as much value as they are extracting from the system.
I'm definitely not agreeing with that article's perspective, just thought it provided a contrasting point of view. Not sure my comment deserved a downvote though (ouch!) :)
That's definitely a good point about the journals not adding enough value. I think it's clear they've placed themselves into a bit of a position where they hold most of the cards and that really does need to change.
It is also interesting to note that Bill Gate is an investor at http://researchgate.net/ whose mission is to connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise
Oh Bill Gates, I love you! This is a wonderful step forward and maybe the beginning of the end for avaricious publishers. As a taxpayer I'm asked to pay £20 to access a single article written in 1960 on work financed and reviewed courtesy of taxpayers. This is madness.
I agree with you. I want to point out though that the older interlibrary loan system still exists, if you want to access papers off-line and at a cheaper rate.
For example, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/ says "Anyone who has access to the [Cambridge] University Library may use this service. The fee for an Inter-Library Loan request is currently £3.00 for members of Cambridge University and £6.00 for all other readers."
I'm a serious advocate of open access, but it should be noted that money which is otherwise ear-marked for research is now being poured into the publishing industry in the form of author fees. The last article that I published cost nearly $2000.
It is amazing how much junk gets published in academia and how many shady practices there are. One professor in my old department used to make slight changes to a paper and methodologies and publish to another journal. He had dozens of publications this way.
Another professor that was a friend of my professor asked us to cite his paper. I was never able to replicate his results, but we still sited it anyways.
One professor used to hunt around for different statistical tests until she found one which gave her the desired p values so she could publish.
One of the PhD students I worked with would draw absurd conclusions from the data. He would see an effect when there wasn't one. He was regularly shown to be wrong when we did statistical analysis, but he never changed his ways. He is currently doing his postdoc at a very well known institution.
The worst part though is that I have also come across many genuine and hard working professors and labs who take time to scrutinize their work and produce good results. They end up losing the tenure battle.
Because it can take over a year to go from submission to publication. Implementing this rule now would mean current articles under review would have to be withdrawn.
Fence sitting. The journals need a way to cover operating expenses. On the other hand, if a more efficient and cost effective model exists, this is good disruption. Nothings free tho, right?
Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.
Why don't they just pay for all of the major science publications to have free access for everyone - not just requiring it of the authors they subsidize?
It would be an interesting experiment to negotiate a single annual payment to all journals to make them publish all articles in an easily downloadable and extractable form.
I guess the publishers would not accept any payment less than their current (very large) profits, so you'd basically be locking in those profits and the system wouldn't get any cheaper.
I think they'd accept a smaller payment (and I'm guessing like you). if you could guarantee them a fixed profit, without the need to compete, advertise, print things, etc, that's just easier.
The idea would be to negotiate terms that are favorable (enabling more scientific research and public access to funded research).
