[HN Gopher] Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to mak...
___________________________________________________________________
Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers
immediately free
Author : cyrksoft
Score : 617 points
Date : 2021-08-08 11:31 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Another point about peer review:
|
| It sounds good but has become hopelessly corrupted in many
| fields. Cronyism ("I'll pass your paper if you pass mine"),
| conformity ("This isn't what the Cool Kids have agreed to, so you
| can't publish it") and also "This is too readable. Needs more
| jargon!" have taken over. Does this mean it should be thrown out
| altogether, or just reformed? I'm not sure.
| bishoprook2 wrote:
| question.
|
| Do peer reviewed papers make the reviewers public?
|
| That would be an interesting angle if not. Allow anyone to
| publish, but they compete for high-status reviewers. Also, the
| reviewers have some skin in the game so far as correctness.
| bearbin wrote:
| Seemingly as part of the same push, the UKRI announced funding
| for an open research project I've worked on before: Dr Alex
| Freeman's Octopus [0], a more radical software platform that
| splits research projects into smaller components. It's good to
| see that the openess of research is finally getting to be a
| priority of the funding bodies.
|
| [0]: https://science-octopus.org/
| Vinnl wrote:
| Alex has been working on that for so long; it was really
| gratifying to see that she finally got some traction and
| serious funding to get it to go somewhere. Really looking
| forward to seeing what will come out of it.
|
| Funding announcement: https://www.ukri.org/news/funding-agreed-
| for-a-platform-that...
| cheese_van wrote:
| A remarkable thing about the COVID crisis is the unprecedented
| close cooperation and data sharing by widely disparate scientific
| communities.
|
| The obvious global benefits may also be driving cooperation and
| sharing in other fields, including (and perhaps especially)
| publishing. Closed data has no beneficiaries except commerce -
| it's being seen as a dead model. Finally.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > "When versions of articles are made available too soon, this
| undermines the need to subscribe [to journals]," wrote a
| spokesperson, Amy Price, in an email to Science.
|
| Yes, Ms. Price, _that is the point_.
| systemBuilder wrote:
| This is so right. It used to be theoretically justified to charge
| a cost for editing, reviewing management, and printing costs of a
| paper journal but most paper journals have disappeared and the
| paper format is useless today. High tech has made these journal
| companies giant vampire squids poking their blood funnels into
| academia to suck the life out of mankind's progress!
|
| But down the road I can see that academic research publication
| will become like Facebook - loaded with bullshit promoted by
| hypesters - wasting time and killing thousands - and no one to
| enforce sanity in that lunatic wilderness!
|
| If the 19th century journals would get with a program they would
| become science repos with a much smaller stuff and light fees
| (enough to support one staff managing editor per journal) for the
| review process! Publishing a paper in this model should probably
| cost about $1000 - $2,000, about the same as it cost the last
| time I was in academia...
| a_bonobo wrote:
| A good development - depositing papers in OA journals is
| extremely expensive and internationally, most funding bodies
| requiring OA don't give you money to publish OA. For example,
| Nature Communications charges around $5,000 for a single paper; I
| can send a student to an overseas conference for that kind of
| money!
|
| Public repositories like arxiv or biorxiv are free.
| arcanus wrote:
| I could not agree more: this is a good thing. Studies funded by
| public money should be freely available by default. This is a
| great decision and I hope major funding agencies in the USA
| follow this example.
|
| As a practicing scientist, I ostensibly have access to a rich
| variety of journals from my employer. However, I've found
| journal access to be difficult during WFH/COVID. My default is
| to look for an open access paper, before jumping to the digital
| library. I've also had a few cases where the digital access
| seemed not to be working, which only put up barriers to my
| work.
| laurent92 wrote:
| The supposed advantage of commercial archiving is duration,
| where as self-hosted tends to depend on the author; But we
| could create solutions where, if works are being used by
| clients (hospitals, research), the client would be in charge
| of automatically downloading all the dependencies. Like a
| Maven repository, but with P2P resharing.
|
| In similar vein, software used by public institutions should
| be required to be made open-source. Open source is already
| the VIIth marvel of humanity, and needs consolidation.
| cs702 wrote:
| Slowly and almost imperceptibly if you look at it day-to-day,
| public research repositories like arxiv and biorxiv, along with
| public code repositories like github and gitlab, are becoming or
| maybe already are _the world 's most important academic
| "journals."_
|
| All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good
| work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored.
| Reviews take place over the Internet via both public and private
| forums.
|
| Gatekeeping power lies more and more in the hands of a global,
| distributed scientific community open to anyone willing and
| capable of doing and reviewing the work. It's fabulous IMHO.
| sfgweilr4f wrote:
| I'm idly curious:
|
| does arxiv show who reviewed it? credentials etc?
|
| Is there a trust scoring mechanism or some such?
|
| is there some way to show a graph of reviewing?
|
| Is there a restriction on who can post a paper?
|
| (I'm not saying any of these are needed to make it
| "respectable" or even that they should be... just wondering how
| arxiv does its thing)
|
| Personally I like the overall concept of arxiv. Even with no
| one necessarily reviewing a paper, which is probably unlikely,
| the fact its even _accessible_ for later review when necessary
| is worthwhile.
| tempay wrote:
| As far as I know the moderator isn't shown, but that's
| probably a good thing as things get approved on a ~overnight
| schedule so publicly shaming them for mistakes seems counter
| productive. Additionally the moderation is very light, "April
| fools" papers are common and I've never heard of something
| being rejected.
|
| For submitting you need to be approved by someone who already
| has several submissions in that field.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Speaking of which, if anyone knows someone at arXiv, would be
| great if you could prod someone to get back to me about this
| PR or the associated email I sent them about it:
| https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-browse/pull/197
|
| It would add the ability for people to state that they have
| reviewed a given work. Might not be the direction they want
| to go in, or it might not be - but so far I'm not even sure
| if someone's seen it, unfortunately.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over;
| good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly
| ignored.
|
| What is the basis for all these claims? Who is giving it the
| quick once-over?
|
| Crowd-sourced review and information, despite some strengths
| and high initial hopes, has a record of extraordinary
| misinformation and disinformation. Why would we want to use
| that system for scientific research?
|
| I prefer careful peer review, standards for announcing funders,
| etc.
| oakfr wrote:
| The problem is that _careful_ (conference) reviews don't
| scale. Large conferences end up suffering from a highly
| stochastic behavior where excellent work is borderline
| rejected on a regular basis while mediocre /incorrect work
| gets accepted every so often. github/arxiv are no silver
| bullet but offer an interesting alternative (with their own
| set of challenges, though).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Every solution has flaws, as you say. The careful reviews
| have worked very well - science is one of the great
| triumphs of humanity.
|
| That doesn't mean we shouldn't look for improvements, of
| course.
| mjn wrote:
| > good work gets the attention it deserves
|
| I'm not sure I'd go that far with the optimism, at least in
| my field (artificial intelligence). Some obviously bad work
| does immediately fade into obscurity, and better work
| probably does _on average_ get more attention, but the
| variation is huge. There is so much stuff on arXiv, that to
| get attention you need some kind of PR push so people notice
| it in the firehose, or a dice-roll around a viral tweet or
| science journalist noticing it. Some of the better funded
| university and corporate research groups have actual
| professional PR and science-comm teams doing coordinated
| social-media blitzes, press releases, and blog posts around
| new arXiv papers! That 's a huge factor in determining
| whether a given paper gets attention.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks for the perspectives. One important nitpick:
|
| > Some obviously bad work does immediately fade into
| obscurity, and better work probably does on average get
| more attention
|
| You don't know what you haven't seen, which is just a
| restatement of the core problem. You'd need a study of the
| entire population to know about the correlation between
| paper 'quality' and outcomes.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| > Who is giving it the quick once-over?
|
| arXiv has 200 expert moderators spread through different
| fields to filter out papers that are blatantly misleading,
| unoriginal, non-substantive, or in need of significant review
| and revision. It's not a peer-review, but it's not a
| _complete_ free-for-all either.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks! I will look that up (but if you happen to have any
| links ...).
| gzer0 wrote:
| Here you go!
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/moderators/
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/help/moderation
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thank you. And I found this one too:
|
| https://blog.arxiv.org/2019/08/29/our-moderation-process/
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| This is completely false! Please stop telling people that
| arXiv moderators judge the technical content of papers.
| That's not their role and it leads to people trusting arXiv
| when they should not.
|
| It's a complete-free-for-all.
|
| arXiv moderators do not judge the technical content. They
| don't filter misleading submissions. They don't filter work
| in need of revision. This is literally described on the
| arXiv website: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "What
| policies guide moderation before public announcement? "
|
| They filter spammers, check for total obvious nutjobs ("My
| grilled cheese said P=NP"), for crazy formatting, for
| blatant copyright violations.
|
| Publishing junk on arXiv is trivial if you're not too crazy
| and know a little bit how to use the right words. You can
| publish anything.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| > They don't filter work in need of revision. This is
| literally described on the arXiv website:
| https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "What policies guide
| moderation before public announcement? "
|
| The page you're linking backs up what I've listed. The
| third subheader in that section for example:
|
| > A submission may be declined if the moderators
| determine it _lacks originality, novelty, or
| significance_.
|
| > Submissions that _do not contain original or
| substantive research_ , including undergraduate research,
| course projects, and research proposals, news, or
| information about political causes (even those with
| potential special interest to the academic community) may
| be declined.
|
| > Papers that contain inflammatory _or fictitious
| content_ , papers that use _highly dramatic and
| misrepresentative titles /abstracts/introductions_, _or
| papers in need of significant review and revision_ may be
| declined.
|
| ---
|
| > it leads to people trusting arXiv when they should not
|
| I'm only claiming that their moderation is a quick once-
| over to filter out papers blatantly in violation of those
| policies (like the _" total obvious nutjobs"_ you
| describe), while being clear that it's not a peer review.
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| If you want to have to read 5,000 poorly written error riddled
| works to find a single gem I guess it's okay. Unfortunately,
| I'm not an immortal
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Then we will also have to find a decentralized rating/sorting
| system that works.
|
| Finally. ( = Let us devise it for the publications, then let
| us export it to the many, uttermostly crucial, contexts that
| can use it).
| beowulfey wrote:
| Good thing you aren't the only one looking!
| kekebo wrote:
| Github stars / number of forks can act as coarse initial
| quality indicators for foss, why not for academic papers?
| sxg wrote:
| The current publication system doesn't necessarily avoid that
| problem either. Many papers are accepted due to the prestige
| of certain authors and conformity to other papers in the same
| field. Filters like these can lead to a false sense of
| security in the quality of the work.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It's really much better than that. At least for the subfields
| I've followed.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I much prefer a system where connected insiders push through
| un-replicatable papers in an opaque quid pro quo system so
| they can pad each others' tenure committee packets!
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Are there any incentive for the researcher to not make the
| research paper free? AFAIK most prestigious journals allows
| researchers to publish their preprint papers in arxiv/the
| researcher's site.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| "Pay journals for "gold" open access, which makes a paper free to
| read on the publisher's website, or choose the "green" route,
| which allows them to deposit a near-final version of the paper on
| a public repository, after a waiting period of up to 1 year."
|
| yeah, that kind of free huh. Sick.
| ectopod wrote:
| That is the old policy.
|
| > But starting in April 2022, that yearlong delay will no
| longer be permitted: Researchers choosing green open access
| must deposit the paper immediately when it is published.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| If you read further you would come to understand that is the
| _current_ state of things, and the significance of the
| submitted article is that a new policy means the papers must be
| immediately made free.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| In case someone has some direct knowledge or credible sources:
| I'm not sure what is stopping reform at a political level. Who is
| the political constituency that obstructs open access? The
| publishers seem too small, and the science and higher ed
| constituency too large.
| cycomanic wrote:
| I can't give you direct links, but I know that large
| scientific/engineering organisations have not been pushing for
| free open access. For example the IEEE has been part of an open
| letter (which included Elsivier) lobbying against Plan S. These
| organisations derive a lot of their money from publishing, so
| while many (most) of the members are strongly in favor of OA,
| the buerocratics in the organisations often are not. Which
| gives mixed messages to politicians.
|
| On top of that I believe that non-scientific publishers have
| also been part of the lobby campaign as they see OA as
| weakening copyright.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Funders have been relying on publishers to tell them (by means
| of who they publish) what researchers are worth funding. This
| is keeping up the pressure for academics to keep publishing in
| paywalled journals.
|
| There is some pressure to both make research not paywalled
| (Plan S is the strongest) and less costly. However, given that
| most of the funders' researchers _can_ access most relevant
| research (albeit rather clumsily, thanks to the access
| mechanisms, and not 100%, hence Sci-Hub even being popular
| among those who do have access), and that the extracted rent on
| the scale of a country budget isn 't _that_ much, the pressure
| isn 't particularly strong. Additionally, it's hard for a
| single funder/country to move on its own without ruining their
| academics' careers (hence Plan S's focus on signing on more
| funders).
| adam0c wrote:
| Can we get ISO to make all papers free next...? You know since
| moat industries need to abide by their standards but they refuse
| to freely make available these standards...
| elmo2you wrote:
| It might even be argued that the de facto mandatory nature of
| their standards constitute a form of (international)
| competitiveness, because their prices sure aren't just trivial
| to particularly smaller businesses.
|
| Especially when you take into account that in other economies
| (outside the USA), their prices can be downright show-stoppers.
|
| But then, it isn't particularly a new thing for larger
| economies to abuse standards and intellectual property
| regulations, to "compete" with smaller economies in ways that
| diametrically oppose the supposed (or at least often hailed)
| purpose and goals of both standards and intellectual property
| regulations.
| tialaramex wrote:
| ISO exists at the whim of the sovereign entities. You are most
| likely a citizen of one (or perhaps even more) of the entities
| that ensure ISO continues to exist, and could ask them to get
| ISO to give away the standards documents.
|
| Of course if the money does not come from ISO selling
| documents, it would need to come from tax revenue. In reality
| however it was scheduled the real money comes from the richest
| countries, as they're most able to afford it, your politicians
| may have the opinion that even a modest sum expended in this
| way would be justified by their opponents as profligate...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yes!! Why do these things even cost money to begin with? It's
| like they want people to not follow the standards.
| shapefrog wrote:
| ISO666 sets the acceptable limits on how much you should
| charge people to get a copy of the standards. /s
| andi999 wrote:
| Immediately means the time span between publication and open
| access, not the rule, which starts April 2022.
| aurizon wrote:
| Now we need to get the Nobel Committee to say they will only read
| open source papers - this is a valid option as the paywalls have
| denied most of the world's 'second tier' countries access for
| their scientists (to say nothing of interested science readers
| wherever they are) so going open source will only add to the
| common pool of knowledge
| sprafa wrote:
| It's truly horrific that as an interested layman I am
| completely UNABLE to read most scientific papers. And to think
| about what they did to Aaron Schwartz...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It's truly horrific that as an interested layman I am
| completely UNABLE to read most scientific papers.
|
| You can usually find a pre-print by Googling the title.
|
| Or ask the author for a copy.
|
| (You shouldn't have to do this, but you can until all papers
| are open access anyway.)
| andi999 wrote:
| Why is it legal for the author to send you a copy (asking
| as an author)
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| They usually send you a 'pre-print' which (in their
| opinion - I'm not a lawyer) is not subject to the same
| copyright as the final reversion which was sent to
| review.
| andi999 wrote:
| Thanks. Any sources for their opinion? Probably I shd
| read the copyright release form in more detail, but if
| you think terms of copyright this won't fly.
| Someone wrote:
| With at least some of the major publishers, it nowadays
| is even legal to put the final paper on a public web site
| or the Archiv.
|
| https://www.springernature.com/gp/authors/how-to-share:
|
| _"Authors publishing via subscription models may also
| self-archive a copy of the accepted version of their
| manuscript (post-peer review, but prior to copy-editing
| and typesetting) in an institutional or subject
| repository, where it can be made openly accessible after
| an embargo period, in accordance with the relevant
| Springer Nature self-archiving policy (Nature, Springer,
| or Palgrave Macmillan)"_
|
| (More info at https://www.nature.com/nature-
| portfolio/editorial-policies/s...)
|
| https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing:
|
| "Accepted Manuscript
|
| Authors can share their accepted manuscript:
|
| Immediately
|
| - via their non-commercial personal homepage or blog
|
| - by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the
| accepted manuscript
|
| - via their research institute or institutional
| repository for internal institutional uses or as part of
| an invitation-only research collaboration work-group
|
| - directly by providing copies to their students or to
| research collaborators for their personal use
|
| - for private scholarly sharing as part of an invitation-
| only work group on commercial sites with which Elsevier
| has an agreement
|
| After the embargo period
|
| - via non-commercial hosting platforms such as their
| institutional repository
|
| - via commercial sites with which Elsevier has an
| agreement"*
|
| (Seems a bit less constrained than SpringerNature)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > but if you think terms of copyright this won't fly
|
| Wooah there I'm not giving any legal advice. Ask a
| lawyer.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Even if it is potentially technically illegal, I don't
| know about anyone who tried to stop it. Note that _some_
| release forms explicitly allow author 's versions of the
| covered work for download on the author's website.
| There's usually a stipulation that they need to be
| different in some way, for example by not using the same
| formatting template as the journal/conference version of
| the paper.
| aurizon wrote:
| The journals always want their 'pound of flesh' as
| Shakespeare spins in his grave.... Some insights:-
| https://www.editage.com/insights/what-are-the-
| differences-be...
| gmueckl wrote:
| I don't see any new insights on the page that you linked.
| I personally signed copyright transfer forms that allowed
| for author's versions. There were some conditions that I
| don't remember in detail. But the gist is that a
| commercial publisher still allowed me to have a version
| of the article text online.
| bidirectional wrote:
| Well you are, if you're willing to pay. Or just use Sci-Hub
| as it seems even many professional researchers do.
| CraftingLinks wrote:
| Each article priced as much as a textbook...
| baltoo wrote:
| think you can email most researchers and get a copy. doesn't
| count as publishing
| jszymborski wrote:
| It is truly awful that publishers do this, however there is a
| certain website-that-shalt-not-be-named that is papering over
| that gap while we researchers get our shit together.
| Vinnl wrote:
| It's called Sci-Hub.
| infogulch wrote:
| That would be a good step.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| One point to my others and pretty orthogonal to them:
|
| I was a tech assistant in Google Patent Litigation. Part of my
| job was to bust patents (a dream job, right?), and for that, I
| would scour the Internet for literature to invalidate a patent
| being asserted against us.
|
| I would _constantly_ see articles behind some paywall, and I
| would never, never click through. There are reasons you can
| imagine, like (1) I didn 't want the hassle of justifying the
| expense, and (2) I hate those publishers. Both true.
|
| However, the biggest reason was:
|
| _I don 't know if it's any good until I read it._
|
| The vast majority of articles are not helpful for my purpose. I
| can't tell if they really are until I read them. If it turns out
| that some article is the killer, then of course Google would pay
| for it. But for the 1000's that are not -- well, why waste the
| money? I can almost always find the same information somewhere
| else, for free.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live.
|
| That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per
| "page" even now that you get things electronically and the cost
| is near zero:
|
| There's a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can
| install a browser extension which automatically copies anything
| you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays,
| and the rest get it free.
|
| It is amazingly complete, much more than you would think. For
| instance, here's the entry for the Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos)
| trial:
|
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/7185174/united-states-v...
| ipaddr wrote:
| Curious if the backup service is legal?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It's been going on for years, I know that. I don't know if
| the rent-seekers have ever tried to shut it down. The fact
| that it's _so_ complete tells me that a huge number of
| mainstream law firms look the other way when their employees
| use the browser extension.
| erhk wrote:
| Lots of illicit things go on for years
| AlbertCory wrote:
| True. This is, almost by definition, a very litigious
| sector though.
| syshum wrote:
| In the case of PACER, they are public records, and have no
| copy right attached to them as they are government documents,
| the government can not hold copyrights by definition
| everything the US government produces public domain.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| > Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to
| live.
|
| Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using
| your brains.
|
| Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher.
| Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing.
| They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of _looks
| evil_ ) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about
| Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Blackwell? And what about the
| hundreds of smaller publishers that control major journals?
| Everyone gives Elsevier shit about suing Sci-Hub, but nobody
| gives the American Chemical Society shit for suing Sci-Hub. The
| fact is that people only hold up Elsevier as the great evil
| because people are tying to over-simplify a complex problem by
| finding a "single evil", because then they don't have to think
| about a more complex, nuanced problem.
|
| The fact is that there is a reason that paid journals keep
| existing, and it's not the profit margins of the Big Four. It's
| the academic research industry. Every single academic research
| institute in the world that publishes papers _depends on the
| reputation of journals_. Getting your paper published in a
| "prestigious journal" is literally the only way to progress a
| researcher's career, and thus get more funding. Without
| funding, there is no research! And the journals _are_ providing
| real due diligence happening in the process of creating those
| journals, and _somebody_ has to pay for that process.
|
| If the paid journals went away tomorrow, researchers would be
| fucked, and academic institutions would have no idea what to do
| with themselves. So please stop with this ridiculous meme that
| Elsevier is The Great Satan holding back science. Sure, they
| should profit a lot less! But getting rid of them entirely with
| no system to replace them will be destructive to scientific
| research.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| as for Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell: yeah,
| them too. Forgot to mention those.
|
| The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for with
| public or non-profit money, and hide it behind paywalls. You
| can't avoid this fact.
|
| Their "reputation" is mostly just a legacy, like the New York
| Times'. At one time they sent out paper journals, which was
| the _only_ way information could be disseminated, and charged
| libraries reasonable fees. There was a manageable number of
| such journals so a library could get most or all of them.
| That world is gone.
| Someone wrote:
| > The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for
| with public or non-profit money, and hide it behind
| paywalls. You can't avoid this fact.
|
| Commercial publishers have paywalls, but for new research
| they no longer have to be the only source for publications.
|
| Nowadays, I think it's often the
| indifference/laziness/whatever of the _authors_ that
| prevent accepted manuscripts (same text, but different
| layout) from also being freely accessible.
|
| For example https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing
| allows putting accepted manuscripts on arXiv.
|
| The way I read it, the main limitations are:
|
| - you can't put your paper on a commercial site.
|
| - you have to mention the DOI, which, I guess, resolves to
| Elsevier's site.
|
| Reading https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting (
| _"Sites or repositories that provide a service to other
| organizations or agencies, even if those other
| organizations or agencies are themselves non-commercial
| entities, are considered to be providing a commercial
| service, and this service activity will also require a
| commercial arrangement with Elsevier"_ ), they make special
| exceptions for arXiv and RePEc.
|
| So, that's not optimal, but ( _for new papers_ ) also not
| as bleak as it typically is described.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| Who is paying and who has access is only one part of the
| puzzle. Most people only care about access, but they don't
| understand why that access continues to be limited.
|
| Why do journals exist? It's not to provide information.
| Ever since the Internet was invented, we can distribute
| information virtually for free. Everybody knows this. Yet
| the journals persist for decades. So their purpose is not
| to provide information.
|
| Yes, of course, their reputation is invented and legacy.
| It's been shown time and again that papers published in
| "reputable journals" can be quite problematic. But
| everybody knows this too. It's not like academic institutes
| are completely brainless. They know they could have
| somebody "less reputable" publish their information and it
| would have the same scientific merit, or that they could
| even publish it themselves on a blog. But they don't; they
| publish on the "reputable journals", even though the
| reputation is clearly not impacting the research results.
|
| So why do these publishers exist? The true purpose of paid,
| "reputable" journals is to provide an excuse for research
| institutions to dole out money to people who meet a quasi-
| arbitrary barrier to the money. They know they don't have
| any good system of how to assign money, or who to promote,
| because in general it's hard to quantify. So they hide
| behind "the reputable journal" and thus the "reputation" of
| their researchers. This way they can receive more money
| (because "our scientists are published by reputable
| journals") and they can dole it out just as easily.
|
| Opening access and reducing cost is a great idea. But
| shunting money away from journals will result in the entire
| research industry scrambling to put together a replacement
| that will allow them to continue being funded, determine
| how to dole out that funding, organize journals "for free",
| and retain some sort of rigor/due-diligence/quality from
| the publishing process. Can this be done? Sure! But we
| should make _that_ our goal and not ignore the big pink
| elephant in the room, which is that journals are still a
| necessary evil for research funding. If we want to get rid
| of paid journals, let 's actually think through the
| resulting impact and build a resilient system to replace
| them. Imploding them and "hoping for the best" is just
| going to hurt research.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers
|
| I don't think your fundamental thesis of "only Elsevier is
| blamed" holds up to the post you replied to.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Good point, but I think the opposite is true: scientific
| research is already broken, and blowing up the publishers
| would force us to rebuild it proper.
|
| I co-authored a peer reviewed paper. Because our English is
| bad and our context is different, we called a system
| operating at 100Hz a "high frequency sensor" instead of a
| "fast sample rate (context) sensor". They gave that paper to
| an HF (radio) engineer to review it. He said "I think I was
| given this paper by mistake, this is not HF. Anyway, nice
| paper, change the color of this graph please."
|
| Pair that with the general replication problem (no one has
| the money, time or incentive to replicate anything), that
| publish or perish mentality, the idiotic bias against
| publishing negative results - jeez, the situation is baaad.
| [deleted]
| nerdponx wrote:
| > And the journals are providing real due diligence happening
| in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has
| to pay for that process.
|
| Both things can be true. They can be providing valuable due
| diligence _and_ also sucking a lot of value (much of it
| funded by public /taxpayer money) along the way.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.)
| went away tomorrow Science would not "be fucked". We would be
| forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access
| journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months
| and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted.
| But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing
| is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don't
| replace the journals now is because of (huge amounts of) path
| dependence and because nobody can solve the coordination
| problem of getting everyone to drop everything and _do_ it.
| But if those publishers went away tomorrow, you'd solve both
| those problems in an instant.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Thanks, the question isn't "do they still provide a
| service?" but "what would happen if they disappeared?"
|
| As you showed, research might be unsettled for a while, but
| pretty soon they'd just be a bad memory.
| nlitened wrote:
| Can't tell if the parent comment is sarcastic or not.
| da39a3ee wrote:
| Yes, that's how it worked. The rather major point you are
| missing is that things change.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Reading this comment, I assumed PACER was a private provider
| who sells access to otherwise freely available material which
| originally might be scattered and unorganised as government
| things usually are. Charging for access would therefore be
| reasonable.
|
| But a quick search reveals that this is in fact a government-
| provided service. So your government charges you 10 cents per
| page to download PDFs from a glorified file server.
|
| The US has around 1.5M people working in the legal field. Let's
| say each of them does 10 document lookups every day. 15 million
| requests in an 8 hour workday comes out to 500 requests per
| second. Don't quote me on this, but I'm pretty sure a modern
| workstation could handle that, let alone a dedicated server or
| ever a few of them with good caching and client-side load
| balancing. SCOTUS spends 16M yearly just on building
| maintenance, I think it's safe to assume they can afford a
| handful of servers without having to resort to
| microtransactions...
| manquer wrote:
| Going down the cost rabbit hole is problematic, the costs are
| not just for the service infra. Even for the service you need
| project managers , product owners, devs, SREs, QAs and data
| entry operators who collate or atleast update the DB . Easily
| costs that can run in millions/year.
|
| Typically such revenue streams cover other holes in the
| budget not related to this service as well, and there is
| indirect overhead costs like Contracts, control structures,
| HR, vendors etc harder to amortize.
|
| Any costs for what should be free public access in not right.
| The argument should be that we pay already tax, this
| information public should have free and easily .
| franga2000 wrote:
| I generally agree and my estimates were of course the bare
| minumum, but the "we already pay tax" argument doesn't
| really work since, well, this service clearly isn't tax-
| funded given the fact that it isn't free. It might be tax-
| subsidised, which often makes sense for things that are
| very expensive and have limited usefulness to individual
| citizens (like many services governments render to
| businesses are). If we consider accessing court records to
| be something with very limited usefulness to most people
| and primarily used by companies to make money (which I do,
| despite having done it myself on a few occasions), how
| expensive it actually is to run becomes very important when
| convincing "the people" to fund it 100%.
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