[HN Gopher] Japan's push to make all research open access
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Japan's push to make all research open access
        
       Author : sohkamyung
       Score  : 633 points
       Date   : 2024-05-31 01:46 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
        
       | worthless-trash wrote:
       | This could be the start of something beautiful.
        
       | koolala wrote:
       | Internet Noodles of Babel! Let's have every corporation do this
       | too! We can solve every problem that matters by working together
       | like this, the rest is just corpo-gaming.
        
         | TaylorAlexander wrote:
         | Absolutely! I think the concept of proprietary knowledge for
         | profit was actually a huge mistake, and that humanity can
         | advance much faster and more effectively through open
         | collaboration. This applies to patents too (and arguably
         | copyright).
        
           | jrhey wrote:
           | There is no advancement without profit. Advances are a
           | product of market competition. When no company can profit
           | from investing in R&D, there will be no R&D.
        
             | __loam wrote:
             | What a sad view of things.
        
               | koolala wrote:
               | Hi, I feel more advanced getting to talk with you so I am
               | grateful for that, didn't cost us anything :)
        
             | anigbrowl wrote:
             | Pfffffft
        
             | immibis wrote:
             | The government invented the internet.
        
               | waihtis wrote:
               | with money that came from ......?
        
               | immibis wrote:
               | Nonsensical question. You invent things with brainpower,
               | not money.
        
               | waihtis wrote:
               | Try going without food for a month and see how many novel
               | inventions you can make. See, even thoughts require
               | participation in the capital markets.
        
               | jrhey wrote:
               | Some life saving pharmaceuticals, automobiles tech,
               | general consumer communications and entertainment tech,
               | all come from capitalists trying to be the first to
               | market to profit. The sheer amount of technological leaps
               | our generation alone has seen was all pretty much for
               | profit. You wouldn't observe the same rate if it was all
               | purely driven by governments.
        
       | klysm wrote:
       | This would be amazing to see in the US. Unfortunately I feel like
       | lobbying is too powerful with the death grip publishers have. If
       | you were to do a popular vote, it would be nearly unanimous I
       | expect.
        
         | karaterobot wrote:
         | > The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that
         | requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely
         | available from 2026.
        
         | pkaye wrote:
         | If you read the article it mentions that US implemented an OA
         | mandate in 2022.
         | 
         | > The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S,
         | introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the
         | United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate
         | the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented
         | an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US
         | taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
        
         | jfkfif wrote:
         | DOE already mandates this
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | > it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63
       | million) to standardize institutional repositories -- websites
       | dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and
       | other materials -- ensuring that there will be a mechanism for
       | making research in Japan open.
       | 
       | The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting
       | access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is
       | not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's
       | from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but
       | they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they
       | want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years
       | to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every
       | obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible--it
       | makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking
       | about projects where open access is written into the funding as a
       | requirement.
       | 
       | My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance
       | processes they're putting in place if all the data is being
       | consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.
        
         | Staple_Diet wrote:
         | I recall a paper that sought to explore how willing authors
         | were to release data when they had published open access and
         | stated 'data available on request'. Iirc it was below 50% that
         | responded with data. See related here;
         | https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/
         | 
         | That being said, there are also issues with opening the gates
         | to anyone to get your data and use it to publish;
         | https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
         | 
         | My data is OA, but I'd appreciate any one wanting to use to
         | first reach out and discuss any nuances that may influence
         | their analysis.
        
         | FredPret wrote:
         | There should be some academic reward for just gathering quality
         | data
        
       | tkgally wrote:
       | Last year, my employer, the University of Tokyo, became the first
       | Japanese university to sign the Declaration on Research
       | Assessment (DORA) [1]. Like open access, that initiative is a
       | positive move toward a better research environment, and it would
       | be great if more institutions committed to it.
       | 
       | [1] https://sfdora.org/
        
         | staunton wrote:
         | Did this change anything about how research is conducted?
        
           | tkgally wrote:
           | Good question. It's probably too early to tell.
           | 
           | By signing DORA, the university leadership has stated support
           | for a principle about how hiring and promotion decisions
           | should be made. But it may take a few years before that
           | principle is fully absorbed by the faculty committees who
           | actually evaluate candidates.
        
       | lieblingautor wrote:
       | Sounds great, hope it will inspire its neighboring countries to
       | take a similar initiative.
        
       | swader999 wrote:
       | Imagine if this was so advantageous that a large portion of the
       | rest of the world got pulled into it. Interesting times.
        
       | a_bonobo wrote:
       | Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded
       | by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be
       | deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the
       | Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their
       | copyrighted formatting).
       | 
       | I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians
       | will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like
       | there's any consequences. It's also about the text of the paper,
       | not about the associated data. And these repositories are
       | generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open:
       | I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to
       | the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable.
       | 
       | it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the
       | eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with
       | all the associated problems.
       | 
       | We've had this system for years now and it feels like it barely
       | made a blip.
       | 
       | >Seiichi says that gold OA -- in which the final copyedited and
       | polished version of a paper is made freely available on the
       | journal site -- is not feasible on a wide scale. That's because
       | the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for
       | universities.
       | 
       | One should note that this isn't too expensive because of
       | associated costs: it's that the for-profit publishers keep
       | ratcheting up the cost. Nature-group journals now take more than
       | ten grand in OA fees per paper, which is not justified by any
       | associated cost. They're typesetting a PDF and hosting it for ten
       | grand a PDF.
        
         | kergonath wrote:
         | > Australia already has a similar system: if the research is
         | funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has
         | to be deposited at the institute's research repository
         | (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before
         | they add their copyrighted formatting).
         | 
         | It's more or less the same in the UK and France as well.
         | 
         | > I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians
         | will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not
         | like there's any consequences.
         | 
         | IIRC in the UK it does not count in the national performance
         | assessment it if is not in an open repository.
         | 
         | > It's also about the text of the paper, not about the
         | associated data.
         | 
         | Yeah. Data is a big problem. There are many different types
         | that cannot be handled just like a pdf (tons of files in the
         | same dataset, huge archives and everything in between). It's a
         | huge lot of storage space, the vast majority of which will
         | never be even accessed, never mind used. I've been part of
         | several initiatives and it is not easy to set up.
         | 
         | > And these repositories are generally built by for-profit
         | providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my
         | Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's
         | repository, papers in there are barely findable.
         | 
         | That's a damn shame. The British government is doing a lot of
         | things right with their open access policy, but a thing that
         | works quite well in France is that there is a single national
         | repository ( https://hal.science : it voild be better indexed
         | but it does show up on Google Scholar) and everyone uses it.
         | This is the sort of things that makes sense at the national
         | level. A myriad of small repositories on obscure university
         | websites is not very helpful. That way it also does not depend
         | on the (possible lack of) willingness of individual
         | institutions to fund it and do it properly.
         | 
         | > it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the
         | eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues,
         | with all the associated problems.
         | 
         | If we're really serious about open access, only articles in a
         | public repository should count. All the legal issues there used
         | to be were cleared up, the infrastructure is there (things like
         | arxiv can be used as a last resort for governments or
         | institutions that won't get their ducks in a row). The issue is
         | really lack of good will.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | Theoretically, something like a national OPDS feed would be
           | perfect for this: OPDS is a publication distribution feed
           | protocol that allows to include other sub-feeds, making for a
           | distributed tree structure. A country could publish a
           | collection of individual university feeds, which in turn
           | linked to the papers of their researchers.
        
         | dguest wrote:
         | This means that journals can't _prevent_ you from uploading a
         | preprint though. A few publishers do this [1]. Even if the
         | upload isn 't enforced it means the restriction can't be
         | either.
         | 
         | But it's odd that the paper must be in the institute's
         | repository and not one of a larger list of preprint servers. I
         | would assume the authors would much rather put a paper on arXiv
         | than on their shoddy university repository.
         | 
         | [1]:
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_publishers_by...
        
           | a_bonobo wrote:
           | Having submitted to biorxiv before many times: oh yeah!!! the
           | ease of submission there is second to none. For-profit
           | publishers' submission process is an overcomplicated pile in
           | comparison.
        
       | gigatexal wrote:
       | I support this 100%. All publicly funded research even in the
       | least bit should be public. Shwartz would be proud.
        
         | surfingdino wrote:
         | Playing the Devil's advocate for a sec, I'd ask the public if
         | it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in
         | perpetuity? And to answer my own question, I think we should
         | demand that scientific papers are made available for free by
         | publicly-funded scientific libraries.
        
           | gigatexal wrote:
           | The library of Congress could host it. Hell I'd ask for my
           | taxes to be raised if needed to host these publications for
           | everyone.
        
           | jfkfif wrote:
           | osti.gov
        
           | whimsicalism wrote:
           | > I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on
           | those publications in perpetuity
           | 
           | are we pretending pdf hosting is actually costly or what? the
           | devil should hire better advocates
        
       | gumbojuice wrote:
       | I could imagine a problem here in India, where there is no
       | funding for publishing papers, especially for graduate students.
        
         | thisisjaymehta wrote:
         | Exactly, but government is doing its best to boost R&D, what
         | matters more is private funding for R&D. Big companies like
         | Reliance, TATA and Adani should setup research labs in
         | universities and colleges.
        
         | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
         | what do you mean?
        
       | low_tech_love wrote:
       | The term "open access" is misleading and carefully engineered to
       | generate good will, when in fact it should be termed "pay to
       | publish" (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it
       | stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to
       | drain public money from European countries. Not only are we
       | paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host
       | PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing
       | for the quality of their research output (in order to get
       | submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned
       | meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of
       | rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now
       | we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific
       | literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a
       | serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more
       | attractive.
       | 
       | If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer
       | expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You
       | can't have the cake and eat it too.
       | 
       | [1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-
       | of...
        
         | WarOnPrivacy wrote:
         | Headline: _Japan 's push to make all research open access_
         | 
         | > The term "open access" is misleading and carefully engineered
         | to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed "pay to
         | publish". [1]
         | 
         | [1] Seems to be about how OA is done in countries that aren't
         | Japan.
        
         | tmalsburg2 wrote:
         | Japan's initiative is focused on "green open access" which is
         | different from pay-to-publish. I recommend the section titled
         | "Green OA" in the submitted article. Relevant quote:
         | 
         | "Japan's move to greater access to its research is focusing on
         | 'green OA' -- in which authors make the author-accepted, but
         | unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital
         | repositories, says Seiichi.
         | 
         | Seiichi says that gold OA -- in which the final copyedited and
         | polished version of a paper is made freely available on the
         | journal site -- is not feasible on a wide scale. That's because
         | the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for
         | universities."
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | Green OA is just as meaningless as---or worse than---Gold OA.
           | You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the "right" to
           | self-publish the preprint, and they _still_ paywall it. The
           | vast majority of people will find the paywalled version
           | before yours, and anyway there is no guarantee that your
           | preprint is accurate with the final, published version, so
           | most people will still trust the paywalled version more than
           | your PDF. Especially when performing systematic literature
           | reviews where you need to document the sources of your
           | references.
           | 
           | The current implementation of OA (any of them) is basically a
           | self-fulfilling prophecy: we convinced ourselves that
           | "publishers are evil" and impossible to get rid of, and now
           | we are paying them so that they don't have to do their job.
           | We basically retired publishers early with an extra pension,
           | all because everyone "wants to believe" in open access. But
           | guess what? This is not disruptive. OA is just as "capitalist
           | evil" as the usual publishing, or even more so. Do you want
           | to be disruptive? The disrupt. Get rid of the publishers. Or
           | at least constrain funding only to not-for-profits for
           | example.
        
             | shellac wrote:
             | > You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the
             | "right" to self-publish the preprint, and they still
             | paywall it
             | 
             | There's no APC with Green OA, so what money are you talking
             | about? Green OA is regular publishing, but with self
             | archiving. There will be a version freely available, and
             | the publishers aren't paid for that privilege.
             | 
             | If you want a route to the death of publishers, green OA is
             | a promising one.
             | 
             | (I think the headline ought to emphasise that this is
             | pushing green OA, which is the interesting bit)
        
               | low_tech_love wrote:
               | I've had to pay for the option to publish my preprints in
               | a couple of CS journals. I'll look into that.
        
               | shellac wrote:
               | Ah, I somewhat see the confusion. Green OA doesn't
               | require the publisher to publish other versions for free,
               | it just means you are allowed to publish them. Typically
               | you'd publish them via an institutional repository,
               | preprint server (often discipline specific), or in one of
               | a number of free online services.
        
             | kome wrote:
             | "Green OA is just as meaningless as---or worse than---Gold
             | OA. You pay the publisher a large sum of money for the
             | "right" to self-publish the preprint"
             | 
             | that's not how it works. you don't pay anything.
        
               | low_tech_love wrote:
               | That's not what I experienced in the past, at least not
               | with IEEE (I stopped caring after a while).
        
             | radford-neal wrote:
             | "there is no guarantee that your preprint is accurate with
             | the final, published version, so most people will still
             | trust the paywalled version more than your PDF"
             | 
             | I think this is backwards. The definitive version that
             | should be cited is the freely-available one, since that is
             | the version that everyone can read. No one should cite the
             | paywalled version.
        
           | cherryteastain wrote:
           | >in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized,
           | versions of papers available in the digital repositories
           | 
           | This is already the case, almost wveryone puts the preprints
           | on arxiv/SSRN
        
             | mcbuilder wrote:
             | That's true for most recent AI/ML work, but hardly true for
             | all of research.
        
               | cherryteastain wrote:
               | I think it applies to most STEM fields. I'm a reviewer
               | for several journals in a STEM field (not AI/ML
               | specifically, but some manuscripts do try to apply AI/ML
               | to this field) and the vast majority of authors seem to
               | upload their preprints to arxiv etc.
               | 
               | Social sciences may be behind though as you say, I do not
               | know as I'm not in that field.
        
               | jfkfif wrote:
               | Econ has a big working paper culture
        
               | ants_everywhere wrote:
               | As someone with graduate degrees in both STEM (math) and
               | social science (psychology) fields, it's true that social
               | science is way behind STEM in terms of preprints to
               | digital archives. It's possible there's momentum here in
               | the last 5 or so years that I'm unaware of though.
               | 
               | That matters for a few reasons:
               | 
               | (1) the average person more frequently encounters
               | psychological, social and medical issues more than they
               | do math problems. And since the research in those fields
               | tends to be pay walled, people are at the mercy of things
               | like SEO spam medical and health sites.
               | 
               | (2) wrong ideas in medicine or psychology can (and have
               | in the past) damaged entire generations of people. So in
               | that sense their blast radius can be very large. This
               | means that peer review is especially important and that
               | there's a potential negative externality to posting
               | preprints and drafts before they're finalized. I suspect
               | we'd have to solve the peer review and quality problem
               | before STEM-style preprint archives become the norms in
               | all fields.
        
               | alephnerd wrote:
               | > I think it applies to most STEM fields
               | 
               | Much of the medical and life sciences space does not
               | publish on Arxiv or OA platforms.
               | 
               | It's slowly changing with Green OA initiatives being
               | pushed by government donors, but not there yet.
               | 
               | > Social sciences may be behind though as you say
               | 
               | Econ, a lot of PoliSci, Finance/Business, and
               | Computational Linguistics was very early on the
               | OA/Working Paper movement.
        
               | cherryteastain wrote:
               | Isn't biorxiv quite popular?
        
               | alephnerd wrote:
               | For Bioengineering it definetly is, but a lot of Medicine
               | is still locked behind high impact Wiley and Sage
               | publications, and for a lot of that research it's fairly
               | easy to pay the $3-4k to make the article open access.
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | Not true at all for bio and medical science in
               | particular. (yes biorxiv exists but it is not most
               | papers)
        
               | insane_dreamer wrote:
               | It's also true for biological research (bioxriv)
        
           | consp wrote:
           | > That's because the cost to make every paper free to read
           | would be too high for universities.
           | 
           | That's just bs. They can make a law fixing that for free but
           | won't. It's not can, but will which is the problem.
        
             | low_tech_love wrote:
             | The truth is that OA is a childish illusion that got
             | "absorbed" by the adults in the room who tapped the kids on
             | their back and said "no worries, we'll take it from here".
             | Then they turned traditional publishing, which was already
             | an elaborate expensive ruse, into OA which is an even more
             | expensive (but less elaborate) ruse. Now everyone is happy,
             | except someone trying to do actual research and having to
             | read 1000 meaningless papers a day.
        
         | 2Gkashmiri wrote:
         | https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/
         | 
         | india's research repository. all phd thesis and everything is
         | here.
        
           | 9dev wrote:
           | You got to love India's ability to pick the most
           | indiscoverable domain names possible for their projects...
        
             | datpiff wrote:
             | It's almost as if they're speaking a different language
        
               | carlob wrote:
               | or 22
        
           | tugberkk wrote:
           | same here in Turkey. https://dergipark.org.tr/en has a lot of
           | journals free of access. One can also find the phd and msc
           | thesis too in
           | https://tez.yok.gov.tr/UlusalTezMerkezi/giris.jsp
        
           | xvilka wrote:
           | It would be nice to make a simple website that will list
           | those repositories in easily discoverable way per country.
           | Something akin to "Awesome Research" list.
        
         | tokai wrote:
         | McGill and you got it backwards. Open Access has a quite clear
         | definition.[0] Publishers have co-opeded the term and dopne
         | everything to confuse the issue. All the so-called open access
         | colours are mainly publisher made, to water down the true OA
         | definition.
         | 
         | [0] https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read/
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | Sure, but none of that matters if the big publishers are the
           | ones gobbling up the money anyway. For some reason it's
           | better to pay them a ridiculous amount of money to host PDFs
           | than it is to pay for subscriptions? What's the difference?
           | Most university libraries have always had access to all the
           | important journals and anyone can go there and do their
           | research. The whole idea that subscription is evil and OA is
           | good is ludicrous. We're paying the same amount of money (or
           | more) only to get a much, much shittier service, and a
           | torrent of absolute meaningless "research" that only serves
           | to drown out the good ones.
           | 
           | PS: And by the way, if you say that "not every country has
           | access to these libraries" then think about whether they have
           | money to pay for APCs.
        
         | sharpshadow wrote:
         | It's a shame that the public has to pay twice. Tax money pays
         | it in the first place and then we have to pay for it again..
        
         | DiogenesKynikos wrote:
         | > Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting
         | them, because a rejected paper makes no money
         | 
         | Prestigious journals have very low (single-digit percentage)
         | acceptance rates.
         | 
         | One or two rungs down, the standard domain-specific journals
         | are still rigorous, and you need to do substantial work to get
         | published in them. It's a hurdle that any decent graduate
         | student with a good advisor can pass, but it's not as if you
         | can just write anything and get published.
         | 
         | There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I don't
         | think scientists generally pay much attention to those
         | journals.
         | 
         | > I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious,
         | systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more
         | attractive.
         | 
         | Doing a literature review is not that difficult. You begin with
         | a few highly cited papers. Then you look at what papers they
         | reference in the intro. You also look at the list of papers
         | that cite them and sort by the number of citations. You can
         | work in both directions and pretty quickly establish what the
         | important papers in the field are.
         | 
         | Notice that the important thing here is to look at citations.
         | Getting a paper into a journal is only the first, most basic
         | step. Peer review is only an initial quality check. Over time,
         | other scientists decide what papers are important and cite
         | them. If a paper racks up 100 citations, that means a lot more
         | than just passing peer review.
        
           | rscho wrote:
           | You are not describing a _systematic_ literature review.
           | Systematic reviews are hell indeed, at least in non-STEM
           | fields.
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | > There are junk journals that will publish anything, but I
           | don't think scientists generally pay much attention to those
           | journals.
           | 
           | Yes, but the point is not that the good journals are not
           | there, it's that the good ones are drowned out by the
           | absolute humongous amount of garbage that comes out every
           | day. If you do research you know that it's not so simple like
           | "oh I only read papers from journals X and Y". Good research
           | comes out everywhere, and if you don't cite it people (I mean
           | reviewers, if you can call them that) will complain, and
           | anyway you'll be putting yourself in a bubble which is bad
           | practice. It used to be that journals would do the work for
           | you to separate good from bad research, but nowadays it's on
           | the researcher to dig through 1000 papers to find a single
           | good one. It's ridiculous and meaningless. If we're paying
           | them and making them rich, at least I'd expect them to do
           | their job.
        
         | mfld wrote:
         | I don't get it. Ditching publishers to fund expert communities?
         | Shouldn't there be some form of organisation that connects
         | those experts, selects some as journal editors, provides
         | infrastructure for submission/review/paper access, etc? If yes,
         | wouldn't "publisher" be suitable term for such an organisation?
         | 
         | There exist publishers that, instead of being part of big media
         | outlets, a run by research organizations themselves (e.g. EMBO
         | press). I agree that it would be nice if more would be
         | published there.
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | I mean in the same way communities organize conferences
           | regularly without becoming publishers. Anyway if you want to
           | call them publishers fine, as long as they are not giant
           | behemoths who feed on large amounts of public money to do
           | nothing.
           | 
           | At least when publishing was an actual market (instead of
           | being just a money sink) the publishers had to actually do
           | their job to survive.
        
         | impendia wrote:
         | I am a mathematics researcher. I agree with most of what you
         | say, but
         | 
         | > Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting
         | them, because a rejected paper makes no money
         | 
         | The only pressure I ever get is from _editors_ (i.e., other
         | mathematicians, who make all the final decisions), if I 'm
         | taking too long and they want me to hurry up.
         | 
         | If a representative of the _publisher_ attempted to pressure me
         | for _any_ reason, then my response would be less than polite.
         | 
         | Occasionally I have gotten review requests from "pay to
         | publish" journals which will publish pretty much anything, and
         | which don't have any credibility within the math community.
         | These, I simply delete as spam.
        
           | rscho wrote:
           | Just occasionally? I get at least 3-4 of those daily! They've
           | become seriously annoying, and confused senior professors
           | around me often fall into the trap.
        
           | low_tech_love wrote:
           | I reject the invitations too, but the fact is that they
           | exist, there are (many) people who do them, the papers are
           | published, they come up in searches, and the whole thing
           | becomes a muddy mess.
           | 
           | Most people say "we'll just don't read/cite them" but the
           | fact is that there is no clear red line; it's all foggy. In
           | order to look at a paper and say "I will not read you because
           | you are crap" you need to spend some time with it, and if you
           | have 2000 of them, that translates to a lot of wasted time.
           | The reason why journals are supposed to do serious peer
           | review was exactly so that we don't have to do it ourselves.
        
           | abdullahkhalids wrote:
           | It's possible for pressure to exist at a higher level. The
           | editor simply stops asking reviews from people who reject
           | papers above some threshold rate. Or at even a higher level,
           | the journal replaces the editor who maintains a too low an
           | acceptance rate.
           | 
           | These pressures are harder to notice, without population
           | level data.
        
         | norswap wrote:
         | In CS, it's widely accepted that you can publish your "drafts"
         | publicly. Basically just the real deal without the notices of
         | publication (I guess maybe legally you have to leave some
         | differences in? I never bothered, and I doubt the publishers
         | who everyone kinda hates would dare creating this kind of
         | controversy).
         | 
         | As others have pointed out, some countries mandate national or
         | institutional repositories.
         | 
         | A good grassroots way out of this is educating researchers to
         | always take one of these options. Let publishers overplay their
         | hand and get crushed.
         | 
         | Of course, it would be nicer if regulators realized how
         | ridiculous this all is and crushed them without the need for
         | public outcry, but one may dream.
        
           | contrarian1234 wrote:
           | When I published with an Elsevier journal they explained the
           | "draft" thing pretty clearly. They said you retain copyright
           | on whatever you write yourself. But once you have reviewer
           | feedback and incorporate feedback from the journal editor(s)
           | then it's no longer entirely your work and you couldn't
           | distribute it at your own will. You could pay the journal a
           | huge amount of money (in effect for the work done by the
           | editors), and then the paper would be open access. The fees
           | might not be reasonable (it's kind of hard to judge) but the
           | overall logic made sense to me
           | 
           | So the first draft before review - the one you wrote all on
           | your own - is what you can put up online. I'm not in CS but I
           | assume the logic is similar in other fields.
           | 
           | They also provided a separate link of the final published PDF
           | that you could use to distribute the paper to colleagues and
           | interested parties. This link worked for a sufficiently long
           | period of X amount of days/months. After that it was
           | paywalled and in their garden
        
         | gbnvc wrote:
         | No, you can invent this idea that open access is a boogeyman,
         | but it's flat out corporate lies. This is free speech. I'm
         | allowed to say I think a statement is untrustworthy.
        
         | pessimizer wrote:
         | > OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain
         | public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a
         | ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on
         | a website
         | 
         | This is a choice that European countries are making that has
         | nothing to do with open access. You can always choose to
         | overpay well-connected insider contractors to accomplish any of
         | the functions of government.
        
         | davidparks21 wrote:
         | I struggle with this question. The editor plays a valuable role
         | and it's not hard to swallow the argument that editors make
         | science better, they're the front line filter. Employing them
         | full time is a core value that the current system provides. I'm
         | wary (but not close minded) to the idea that volunteer orgs
         | could scale to the top echelons of scientific publication,
         | which require a lot of filtering. Perhaps if we look to the
         | conference paper model where funding primarily comes from the
         | conference? The conference brings benefits beyond publishing.
         | In that model publishing equates to financial discount or free
         | entrance to the conference, so it flips the equation.
        
           | eslaught wrote:
           | I work in CS and we do (mostly) conference publishing.
           | 
           | I could be wrong, but I don't think PC chairs are paid, by
           | anybody. Maybe they get free housing at the conference, but
           | this is more of a consolation prize given the amount of work
           | involved.
           | 
           | Certainly the rank and file PC members don't get anything. I
           | was on one PC mailing list where one of the organizers
           | accidentally let slip that (some) organizers get free
           | housing, and there was a big uproar in the PC. None of us get
           | anything like that.
           | 
           | So this is literally a system where the expert reviewers get
           | nothing, and even the chairs in charge do it nearly for free.
           | What part of this needs to cost money?
           | 
           | The peer review comes from the community. The exclusivity and
           | filter comes from the community. Even the _funding_ comes
           | from the community, because community members pay to go to
           | the conference.
           | 
           | What the publisher does is, as GP noted, mainly to host PDFs
           | on a website and make sure they stay up. That costs
           | something, but nothing like what the licensing fees for these
           | services are (or the so-called "open access" fees that we now
           | pay).
        
         | barfbagginus wrote:
         | Don't forget the most important OA mode
         | 
         | Black OA means hacking journals and making their papers free
         | for all.
         | 
         | That's the only OA we need to invest in. Make the BOA ratio
         | into a perfect 1.0, and all other problems with OA vanish.
        
         | barfbagginus wrote:
         | Gold OA is trash, don't confuse it with true OA modes:
         | 
         | 1. Green OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author;
         | author waives copyright
         | 
         | 2. Diamond OA: peer reviewed and free for reader and author;
         | author KEEPS copyright
         | 
         | 3. Black OA: free for readers, pirated by hackers; DISREGARDS
         | copyright
         | 
         | See my other note where I argue that BOA is the most important
         | one, since it does not depend on state funding or publisher
         | largesse. It simply seizes the knowledge that must be seized.
        
       | tmalsburg2 wrote:
       | Smart, because why would you use billions in tax money to fund
       | research then let publisher parasites take the results hostage.
        
       | rondrabkin wrote:
       | So many problems with the existing process but questions could
       | include -is anyone going to take down bad quality or fake
       | research -is there a way to update published papers (like link
       | rot in references ) -will the repositories be SEO optimized so
       | people will find them
        
       | amadeuspagel wrote:
       | Why can't academics just publish their stuff on a blog like
       | everyone else?
        
         | rscho wrote:
         | Because: poor graduate students would contemplate suicide for
         | having to gather hundreds of papers from just as many obscure
         | blogs.
        
           | insane_dreamer wrote:
           | if authors all just uploaded a copy of their final PDF to
           | sci-hub this would solve the problem
        
         | ufo wrote:
         | Papers should be immutable, blogs bit rot, and anonymous peer
         | review is important.
         | 
         | The million dollar question is why don't researchers publish on
         | journals that don't charge outrageous open-access fees. Here
         | the main problemis that carreer advancement is predicated on
         | publishing in prestigious venues. Such venues take advantage of
         | that by jacking their price. Fixing this will require
         | cooperation from governments, which have leverage on both sides
         | of the equation: they can help fund alternative paper
         | repositories, and they are ultimately responsible for the
         | rating criteria of what venues are prestigious and how research
         | grants get awarded.
        
       | jimbobthrowawy wrote:
       | Nice change! I expect people to still use sci-hub, or something
       | like it, to access these for UX reasons.
        
       | EchoReflection wrote:
       | "Japan plans to make all publicly funded research available to
       | read _in institutional repositories._ "
       | 
       | Oh, are you not a student or teacher or employee here at the
       | University of XYZ? I'm sorry, this research is not 'freely'
       | available to you.
        
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