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Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

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Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#201

Post by baghira »

sawwit wrote: post #200
baghira wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the editorial board is not the only cost component of a journal. I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I'll admit my comment was influenced by some proposed models (e.g. in the UK), arguing for the allocation of taxpayer resources to "buy" open access for research.

> I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with good reputation on it, that's a…

exgrv's commment, the way I read it, was arguing for something less radical: "simply" insourcing the work of the journal publishers, and having it done by scientists (maybe allocating more resources to scientists so that the workload remains sane).

What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to establish relevance, such a model is much less effective at gauging quality (which is the problem, if you want to use bibliometric scores as a way to establish whose careers are to advance). In other term, the outcome of a search for "cloud computing" is certainly pertinent with the subject. That is not how you would choose which cloud service to use.

Of course, it may well be possible that the human judgment component is codifiable in a few hundred/thousand of heustics (sounds like a hard problem, but it's not my field), thus allowing the construction of a good model.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#202

Post by omginternets »

DaveWalk wrote: post #174
omginternets wrote: post #10

I'd love to see "popcorn time for scientific publications". Hint, hint.

An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting movies, TV shows or music.

>It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there

I actually think this would be fairly trivial.

For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then, anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely download plugins.

This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement ("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and distributes the task of hosting the files.

Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#203

Post by sawwit »

baghira wrote: post #201
sawwit wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with good reputation on it, that's a…

exgrv's commment, the way I read it, was arguing for something less radical: "simply" insourcing the work of the journal publishers, and having it done by scientists (maybe allocating more resources to scientists so that the workload remains sane). What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to establish relevance, such a…

Intuitively I think, the problem is much simpler compared to web search because it's a much smaller graph and each node gets checked against reality in some sense, while on the market and on Google things mostly only get compared with the competition under very obfuscated circumstances with extremely weak feedback loops. PageRank is probably unnecessary for most areas as they are small enough so that specialists can easily keep track of new publications. It could just be a useful tool for listing a lot of publications, but, as I said, measures like citation, review count and reputation of the institution are probably pretty good on their own. It was perhaps misleading that I've mentioned PageRank at all, it was just an idea that I had at the time I wrote the comment.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#204

Post by kragen »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #156
masklinn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These journals are providing a service. The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices. http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little els…

Earning profits is good for society. It demonstrates that the seller is providing a needed product. And it triggers others to innovate, to find ways to provide that product too, and get in on the racket. This innovation then drives down costs. And that's exactly what you see happening here. The linguists are saying that they'll be able to provide the product for a lesser price, but being nice and offering to let Else…

Profits are neither good nor bad. Providing a needed product is good for society. Reducing the cost of the product is also good, because it allows us to produce more of it. Therefore, for the benefit of society, profits must be kept to the minimum necessary to incentivize production. And that's what happens in a free market: competition drives down profits. Any profits are a signal that the market is not very free, and large profits are a signal that the market is very nonfree.

What's happening with #icanhazpdf is that researchers are innovating to find ways to provide the product (access to research papers) at a much lower cost than Elsevier provides it — free, in fact. However, Elsevier, rather than compete with them, seeks to enforce government-granted monopolies on providing this service, known as copyrights, in order to protect their profits, at the cost of providing benefits to society.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#205

Post by kragen »

dalke wrote: post #164
kragen wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interlibrary loan services are wonderful. They were a lifesaver when I lived in a small town of 40,000 people 400 km away from the nearest "city" (of 120,000 people). But they are not a substitute for being able to browse the stacks; it's like the difference between using a web browser and a command-line anonymous FTP client.

I think you are voicing a frustration here which is not coupled to your earlier point. If I am wrong about my interpretation, let me point out that the US system isn't especially better than other developed countries in this respect. For example, the local college library to where I went to high school in Miami requires a fee to enter the library. http://library.miami.edu/policies/non-um-patron-access/ . (As a studen…

The library is the heart of a university, of course, and generally the best libraries are university libraries. But public libraries are also important — not only for reasons like Stanford's sad policy (and when I visited UPenn one night, they wouldn't even let me into the library because I wasn't a student there, even though I was accompanied by a student) but also because they exist in places where universities don't.

My disappointment in the library systems of other countries that I've visited is composed of two parts: first, there are many fewer and poorer public libraries than in the US; second, there are many fewer and poorer universities than in the US, which limits the available university libraries sharply.

It wouldn't surprise me if Sweden were better than the US in this regard. Sweden has an excellent welfare state, a world-class university system, and if I'm not mistaken, a centuries-long tradition of universal literacy.

But much of the developed world does not have this advantage; Germany, Norway, Benelux, Finland, Switzerland, Canada, Iceland, Israel, and possibly Austria share these attributes, but the US and UK do not have a reasonable welfare state, and Ireland, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Japan do not have the long tradition of universal literacy, although of course their educated elites have been literate for over a millennium, producing a rich literature¹. Countries outside this group (except possibly Singapore and Taiwan) do not even have a world-class university system.

That means that in Brazil, mainland China, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Brunei, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi, Oman, Czech, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and even Hungary, Russia, and Greece, you won't even find the kind of university where you're thinking to look for a good library, let alone the kind of university library you're thinking of. Maybe they have good public libraries (I hear Estonia's public library system is particularly good) but generally I expect not. But these are surely developed countries.

¹ Yes, before a century or two ago the educated elite of Australia and New Zealand lived in England, so perhaps that's a bit of a stretch.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#206

Post by kragen »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #161
kragen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prosecuted Galileo, resulting in him spending the rest of his life under house arrest?

Oh, you meant Pope Urban VII I . Urban VII lived like a hundred years earlier. But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.

Oh! Of course you're right; I mixed up my popes. Thank you for the correction!

It would have been surprising if the papacy were able to hold back Kepler and Newton, since they both lived in Protestant lands. That might be a coincidence. But maybe there were potential Keplers and Newtons living in Rome, or Madrid, or Tuscany, or even Paris¹, who were simply intimidated out of doing research.

¹ Even if they were Huguenots, who were still experiencing religious assassinations at the time, despite Henry IV; but especially if they were Catholics whose friends and family might suspect them of Huguenot sympathies.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#207

Post by kragen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #153
TeMPOraL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three links, especially the LW comment, go into details of what exactly this is supposed to mean. TL;DR: The models that were popular in times of Galileo weren't stories told to poor villagers by the Evil Church; they were precise mathematical tools that could be used to predict in advance the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. They also had an elaborate explanations for what the parts of their models mean. And…

> It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mas…

"Because it's stuff" is considerably better than "because it's Quintessence", and "stuff is attracted to other stuff with a force F⃗ = GD̂m₁m₂/D², which accelerates it by a vector m/F⃗, whose integral is its velocity vector, whose integral ∫∫(GD̂(t)m₂/D²(t))dt² is its displacement, and the Sun has a whole hell of a lot of stuff in it, from which we can derive Kepler's Three Laws as follows…" is really a dramatically better explanation than "the natural motion of Quintessence is eternally circular".

But that was Newton, not Galileo. (And the notation of course is more or less modern, except to the extent I've screwed it up.)

The main problem with Copernicus's new theory in Galileo's time, as I understand it, was not that it didn't make numeric predictions well; the problem was that it predicted qualitative phenomena that were "known" to be false, like stellar parallax.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#208

Post by masklinn »

baldfat wrote: post #199
masklinn wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Orthogonal means independent, not opposing. You can have free and open, you can have free and closed, you can have non-free and open and you can have non-free and closed. > IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall. Be as it may, even with mostly volunteers running a p…

you 100% right. I was thinking of Orthogonal lines :) 90 degrees to each other.

That's the origin, the simile is that orthogonal lines represent completely disjoint sets and are uncorrelated, so one can be changed without impacting the other. It's kinda weird, but there you are.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#209

Post by kragen »

TheCondor wrote: post #103
roel_v wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't claim to know across the world, but in much of Europe you can get a 'visitor' subscription to university libraries for some nominal fee (50 euros or so in my nearest library; hell, enrolling in a Belgian university as a student costs 70 euros per year, which gives you access to the library, e-journals, email, Eduroam, the whole shebang). I get a little irked every time this topic comes up, and people go on an…

The $30 isnt so much a fee as it is a stupid tax. If you are too stupid to go to a library, you have to pay the tax... What's more, you might be amazed at the lengths librarians will go to help you. Just because it's not on the shelf doesn't mean they don't have access to it or won't get access to it. real science journals are a special case too, they take a lot of space, they get very little actual use, the libraria…

Are you saying, "if you are too stupid to move out of Argentina"? I think many of us here would take exception to that. And we actually do have a National Library with a few million volumes; it's just that its selection of IBM Internal Technical Reports is relatively thin.

My friend who lives in Lahore, like 6 million other people, is not so lucky; his National Library has only some 0.2 million books, and it's a couple of hours away by car. Unlike many of his countrymen, at least he has a car and doesn't live in a part of the country where "Islamist" highwaymen might kidnap you off the highway for ransom.

Maybe you think he's stupid for not moving to the US. But I assure you that it is not as easy as all that. I haven't seen my parents in five years, and I miss them.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#210

Post by dalke »

kragen wrote: post #205
dalke wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are voicing a frustration here which is not coupled to your earlier point. If I am wrong about my interpretation, let me point out that the US system isn't especially better than other developed countries in this respect. For example, the local college library to where I went to high school in Miami requires a fee to enter the library. http://library.miami.edu/policies/non-um-patron-access/ . (As a studen…

The library is the heart of a university, of course, and generally the best libraries are university libraries. But public libraries are also important — not only for reasons like Stanford's sad policy (and when I visited UPenn one night, they wouldn't even let me into the library because I wasn't a student there, even though I was accompanied by a student) but also because they exist in places where universities don…

I feel like you have switched contexts, without enough notice.

These comments started because of an article about scientists working around copyright restrictions. This thread started off as a complaint about the cost of getting access to foundational papers in a research field. I pointed out a cheaper mechanism for getting access, via the local library.

Hence, I thought that's what you were talking about, which is why my examples were to research libraries in the US.

I'm going to go back to your original statement, which is "I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!"

I think most people are aware that the US is a wealthy country, and therefore expect that the US library system should be above the world average. That is what you elaborated on now.

But your original statement suggested that the library quality in the US was appreciably above what one would expect for a country as rich as the US.

Yet you listed a number of countries which are comparable in wealth to the US, and which have comparable library systems. (Germany, the Nordic countries, etc.)

Therefore, it doesn't seem like the US's library system is better than what most people would expect.

Had you said "The US has a good library system", I would not have asked for clarification. But you said people in the US don't know just how good it is, even when compared to countries on a similar economic level. Which doesn't appear to be the case.

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