Earlier quoted context omitted.
Universities already pay comparable subscription fees
If most papers can be accessed for free, why would universities still pay?
Harvard is starting to complain. Harvard.
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
61–70 of 327 posts
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
I agree with this in theory... but do you really want my garbage, ad hoc, messy code that I used to pipe output from one program to another?
Yes.
Especially because if you are forced to publish your code, it will be better.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#63I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?
They should be. It's better to pay for open access than lock science behind paywalls. There is vast knowledge that could be mined by machines, indexed by AIs , processed for finding novel patterns, but it's impossible when it's all locked behind paywalls. Want to buy "prestige" ? pay for it. That's more fair than "give us exclusive rights to your science for free or you don't get prestige".
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Journal publishing has costs I've yet to see any justification at all for the outrageous fees charged by academic journals. The only costs I can see are printing/distribution and web hosting. Typesetting is trivial. Editing is non-existent. Editorial isn't paid. Peer review isn't paid. Having a nice office and marketing staff who hold university libraries to ransom shouldn't count as a cost.
The first fact you need to deal with is that open access journals, started to explicitly counter the cost problem, have similar costs. If it was as simple as you think it is, open access journals would be much cheaper. (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.) The second point is that publishers costs are around 70% of revenue, as the article says margins are around 30%. That means there's a limit to how low…
Free open access journals (just two I happen to know of - I'm sure there are more):
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a perfectly fine policy, if they want to implement it. Just note that it will increase the cost of every paper, because they now need to pay for open access.
Publication costs are minuscule relative to research costs. Rounding error. And furthermore, they're minuscule compared to costs of journal access. Edit: I'm wrong on the second point. They're actually comparable. See comment below.
According to the article, they're 70% of publishers' revenue (straightforward extrapolation from 30% margin). I can't think of any sense in which that's minuscule.
Research costs may be correct. Do you know where I can find data on average funding for published studies? Or how many government funded studies were published at what budget?
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
I agree with this in theory... but do you really want my garbage, ad hoc, messy code that I used to pipe output from one program to another?
Absolutely yes. Science isnt supposed to be clean and tidy, but reproducible.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does ACM sell individual papers? If so, what's the price?
It's about the same as everyone else: about 15 USD per paper, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CF... They also have a somewhat restrictive licensing on their software: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice This part is kind of weird, as they have a noncommercial clause on their copyrighted algorithms, which makes them non-free. On a slightly different note, I was some…
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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#68I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
That would also have the benefit of making sure the code actually works. From my time in CS grad school I'm pretty sure there are many published papers where the author never had code that achieved the results they described.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#69> “The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community — Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities — who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr. Eisen. “University presidents love to tout how important their scientists are because they publish in these journals.”
For me, this is the cog of the problem. People who are in a position to change should push for it.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
I agree with this in theory... but do you really want my garbage, ad hoc, messy code that I used to pipe output from one program to another?
Considering that a mistake in such a program could completely skew results, yeah that seems pretty important.