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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#101

Post by aroberge »

jimjimjim wrote: post #93

unpopular opinion ahead: no, and probably not even for taxpayer funded research. Can you demand a lift in a garbage truck? or in a tank? both of these things are provided for local or central government. why not? because it distracts from the job that they are there for. The same can be said for research (and source code). It takes time, effort and money to publish and peer review research. If journals can't make mon…

Reviewers do not get paid. In many scientific fields, authors use LaTeX together with a well-defined style to format their own articles. The cost can be minimal, as has been demonstrated by many new journals (see https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an... for an analysis by an expert in his field who started what may very well become the most prestigious journal in that field and is freely accessible.)

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#102

Post by [deleted] »

skybrian wrote: post #84
lacker wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because if it doesn't even compile then I will call BS on your results.

See, that's exactly what you shouldn't do if you want to encourage academics to release the source code. Academic code sometimes only has been made to work on one machine (the author's). Someone reproducing the results should still have access to the source, even if they have to hack it to work on their system.

[deleted]

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#106

Post by _snydly »

ikeboy wrote: post #81
denzil_correa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count. Oh it does count. Peer reviews in journals are done by scientists for free. Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal. ArXiv is the perfect example.

> Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal. Then can you explain why arxiv costs around $10 per paper, while plos charges over 100 times as much?

I really can't explain why, but PLOS tries to: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/

They just increased the fees for their general purpose publication, PLOS ONE. Here's their reasoning:

"PLOS ONE has not increased its Article Processing Charge (APC) since 2009, for the past six years absorbing increasing publishing costs without raising author fees. Its new price reflects the work involved in shepherding the volume of papers PLOS manages from submission to published work; PLOS invests significant resources to improve the quality of PLOS ONE output, thoroughly checking for ethics, competing interests and robust science."

They also say they're updating their terrible article submission system. I don't see how any of this costs as much as it does. PLOS ONE alone publishes ~30,000 articles a year, that's a huge amount of money in fees, even if not everyone pays. On top of all of that, they accept and publish 70% of all articles. That's a really leaky sieve that shouldn't be so expensive to maintain.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#107

Post by return0 »

vlasev wrote: post #97
jimjimjim wrote: post #93

unpopular opinion ahead: no, and probably not even for taxpayer funded research. Can you demand a lift in a garbage truck? or in a tank? both of these things are provided for local or central government. why not? because it distracts from the job that they are there for. The same can be said for research (and source code). It takes time, effort and money to publish and peer review research. If journals can't make mon…

I don't think that's a sound analogy. When does getting a lift in a garbage truck allow you the opportunity to further humanity's knowledge to the same extent as being able to access papers and do some research. These are rather different things. Also, isn't it true that a lot (or most) of the peer review is done on a volunteer basis?

Actually is there any journal that actually pays reviewers?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#108

Post by mrcsparker »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #60
mmmBacon wrote: post #13

Earlier 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, please.

To be fair, a lot of people do publish their working code with the paper. It helps people like me understand how to do the work.

Bad code is fine, good code is better, great code is great. Stick to fine and I can do my job and you can write papers knowing that your work will be used by many.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#109

Post by danieltillett »

return0 wrote: post #95
arbre wrote: post #89

Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.

Most journals withhold the copyright, and the scientists happily relinquish it. They can distribute preprint copies of their article (very few do in life sciences) but not the article itself.

I would not say that most scientist happly relinquish it, but they trade off the prestige gained from publishing in the journal for the copyright.

The real problem is the use of journals as an arbiture of research quality. If it didn’t matter to your career if you published in Nature or PLOS One then everyone would publish in PLOS One. If you are more likely to get a job or grant by publishing in Nature then people will do almost anything to get their work into Nature. We are trying to solve the wrong problem by worrying about journals controlling copyright.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#110

Post by zmmmmm »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #60
mmmBacon wrote: post #13

Earlier 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?

If it's that garbage, how do you know your results are correct? It should be at least non-garbage enough that someone else could theoretically check it, or you're not doing science at all.
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