111–120 of 327 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm not actually recommending this license, but it seems relevant to mention: The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
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.
Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise. They want their results disseminated as widely as possible.
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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?
Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access.
So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay (your share of) the extra $1000 or so per paper that it would take?
In CS, conferences (which organise peer review and pretty much all publish open-access proceedings) hardly ever charge more than something like $200 for attendance, and this also pays for the conference venue, logistics and a slush fund of financial support for student attendees. Why would the peer review and publication part cost more in other fields? It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or…
People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage.
There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
What about all the IP generated as a result of taxpayer-funded research?
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…
Just to clarify: Is your position that research written by academic scientists, funded by government grants and university budgets, reviewed by volunteers, and proofread and typeset by the researchers themselves, handed off to a journal to put in a print edition or stick a pdf on their website, should belong exclusively to the corporate owners of the journal for a period of ~100 years after publication, with no profi…
Journals made a lot of sense before the age of the internet, when they actually did have to do a lot of work to coordinate the activity of physically collecting research papers, mailing them for reviews, paying dedicated people for typesetting and so on. Although the cost of all of this has almost vanished now that tools for editing are so accessible and delivery costs are inexistent, publishers still charge ridiculous sums for papers produced mostly from public money simply because of their prestige.
What benefit do the publishers provide to anyone? Why do the publishers deserve billions of dollars?
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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 w…
But the control of copyright is a real problem, and i think we underestimate how much it hampers science (esp. considering the wonderful things one could do with machine analysis of the texts)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
What about all the IP generated as a result of taxpayer-funded research?