Should All Research Papers Be Free? • Hacker News Board

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#121

Post by jjoonathan » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #110

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #60

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?

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.

You don't. But there are 5x-100x more bugs lurking in the methodology so triage is the name of the game.

A much bigger problem is that grantsmanship strongly incentivizes against verifying your methodology and being diligent in your construction of null hypotheses.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#122

Post by return0 » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:20 AM UTC

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114

4bpp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors. 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, a…

For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about, it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#123

Post by pervycreeper » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:21 AM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #19

imglorp wrote: post #2

Some things, like dissemination of knowledge, are truly in the interest of all humanity. It seems criminal that a few hundred people at the publishing houses should benefit at the expense of billions' welfare.

While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are doing a better job than Springer or Elsevi…

They are extracting rents from research far beyond the value they add to it.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#124

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:22 AM UTC

4bpp wrote: post #92

ikeboy wrote: post #20

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…

CS conference proceedings published by our friends at ACM and IEEE are usually for-pay just like their journals.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#125

Post by danieltillett » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:22 AM UTC

return0 wrote: post #118

danieltillett wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, i find it hard to imagine a scientist feeling sad that he will publish a Nature paper. You are spot on that we need a new arbiter. It's 2016 and we rely on this ancient system, it's no wonder that the elseviers of the world take advantage of it. 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 machi…

I have not met a scientist (including myself) that was happy about giving up the copyright, but it is viewed as the cost of publishing in a “prestige” journal. Nearly all scientists would prefer to retain the copyright if they could and make their papers widely available to everyone interested provide it did not exclude publishing in a career advanacing journal.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#126

Post by adrianbd » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:23 AM UTC

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #19

imglorp wrote: post #2

Some things, like dissemination of knowledge, are truly in the interest of all humanity. It seems criminal that a few hundred people at the publishing houses should benefit at the expense of billions' welfare.

While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are doing a better job than Springer or Elsevi…

What exactly is the valuable service they provide as intermediaries? Why couldn't all taxpayer-funded scientists just publish their (anyway voluntarily peer-reviewed) research on whatever free online platform?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#127

Post by arcanus » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:23 AM UTC

lacker wrote: post #68

mmmBacon wrote: post #13

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.

At least in the engineering fields, many of the papers require at least a discussion of the verification and validation of the codebase. So it is improving, if admittedly far too slowly.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#128

Post by catnaroek » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:26 AM UTC

What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is.

What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of the journal in which it is published, or by the presence of fashionable keywords in its title or in the abstract, scientists are giving publishing houses the very rope with which they will be hanged. So, while the behavior of publishing houses is certainly antisocial and most abominable, it is only made possible by the very scientific community that condemns it.

Is there any fundamental reason why scientists can't always submit their papers to the arXiv, and let the web of citations determine their relative importance?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#129

Post by a_bonobo » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:27 AM UTC

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.

For the $1000-3000 that a single OA application costs I can pay for a new computer, or send one or two students to conferences, or pay for part of a stipend, finance a temporary web design guy, etc. Now I try to publish 10 papers per year - that's $10-30,000 out of the window for no "return" to our group. For $30,000 I can send everyone to several conferences!

Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper. The people who hire you will in all likelihood have access to your paper even if it's behind a paywall.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#130

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 2:28 AM UTC

adrianbd wrote: post #126

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are doing a better job than Springer or Elsevi…

What exactly is the valuable service they provide as intermediaries? Why couldn't all taxpayer-funded scientists just publish their (anyway voluntarily peer-reviewed) research on whatever free online platform?

As a taxpayer-funded scientist I publish all of my stuff on arXiv before submitting it to a journal, and it is 100% worthless for my career. If my research is not published in respected journals, other researchers will not bother looking at it, and justly so. Have you tried reading a paper selected at random on arXiv? You'll spend many long hours reading it only to end up realizing that it's garbage (unless you're lucky to realize this from reading the abstract).