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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#171

Post by eru »

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…

Then just make the Word document open access. Someone at Google or Facebook can come up with some machine learning tools to automatically convert these into the proper format and add cross references.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#172

Post by eru »

haskal wrote: post #168
reuven wrote: post #164

When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company. They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it. Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800. Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to…

There's nothing that stops you from uploading the PDF elsewhere, right? Why not just push the file to some free hosting service (or even GitHub in a GitHub Pages repo)?

Some journal forbid doing that.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#173

Post by a_bonobo »

a_bonobo wrote: post #129
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 tha…

%s/application/publication, can't edit anymore

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#174

Post by bloaf »

Yes. They should.

It is in the best interests of humanity to make the knowledge obtained through research available to anyone looking for that knowledge. There is a clear consensus among scientists that the current publishing model is at best inexpedient and at worst hostile to that end.

Most people are asking what good the current publishing model provides, but I think to answer that question we need to ask: "compared to what?" It seems clear to me that the current model is better than having no publishing mechanism at all, but I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the "none" model is the only alternative.

I think that if we sat down today and thought up a new publishing model from scratch, we would be able to outdo the status quo on just about every "good" people have mentioned here, as well as provide features that the current model is incapable of. I think it is highly likely that we could make a system that ran on donated resources alone.

Some things we might want/have in a "from scratch" model:

1. Direct access to data-as-in-a-database instead of data-as-a-graph-in-a-PDF

2. Blockchain-based reputation system for scientists

3. P2P storage and sharing of scientific data

4. Tiers of scientific information, e.g. an informal forum-of-science, semi-formal wiki-of-science, and formal publications

5. Automated peer review process

6. A better and more consistent authoring tool for scientists

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#175

Post by cheald »

Balgair wrote: post #162
mmmBacon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.

Have you worked with biologists? If they could figure out how to use git, let alone github, I would be astounded. No forgetting, these are incredibly smart people, they just are bench-top scientists, not laptop ones. If you want their code, it will be, at best, a copy-paste of badly hardcoded Matlab, years in the making, with for-loops for the sake of for-loops alone, and without ANY comments or documentation whatsoe…

Sounds to me like there's an opportunity to propel biology forward by teaching some biologists how to manage their code in a way that won't cost large amounts of productivity.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#178

Post by gaur »

beloch wrote: post #160
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #147

Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article. It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does. - Scholars write the content for free - Scholars do the peer-review for free - All the legacy publish…

Scholars actually pay journals to publish their papers. No, this isn't vanity press or a bribe. Scholars must work very hard to reach the point where they can pay those fees. For example, say you submit a paper to Nature. Odds are it will be rejected, because Nature has a high impact factor. Say your paper is both accepted and passes the review process. Now you have to pay Nature to publish your paper. Depending on t…

> Scholars actually pay journals to publish their papers.

Depends on the journal and the field, really.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#179

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wodenokoto wrote: post #33
payne92 wrote: post #5

I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.

From a government / national perspective should it be free world wide? If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially? Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!

> From a government / national perspective should it be free world wide?

Yes. The answer is unequivocally yes. Your country will benefit vastly more from the research being freely available than other people having a better world on your dime will disadvantage you.

And here's the thing. Other countries face the same calculus. Scientific research brings the greatest return on investment of anything ever. It's why we have electricity and computers and satellites and penicillin. At the national level you can pay for it and give it away and still come out ahead regardless of what anybody else does.

Since every country benefits from doing it by more than it costs them, everybody can "cooperate" by doing research and giving it away without having to worry about anybody else defecting -- because defectors can't hurt you, they can only not help you. The sooner everybody realizes that the sooner everybody can choose to cooperate and the better off the whole world will be.

And the returns when every country publishes research for free are... large.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#180

Post by cft »

Publishing used to cost money when it required physical printing/distrubution/storage of journals. Now all of this is basically free, but they still charge. Most theoretical physicists for example only care about "publishing" in the ArXiv (all free, open source). The traditional publishing is ridiculous.
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