Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 327 posts

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#181

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mc808 wrote: post #120
beambot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about all the IP generated as a result of taxpayer-funded research?

That too, although a case could potentially be made that licensing of university-owned patents reduces the need for tax subsidies. E.g. the University of Wisconsin recently won a $234 million judgment against Apple just as their state funding was being cut by $250 million. http://news.wisc.edu/warf-wins-patent-infringement-lawsuit-a...

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just tax Apple by the same amount of money and then use it to fund research, rather than turning universities into patent litigants and then having a large proportion of the money go to lawyers rather than research?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#182

Post by anonymousDan »

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…

$200 is a lot lower than I've seen for top CS conferences recently, e.g. CCS 2015 was over a grand for the full conference last year: http://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2015/pro_reg.html

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#183

Post by justinjlynn »

gaur wrote: post #178
beloch wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that it's a thing at all is outrageous enough.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#184

Post by lsc »

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…

My experience is that it takes a certain kind of twisted intelligence to write code that is below a certain level of quality, but still works. Someone like me who is a mediocre programmer? if my code gets too terrible, it simply stops working. I'm forced to use some base level of software engineering if I want to write a large program that runs, just because there's a limit on how many random side effects I can keep track of.

From what I've seen when supporting EEs? People who are that much smarter than I am don't have this limitation. They can write thousands of lines of spaghetti perl and bash and as long as nobody touches the damn thing, it works fine. God help you, though, if you make a change.

But... there is an established job role for this; I mean, you don't want to make your EEs sysadmin their own LSF cluster, either.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#186

Post by mc808 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #181
mc808 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That too, although a case could potentially be made that licensing of university-owned patents reduces the need for tax subsidies. E.g. the University of Wisconsin recently won a $234 million judgment against Apple just as their state funding was being cut by $250 million. http://news.wisc.edu/warf-wins-patent-infringement-lawsuit-a...

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just tax Apple by the same amount of money and then use it to fund research, rather than turning universities into patent litigants and then having a large proportion of the money go to lawyers rather than research?

I'm not really interested in those particulars but offered it as possible rationale that isn't there for academic publishing. I don't think patents (or copyrights) should be granted for publicly funded research at all, as it's effectively work-for-hire already owned by the public. But it gets more difficult when public grants are only a minor part of the funding.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#188

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mc808 wrote: post #186
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be more efficient to just tax Apple by the same amount of money and then use it to fund research, rather than turning universities into patent litigants and then having a large proportion of the money go to lawyers rather than research?

I'm not really interested in those particulars but offered it as possible rationale that isn't there for academic publishing. I don't think patents (or copyrights) should be granted for publicly funded research at all, as it's effectively work-for-hire already owned by the public. But it gets more difficult when public grants are only a minor part of the funding.

It seems like the easy way to solve that would be to not have research where the government funds only a small part. If the government is going to fund it, fund it the whole way.

The alternative has way, way too much potential for rent seeking. You'll get private interests who connive a way to have the government pay to do the hard/uncertain/expensive part while they don't put in their dime until they're already sure it's going to pan out, at which point they swoop in and claim the full IP monopoly to the detriment of the public.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#189

Post by js8 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #185

Nothing is "free", the only question is: "who pays, and how does that change the incentives and results?".

Of course there are things that are "free", such as scientific progress and artworks made by already dead people, or sun radiation. Making everything "non-free" will lead to self-contradictory theories such as labor theory of value.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#190

Post by Bluestrike2 »

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…

Ha, it could be worse. I have a friend who's getting his PhD in microbiology and he and his team were running into some trouble with these massive multi-gigabyte CSV files from NIH (gene sequencing data, if I recall). Turns out they were trying to open the little buggers in Excel and wanted to stay in Excel since it was familiar. At some point, I wound up just suggesting they use split on the stupid (but very important) things and people acted like I just blew their minds.

I think sometimes you just get so caught up in your field of expertise that you miss some of the tools that could drastically help you entirely. You have to wonder how much of an efficiency drain that adds up to over the course of even just individual research projects. And that's before you get to bad code.

Post reply on HN