I wonder, in the end what's really holding open-access publishing back? What can we do, as technologists, to help fix it?
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
201–210 of 327 posts
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#202If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case. I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or priv…
Some research grants are industry subsidies. Taking this away results in pure, accessible research that is absolutely useless.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#203If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case. I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or priv…
Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#204Full 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…
I think this is very different. Nature has created a strong brand and they can charge whatever they please. I understand why publicly funded institutions would want to pay to have their research papers published in Nature, it could be part of their marketing budget, like billboards.
It's just that publicly funded institutions should be forced to make their papers widely available free of charge.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've read enough journal articles that I've come to appreciate proper formatting, rather than "Time New Roman 12" Word documents or "Generic LaTeX Template #17"
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#206If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case. I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or priv…
Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.
This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#207Earlier 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…
Does ACM sell individual papers? If so, what's the price?
The ACM is paywalled for the majority of the publications it manage.
I found the ACM paywall to be one of the obstacle that limit access of the new wave of the code educators to older results in teaching programming: they are not in the academic sector and lack both knowledge of and access to this enormous amount of papers.
So, in this case, the paywall keep a new generation naive, as they reinvent independently research that have been conducted decades earlier.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#208Earlier 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…
$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
Yikes, and I have a paper in the oven I'm hoping to submit to CCS this year... I suppose my mental image was influenced by less flashy conferences along the lines of https://cie2013.wordpress.com/registration/. For what it's worth, I don't think there is any reason to assume the peer review and publishing effort put in by CiE is of lower quality - though its acceptance rate is likely to be higher than that of CCS, which may play a role if attendance is closer to being proportional to how much they accept than to how much is submitted.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#209Science funded by taxes should be free, obviously.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Pro tip: check http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ to review journal self-archiving policies.