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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#221

Post by drjesusphd »

lsc wrote: post #184
Balgair wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> God help you, though, if you make a change.

Or need to add functionality. Or, just wait a year.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#222

Post by Gatsky »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #152
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…

Why are you under the impression scholars write the papers for free? That is what researchers are employed at universities to do ... Yes, it is not like publishing a book but these papers are not really like books anyway.

The point is that publishers make immense profits from publishing the work of others whom they don't compensate. Do you think it is 'fine' that the output of publicly funded research is locked away and rented out to other scientists by 3rd parties who contribute very little?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#224

Post by deepnet »

It is tragic that foundational papers are hugely paywalled.

I can read David Silver on arXiv but not Donald Michie or Robin Popplestone.

I am missing the foundations of my science, so much is uncitable for me, and bibliographies are useless before 2001.

Yes I can track them down but the effort is huge as I'm far from an urban centre.

My light does not diminish yours, let me cite you

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#225

Post by drjesusphd »

arcanus wrote: post #127
lacker wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is it's very difficult to fit a full and proper validation in the appendix of a paper. What's really needed is to standardize the inclusion of "additional material" with the paper, including source code, test cases, and results.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#226

Post by jakub_g »

adrianN wrote: post #206
doppioandante wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal.

If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you're more likely to not have your contract extended etc.

The ministry reevaluates the (journal's IFpoints per publication) mapping each year, but it takes a few years for a new journal to get significant number of points. Publishing in low-IF journals if your paper could be accepted by a major one is a career suicide.

The hidden implication is that the system reinforces the power of the all-powerful top journals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#227

Post by igravious »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #152
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…

Why are you under the impression scholars write the papers for free? That is what researchers are employed at universities to do ... Yes, it is not like publishing a book but these papers are not really like books anyway.

> Why are you under the impression scholars write the papers for free? That is what researchers are employed at universities to do ...

Researchers are employed to drumroll please research. (inc. teach, and mentor, and advise, and admin, etc.)

Disseminating your research, that requires writing it up, yes. So, no, they don't technically write up the research for free, but those who benefit (the publishers) are not the same entities who pay the researchers salaries so it's as if they are getting something for practically nothing, i.e. "free".

> Yes, it is not like publishing a book but these papers are not really like books anyway.

Nobody is making that comparison.

---

It's very simple, the internet has shone a strong light on a very profitable business model and people don't like what they see.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#228

Post by sndean »

jakub_g wrote: post #226
adrianN wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal. If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you'…

Another important point, is that lower IF journals generally have a smaller audience than high IF journals. This is really important for how many times your articles are expected to be cited. Your H-index [1] is now sometimes requested from funding institutions, and I'm starting to see it on resumes. It's all kind of sad.

So, in a lot of ways, the competitive research culture isn't helping inaccessible/exclusivity journal problem, since researchers are actively seeking out those journals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#229

Post by Sacho »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #156
euske wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like saying "I don't want to file a tax because my handwriting is bad". Well, if you're embarrassed by your terrible handwriting, maybe it's a time to put some effort to improve it.

Ok I don't mean this in a mean way but you don't seem to appreciate what CS research is like. It is not about handwriting.

Filing taxes is not about handwriting either - I guess you missed the analogy. Research isn't about writing good code, but publishing your code is useful(for reproducibility, which is part of research), and if you're embarrassed by your code quality, then you should put some effort into it.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#230

Post by Luc »

mattlutze wrote: post #218
kriro wrote: post #199

If 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…

I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful…

The publishing of academic journals generates billions of profit per year. One could easily decimate these profits and still have a viable industry, whatever definition of decimate one cares to use.

Profit margins around 40% if I recall...

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