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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#231

Post by maruhan2 »

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…

If there's a demand, there will be a solution. With proper review sorting mechanism, I'm sure that can be solved

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#232

Post by amelius »

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…

> 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.

I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic.

In other words, filtering can be done perfectly well by communities and third-party organizations.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#233

Post by mathattack »

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 agree with your first premise - yes, they should be free. In this sense, the peer review process should be paid for by whoever funds the research, rather than whoever wants to read it.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#234

Post by juliendorra »

jmvalin wrote: post #166
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 is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care about.

And another alternative at some universities is the university thesis open archive itself. In Northern Europe I'm told some universities won't even give you your diploma if you don't upload your thesis in their open archive.

Frankly, every university in the world should have an open archive for thesis (and mutualized is even better). It's just the continuation of keeping thesis copies at the university library.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#235

Post by [deleted] »

amelius wrote: post #232
mattlutze wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic. In other words, filtering can be done per…

[deleted]

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#236

Post by amelius »

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…

And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors?

(Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#237

Post by timr »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #169
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…

> Honestly, it would take less time for you to write it yourself and compare, rather than to try to peek under the hood of a spaghetti mess. That's not actually the point. The point is reproducibility. If you write your own code and get a different result, why? If the reason is the code then having the other code, no matter how terrible it is, allows you to figure out what the difference is. And then somebody is wron…

Exactly. IMO, this is a big problem in some areas of computational biology right now. Code to a famous project gets released, and instead of independently validating the results, other researchers (rationally) choose to just build on top of the famous project. It's faster, easier, and the "collaboration" leads to social prestige for everyone involved.

The end result is that empires are built, reproducibility is (paradoxically) harmed, and we're someday going to end up finding out that some big, high-profile projects were built on pillars of sand.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#238

Post by adrinavarro »

amelius wrote: post #236
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…

And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors? (Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).

Well, they are the ones funding the research teams and equipment, so it's a different scenario IMHO.

I think we can agree though that knowledge should converge into being easily accessible, all while reducing the collateral effects of doing so (as the article explains: tenure, promotions, prestige…).

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#239

Post by tomahunt »

There must be thousands of people who could use free access to research papers: PhDs and Masters now in industry trying to apply the state of the art, engineers who have worked their way into a subject, concerned citizens who want to read the source material.

I am a PhD who'd love to be working in industry, but I'm shit scared that once I leave the gates of the university I'll simply lose touch with the state of the art because the papers will no longer be accessible.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#240

Post by sitkack »

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…

From the kitchen link,

    "A PDF is a weapons-grade tool for piracy"
...

    "This is despite the fact that the publishers’
    action directly addressed a very real
    economic problem."
This "very real economic problem" that the author describes is not making enough of money off of textbooks. The publishers have lost all relevance by having contorted themselves over the years to fit into a model which no longer makes sense.

Journals can run themselves (with proper software) and historical impact factor needs to be abolished.

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