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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#241

Post by elbear »

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…

Couldn't we have a wikipedia equivalent for research? The peer reviewers do voluntary work anyway. I'm not in the system, so this is a genuine question.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#242

Post by baldfat »

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…

We already have research hubs for free publications. As a former Systems Librarian "Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time" is true for professors period. Students just want articles.

> 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

Directory of Open Access Journals - https://doaj.org/

Advance Public Access to Articles (Chorus) - http://www.chorusaccess.org/

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#243

Post by collyw »

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…

Nope, its always below average programmers who don't seem especially smart, and who don't want to learn who produce the worst code in my opinion.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#244

Post by sitkack »

cheald wrote: post #175
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…

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.

This is exactly the goal of http://software-carpentry.org/workshops/

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#245

Post by winter_blue »

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…

> Can you believe it? Paywalling. PDFs. For billions.

Wow, I'm amazed that a scientists of all people would tolerate such a scam. Why don't they come together, and en masse leave these pay-walled journals, and switch to free open ones?

In politics, you hear about how uneducated voters are tricked by politicians, but this is far more worse. Here you've got some of the most intelligent and creative people on the planet knowingly allow themselves to be screwed over. Wow.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#246

Post by mrdrozdov »

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 am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#247

Post by jernfrost »

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.

I think it is a technology problem, because the journals exist in the first place to solve a technology problem: How to distribute, quality assure etc a paper. Without internet this obviously cost a fair amount of money. Nobody was going to just print copies of journals and distribute them for free.

I doubt a system like the journals would have developed in a world where internet already existed.

I think a variation of the system used to build the Linux kernel could have worked for scientific papers as well. In the Kernel you have a pyramid of trust. Linux trust some people directly, who again each trust another set of people. This continues downwards. In this fashion code can be signed off and bubble up through the hierarchy.

I suspect in similar fashion a scientific paper could bubble up by being reviewed by ever more respected scientists in a hierarchy.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#248

Post by michaelhoffman »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #246
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 am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

Almost all published biomedical research is government-funded. "Private" universities in the U.S. get massive federal grants for research.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#249

Post by huac »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #246
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 am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

lots of private university papers are still paid for with govt research funds

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#250

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #246
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 am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

Companies and private universities publish obviously a lot of research papers. These are still more often than not somehow funded by governments e.g. Darpa, EU funds (Horizon 2020) etc. I am not aware of many projects that are truly completely, privately funded.
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