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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#251

Post by capnrefsmmat »

return0 wrote: post #122
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

The federal NIH open access standards require JATS XML: http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/

Proper formatting makes it possible to automatically extract bibliographic reference data, text-mine the contents for whatever interesting purposes you might think of, display it in apps and new formats, and store it for decades in a stable format.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#252

Post by capnrefsmmat »

swiley wrote: post #139
capnrefsmmat wrote: post #114

Earlier 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…

Then require that the papers be written in fucking markdown and have pandoc handle the 1" borders and 12pt times New Roman font.

Markdown does not support cross-referencing of figures, tables, and sections, and doesn't have numbered "environments" like LaTeX (e.g. theorem, definition, example). It would need to be extended.

There's a slow-moving Scholarly Markdown project, but I don't know what its status is. http://scholarlymarkdown.com/

I agree with the sentiment, though. If there were some markup language that supported what academics do with LaTeX and Word, and converted cleanly to JATS XML and to nice-looking PDFs, it would be enormously useful.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#253

Post by tosseraccount »

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.

U.S. private universities get plenty of public funding.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#254

Post by alphonsegaston »

tomahunt wrote: post #239

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…

Many university library systems have programs where alumni (and sometimes outsiders) can purchase access to their resources for a yearly fee. If that's unavailable to you or cost prohibitive, most academic libraries are open to the public. When I worked at an engineering library for a large university, a good part of my day was spent helping working professional access these kinds of resources.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#255

Post by matwood »

ikeboy wrote: post #148
matwood wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me what someone like Elsevier does then? Basically they have a monopoly on various prestigious journal names and extract rent from both sides. Finally, researchers are taking a stand and slowly moving towards open journals. See here: http://openaccess.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/05/20/elsevier-ev...

If they're merely extracting rent, you should expect two things to be true: 1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less Neither is broadly correct. Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?

Margins for Elsevier are closer to 40%, but I don't care about margins. What I care about is that we the tax payer have already paid for the research. Research often happens with government grants, done by researchers working at public universities. Editing and peer review is done for free by other researchers (who are also usually paid by grants and public universities). Elsevier does nothing but extract rent and pay for lawyers to help them keep extracting.

It is insane that they go after people who wrote the paper when they try to give it away on their own website.

A little reading goes a long way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#256

Post by ikeboy »

matwood wrote: post #255
ikeboy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're merely extracting rent, you should expect two things to be true: 1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less Neither is broadly correct. Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?

Margins for Elsevier are closer to 40%, but I don't care about margins. What I care about is that we the tax payer have already paid for the research. Research often happens with government grants, done by researchers working at public universities. Editing and peer review is done for free by other researchers (who are also usually paid by grants and public universities). Elsevier does nothing but extract rent and pa…

You've paid for the research, but not for the publishing cost. If you don't care about the cost, then the decisions you support will obviously be skewed.

Claiming that they're just extracting rent ignores the cost, which even at a 40% margin is still 60% of what they charge.

Do you have any information on their legal costs that would reduce the cost above?

Do you think everyone complaining about prices would be happy if they would reduce prices by 35% across the board, thus making no profit? Or would you still want it to be free? If the latter, your complaint is not solely based in Elsevier's "rent extraction", but in something else.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#257

Post by emodendroket »

raverbashing wrote: post #220
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…

It seems the real BS is paying to publish in "big name journal" because the Cabal will place a high value in said "big name journals" It makes just as much sense as wearing a fashion accessory. "This person must be important because of his fancy watch"

I mean, not really. It's a big name because the best research is published there. Therefore, if you are published there it's because you are doing some of the best research.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#258

Post by Blahah »

ikeboy wrote: post #18
ikeboy wrote: post #16

>The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication. > But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. These…

The quote from the The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (not the UN charter http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/ , odd mistake by the nytimes) is also misleading. The very next sentence says >(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Note that the authors do not get materials benefit when journals sell their articles. If anything that sentence means that authors can claim back the profits made by publishers.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#259

Post by alkonaut »

Let's rephrase the question: should public research funded with public money have results available to those who paid for it?

This isn't Elseviers fault, or the researchers fault or the universities fault, it's the fault of whoever distributes public money to research without having proper criteria for what is expected in return.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#260

Post by mattlutze »

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…

I can certainly rely on social-network-style filtering to surface interesting reading.

It comes with its own trade-offs, particularly the tendency toward "viral" titles and abstracts so that a particular paper would be more likely to be clicked / skimmed / shared. I'm not sure that we want to encourage that as I think it would injure the quality of published works in general.

There are merits to being able to put faces, and reputations, behind the editorial direction of the information stream. Social-network-style consumption would necessarily anonymize or obscure the effect.

As before, there's definitely agreement that more access is better and I'd bet there's a good middle ground available.

For example, a journal I worked with while I was an undergraduate changes their articles to open-access nine months after publication. You still get the editorial process and curation, the team has some financial support to evangelize their journal's mission and most folks who won't have needed the most immediate access can get to it for free. If you're an individual and want the articles immediately, the "subscription" is in the form of a $40 or more donation each year, which receives as a gift the biannual physical volumes and full digital access.

They're not the majority of course but options do exist that straddle both stakeholders' needs. Flipping the market completely on its head simply might throw out useful qualities that wouldn't completely transfer over.

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