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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#281

Post by ska »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #270
winter_blue wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Here's a hint: some perfectly qualified scientists pursue work outside academia because they're unwilling to put up with publishers and journals. The ones who stick around base their career advancement almost entirely on publication-derived credentials, so it isn't in their best interest to rock the boat. There's a strong selection bias at play.

To be fair, many perfectly qualified scientists pursue work outside of academia because they couldn't get a permanent job in academia. Which is another sort of selection bias at play, particularly wrt their commentary on academic practice.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#282

Post by sre_ops »

I see the smartest people in the room do not know the difference between society journals and regular journals.

It is actually very simple. If it is a society journal then the copyright is owned by a society and the society decides what they want to do. Some of them outsource production to publishers by paying publishers money. The others do it all themselves. Over last 10 years most of smaller society journals went away because contrary to popular but highly delusional belief turning the manuscript into a readable paper is a rather expensive process and most of the society journals cannot afford it.

So instead they simply sell the copyrights to the likes of T&F, Springer, etc. EICs get to continue to dabble with deciding who gets accepted and someone else gets to do the unsexy part of making sure that 3/4 of the content has not been lifted from websites or other papers.

Most of the publishers have different level of open access policies, some of which are pay $X thousand dollars (i.e. production costs at the publishers scale which are an order of magnitude smaller than for the society which has no scale ) and the content is available for free to anyone all the way to "pay $X per article"

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#284

Post by ska »

mirimir wrote: post #170
russell_h wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ACM publishes annual reports with a high level breakdown of their finances. The most recent one is here: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-rep... The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.

What I'm wondering about is the economic justification for charging $15 per article copy. Other than "we can", I mean.

The usual "economic justification" for such things is that people are paying it.

In reality, very few people pay the individual article prices. The real market is in site licensing, as it were. The individual article prices are probably set to support the sales story on these institutional access licenses, not the other way around.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#285

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

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…

One difference between HN and, say, math is that in this community most readers are probably interested in at least a sizable minority of the topics that get posted here, whereas in a hypothetical community of mathematicians discussing papers, I find it hard to believe that most people will be interested in more than about 1% of the literature.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#286

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast »

collyw wrote: post #243
lsc wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a difference between 'being smart' and 'being able to program well', and that difference is precisely why academic code has its reputation.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#287

Post by greeneggs »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #188
mc808 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really interested in those particulars but offered it as possible rationale that isn't there for academic publishing. I don't think patents (or copyrights) should be granted for publicly funded research at all, as it's effectively work-for-hire already owned by the public. But it gets more difficult when public grants are only a minor part of the funding.

It seems like the easy way to solve that would be to not have research where the government funds only a small part. If the government is going to fund it, fund it the whole way. The alternative has way, way too much potential for rent seeking. You'll get private interests who connive a way to have the government pay to do the hard/uncertain/expensive part while they don't put in their dime until they're already sure…

"Easy"? Certainly in biology that would overturn the entire system for drug/treatment discovery. The government is good at funding basic research, and the private sector is good at bringing products to market. There is no clean separation between the two activities.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#288

Post by lsc »

collyw wrote: post #243
lsc wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My observation is that to make a program run, a less intelligent person needs to organize that program better. But, intelligence is a controversial subject in and of itself, so I don't expect to see agreement.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#289

Post by kilotaras »

Luc wrote: post #230
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…

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...

Profit margins doesn't mean much in this case. Most science related work (e.g peer review) is done for free. Typesetting costs around $30 per article [1]. It looks like big part of spending is administration and lawyers for taking down copies of the articles.

[1] https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-... (ctrl+f $30)

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#290

Post by emodendroket »

raverbashing wrote: post #278
matwood wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see my point though. Charging to be in the journal means that there may be amazing research that simply refused to pay. Charging to be published in the journal is at odds with it always containing the best research.

Exactly that Papers published there are certainly at a high quality level, in predicate logic: A - Published on Nature B - Good Research A -> B is true, which does not imply !A -> !B

Sure, but the claim I disagreed with was the claim that big-name journals were nothing more than a brand with cachet. That is not true; research in one of them is almost certainly of the highest standard.
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