Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 327 posts

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#301

Post by thescriptkiddie »

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…

Journals provide a valuable service, but I don't think that exclusivity is a necessary component of that service. The people buying the journals will (probably) keep buying them even if they can legally get the papers for free elsewhere, because getting a physical copy of the paper was never the point - curation and peer preview are what subscribers are really paying for. Of course, this goes both ways: if journals start publishing crap to cut costs, people will stop buying them.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#302

Post by DaveWalk »

mvaliente2001 wrote: post #292
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…

Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero. One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis ha…

You're definitely on to something; the parallels between science and open software are tantalizingly close.

From my experience a main problem is real estate; you can't do most science experiments without a proper lab. We could probably brainstorm some creative solutions (like operating an "open" contract research organization to be the hands for everyone's ideas), but at the moment this is too big of a barrier.

With real estate comes cost, then funding, then jockeying for funding, and finally journal impact factors as a measurement of worthiness.

It's also why one can't make a science-related "hackathon" without changing the concept.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#303

Post by DaveWalk »

justinjlynn wrote: post #183
gaur wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scholars actually pay journals to publish their papers. Depends on the journal and the field, really.

The fact that it's a thing at all is outrageous enough.

Indeed, and as further commentary to the previous two posters -- Nature doesn't charge publishing fees, because its popularity allows for high funding revenues.

This is not true for the vast majority of journals in the biomedical scienecs.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#304

Post by godzillabrennus »

mvaliente2001 wrote: post #292
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…

Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero. One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis ha…

The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#305

Post by DaveWalk »

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…

Depends on your field, but my local library has the latest Cell, Science and Nature magazines for perusal, and anything older than 1 year is usually released gratis. If you need more than this to stay up to the state-of-the-art, chances are your future "industry" job will also have access to this, or it will become more of a hobby.

Just my opinion as a PhD, working in industry, who does not read nearly as much as he used to.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#306

Post by DaveWalk »

a_bonobo wrote: post #129
arbre wrote: post #89

Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.

For the $1000-3000 that a single OA application costs I can pay for a new computer, or send one or two students to conferences, or pay for part of a stipend, finance a temporary web design guy, etc. Now I try to publish 10 papers per year - that's $10-30,000 out of the window for no "return" to our group. For $30,000 I can send everyone to several conferences! Conferences are more important to a scientific career tha…

> Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper

Depends on you field of research, maybe? Paper publications make or break early biomedical research careers.

Further, the grants that these funds are paid out of often have travel funds built-in, so conferences are still available.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#308

Post by justncase80 »

I was thinking a good startup company may be an open publication and peer review site. Something where users are non-anonymous and they are weighted by their accomplishments irl. Submissions and peer reviews would be open to anyone but weighted heavily by ranking, which is affected by irl achievements and cumulative quality contributions to the site. Like a combination of stack overflow and wikipedia maybe.

Money would be made by donation (ala wikipedia) and paper submission fees. Perhaps organizational level membership fees, such as universities, etc.

Just an idea I haven't had time to work on.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#310

Post by andreasvc »

albinofrenchy wrote: post #263
taneq wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or code that worked on the specific test case described in the paper but was flaky as hell on anything else.

The most disillusioning thing for me as an undergrad was to try to replicate results from a paper on a relatively complicated problem, and not achieving anywhere near the papers level of results. I got access to the source code, and the super complicated algorithm added almost nothing to the results, the glossed over / hand waved past data normalization worked so well that there wasn't a need for any further classifi…

I am afraid that what you describe is a pretty fundamental limitation of peer review. Currently it is not expected of reviewers to try to replicate experiments, but only to check if the methodology of the paper seems sound and the relevant previous work is cited. Should this be expected of reviewers? Should the authors provide all code and data so that the results can be replicated at the push of a button? That seems a pretty tall order. Seems like we'll be stuck with a modus operandi of lots of papers being published, peer review only catching obvious errors, and replication being very rare.
Post reply on HN