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

311–320 of 327 posts

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#311

Post by andreasvc »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #143
catnaroek wrote: post #128

What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is. What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of…

Papers not published in a prestigious journal are not cited.

Not necessarily true. Depending on the field, publications in arxiv can be important and cited.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#312

Post by russell_h »

ska wrote: post #284
mirimir wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#313

Post by effie »

wojt_eu wrote: post #204
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…

I think this is very different. Nature has created a strong brand and they can charge whatever they please. I understand why publicly funded institutions would want to pay to have their research papers published in Nature, it could be part of their marketing budget, like billboards. It's just that publicly funded institutions should be forced to make their papers widely available free of charge.

> It's just that publicly funded institutions should be forced to make their papers widely available free of charge.

Exactly. This problem needs a big push from outside the system, from government and people, because the publisher-academic careerist marriage is, unfortunately, working well for both.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#314

Post by albinofrenchy »

andreasvc wrote: post #310
albinofrenchy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get that, and I don't even think that that should be the reviewers job. But for CS in particular, I do wish more people published source code and build procedures.

I think a central hub for public comments, with source, and available PDF would be incredibly useful for CS as a field. For most papers I had access to, to get the source I'd have to go through at least one person. So I tried for quite a while to replicate the result before even trying to get access. If it was available, on say github, I'd have grabbed the source code as a resource to understand the paper, and with something like publicly available commenting, I think it'd have been a non-issue.

The problem is, I can see how such a system would be incredibly constructive to the field and the community, but it could be a liability to the authors, and would make publishers meaningless, so I doubt it happens anytime soon.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#315

Post by mirimir »

russell_h wrote: post #312
ska wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.

Paying $25 annually for membership would be entirely fair. That's far less than site license for even one journal.

But what are criteria for student memberships?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#316

Post by a_bonobo »

DaveWalk wrote: post #306
a_bonobo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Paper publications make or break early biomedical research careers.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the OA-status of those publications - if it's a high-impact journal, then it makes the career, if it's not, then not.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#317

Post by ska »

russell_h wrote: post #312
ska wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.

That's true. Many of these sorts of memberships are at least a few hundred dollars when you are no longer a student, so they add up pretty quickly (but maybe have tax credits).

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#318

Post by pitt1980 »

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…

that's a great idea

someone should figure out a way to make that happen

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#319

Post by amelius »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #285
amelius wrote: post #232

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. 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.

In that case, you probably know 100% of your peers, and it would be easy to find their work :)

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#320

Post by candu »

istjohn wrote: post #300
candu wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is truly economic value to be had in filtering papers, we would expect an eventual growth in service businesses to help sift through the glut of openly published papers. Since we're currently in a long transitional period from closed to open publishing, there's plenty of time to evolve these third-party filters - from both the business and community sides - without incurring a chaotic "filter vacuum" period.…

I agree with you that it's ridiculous in both cases, but I have to point out that PACER, the Federal Judiciary database, isn't free.

Exactly.

:s

Post reply on HN