81–90 of 135 posts
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Is it possible for you to release a PDF/LaTeX source via other means?
Then you are running into problems with the commercial journals, and you need their peer-review.
If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.
published research be available to the public no later than 12 months after publication Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately? Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost... "The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available." Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
(as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
Would it be legal to write a Twitter bot that detects mentions of pay-walled academic papers and responds with a SciHub link? This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.
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This is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework
The major UK research funding councils have an open access policy for the next REF - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/
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Is it possible for you to release a PDF/LaTeX source via other means?
Then you are running into problems with the commercial journals, and you need their peer-review.
I know at uni, our tutors told us to politely email researchers for a copy in case our subscription didn't cover their research. I didn't bother with this as booksc (libgen) and sci-hub are faster.
Reminds me of the pre-netflix era.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost... "The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available." Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
If these are valuable services, then customers will pay for them; no need to have a monopoly on access to published research. (as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there will be less grants, it's just math.
(Previously I was told that the cost is minuscule compared to the cost of the study itself in general, in which it won't have a large effect. But I haven't seen data.)
If we decide we want the government to also pay the cost of publication, as opposed to having readers pay, great. But it might be expensive, again, data would be helpful.
Blanket statements like "taxpayers paid for it, therefore it should be open" ignore the reality that publishers subsidize publication precisely because they charge for access.
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There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers:…
> a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric. Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology; ISSN: 2330-1643.
Scientometrics; ISSN: 0138-9130.
Journal of Informetrics; ISSN: 1751-1577.
Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…
There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers:…
Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.
But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.
Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.
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> Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice. Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that my…
How much is the department paying for those journal subscriptions? Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access submission fee.