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Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

sciencemag.org

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Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#181

Post by return0 »

secfirstmd wrote: post #93
Blahah wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done a lot of work on tools that interface with the academic publishing infrastructure. Elsevier not only make a huge profit margin, but they operate at a staggering level of inefficiency. They are haemorrhaging money and producing precisely nothing of value, and still making profit for their investors hand over fist. Quite incredible.

Hmmm...it seems like the space is ready to be disrupted. How might that look? I mean purely publishing isnt just ideal as it lacks the so-called quality control and prestige of established publications. What might be a middle ground for disrupting this crappy monopoly on the world's knowledge?

You would need a shift away from publishing i think. The rationale behind publishing in long-form journal articles is not really valid in our century. There is an immense amount of noise in each paper, and findings are typically summarized in their 3-4 figures anyway. There are proposals for new approaches (e.g. http://www.silvalab.com/silvapapers/QAAlcinoSilva.pdf).

I believe we need a directory of scientific findings of sorts. It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on, thus creating a graph of influence/significance. The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable. It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#182

Post by [deleted] »

nailer wrote: post #144
dalke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science". Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement. Researchers can publish…

> A publication in "Science" or "Nature" What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?

[deleted]

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#183

Post by raverbashing »

dalke wrote: post #92
nailer wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand academia (genuinely): Couldn't the researchers simply publish their own papers? Make torrents etc? Or are they prevented from doing that somehow?

Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science". Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement. Researchers can publish…

Pretty much this:

Researcher: "I have to go to this club so people think I'm fancy"

Club: "The club charges a lot so only fancy people go there"

Other people: "This person is very fancy because they go to that club"

End result is that people buy their "fanciness" by being on that club

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#184

Post by return0 »

nailer wrote: post #144
dalke wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals are used as a proxy for quality. A publication in "Science" or "Nature" is generally regarded as being better than a publication in, say, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science". Bibliographic metrics, like the number of publications and where they are published, are use as a proxy for the quality of someone's research. It can affect grant funding and career advancement. Researchers can publish…

> A publication in "Science" or "Nature" What excludes the academic from also publishing elsewhere?

Even if they could (and they can publish their preprints), scientists rarely bother. That's because they want to communicate their science to people who matter to them (e.g. grant giving bodies), not to the general public.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#185

Post by [deleted] »

taneq wrote: post #4

> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia Wise You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free. Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.

[deleted]

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#186

Post by dalke »

parenthephobia wrote: post #169
tomp wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you were trying to bootstrap a new journal, you'd have a tough time; unless you didn't care about its quality. You could (should?) start by going through freely published (open access) papers, collecting the most quality ones, then publishing them in your journal. That's most of the value of journals, as well - informing the subscribers of noteworthy research.

But how do I do that? I can interpret a paper and apply it to my problems, but I'm not qualified to tell if it's a good paper[1]. In my field -- computing -- research papers are often written in a language that only just makes sense to me. I'm sure it'd be easier if I was a computer scientist that regularly published, but that's why I suggest you'd need a team of actual scientists who are used to reading, writing, an…

I believe tomp's suggestion is that you can bootstrap as an overlay journal (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal ) to build up that expertise. You don't need to have experienced people from the start, because they can learn while doing. At the start, no one is going to pay attention to the journal. Then as it gets known for being a good curator, people will start requesting to be reviewed for inclusion. Poof you've got a journal.

You might even start with only yourself. And in 5 years if you want to distance yourself from your earlier, naïve efforts, then simply announce a name change.

Here's the ugly truth - it's hard to tell if most papers are "good", and there are many types of "good".

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#188

Post by brohee »

Laforet wrote: post #56
thirdsun wrote: post #31

I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way? As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - fro…

I've just had a paper accepted last week in a traditional journal (peer-reviewed and paywalled) and I'd share a few things I know and feel about scientific publishing from an anthor's perspective. The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further con…

In many disciplines, authors do the typesetting, the publisher only really handle the peer review coordination (reviewers themselves are not paid)...

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#189

Post by throwaway7767 »

userbinator wrote: post #13
taneq wrote: post #4

> “I’m all for universal access, but not theft!” tweeted Elsevier’s director of universal access, Alicia Wise You want everybody to have access, but you don't want them to get it for free. Wow, so you want the entire world to all pay for the material you were given for free. Hmmmm.

That reminds me of the whole talk around "open standards" that you have to pay for to legally acquire (ANSI, ISO, IEEE, etc.), although in that case the situation is slightly different. Also, the "free software" vs "open source" distinction.

Ugh, yes. I recently wrote a parser for an ISO standard file format. I had to base it on the draft submission because they wanted me to pay them a bunch of money for the actual end standard.

I really hope the final standard didn't have any substantive changes, so that my implementation is correct. But all I can really do is cross my fingers since it at least seems to work with available data.

Charging for standards has a direct negative effect on the proliferation of those standards, especially today when a lot of code is written as open source hobby projects, which are left out in the cold.

Re: Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

#190

Post by jonathankoren »

thirdsun wrote: post #41
pedrosorio wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to be recognized as high quality you will publish in those journals and whether they are "open" or "controlled by a publisher" is irrelevant. It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.

Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp. However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?

It's not the medium, but the forum that matters. There's a hierarchy to forums such as workshop, conference, journal. Then within each forum there are tiers. For instance SIGIR is better than CIKM for information retrieval. USENIX is better than FAST for file systems.

The World

Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most.

At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.

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