All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#81

Post by peteretep » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:03 AM UTC

holyoly wrote: post #67

hackuser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund In fairness, we pay twice for many things, such a toll roads. The first payment isn't always sufficient.

That doesn't make any sense... How does having one screwed up system justify another? Maybe we should start paying twice for groceries too, because we pay twice for toll roads and research papers...

The first payment is the one you and I make because it's valuable to society for the research behind these papers to be written.

The second payment is for you only, because you are getting specific and temporal value from access.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#82

Post by Fomite » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:24 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #75

Fomite wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm not a particularly passionate advocate of open access publications, and am actively skeptical of open data requirements. But if said open access occurs by mandate, and doesn't cost my lab money...why not?

Thanks for responding. Why be "actively skeptical of open data requirements"? From the outside, they seem to have very little downside and occasionally valuable benefits. As always, I suspect the outsider is blind to some important issues.

A couple reasons, in my case:

1. For the work I do, what "The data" is often somewhat ambiguous, and depending on how you define it, falls anywhere from "That's not mine to give" to "This is useless for what you actually want, but obeying the letter of the law".

2. It makes work with minority communities harder - they have a very, very poor history with "Consent to this, and researchers will do whatever they please with your information without consultation."

3. Sometimes privacy issues come up as well with medical data.

4. I think it gives us a false sense of security. "I re-ran their code with their data and got the same answer" is markedly inferior to "I attempted to replicate their study in a different population", but we often do the first and then pat ourselves on the back about it.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#83

Post by tmalsburg2 » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:29 AM UTC

WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund

Most researchers will publish in journals that publish open access for a fee and the money for the fee has to come from somewhere. So in the end the public will spend as much money as they are doing so far.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#84

Post by tmalsburg2 » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:31 AM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #60

brodo wrote: post #27

Under the Horizon 2020 programme, open access publishing (green or gold) is already mandatory today for all EU/EC funded projects. Grant proposals must incorporate open access fees in order to be accepted. It's not much money for most project consortiums as the EU tends to fund big projects with budgets of ~10 million € and more as the norm (there are smaller ones, but ~2 million is really as small as it gets as far…

Gold open access needs to die, and "open access fees" with it. Seriously, there is no STEM field I know of where you can't find good journals that allow posting of preprints. Green open access solves all the problems at zero additional cost.

Gold open access is where the authors pay the journal a fee for open access publishing. I don't see what's wrong with that and actually I think it's the best approach. The journal offers a service (editing, hosting, ...) and charge for that. Very simple.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#85

Post by tmalsburg2 » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:40 AM UTC

alex_hirner wrote: post #46

To top it off, I would love that open access is tied to open data and strong councils for standard setting of such formats in a particular domain. The current swath of approaches to open research data is babylonian.

Wait, are you saying that politicians should decide which data formats we're supposed to use when we make research data public? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. I think it's great that we have many competing approaches to open science at this stage. Over time, each research field will identify an optimal approach for their purposes and that approach will win. I just hope that the winner is not going to be GitHub which is becoming more and more popular at least in my field. GitHub is a terrible platform for open science because what happens if they shut down or change their pricing or ...? GitHub is just not made for open science and I think an open science platform should not be run for profit. Also, more technically, git histories can be completely rewritten which means that GitHub would not be a trustworthy historic record.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#86

Post by daveheq » Sat, May 28, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

But wait, scientific articles are hoaxes made for tax money, so now the lies are freely available to anybody!!! We need to cut more taxes on billionaires and publicly fund more oil projects so we can get these inconvenient science articles out of our way. Where's my next iPhone?!

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#87

Post by olalonde » Sat, May 28, 2016, 1:27 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #66

WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

> I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund In fairness, we pay twice for many things, such a toll roads. The first payment isn't always sufficient.

But at least when you pay your toll, the money goes to the government and not some private corporation.

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#88

Post by tunnuz » Sat, May 28, 2016, 2:24 AM UTC

WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays.

On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" researchers that "contribute" to 20+ papers a year (except for the fact that they have an army of Ph.D. students slaving off for them).

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#89

Post by [deleted] » Sat, May 28, 2016, 3:04 AM UTC

tunnuz wrote: post #88

WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays. On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" resea…

[deleted]

Re: All European scientific publicly funded articles to be freely accessible by 2020

#90

Post by a_bonobo » Sat, May 28, 2016, 3:24 AM UTC

tunnuz wrote: post #88

WhoBeI wrote: post #61

I think this is a really good move. About bloody time to. I shouldn't have to pay twice to read research papers I helped fund and I certainly shouldn't be paying a private company for it. EU is saying that when and if you choose to publish papers based on publicly funded research you must ensure those papers will be publicly available. This means you must budget for any cost associated with it but since your budget a…

Maybe, since publishing an open access paper is (currently) more expensive for the authors, researchers will end up publishing less often (and possibly more significant results), which is not necessarily a bad thing given the bloating state of research literature nowadays. On a related note, a colleague of mine had this idea of an annual publication cap (3 papers) for researchers. Less burnout, less "superstar" resea…

As long as universities and funding bodies - i.e. your potential employers and the people who give you money - judge you by the quantity of your publications and the impact factor of journals you publish in I'm afraid this won't happen.

We'd need a different way to judge someone's scientific output which is definitely hard - do we start to check Twitter or blogs for scientific outreach? Do we judge scientific "novelty" (of which maybe only the author herself/himself is the expert in, so only s/he can properly evaluate)? Do we start to evaluate preprints (biology doesn't do this much)? Many open questions, and not much is happening in terms of change.

(Edit: This is, by the way, one of the reasons why there is so much more Arabidopsis than Wheat research - Arabidopsis is easier to manipulate and grows faster, so you can get more publications out for the same amount of work)