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European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

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Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#21

Post by leemailll »

azag0 wrote: post #11
sgt101 wrote: post #2

Getting papers refereed and distributed does cost. I think many journals are now charging more than £1k for accepting papers for open access, conferences charge fees ~£.5k or more (+ travel). Of course you can submit to arXiv, but that's moderated - not refereed and is sponsored by wonderful people - but what if one day the people paying for it stop being so wonderful. In the past the cost of papers was paid on the d…

The yearly budget of arXiv is ~$1M. I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.

I dare you when you use your real name to criticize a recent paper of top guru in field is total garbage and never has a moment worrying about subsequent funding application which the guru usually serves the reviewing board.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#22

Post by coldtea »

Keverw wrote: post #20

Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be. Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(

>Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be.

Well, "private" and "public" is a fuzzy distinction.

Most of the mega-private companies get so much public money (in the form of subsidies) or avoid paying so much money (in the form of special tax deals and exception laws they lobby and pay under the table for) that end up costing more to a state than lots of its own operations.

When they tanked after decades of gluttony and playing it fast and loose with huge profits (which they didn't share of course), the "private" financial firms got a 1 trillion government bailout (and similar treatment in Europe and elsewhere), whereas no small private business will ever see a dime in such fashion.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#23

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

a_bonobo wrote: post #15
xamuel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... Profit margins are amazin…

make the PDF look good

Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good.

give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example)

They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

a_bonobo wrote: post #15
xamuel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... Profit margins are amazin…

[deleted]

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#25

Post by denzil_correa »

I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant article access fees for research already funded by tax payers?

[0[ https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#27

Post by bubblethink »

This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical work (program committee, reviews etc.) is done for free by everyone involved. That it can end up behind a paywall is quite sad.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#28

Post by pfortuny »

sddfd wrote: post #18
pfortuny wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, you would be amazed at the trickery involved in refereeing. Drop a couple of citations and you end up with a 90% probability of getting your desired reviewer... And many more.

Ok my statement wasn't completely clear: in the current system there are by definition no wrong reviews

OK: I thought you night mean this, and that is right, and a problem, a big one.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#29

Post by roadnottaken »

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by the publishers.

Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.

It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#30

Post by roadnottaken »

bubblethink wrote: post #27

This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical…

Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.
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