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

sciencemag.org

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

#71

Post by Nullabillity »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #61
a3_nm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors. In any case, the…

In the biomedical fields, many articles have to be deposited on PubMed Central, which requires them to be reformatted in their archival JATS XML format. Since articles are typically written in Word in those fields, this process involves a lot of manual tagging of references and figures and such, only partially aided by scripts. The process must incur a fairly hefty cost in maintaining warehouses full of people to do…

So... require that the scientists submit the articles in JATS instead of Word files or PDFs? LaTeX already knows about the stuff you mentioned, so it shouldn't be too hard to make it output JATS directly. In fact, that already seems to exist[1].

[1]: https://github.com/mfenner/pandoc-jats

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

#72

Post by tnecniv »

a3_nm wrote: post #49
roadnottaken wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

Tenure isn't the end of the road and tenured researchers don't work alone.

Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishing in OA journals, but it's way easier to sell yourself and maintain your status if you publish where everyone else publishes.

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

#73

Post by DaveWalk »

a3_nm wrote: post #49
roadnottaken wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field.

From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.

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

#75

Post by a3_nm »

raarts wrote: post #60
a3_nm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.

I thought the 'double payment' refers to people paying for the research through the tax system, and then paying again to look at the resulting paper?

Oops, right. I thought the parent comment referred to "double dipping" for hybrid journals (those that have both open-access and closed-access articles): where research institutes pay once for "open-access article processing charges" (to publish) and once more for subscriptions (to read the articles that are closed-access).

Of course, all of this is in addition to the intrinsic cost of doing the research.

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

#76

Post by a3_nm »

tnecniv wrote: post #72
a3_nm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

Tenure isn't the end of the road and tenured researchers don't work alone. Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishin…

I agree with what you say, but I do not understand why it is related to my comment. I was trying to say that refusing to publish in closed-access journals is hard, but refusing to review for them is easy.

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

#77

Post by tnecniv »

coldtea wrote: post #22
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 th…

It's also fuzzy because money doesn't just come from one place. I know grad students who were paid off NSF grants but worked on projects also funded by private companies.

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

#78

Post by hueving »

a3_nm wrote: post #59
vanviegen wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.

In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.

Well they wouldn't make it obvious. It would be rejected for other reasons.

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

#80

Post by roel_v »

DaveWalk wrote: post #73
a3_nm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

What motivates the senior scientists to do this? Is it because they want to guide the latest research in high-impact journals, oblivious of any profit motive? In the life sciences, many top researchers are actually editors or on the board of journals in their field. From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder…

I get voted into oblivion every time I post this when this topic comes up (which is like, every other day), but the fact of the matter is that nobody cares about 'open access' in academia (well, not 'nobody' in the pedantic nerd sense, but 'nobody' as in 'only a vocal but ultimately insignificant minority', mostly very junior researchers - who usually don't even have their PhD's yet; the number of senior faculty staff who spends time on writing blog posts about this is minute). In fields where there are elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations (but, of course, who call themselves 'principled' and 'not corrupted by money' and that sort of spin on it) like CS and physics the proportion is higher, but still not enough to make a real difference.

The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it.

So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access.

Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).

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