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Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

badscience.net

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Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#31

Post by rmc »

Caligula wrote: post #3

One of the tremendous values of being in a masters program is having access to JSTOR and all the other journal sources. Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.

It annoys me that there's essentially a big cartel of the publishers and the universities and university students so that they can access it for free. And that's why it's been slow to change, the people who most want access already have it for free. It's the general public who are cut out. If graduate students had to pay the same fee as the general public, things would have changed by now.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#32

Post by tensor »

Locke1689 wrote: post #25
Mizza wrote: post #2

Academic lectures are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action: http://lectureleaks.com

Woah, what? I understand how people could believe that papers should be public given that many were funded by public research grants, but I've taught a class for two years now and not only am I not funded through a public research grant, I'm not paid. I don't see how you could construe that my lectures are the property of anyone but me and my university (which is private).

The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive.

If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do when tax dollars are at work. I suppose it must have something to do with having a choice to pay: with taxes, you have none.

I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#33

Post by aheilbut »

rmc wrote: post #30
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #22

"Direct action" to find "hidden" papers? Visit a university library. Done.

Only works if you're a student there, they are no usually open to the public.

In the US and Canada, at least, they usually are open to the public.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#35

Post by nooneelse »

_delirium wrote: post #29
Mizza wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something we've heard a lot of from professors - not sure how it will play out in the long run (we only launched a week ago, although we already have submissions from ~60 schools - more audio than we can process!!) Perhaps the solution is to cut them off at the pass, as it were. Record your lectures yourself and make them available online, so students won't even be thinking about making bootlegs.

> Record your lectures yourself and make them available online The point though is then it's not the same teaching--- if I'm recording something For Official Broadcast, it's a different kind of thing than if I'm having an informal seminar with 20 people in a room where we all (at least sort of) know each other. I'll be more formal and less chatty, students will be less free with their discussion too, etc. I don't thi…

Concerning the questions students ask. I completely concur that it is an issue.

I have only ever taught lab classes, and even in those groups of 10-14 people, getting people comfortable enough to ask their questions took a skill (I don't know if I ever got the hang of it) and constant attention toward not shutting people down. The times that the class was split into lab-partner teams of 2 people, and I roamed between those teams, the questions were far more free-flowing, and about basic/fundamental concepts. Letting me know I probably wasn't covering those kinds of concepts well enough other times, but I wasn't getting feedback on it because no one had wanted to ask.

In my possibly biased and very limited experience, it was usually students with more "in-your-face gruffness" that would speak-up in larger groups to ask about basic things I wasn't explaining as well as they needed. It made me appreciate that personality type more.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#36

Post by xyzzyz »

rmc wrote: post #31
Caligula wrote: post #3

One of the tremendous values of being in a masters program is having access to JSTOR and all the other journal sources. Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.

It annoys me that there's essentially a big cartel of the publishers and the universities and university students so that they can access it for free. And that's why it's been slow to change, the people who most want access already have it for free. It's the general public who are cut out. If graduate students had to pay the same fee as the general public, things would have changed by now.

General public is not anywhere nearly as interested as academia people. The ones who are in the greatest need of access to science journals are researchers, and since most of them work for public research institutions, they already have it. Undergraduate students don't really care about papers, because they're too advanced for most of them to grasp. That's why they use textbooks. People who are not connected with academia, but still want to have an access to academic papers, are a really, really small group, so it's no strange that nobody cares about them.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#37

Post by nooneelse »

tensor wrote: post #32
Locke1689 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah, what? I understand how people could believe that papers should be public given that many were funded by public research grants, but I've taught a class for two years now and not only am I not funded through a public research grant, I'm not paid. I don't see how you could construe that my lectures are the property of anyone but me and my university (which is private).

The sense of entitlement that people get when tax dollars are even remotely involved is astonishing. While I agree with the idea of open-access journals, I find this vigilantism crude and a bit naive. If you think about it, the people also pay the salaries of corporate employees. You buy the product, it's your dollar at work. Yet nobody has the same sense of I paid you thus I deserve all your ip and time that they do…

> I can't shake the feeling that all of this has much less to do with people wanting to learn and much more to do with people wanting to take it to the man.

I think it might be people with genuine idealism about the virtues of openness trying to find a way to go in that direction and hoping to yoke the sense of entitlement other people have in order that it will do some rhetorical work for them. If you find the one distasteful, then those seeking to use it as a tool might lose some respect for doing so.

Personally I think the important issue for more openness isn't finding such rhetoric to motivate it. It is finding and promoting solutions to the review process and filtering/ranking-by-quality of papers in more fields. If the best minds in a field don't have any other incentive toward contributing to that process than the journal system, then I still need to go through the maw of the journals (or tell the library I use to do so) when I need to learn about the field using the benefit of the understanding in those minds.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#38

Post by xyzzyz »

rmc wrote: post #30
NY_Entrepreneur wrote: post #22

"Direct action" to find "hidden" papers? Visit a university library. Done.

Only works if you're a student there, they are no usually open to the public.

From my experience (in Poland), university libraries are open for whoever wants to use them. My department does not even care whether people who attend classes are actually students of my department -- as long as there are free chairs and desks, you're welcome to attend almost any course. If you talk about it with dean and professor responsible for the course, you can even pass it this way, so that if you actually enroll in some degree program in future, you don't need to do it again. I actually have friends who passed courses on my university when they were in high school.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#39

Post by vilhelm_s »

gammarator wrote: post #4

Without justifying any of this, since the Schwartz incident JSTOR has made all of the out-of-copyright content freely available: http://about.jstor.org/participate-jstor/individuals/early-j...

Not all of it. Their FAQ say:

> Why not make any and all public domain content freely available? We do not believe that just because something is in the public domain, it can always be provided for free. There are costs associated with selection, digitization, access provision, preservation, and a wide variety of services that are necessary for content to reach those who need it. We have determined that we can sustain free access and meet our preservation obligations for this particular set of content for individuals as part of our overall activities undertaken in pursuit of our mission.

Re: Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here's some direct action.

#40

Post by dagw »

brianobush wrote: post #9
Caligula wrote: post #3

One of the tremendous values of being in a masters program is having access to JSTOR and all the other journal sources. Before I would email the professor and request a copy, usually they would oblige.

Or you can go visit your local library, which has access typically to most journals in digital form.

Do most local libraries in the US really have unrestricted JSTOR access? Here only the University libraries have JSTOR and they only make it available to students and faculty.
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