Earlier quoted context omitted.
PLoS is.
And it costs thousands of dollars to publish a paper there.
Yes, and? The price to publish with PLoS is not meant to be a barrier; they will wave the fee if you cannot afford it.
Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
41–50 of 75 posts
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then how do you explain them having time for this; https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
In practice that death star response probably only took an hour or two to write. However, figuring out federal policy on research is really tricky, and there are many stakeholders. The fundamental problem is that the White House would like all research to be open, but every time they take any steps in that direction, they get whacked over the head in the media by the journal industry, and get called job-killers. The…
>The White House really wants to turn the debate around, and argue that open access for research is a stimulus for jobs: it will create more jobs, not fewer. To argue for that requires marshaling arguments and data from the private sector to establish that if people have access to federally-funded research, that will help them in their lives, and those benefits will outweigh the costs that the journal industry may experience.
Do they have a team working on this, and is there any form of crowdsourcing being used to marshall this data?
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#43The White House hasn't had time to respond to this petition because they've been busy responding to more important ones - like "begin construction of a Death Star by 2016". https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/isnt-petition-resp...
The Death Star one was simple, so it is easy to respond to. The research one is complicated. To move from the current system to one where were everything is available at no cost, without compromising peer review and without making it much harder for working scientists to follow the important developments in their field, is a hard problem.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The high prices are the costs to publish articles in open access journals. Somebody has to pay the costs of publishing, and it's currently either subscribers (traditional journals) or authors (open access journals).
A mail server and website combination is cheap to build. Your only cost is bandwidth. The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?" And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web pag…
Publishing is not referring to printing the physical journals (no one is arguing that those should be free).
Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#45This needs to also happen for case law (free as in beer). How absurd is this: "Pursuant to common law tradition, the courts of California have developed a large body of case law through the decisions of the Supreme Court of California and the California Courts of Appeal. The state supreme court's decisions are published in official reporters known as California Reports. The decisions of the Courts of Appeal are publi…
Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.
It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#46How many such petitions have there been that have been popular enough to warrant a response? 100? Of those, how many have led to actual changes in policy? Has there been any example of a successful whitehouse.gov petition?
Why do people keep doing these? They're worse than useless. Send letters, don't shout into the void.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.
Can you provide a link? I am not a lawyer, but I have seen http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions-slip.htm which provides a link to the LexisNexis website for opinions from 1850 - Present. The LexisNexis website also states "There is no charge to search, retrieve or save documents from the California Official Reports Web site, and there is no copyright on opinion text. The site, however, is for personal, not commercial, u…
This is new in the last few months. I think you can do what you want with the opinions, but you can't build it on top of their servers.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but all those reports are freely available online from the courts websites. The publishers just publish them in paperbound form.
It's almost like it would be nice if a hacker used library access to download a bunch of federal court electronic records and provided public access to them, possibly with the assistance of a major university.
Spare us your sarcasm. What you want is already available via http://bulk.resource.org There is no copyright on judicial or legislative proceedings, nor any restrictions upon their distribution.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it costs thousands of dollars to publish a paper there.
Yes, and? The price to publish with PLoS is not meant to be a barrier; they will wave the fee if you cannot afford it.
Not many people waive the fee currently. If a lot of people did, it would be a huge problem for publishers like PLoS and they would have to change their practices.
Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.
Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research
#50I signed this petition when it surfaced originally.
It's amazing that the public has to pay for it all initially and then it's handed over to corporations and the same public has to pay ridiculous prices again just to see the findings they originally funded. The same principle applies to all other walks of life whether it's roads or communications infrastructure.
Of course if the banks fails we all get to fund the deficit and if they earn huge profits it's "free market capitalism."