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Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

petitions.whitehouse.gov

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#61
Ask that the US Attorney Carmen Ortiz be removed: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

Carmen Ortiz is planning on running for Massachusetts Governor so if you live in Massachusetts OR if you know any one who lives in massachusetts spread the word about Carmen Ortiz.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#62
post #58

The NIH has been working hard at getting all NIH-funded research publications into a free database, PubMed Central. And I'm pretty sure all publications listed on CVs for NIH grant applications must include a PubMed Central ID.

Pubmed is great.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#63
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#64
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

Very few people understand how the academic publishing industry works, so don't be so fast to smack this person down. The fact is that the authors do all the content and technical editing work, and unpaid volunteers do all the peer review work, and depending on journal, either underpaid or unpaid editors do the coordinating between then, with the exception of very few top journals. The publishers generally do the typesetting, which is a minimal amount of work compared to everything else, and hold the exclusive license to distribute the work, which is essentially all the value of the paper. Most will force authors to give them the exclusive right to destroy people's lives for copyright reasons without the author's consent.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#65
post #56

Academia.edu was very active in working with the White House to spread the word about this petition when it first came out, and getting signatures for the petition to hit the 25k threshold. The White House hasn't responded to it because initially they were busy with the election, and then with the fiscal cliff, and now with gun reform. Getting more signatures on the petition now will help them see that people care ab…

Ugh, if they delay important things like health care, copyright reform and the economy over gun reform, I'll be angry. I mean, guns are a minor issue. Make them freely available, and some crime stats change somewhat. Completely ban them and do away with 2A, and some crime stats change somewhat, and destroy a relatively small industry. It's not a huge issue either way. Tiny compared to the overall economy, or overseas…

Not to mention I just saw a timely political cartoon about the hot issue of gun reform - from 1881. I don't think it's going to get resolved.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#66
post #60

This is one of those things that for the life of me I don't understand why we have to petition our government. Why in the heck wouldn't you set it up this way to begin with?

Because the article title is misleading. Purely publicly-funded research is freely available (e.g. NASA reports). What's at issue are e.g. papers written pursuant to research that is the subject of public funds, but by research teams who are otherwise employed by a university or research lab. In that case, the resulting paper isn't purely a product of public funding, so it's not obvious it should automatically be fre…

To some extent, they are though. Most peer reviewers are not paid for their time; instead, they are largely federally-funded academics. The journals have an incredible racket: they don't pay for their raw inputs, and they get a lot of their value-added for free as well. Since there's been a large shift away from the dead-tree versions being critical for researchers, the cost of transporting bits is a lot lower than stacks of paper.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#67
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLoS and arxiv seem to have figured it out. Require federally funded research to be posted on a similar platform.

arxiv is not peer-reviewed.

Doesn't matter. Just require that peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly funded research also be posted on the arXiv. This is how it's done anyways in physics.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#68
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

Very few people understand how the academic publishing industry works, so don't be so fast to smack this person down. The fact is that the authors do all the content and technical editing work, and unpaid volunteers do all the peer review work, and depending on journal, either underpaid or unpaid editors do the coordinating between then, with the exception of very few top journals. The publishers generally do the typ…

You're right Kliment. I was too harsh, only due to my anger. It's also a sore point to me and quite a few of my friends.

I'm sorry, cmsmith.

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#69
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost? http://www.plos.org/about/people/staff/

Re: Petition: require free access to publicly-funded research

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost? http://www.plos.org/about/people/staff/

"So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost?"

I would argue that value would be gained by sacking these people (and organizations).

Most of the money they (and other journals) uses is dependent on excessive licensing fees charged to universities. The universities turn around and add that to each person's tuition.

And all the work the journal publishes WAS owned by the students of the very university, until the journal demands transfer of copyright to the journal... So they can sell them back work at 1000X the profit.

By definition, they are parasites. What we need is a good anti-parasitic medicine.

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