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Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

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Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#81

Post by ecesena »

dang wrote: post #23
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat peopl…

$5k is surely high, but from a researcher/professor point of view I don't think it's prohibitive, especially if you compare it with papers accepted to conferences where you need to cover travel and staying, sometimes maybe for 2 people. It's just sad that you have to pay for openness.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#82

Post by akjj »

p4bl0 wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

To me, $1000 per article sounds insanely low. PLoS is a non-profit founded for the purpose of publishing open-access journals. They charge between $1350 and $2900, depending on the journal, and only one journal is less than $2200. Another open-access publisher, BMC charges over $1900 for most of its journals. Do you think that PLoS and BMC are very inefficient? Are there _any_ large-scale open-access publishers that charge less than $1000? I don't count low-volume journals where the administration work is done by professors on donated time that would be valued at more than the cost of hiring a professional.

Sources:

http://www.plos.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/about-journal... http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/apcfaq/howmuch

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#83

Post by sillysaurus3 »

sp332 wrote: post #80
rhino369 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles. Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics. The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright. Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it…

A use doesn't have to fall under all four factors to be "fair". Educational, noncommercial use can certainly be fair use.

Circumventing the fee is in no way fair to the corporation trying to charge the fee, especially when the corporation expressly wants to force each of those people to pay the fee. I can't rip off a book for my personal education. Same with an academic article.

No matter how much we wish the world was different, that's how the law is currently set up.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#84

Post by Coding_Cat »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #77
voronoff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is notoriously poor on science, particularly cutting edge. That's the wrong model.

That's surprising, since their math and CS stuff is usually pretty good.

The thing with math (and abstract CS) is that it's generally purely logic. In principal you should be able to write (at least verify) an entire article with no outside references as it is all logical deductions, it's armchair science in that sense (no negative connotations meant).

But if you're going to write an article on say quantum computing or confocal microscopy, to name random things, you are going to need outside references to experimental work, history, best practices, open debates, etc. And that is usually where the errors slip in, how many people actually check the sources properly?

They're also usually pretty terrible when it comes to modern science things, but I suppose that can be attributed to a small group of people actually knowing about those things in the first place.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#85

Post by carljoseph »

lvs wrote: post #78
carljoseph wrote: post #76

Whilst I feel this is a step in the right direction, some have already argued[0] that it goes too far and sets up the wrong incentives. [0] http://www.digitopoly.org/2014/11/24/the-gates-foundations-o...

Which incentives are wrong? The post you link seems a bit confused about, for example, why it's important to publish a finding only once. (Hint: So lazy people can't keep regurgitating their old results to seem productive in the eyes of grant-givers.) It also says the Gates decision goes too far, and then suggests something even farther: that the paper would need to be written twice, separately, for public and commer…

I'm definitely not agreeing with that article's perspective, just thought it provided a contrasting point of view. Not sure my comment deserved a downvote though (ouch!) :)

That's definitely a good point about the journals not adding enough value. I think it's clear they've placed themselves into a bit of a position where they hold most of the cards and that really does need to change.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#86

Post by MichaelApproved »

sp332 wrote: post #80
rhino369 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles. Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics. The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright. Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it…

A use doesn't have to fall under all four factors to be "fair". Educational, noncommercial use can certainly be fair use.

That's just one piece to "fair use". In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

* the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

* the nature of the copyrighted work;

* the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

* the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

It doesn't have to pass all those tests but it likely will need to pass more than just one of them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#88

Post by jrochkind1 »

dougmccune wrote: post #31
kenshaw wrote: post #25

Is it not possible to create a separate foundation / organization that manages peer-reviewed, open-access journals for multiple scientific fields? I realize the costs involved in asking academics to review submissions, etc., but couldn't a small $10-$15 million grant for an organization be enough to kickstart an open journal consortium? Even if they did require small review fees from submissions ($25-$50), I feel tha…

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…

I don't understand, can you clarify how a journal/publisher can spend money to get prestige? Spend the money on what, that results in prestige?

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#89

Post by scott_s »

acveilleux wrote: post #74
scott_s wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is some confusion here. Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays". The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what the…

When was the last time you published in a traditional journal? Last I saw an invoice was 4 years ago and we paid to be published in journals that were pay-only.

This year; it was IEEE, which counts as "traditional" for my field. Computer science is different from most other science and engineering though, since most of our conferences and journals are run through our professional organizations (ACM and IEEE), not a for-profit company.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#90

Post by verisimilitude »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be…

This is the single best tip I've read about anything in the past six months[1]. Here's why:

In 2012, I graduated from dental school in debt up to my EYEBALLS[2], and look, I can NOT afford the per article fee required for me to form my own opinions on important dental topics like implantology, oral surgery, adhesive bonding, high strength porcelains. I've had to rely on reading literally tens of thousands of forum posts[3] by dentists to sort out the totally-wrong from the quite-valuable information, to see if the "thought-leaders" (the well-known dentists who are paid to write articles) are supported by fact.

I sent a letter to the dean of my dental school about being able to read primary lit articles like I could in school, here's a quote from the letter: "As you are undoubtedly aware, one of the School’s objectives in its mission statement is a devotion of “time and resources to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge.” Considering this goal, it is frustrating for the School of Dentistry to espouse the value of scientific research yet deny alumni access to the primary literature." I received a very polite non-answer and no action in the two years since I sent it. Ef that.

I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.

So, sillysaurus3, you finally gave me the tools to round out my collection of dental primary literature articles in Pages 2.7.3 (per the second footnote of this post, you will note that I can not afford to upgrade to Papers 3). Because of your post, I can become a better dentist, faster, with fewer errors.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!

[1] And I became a father four months ago.

[2] Seriously, my student loan payments are 2.7x my house payment. 35% of my after tax income is student loan payments. It's... sad.

[3] DentalTown.com ... the good, the bad, and the ugly in dentistry. Just don't go on their political forums. Good God, what a bunch of fools.

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