[deleted]
EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
11–20 of 143 posts
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#12I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1]
It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community embraces this with gusto. The parallel with OSS is interesting - somewhat in the same spirit as the programming community embraced open source, I think the benefit of open access is that the researcher evaluates the tradeoff between 'capturing value' vs 'making a difference', without worrying about the external factor of 'what does this external entity, which provided very little in terms of constructive input when the work was being done, allow me to do (with regards to publishing openly)?'.
But then again, I could be completely wrong, especially in domains like the physical sciences where I don't know how the incentives align. I hope it works out well, and that soon this is the just the norm in all countries.
[1] http://blogoftheisotopes.blogspot.in/2012/01/elsevier-backla...
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#13Note that the current publishing arrangements for "open access" can often involve substantial fees paid by the authors to the publishers. Arxiv is definitely an exception.
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#14Note that the current publishing arrangements for "open access" can often involve substantial fees paid by the authors to the publishers. Arxiv is definitely an exception.
Precisely. European articles may be "free to read", but most of them will probably not be free to publish.
For-profit publishers will probably appreciate this: it means that, while European institutions will probably still pay subscription fees (to read foreign research), they will now also have to pay extortionate open-access fees when publishing. In addition to paying researchers to produce and peer-review the research...
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#15I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1] It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community emb…
> someone has to bear the cost of the review process
Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#16arron swartz was right
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#17I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1] It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community emb…
> someone has to bear the cost of the review process Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).
The cost of the review process in this particular two sided marketplace (which publishing is - how do you decide which journal to send your paper to?) is not just the unpaid labor of the reviewers, but rather the establishment of the credentials and authority which the journals build up over time, which basically drove down the cost of reviewing to be much smaller than if it were simply a free for all.
To see this in action: Many OSS software projects have trouble attracting quality contributions because they are simply not well known. To the community as a whole, the cost of soliciting contributions is not merely the difficulty of modifying the software, but in addition the promotion of the project itself to the point where the only costs have to do with making said modifications.
I could have worded it better (maybe cost of the review + credentialing process), but I think this is going to be the pain point in open access, just like even folks here on HN say that OSS sometimes resembles the wild west.
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#18Note that the current publishing arrangements for "open access" can often involve substantial fees paid by the authors to the publishers. Arxiv is definitely an exception.
Precisely. European articles may be "free to read", but most of them will probably not be free to publish. For-profit publishers will probably appreciate this: it means that, while European institutions will probably still pay subscription fees (to read foreign research), they will now also have to pay extortionate open-access fees when publishing. In addition to paying researchers to produce and peer-review the rese…
I don't understand why this comment is downvoted. What a3_nm says is very important. There are multiple forms of open access, and the EU is being lobbied by publishers to push for their idea of open access, sometimes called "gold open access", in which the authors pay to publish.
This is a really bad model as it makes money part of an equation which should only be governed by scientific concerns: should this paper be published or not?
Now, researchers is poor countries may be able to access existing research but they won't be able to publish their findings…
And even thought it kind of solve the problem of mass access to scientific publications, it doesn't deal with the fact that a lot of public money is going in the pockets of private academic publishers for no good reasons. With this model, research is still paid for at least 3 times (for doing it, reviewing it, and now publishing it instead of accessing it) by universities and research institutions, while publishers are making an awful lot money for hosting PDFs. This money which could be used to do more research, as only a tiny part of it would be necessary to support the necessary arXiv-like infrastructure.
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#19I sometimes wonder if companies like Elsevier are the patent trolls of the research publishing industry - with the same chilling effect on the spread of innovation. [1] It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality of reviewing. I think the defendants of the current system (who usually say someone has to bear the cost of the review process) are going to be rudely surprised when the academic community emb…
> someone has to bear the cost of the review process Maybe you are aware of it, but this argument is bogus in any case, because reviewing is unpaid labor. You can make an argument that someone has to organize the review process, but publishers usually don't pay for that process (except paying token amounts to an editor for some journals).
Seriously, everyone from the reviewer to the AE to the editor is doing this for free in almost every case. Or not for free exactly, but not for money either. For academics, reputation is the coin of the realm. Academic publishers have tried (quite successfully, until the last couple of years) to corner the market on prestige. This means they can get academics to do all kind of work, without spending any actual dollars.
Re: EU Announces That All Scientific Articles Should Be Freely Accessible by 2020
#20*European Union
[deleted]