FWIW, all research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the major funding body behind STEM research in the UK) is required to be Open Access, including data collected. In the next REF (the process through which UK universities including Oxford and Cambridge receive funding) only papers that are open access will be assessed. This puts immense pressure on both academics and UK universities to ensure their works are open access.
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
101–110 of 135 posts
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#102If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.
You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search. Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of gar…
> You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.
This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corrupt doesn't mean illegal, it means dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity, etc.
Or fraudulent which is the right word in this context. Lobbyism is legal whether it's dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity. So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
In what sense is it fraudulent? A straightforward exchange of money for policy doesn't require anybody to lie. The harm is from the disloyalty and lack of integrity of the elected representative. And making policies in order to get money is disloyal regardless of whether it's illegal.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#104I don't understand how research can possibly be published and properly evaluated without everyone who can contribute to it not having access.
For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or fraudulent which is the right word in this context. Lobbyism is legal whether it's dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity. So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
In what sense is it fraudulent? A straightforward exchange of money for policy doesn't require anybody to lie. The harm is from the disloyalty and lack of integrity of the elected representative. And making policies in order to get money is disloyal regardless of whether it's illegal.
Lobbyism is legal so in this context corruption to be anything meaningful is illegal. Otherwise it's just lobbyism.
Fraudulent is one of the terms used to describe what corruption is it's adequate here.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers:…
> * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobo…
Rephrasing the gist of your argument: The professors are overloaded, so they cannot do a thorough job when they are on a hiring committee. Therefore, we should use the existing structures that make it trivial to rank applicants, with the unfortunate consequence of us supporting the closed-access journals of today.
My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.
As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.
Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.
You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.
And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#107The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consi…
>Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.
You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corrupt doesn't mean illegal, it means dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity, etc.
Or fraudulent which is the right word in this context. Lobbyism is legal whether it's dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity. So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
If there are multiple meanings for a word, I think the author (AnthonyMouse) would get the final word on which meaning he intended. And he made it clear he intended it to mean "dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity" not "fradulent" or "illegal".
Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
#109The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consi…
>Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it. You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money f…
I think the suggestion here is more "Because Joe over in Agriculture took USDA money, I suddenly can't do contract work for Large Company because they want to keep it proprietary".