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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

#101

Post by robryk »

dalke wrote: post #72
sre_ops wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.

"publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced…

> Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals.

Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?

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

#102

Post by runiq »

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…

Thanks for the link. This resource has saved my hide more than once during my time as a university student.

Also, to anyone with access to scientific literature: We welcome you to "pay it forward" and fulfill some requests on /r/scholar" rel="nofollow">https://reddit.com/r/scholar>/r/scholar yourself.

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

#103

Post by NoodleIncident »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #83
sp332 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bad example... people can and do buy books, and let anyone who comes over to their place read them. They even let complete strangers take the books home for a short time, you just have to fill out a form to get a card from them first.

The fact that digital copies are rather easier to loan out, and the fact that you don't much care if you get the copy back, shouldn't make /r/scholar illegal. It might, but it shouldn't.

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

#104

Post by bluehex »

This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading research papers?

I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wanted to reference was behind a paywall, to the point that I lost all interest in even trying to gain access. I'm sure my own laziness plays a role, but I feel like the restricted access trained me to think research papers are for academics and scientists and it's not worth the effort to try reading them.

Now I'm a professional Software Engineer and I can count the number of research papers I've read on my hands. I wonder how much better off the next generation of knowledge workers will be as access becomes more open.

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

#105

Post by lultimouomo »

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…

I think the open data approach, where readers do not pay, but authors do, shows who really is the customer in the academic publishing business: the authors who must publish to advance in their career.

It used to be that the reader, as someone who needs reliable information in a field, payed a journal so that the people could work for guaranteeing the quality of the articles. Now the authors pay the journals to rubber stamp their articles with an often cargo-culted peer review, so that they can keep receiving grants.

I am all for giving free access to information; but if you want reliable information in a competitive field such as academia, where people have all incentives to cut corners, cook data, embellish results etc., you have to pay someone to do it.

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

#107

Post by p4bl0 »

dalke wrote: post #72
sre_ops wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax payers aren't funding publishers. Don't like it? Go publish it on your blog.

"publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced…

Just a remark: actually Google Scholar indexes everything that resembles a publication. For instance it indexes PDF linked from the "research" page of my personal website: if you search for "rauzy ARMv7-M" for instance [1] you'll find a preprint paper that is publicly only available on that web page.

[1] https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?q=rauzy+ARMv7-M

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

#108

Post by dalke »

robryk wrote: post #101
dalke wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"publishers should work for free. plonk" We expect peer reviewers to work for free. We expect the authors of the papers to work for free. But no, we don't expect the publishers to work for free. As p4bl0 wrote, "But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost." That means p4bl0 think the prices should be reduced…

> Google's standard search engine, good as it is for search, is lousy for searching the academic literature. Google Scholar is better, but it only manages it because it only indexes the academic journals. Google scholar seems to index arxiv.org (a free for readers and authors, no review paper archive). Would you consider publishing those things you've published as blog posts there too?

I have considered it. However, I work in cheminformatics, which doesn't really fall under "Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics". I don't see an appropriate place for my work.

For example, under Quantitative Biology you'll notice a lack of pharmaceutical chemistry, toxicology, or pesticides, which are closely related areas to the types of work I do.

Searching out of curiosity, I found http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.1724 as an example of something in my field. It's under the catch-all "Computer Science > Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science", so that's a possibility.

There is some toxicology under metabolomics, but that focused on expression data, not structure-based prediction. There's another tox paper filed under "Mathematics > Statistics Theory", again based on gene expressions.

There's no history of people using arxiv.org in my field. If people don't like to cite blog publications, I don't know if they would like to cite preprints. Something to find out the hard, slow way, I guess.

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

#109

Post by sjtrny »

droithomme wrote: post #106

> The policy doesn’t kick in until January 2017 Why not kick in several years earlier - like... now.

Because it can take over a year to go from submission to publication. Implementing this rule now would mean current articles under review would have to be withdrawn.

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

#110

Post by sjtrny »

bluehex wrote: post #104

This got me wondering: What am I missing by not being in the habit of reading research papers? I remember being in college and finding nearly every paper I wanted to reference was behind a paywall, to the point that I lost all interest in even trying to gain access. I'm sure my own laziness plays a role, but I feel like the restricted access trained me to think research papers are for academics and scientists and it'…

You're probably not missing much in terms of publications related to your field of work. This mostly applies to active researches.
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