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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

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Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#111

Post by ThomPete »

livingparadox wrote: post #108
ThomPete wrote: post #98

Earlier 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.

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".

Yes there are multiple meanings. Since lobbyism is legal in this context corruption would mean fraudulent.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#112

Post by Lawtonfogle »

Fomite wrote: post #109
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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".

If he has used up the USDA money and switched to private sector, where is the problem? If he wants to do work for Large Company with USDA money, then that is a problem and I see no reason to not ban it.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#113

Post by zmb_ »

tombert wrote: post #44

I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it. I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

I don't think that's a winning argument. Your tax dollars pay for space rockets and fighter planes too, but you don't get to ride them. There are many such things that you pay for, and that you get some indirect benefits from, including the pay-walled research. And in many fields the researchers take big pay cuts compared to what they'd make in the industry, meaning they are effectively paying a large chunk of the cost of creating the research themselves.

I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.

The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#114

Post by return0 »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #32
tma-1 wrote: post #7

I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?

Bioinformatics is close.

Close by a few light years? no, they are terrible

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#115

Post by kilotaras »

ikeboy wrote: post #87
paulclinger wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If these are valuable services, then customers will pay for them; no need to have a monopoly on access to published research. (as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)

You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does, or charge the reader customer, which is what non open access does. Insisting that the reader customer not pay just increases the costs elsewhere. If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there…

> You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does...

But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#116

Post by hfourm »

atom-morgan wrote: post #62
burkaman wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still hate the player, especially when they have more power than you. "It's legal" doesn't mean it's right.

I definitely didn't mean to imply that. I simply believe people target their outrage at the wrong party in this instance.

Its also reasonable to both blame the laws and the insert "greedy" player here. It usually takes two parties to mutually benefit off a partnership

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#117

Post by ikeboy »

kilotaras wrote: post #115
ikeboy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does, or charge the reader customer, which is what non open access does. Insisting that the reader customer not pay just increases the costs elsewhere. If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there…

> You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does... But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.

See https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/18625/do-spring... and http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/We...

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#119

Post by randyrand »

coldtea wrote: post #10
lugus35 wrote: post #3

"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?

Yeah, why not? Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?

The usual reason is that then there is an incentive to not spend your own money on research and to just wait for someone else to do it for you.

Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#120

Post by jsprogrammer »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…

>What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons.

The University of California has already done this.*

Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*

* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...

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