111–120 of 293 posts
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It's the federal government, not a startup in your garage.
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It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness. The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. An…
The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG. And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.
Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continu…
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues. I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding. Further…
So, we don't have to pay for the access, great. But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher. .....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can u…
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the publication fees (paid by the authors) seem to be considerably higher
Elsevier pockets a 30+ percent profit margin.[1] Nothing besides market power forces them to push this to the authors. [1] https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/re... (page 23)
As someone in the ML community where arxiv rules supreme, I really do not understand why other communities do not also have something similar. I get that there are some perverse incentives around, but there is a relatively straightforward solution to all of the problems with journals - just publish your work on the internet first so that it's out in the open, then send it to some journal who can make money from your…
There are similar things in other fields, but I think formal peer review still supercedes them, at least as it's perceived. Things are changing though. I do think unless there are some significant changes to the system there will be some tipping point where journals will start being ignored but I'm not sure how that will occur.
So, we don't have to pay for the access, great. But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher. .....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can u…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub
Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it. Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continu…
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
I assume they mean for this to apply only to copyrights over the actual text of the published paper and supporting data, but it's strange that they are so vague.
This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding stud…
You're right it doesn't fully address the issue, but it does provide some pressure. If an article is available for free immediately, there's no need to spend $6K to make it available at all . Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the revi…
In contrast, the government could easily fix this by simply not providing the money currently required by such journals, which would force them to come up with models that can work with lower fees.
I hope you are right though!