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“You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

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Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#121

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cableshaft wrote: post #105
Houshalter wrote: post #80

I hate how copyright now lasts indefinitely. There are many papers from the 50's by people who are dead, and these companies are still claiming ownership over them. Copyright should last a relatively short time, and maybe be even shorter if you don't pay a fee to get it extended. Perhaps even a special exemption for scientific research. If you could read all papers published 10 years ago for free, that would be incre…

I wish they'd just acknowledge that Disney really, really wants to keep their IP forever, and just make a "Disney Exemption" -> if you're willing to pay all the money you would normally pay lobbyists to lobby to keep copyright perpetual, you get to keep your IP. Otherwise, you only get X number of years, period. That way we can stop artificially extending copyright terms just to make one corporation happy and ruining…

Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#122

Post by mindcrime »

mrdrozdov wrote: post #115
mindcrime wrote: post #114

I have to say, I'm a little surprised at how many people in this thread seem to be taking the side of the publishers. If not completely, at least to some extent. I look at this as being pretty cut and dried "if research is paid for by tax dollars, it should be freely available to the public." I don't even see how that's controversial. That said, I understand the arguments that academics are sort of in a catch-22 situ…

To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?

To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?

No doubt. And there are all sorts of discussions one could get into about what should and shouldn't be publicly funded. As a Libertarian, I'm usually in the minority on those discussions, so let's not even go into that. My take on this is basically "if they're going to take my money and spend it, I at least want the system to be fair" (as I perceive it). And at least in my world-view, I think it's ridiculous to have to pay again just to read the research, especially now that we're in the Internet age where distribution costs are dramatically lower. If I wanted a paper journal mailed to me, sure, I'd be fine paying for that (up to a point). But as cheap as it is to create a PDF and slap it on a website, and then looking at how much journals are charging per article, it just feels like a complete abuse.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#123

Post by mandor »

jeffwass wrote: post #86
praseodym wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually you can publish a draft version of your paper, but not the version that is edited by the journal. They should be mostly the same, though.

Often people post to the Arxiv as well, clearly not formatted the same way as the journal publication. But in many cases the exact same text. I'm not sure if some journals like Nature prevent or discourage you from doing this.

Nature (and the vast majory of journals) is OK with posting on arxiv the pre-review manuscript, but not the post-review (ie, with the changes made after the comments by the reviewers) and not the version they edited (and added their page layout).

Some journals allow us to post the post-review paper (at any rate, the changes are usually mostly cosmetic).

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#124

Post by mandor »

p4bl0 wrote: post #58
thaw13579 wrote: post #15

I think the most important point was brushed over in the article--that journals offer prestige. Scientists are entirely aware of the problems, yet they still volunteer to submit their work to them, because they significantly improve the chances of promotion and tenure. These things are already tremendously competitive, so most would rather not volunteer for a handicap by publishing in other venues.

Exactly. The open access problem is very tied to the « publish or perish » one. Interestingly, the biggest publishers are the ones who lobby in favor of bibliometrics, and even sell off-the-shelf bibliometrics solutions (e.g., SciVal by Elsevier). One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals. Olde…

In H2020 projects (EU projects), the maximum embargo that can be "tolerated" is 6 months (then it has to be on arxiv) [12 months for social sciences]. However, all journals are OK with an arxiv post of the submitted (pre-review) manuscript, and this is what every authors should do.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#125

Post by ikeboy »

ufo wrote: post #119
ikeboy wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It all does strike obviously inefficient though. In my day to day research I almost never benefit from work the publishers did. I don't even use them to download my papers because the paywalls are so annoying that I usually go directly to the author's home page (google scholar will even find these for you). Every half-decent CS researcher makes their work available on their personal website, at no cost, Different fi…

In all fields, the peer review process is performed by volunteer researches at no cost. The publisher DOES NOT evaluate arguments or ensure that the contents of the paper are correct. The only thing the publisher does is own the name of the prestigious journal.

If that's the case, why do people give them prestige and won't give a new startup journal prestige?

Why is it considered hard to get into those journals, when all you need to do is have a correct paper?

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#126

Post by sidrajaram »

dubya wrote: post #112
maaku wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get promotions and tenure for doing successful grant work that brings in money to the University. You get the best grants by publishing in Science and Nature. The government (main source of grants) shares the blame here.

Grants are not judged by government bureaucrats, but by committees of peer researchers. (At least for NSF grants; not sure about NIH or others).

NIH too.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#127

Post by mrdrozdov »

mindcrime wrote: post #122
mrdrozdov wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research?

To play devil's advocate for a moment, surely there are other things paid for by tax dollars where the benefit is indirect like it is in research? No doubt. And there are all sorts of discussions one could get into about what should and shouldn't be publicly funded. As a Libertarian, I'm usually in the minority on those discussions, so let's not even go into that. My take on this is basically "if they're going to tak…

I suppose the argument that I'd like to investigate is the true purpose of tax dollars, since it's not explicitly clear to me how tax dollars are meant to be used. I think that's a distinct line of reasoning from how research papers should be shared more openly. It sounds like you'd probably agree that the issues are separate, in which case tax dollar allocation may not need to be involved in this conversation.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#128

Post by effie »

ikeboy wrote: post #57
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we don't even need the publishers at all! There are already free venues for publishing documents! It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!

If we don't need them, why are they still being used? You may think peer review is over-rated. The response should be to convince others of that and get them to stop using it, not complain about the high cost of peer review/journals/etc.

> If we don't need them, why are they still being used?

They are "still being used" mainly by researchers and grant agencies. But this is only a fraction of the number of people who care to read the results of the research work.

Researchers think of their research first, public access second. They think they need to publish with the incumbents to secure their future research. This is because the incumbents own the most respected journal names and have them in tight grip. For most researchers, there is currently no easy alternative way to get credit for their work.

But there are alternatives, it just isn't as easy and convenient for researchers to explore and start using them. The reason most of the people oppose current publishers such as Elsevier is not that researchers do not need them, but it is that society does not need them. It is because business has injected itself in a place where it prevents rather than enables society to benefit from the research.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#129

Post by snowwrestler »

bruceb wrote: post #2

The counter argument to this is you pay to use national parks even though you already pay for it. A lot of people don't even go to the parks now. Making them free will mean more tax money from people who don't go to them. How many people read this research? 1% of America? If it is free then tax payers will have to pay more to make sure it is available. 99% percent will pay to provide things they will never read. To b…

Paying for entry to national parks is a terrible idea too.

Re: “You pay to read research you fund. That’s ludicrous”

#130

Post by philovivero »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #121
cableshaft wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish they'd just acknowledge that Disney really, really wants to keep their IP forever, and just make a "Disney Exemption" -> if you're willing to pay all the money you would normally pay lobbyists to lobby to keep copyright perpetual, you get to keep your IP. Otherwise, you only get X number of years, period. That way we can stop artificially extending copyright terms just to make one corporation happy and ruining…

Maybe your pragmatic approach is right but I don't think I could settle for "we'll do this for this company because our politicians are easily bought". The real solution seems to be to get politicians with better ethics or create laws that force them to comply with good morals ... then of course you need a strong judiciary.

Ah, yes. I'm familiar with this argument, as I've seen it in tech.

"Let's just hack this variable so it stops paging us."

"No. Let us re-write the entire thing in Rust and deploy to a new cloud provider, because putting this hack into place will just lead to bad things."

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