It is also interesting to note that Bill Gate is an investor at http://researchgate.net/ whose mission is to connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise
Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
121–130 of 154 posts
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#122Bravo. 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…
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Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#123> "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…
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Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#124This 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'…
It depends greatly on the field.
When I did my MSc dissertation on methods to improve OCR error correction, and had to pick a set of OCR engines to test, it was illuminating to see just how badly e.g. gocr and ocrad fared vs. Tesseract (which started out closed source) and commercial products (this was years ago so the situation may have changed).
In that field it was clear that even relatively basic methods from the literature had not yet made it into open source "organically" and it was first the open sourcing of Tesseract that appeared to start to make some of the algorithms more widespread.
There are many niches like that, but you can also easily spend the entirety of your software engineering career never touching on areas where the research papers will be particularly critical to you.
It also depends on whether there are many "bridges". E.g. in areas like distributed computing that are hot fields in the tech industry, a lot of the research gets jumped on pretty quickly by people that implement the algorithms presented and/or nicely digests it into blog posts for us, and for most people it's then sufficient to "just" track that, unless you want to be at the true cutting edge of the field.
I like reading research papers, but frankly it is mostly for my own curiosity rather than because it's a necessity.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#125> "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…
But those are not the fees the Gates foundation are going to pay. They are talking about the somewhat lower fees payable to open-access journals. E.g., some $2000 for PLOS journals, if I remember correctly.
What you describe appears to be the opt-in open-access option provided by commercial academic publishers such as Springer or Elsevier. If you ask me, this option is probably there so that they can say they accommodate open access; they don't really expect many researchers to pay them.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#126Bravo. 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.
Your tax dollars are used to fund many, many things you can't access. Nor would your average tax payer get any value out of being able to access the research papers.
This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits.
However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead.
A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#127This 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'…
General media is usually terrible at reporting science. Being able to read the papers is useful to cut through the bullshit.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#128The question is what is the volume of papers published by the foundation's funding, and is it enough impetus to cause a shift of mentality across the academia?
Also, what will be the cost of this endeavor? It will certainly help to lower the price for open publishing among journals.
Hopefully this will put into question the hesitance of government funding agencies to stop subsidizing ancient publishing conglormerates.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#129And the underlying data must be freely available.
This is the best part. It's not even funny how I have to extract data points from plots of articles if I want to use them. Even from recent ones. Most often the raw measurement data is not even available even in the form of plots.
Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is some confusion here. Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays". The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what the…
Sadly you are wrong. Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, etc. they all have (what they call ) "open access" journals where you have to pay to publish, and even some "authors choses" journal where you can pay to make your article freely available on the web but also choose the "free" closed access option. And yes, this means that universities still have to pay the subscriptions to these journals because not all of their papers…
I was unaware that the old publishers had co-opted the label "open-access". But it is still true that some "true" open access journals require author fees - there's no free lunch.