131–140 of 154 posts
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.
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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…
Unrelated design gripe... Someone paid someone else to make their website look like this: http://i.imgur.com/dTQUQGd.jpg A disturbing trend that seems to be increasing.
Earlier 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…
And 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.
They would, for example, only publish the backbone structure of a protein as a drawing, and not as 3D coordinates. In response, people would input the 2D coordinates into software that would try to reconstruct the 3D structure. (This was possible because the publication would often be as a split stereoscopic image.)
Finally, in the mid-1990s, the major journals put their feet down and said they would only publish of the coordinates were deposited in a public data collection, which would be released no later than a year of publication.
So yes, the people funding the science, and the people publishing the science, who sometimes have to force the people doing the science to actually be more open.
Oh Bill Gates, I love you! This is a wonderful step forward and maybe the beginning of the end for avaricious publishers. As a taxpayer I'm asked to pay £20 to access a single article written in 1960 on work financed and reviewed courtesy of taxpayers. This is madness.
For example, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/ says "Anyone who has access to the [Cambridge] University Library may use this service. The fee for an Inter-Library Loan request is currently £3.00 for members of Cambridge University and £6.00 for all other readers."
And for Sheffield, http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/services/ilcharges suggests it would be £9.40 for an article.
I don't know about the UK, but here in Sweden it's easy to get a library card for the local university library, and access to their ILL services.
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'…
I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work.
For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious)
I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat.
Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical.
I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.
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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.
Without going this far, I personally think civil disobedience is ok in that case. How can you change the law, if the law is absolute? (I've noticed that this is a rather controversial opinion though.)
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The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…
I don't understand, can you clarify how a journal/publisher can spend money to get prestige? Spend the money on what, that results in prestige?
There's a huge divide between different types of peer review right now. There's the typical peer review you get in a prestigious "traditional" journal, which includes a review of the scientific method and also the "importance" of the work (is it a new/original work, does it move the field forward, are the results groundbreaking, etc etc). Then you have what's becoming the norm for OA megajournals, which has been pioneered by PLoS One, which focuses exclusively on the methodology (ie is it good science, regardless of "importance"). To put it bluntly, that's an easier and cheaper way to review a paper. I'm not at all arguing it's the wrong way, there's a solid case that pre-publication peer review should be methodology-focused and we should let post-publication review of some sort sort out the "importance" factor of a paper later.
So in these two types of peer review, the "traditional" version that assesses for importance will likely lead to a higher chance of a higher impact factor for your journal, since you're assessing articles based on their impact on the field (theoretically leading to more citations in the long term). Couple that type of peer review with open access (like eLife is doing) and you get a really good formula for producing a high impact journal after only a year or two. But getting that type of peer review done, particularly if you're in a hurry, as you are when launching a brand new high-cost journal, is hard and expensive. So eLife has chosen to fund all the aspects of the process, including paying the reviewers. So that's one way of throwing money at the problem of going from zero to high impact in a short timeframe.