Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay • Hacker News Board

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#151

Post by tylerneylon » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

krull10 wrote: post #91

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…

I fully agree. The US's academic system provides a lot of insulation to researchers because generally this publishing cost will be paid for by your employing company, by your university, or by a grant. So researchers are not incentivized to spend a ton of time worrying about it. At the same time, I believe the large majority of researchers don't realize how little (or negative, arguably) value they receive from paying for publication vs doing so for free (such as on arxiv).

Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.

As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#152

Post by geoalchimista » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

dwheeler wrote: post #94

krull10 wrote: post #91

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…

> 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 reviewers typically aren't paid either.

You are assuming researchers are saintly figures dwelling in a vacuum who don't need to constantly prove to their department head or promotion evaluation committee of their worth. That is not the case. The walled gardens are desirable for some because their social functions are not easily replaceable.

One way to decouple the evaluation of scientific output from the walled garden is simply to stop using them as a gate-keeper in making hiring and research grant distribution decisions. But apart from the constant lip service, there is no momentum in doing anything concrete about this in academia.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#153

Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:11 PM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #140

TulliusCicero wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. 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? *…

I don't see how any of this applies. The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment. It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage. If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margi…

> The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.

Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here.

> It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.

Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doing so.

> If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.

For sure. Of course, real world charges for roads/parking is a little more complicated than that.

> Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.

Yeah, the most obvious reason to do this for street parking is because you actively want to manage demand of a highly demanded, finite resource. You don't really need the money, but charging gets you other changes you want. Ditto for congestion charges.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#154

Post by TulliusCicero » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:16 PM UTC

rzazueta wrote: post #146

TulliusCicero wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. 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? *…

We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society. So, in that vain, I agree with another poster who said this should all be free. Perhaps with some changes. > * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free? Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in…

Free parking is actually bad, particularly in cities, though it's bad for reasons largely specific to cars.

> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.

I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.

> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.

Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?

I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.

> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).

Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).

I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#155

Post by efitz » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

I hope this will include research at universities where government grants are involved.

On the topic of openness, we also need to ensure open access to government records even when involved parties are trying to use NDAs (StingRay) or copyright (many municipal building codes) to hide government records.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#156

Post by briffle » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #101

Test0129 wrote: post #39

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…

Yep, that is how the Chinese government and industry has gotten so far ahead in Flow Batteries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/03/the-u-s-made-a-breakt...

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#157

Post by SiempreViernes » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

ml_basics wrote: post #62

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…

The humanities are weird, people write and defend their PhD and then they can keep their PhD thesis confidential for years!?

The theory seems to be that the thesis doesn't count as a publication so you must keep it secret while they turn it into papers/book??

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#158

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

krull10 wrote: post #91

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…

This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work

It'd be nice if there were just a different model. I do a lot of research in a niche field and would like to publish some of it. But the enormous submission fees are unaffordable as a non-academic with no connection to grant infrastructure. I had thought that rigor and reproducibility would be the main hurdles, but it's pretty discouraging to have or be close to publication-quality datasets and discover how steep the financial wall is. I was aware of submission fees for papers, but until recently had been under the impression that they were an order of magnitude lower.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#159

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

trevcanhuman wrote: post #148

krull10 wrote: post #91

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…

Serious question: What do journals actually do ? Do they check the article ? Why is it important for it to be in a journal ? I don't know much about academic research, fyi. I think it's also a midway proposal for other reasons. The proposal merely suggests open access but barely specifies anything. I don't want to give the government personal information and enable endless tracking to them just because I want to down…

The find one or more well-credentialed and cited experts in the field to anonymously review the paper and point out shortcomings in the research or drafting - this is the 'peer' part of peer review. Then they either accept for publication, suggest revisions, or reject it outright.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#160

Post by andrewon » Thu, Aug 25, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

They should do the same for patent. I see companies and now universities freely take tax payer money to develop their own products. It just becomes an additional source of funding with little string attached.

It's fine to use tax dollar if there's potential for public good, but the tech developed should be released to the public domain right away. I have seen a selfless act from an academic group making decision not to patent a technology because they felt its an important one that many other things can be built on. Now tens of companies were started based on that tech and counting. I hope our gov understand how much value can be unlocked by public domain technology.