Yes
Should All Research Papers Be Free?
161–170 of 327 posts
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#162I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
Have you worked with biologists? If they could figure out how to use git, let alone github, I would be astounded. No forgetting, these are incredibly smart people, they just are bench-top scientists, not laptop ones. If you want their code, it will be, at best, a copy-paste of badly hardcoded Matlab, years in the making, with for-loops for the sake of for-loops alone, and without ANY comments or documentation whatsoever. Honestly, it would take less time for you to write it yourself and compare, rather than to try to peek under the hood of a spaghetti mess.
Honest to god and on the grave of my mother this happened to a friend. He was going over some old Fortran 88 code, filled with GOTO statements. The code, at best, was a rat's nest. Only a deep and long fight could get it into your brain. At about 3 am after a long day in the lab, she finally gets to a line in the code that says GOTO LINE 12345 with the comment 'HAHA MADE YOU LOOK' . Her boss bought her a new computer after she threw that one off the roof.
That experience is universal with Biologist code.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
FTA: >But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs. Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
Some portion of the other 70% is going toward legal fees to protect "their" intellectual property, developing new ways to monetize the windfall, lobbying to obstruct copyright reform, running lower-margin businesses unrelated to academic publishing, and so on.
Yes, I suspect creative accounting.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#164When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company.
They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it.
Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800.
Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to see it" would cost me nothing.
Having just finished, and being in debt to do so, it shouldn't come as a surprise that I wasn't rushing to pay even more. So now, if people want to see my dissertation, they have to pay -- or be part of an institution that pays an annual fee to ProQuest. (BTW, e-mail me if you want a copy.)
My guess is that it's similar with other journals. And while professors have more than PhD students, they have limited enough research funds that they'll hold their nose, save the money, and keep things behind a paywall.
Which is totally outrageous. It's about time that this change, and I'm happy to see what looks like the beginning of the end on this front.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#165Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article. It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does. - Scholars write the content for free - Scholars do the peer-review for free - All the legacy publish…
Of course the publishers say they create immense value by typesetting said PDFs, but as technologists, we can clearly see that this is bunk.
Amusingly, when I was a grad student, some friends showed me how they could use LaTeX to produce a manuscript that looked like a spitting image of a Physical Review article.
That was in 1992.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#166When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company. They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it. Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800. Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to…
There is an alternative: you host your thesis (and/or papers) on your own website, or you put them on arXiv.org. It's called self-archiving and it's allowed by most publishers. Funny thing is: making your papers available for free also increases the number of citations, something academics really care about.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#167Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica that provides software that helps journals peer-review and publish open-access content online. One of our journal clients, Discrete Analysis, is linked to in the NYT article. It is incredibly obvious that journal content shouldn't cost as much as it does. - Scholars write the content for free - Scholars do the peer-review for free - All the legacy publish…
I still believe publishers have value, but recently some of them have figured out how to do as little work as possible while making the most money. Who can blame them in a capitalist society. Anyway, I'm glad to see people respond via places like Arxiv. Sci-Hub is more like civil disobedience. Great that it happened for all the learners out there, but it's going to make some people very angry because they have bet th…
The returns that we expect and want from research have nothing to do with publishing models, though. And most of the people profiting from the current publication system aren't what we would call great scientists, so much as opportunistic capitalists. They aren't advancing society; they're just pulling in a paycheck, extracting rent from people trying to make actual scientific impacts, or figure out how to transform those advances into productive realities.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#168When I finished my PhD at Northwestern, part of the university's procedure involved going to the ProQuest Web site. ProQuest is a journal and dissertation publishing company. They asked if I wanted my dissertation to be available, free of charge, to anyone interested in reading it. Clicking on "yes, I want to make it available for free" would cost me something like $800. Clicking on "no, I'll let you charge people to…
There's nothing that stops you from uploading the PDF elsewhere, right? Why not just push the file to some free hosting service (or even GitHub in a GitHub Pages repo)?
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think code used to produce results should be published as well.
Have you worked with biologists? If they could figure out how to use git, let alone github, I would be astounded. No forgetting, these are incredibly smart people, they just are bench-top scientists, not laptop ones. If you want their code, it will be, at best, a copy-paste of badly hardcoded Matlab, years in the making, with for-loops for the sake of for-loops alone, and without ANY comments or documentation whatsoe…
> Honestly, it would take less time for you to write it yourself and compare, rather than to try to peek under the hood of a spaghetti mess.
That's not actually the point. The point is reproducibility. If you write your own code and get a different result, why? If the reason is the code then having the other code, no matter how terrible it is, allows you to figure out what the difference is. And then somebody is wrong and you know why and can publish that result.
Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
How the hell can that be "non-profit"? Where is the money going? Free conferences in Dubai?
The ACM publishes annual reports with a high level breakdown of their finances. The most recent one is here: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-rep... The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.
What I'm wondering about is the economic justification for charging $15 per article copy. Other than "we can", I mean.