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Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#181

Post by mcguire »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #153
TeMPOraL wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The three links, especially the LW comment, go into details of what exactly this is supposed to mean. TL;DR: The models that were popular in times of Galileo weren't stories told to poor villagers by the Evil Church; they were precise mathematical tools that could be used to predict in advance the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. They also had an elaborate explanations for what the parts of their models mean. And…

> It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mas…

"...additionally predicts things that we know to be false."

What, specifically did the Tychonic system predict that was known to be false in the early 17th century? As far as I know, the interpretations of its model were kind of a mess, but the model itself was fine, up to the precision of then-known instruments.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#182

Post by astaroth360 »

What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist?

Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#183

Post by nmrm2 »

PinguTS wrote: post #51
kragen wrote: post #11

The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who paid Elsevier page fees to publish it . Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even…

Maybe ResearchGate is a way to change that? (Not affiliated with. Just discovered it recently and found out, that 2 of my papers very cited without my knowledge.)

ResearchGate is the LinkedIn of Academia -- a spammy and creepy service that will inevitably begin selling its users the ability to spy on each other.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#184

Post by Fomite »

astaroth360 wrote: post #182

What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist? Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.

There was a Academia Stack Exchange question on this very thing: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-th...

My answer, from there:

They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals, if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending their conferences.

They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something that is not necessarily an academic skill set.

They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field" and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues - popularity and quality.

Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far more weight because of the associated journals.

Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in addition to targeted searches of the literature.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#185

Post by Fomite »

DaveWalk wrote: post #175

For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around. In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current,…

I wouldn't say nearly useless.

For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact.

Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#186

Post by Fomite »

mandor wrote: post #84
teekert wrote: post #46

I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself. I'm all for free papers by the way, noth…

> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. - Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in contrast to grant proposal for which we are sometimes paid) - I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view section, not that much for the academic papers at the end) - Co…

- Biomedicine primarily uses word, and it's a major area of publishing. I'd also contest that many latex files end up "nice" - I've read more than my share of incoherently organized and formatted latex.

- Some of us like printed journals. I subscribe to at least three.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#187

Post by exgrv »

baghira wrote: post #106
sawwit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> … it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles. I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access world like on arXiv.org.

Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function. Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way one decides who to promote. At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1. Count the citations. 2. Make a list.…

Members of the editorial board of scientific journals are not paid. So nothing prevents having a completely free and open access journal, which is peer reviewed. As a matter of fact, such journals already exist in some fields (e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research[1], which is the best journal in machine learning).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#188

Post by wolfgke »

DarkLinkXXXX wrote: post #132
wolfgke wrote: post #25

Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto > https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM... > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto

That first link will probably 404 within the year. The next time, you should right click and copy the link, which hasn't been redirected. https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...

Thanks.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#189

Post by effie »

roel_v wrote: post #56
masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.

I can't claim to know across the world, but in much of Europe you can get a 'visitor' subscription to university libraries for some nominal fee (50 euros or so in my nearest library; hell, enrolling in a Belgian university as a student costs 70 euros per year, which gives you access to the library, e-journals, email, Eduroam, the whole shebang). I get a little irked every time this topic comes up, and people go on an…

Maybe people would like to pay if it wasn't $30 but, say, 30 cents. The high price is mentioned not because people pay it regularly, but because of its absurdity. Regarding the people in the offices around you, I am sorry for you.

Re: Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

#190

Post by RBerenguel »

roel_v wrote: post #56
masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.

I can't claim to know across the world, but in much of Europe you can get a 'visitor' subscription to university libraries for some nominal fee (50 euros or so in my nearest library; hell, enrolling in a Belgian university as a student costs 70 euros per year, which gives you access to the library, e-journals, email, Eduroam, the whole shebang). I get a little irked every time this topic comes up, and people go on an…

Libraries pay huge fees for that access. If it was cheaper we could have better service, better books, or better X.
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