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This is HUGE. If you work/study at a place with less resources it becomes annoying to try and get papers for journals your instn doesn't subscribe to. This is a barrier to research that just should not be there.
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I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data). The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people? Also, the current system rewards incestu…
Also: "Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use." OK, I'm imagining it. Now what? Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. (Most) everybody today whose success in advancing the state of the art depends on having access to libraries already has a…
Yeah, what a laugh. Can you imagine if Albert the Patent Clerk started writing science papers?
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A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper). It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
But paper abstracts are always free (even with paid journals). If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-)
The disadvantage to being a generalist is that I don't know the terminology of the field I need to research. Take the texsearch example above. Given a LaTeX string I want to find similar strings from a large corpus so I start by googling things like "code search" and "syntax tree search". After scanning a few dozen papers and following links I find that the magic search term is "approximate string matching" which nets me an overview paper. I scan through the links from that paper and dismiss most of the algorithms as unsuitable for my particular problem until I'm left with a few candidates for prototypes.
Back then I had access through my university. Today I wouldn't be able to read half of those papers. For recent math/CS papers I can usually find a preprint but anything else is a struggle.
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"I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data)." Probably. Like I said, my impression is based on personal observations only. That said, I don't really have objective reasons (of the cuff) to believe otherwise, nor do I have data (or even an idea of how one would measure it correctly). For example, I don't know anyone except from undergrads who don't know how to use th…
> My point is: while ... theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are ... not a real problem for the vast majority of people. ... philosophical objection ... best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things. What you basically say is : "It is the way it is because that is how things are. period" Do you agree with the complaint? Or do you think it's useless…
No, what I'm saying is "it's irrelevant how we got to where we are, but there just isn't enough demand to drive a change, and therefore I suspect things will remain the way they are for at least a while longer, until the boundary conditions change (more)."
My overall point vis-a-vis the article is that it's wrong in its premises and conclusions - it's not about it being hard, or about some sort of conspiracy where publishers are repressing us (although of course, publishers will try to stop any mass movement to go 'open access', but their power has limits, contrary to what the article seems to suggest); it's simply the market at work. Not enough people care enough about open access for it to happen.
I'm not telling anybody to shut up, just that if they want to change something, they should identify and remedy the correct causes of that something, rather than fighter windmills. Hollow rhetoric like "In effect, we have too much organizational scarring tissue in science. It could be that we need to reboot the system. As a starting point, we should collectively recognize the problem. Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business" is just a misrepresentation of the situation.
Finally, I don't agree nor disagree with the complaint - I just don't care, much like most other researchers I know - and by extension, I suspect, most other researchers tout court. That's my whole point.
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"I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data)." Probably. Like I said, my impression is based on personal observations only. That said, I don't really have objective reasons (of the cuff) to believe otherwise, nor do I have data (or even an idea of how one would measure it correctly). For example, I don't know anyone except from undergrads who don't know how to use th…
A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper). It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals.
Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.
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> My point is: while ... theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are ... not a real problem for the vast majority of people. ... philosophical objection ... best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things. What you basically say is : "It is the way it is because that is how things are. period" Do you agree with the complaint? Or do you think it's useless…
"What you basically say is : "It is the way it is because that is how things are. period"" No, what I'm saying is "it's irrelevant how we got to where we are, but there just isn't enough demand to drive a change, and therefore I suspect things will remain the way they are for at least a while longer, until the boundary conditions change (more)." My overall point vis-a-vis the article is that it's wrong in its premise…
Ah, that makes your reaction clearer to me. Thanks for responding.
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A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper). It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
OK, so how did you do your research in the end? Do you think you missed much because of not being to access certain papers? I mean, it seems that you found a way to access at least that paper, or did you pay for a subscription to a certain journal?
Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. You can get data used by professional astronomers in publicly-accessible databases on the web. Here's a collection of these resources: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to inter…
> Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say... See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused…
It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford…