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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#211

Post by doppioandante »

adrianN wrote: post #206
doppioandante wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.

This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.

Thanks for clarifying, I was replying to the technological insight in kriro's post however. Btw, is technology here completely irrelevant? The way to access content is pretty important after all. In a decentralized publishing system, what is reputation? Maybe it could be an intrinsic measure with a ranking system of some sort. But this is pretty hard. Maybe the "natural" way to publish content has no unique or sensical way to quantify prestige. The following question arises: is prestige a good criterion to judge science?

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#212

Post by yxhuvud »

wodenokoto wrote: post #33
payne92 wrote: post #5

I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.

From a government / national perspective should it be free world wide? If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially? Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!

Stuff with military applications should not (and isn't) published in journals either.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#213

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

catnaroek wrote: post #128

What follows is just my very uninformed opinion. I'm not a scientist myself, but my interest in CS and math has made me an avid reader of scientific papers and books - whenever they're publicly available, that is. What publishing houses do is exploit the rules of the social games that scientists themselves willingly play. When the importance of an academic work is judged by the names of its authors, or by the name of…

In my country, for example, most applications for tenure, salary complements, required assessments, etc., have an assessment scale like this (simplified but this is basically the idea):

Paper in the 1st quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 3 points

Paper in the 2nd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 2 points

Paper in the 3rd quartile of the ISI JCR journal list - 1 points

Rest - 0 points

So if you publish a ground-breaking paper in arXiv that everyone reads and everyone cites, you get exactly zero points.

Of course, stuff like length of the paper, number of authors, possible overlap with other published papers, or just actual quality (as in someone reading the paper to see whether it's any good) also count zero. And then you have the roulette factor of submitting a paper to a first-quartile journal in year X, which gets published in year X+1 (due to the length of the publication process), only to see that in year X+1 the journal is now fourth-quartile as in CS they are dancing all the time...

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#214

Post by RBerenguel »

analog31 wrote: post #165
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #147

Full 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.

In maths everyone typesets their own papers. Good publishers let you use their (La)TeX styles beforehand to make sure it will compile finely, after that they do little else.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#216

Post by kriro »

adrianN wrote: post #206
doppioandante wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.

This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.

I completely agree (I am currently a scientist). It's a very hard problem to solve. I'd love working on it and in many ways it can be framed as a tech startup type of problem since it is essentially trying to build a consensus network. In a theoretical world in which I have retirement level money that would probably be the issue I'd try to fix for the rest of my life (unfortunately expecting no progress).

Mathematics seems like the most promising field to start with if you follow a bowling pin type of strategy. There have been some boycotts of Elsevier etc. from math departments and they have somewhat of a "free publishing" tradition at least from my outside point of view. It's also an excellent viral starting point because you can infiltrate other disciplines that tend to cite math papers (physics, machine learning, economics etc.)

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#217

Post by brohee »

Fomite wrote: post #205
return0 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about, it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.

I've read enough journal articles that I've come to appreciate proper formatting, rather than "Time New Roman 12" Word documents or "Generic LaTeX Template #17"

DJB got a quite different view on journal provided LaTeX styles : https://cr.yp.to/writing/visual.html

Nice value added by the MSRI style right here.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#218

Post by mattlutze »

kriro wrote: post #199

If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case. I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or priv…

I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site.

Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading.

Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#219

Post by freyfogle »

analog31 wrote: post #165
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #147

Full 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.

Check out Overleaf - here's a referral link that gives you and me more disk space: https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138

Web based LaTeX editing, makes it very easy to collaborate. But also they have many standard journal and university templates, and direct submission links to lots of journals to make the whole process of formatting and submitting a paper much simpler.

Yes, this of course raises the question of why some journals charge so much.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#220

Post by raverbashing »

beloch wrote: post #160
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #147

Full 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…

Scholars actually pay journals to publish their papers. No, this isn't vanity press or a bribe. Scholars must work very hard to reach the point where they can pay those fees. For example, say you submit a paper to Nature. Odds are it will be rejected, because Nature has a high impact factor. Say your paper is both accepted and passes the review process. Now you have to pay Nature to publish your paper. Depending on t…

It seems the real BS is paying to publish in "big name journal" because the Cabal will place a high value in said "big name journals"

It makes just as much sense as wearing a fashion accessory. "This person must be important because of his fancy watch"

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