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Open science: why is it so hard?

lemire.me

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Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#31

Post by polyfractal »

Vivtek wrote: post #30
roel_v wrote: post #5

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…

There's one point you're missing, and that's that you're only talking about people in America or other rich, large countries. The money is an incredible bar to, say, Hungary.

Unfortunately, I would wager a guess that most of the money is in these large, rich countries. There is little incentive for Elsevier et al to lower prices when they can demand top dollar from American and European universities.

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#32

Post by polyfractal »

kitsune_ wrote: post #10
roel_v wrote: post #5

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…

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…

Actually, and this is very surprising, most multi-billion dollar biopharmaceutical companies do not have access to scientific literature.

I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract.

Scary, but true. Management at big Pharma has effectively gutted R&D because it is too expensive.

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#33

Post by zerostar07 »

roel_v wrote: post #5

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…

You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public, while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community, making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest being introductions and hypothetical rambling. You know, most journals (at least in the life sciences) don't even have a comment section (and even when they do, discussion is hampered by the fact that there are so many journals out there)

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#34

Post by polyfractal »

roel_v wrote: post #24
route66 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As someone in academic biology, I just want to provide additional support for what roel_v is saying. All of his points are accurate from my personal observations of academia as well.

To further the point, I've worked in both large (rich) and small (poor) universities. At the small universities where access is limited, you just bug the PIs that went to rich universities for grad/post-doc. They hop onto their alumni VPN and can easily get any paper for you.

90% of scientists do not know or care about open science.

I would also state that there is serious stigma against open science. One of my PIs claimed that PLoS wasn't even peer-reviewed (which is false) and that anyone who submitted there was performing career suicide.

This is, sadly, a pervasive viewpoint among many scientists. Especially older and more established PIs.

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#35

Post by polyfractal »

zerostar07 wrote: post #33
roel_v wrote: post #5

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…

You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public , while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community , making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest…

But see, researchers just don't care. In biology, you want to publish in Nature, Science or Cell. Barring that, you grab one of the second tiers (Nature Neuroscience, etc). Barring that, you take a third tier like Molec Human Genetics or J Neurosci.

If that paper is closed access, the average research does not give two shits. He just wants his paper in a quality journal that will gain him prestige and career advancement. He is not considering how easily data-miners will access the literature, or if researchers in Bulgaria can access it.

I'm sorry if this sounds terrible (it is), but it is also the truth.

For the record, I'm very pro-open-science. And all "he" can easily be replaced with "she" in this post :)

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#36

Post by mechanical_fish »

polyfractal wrote: post #32
kitsune_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Actually, and this is very surprising, most multi-billion dollar biopharmaceutical companies do not have access to scientific literature. I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract. Scary, but true. Management at…

If true - and you'll forgive me if I haven't yet picked my jaw up off the floor - this is the biggest argument for open publishing that I've seen yet. The situation is way worse than I thought.

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#37

Post by oscilloscope »

nextparadigms wrote: post #6
roel_v wrote: post #5

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…

Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?

http://www.scholarpedia.org/

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#38

Post by jamii »

andrewfelix wrote: post #12
kitsune_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Specifically which subscriptions would be prohibitively expensive to interested parties?

Prices vary wildly. IEEE starts at $5695 per 350 downloads per year [1]. ACM membership + library access is a very reasonable $200 [2]. I can't find an all-access subscription for Springer but individual journals range from 100 EUR to 20000 EUR per year [3]. JSTOR only sells subscriptions to academic institutes and libraries [4] but you can buy 14 days access to a single article for $10+ [5].

[1] http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subs...

[2] http://www.acm.org/membership/dues

[3] http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585...

[4] http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp

[5] http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales...

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#39

Post by zerostar07 »

polyfractal wrote: post #35
zerostar07 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public , while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community , making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest…

But see, researchers just don't care . In biology, you want to publish in Nature, Science or Cell. Barring that, you grab one of the second tiers (Nature Neuroscience, etc). Barring that, you take a third tier like Molec Human Genetics or J Neurosci. If that paper is closed access, the average research does not give two shits . He just wants his paper in a quality journal that will gain him prestige and career advanc…

That's the point ; there's a whole system behind (grants, career advancement) that depends on "journal prestige"; that mechanism is based on "prestige factors" that were built decades or centuries ago. It's a self-reinforcing circle, authors-> journals -> author prestige that doesn't even have to do with the quality of review (i believe all well known journals are equally good at reviewing science, what differentiates them is politics, and a careful selection of what subjects they publish). I 'd go as far as to say that this model is an impediment to science since most articles don't publish their research data (or simulation code) along with the articles. [And i must say that biologists and other life scientists seem really attached to that old model, unlike physics or maths].

Taking a step back you have to ask: Why are these publishing companies given such power by governments and universities (the power to determine grants and promotions). Why don't governments and universities instead actively promote open science? I argue that the benefits will be greater if we switch, but it's gonna take a quantum leap that's currently unlikely due to inertial forces.

Another thing is that when research article text is as open as a blog post text, you can create aggregators, get scientists to work in online communities. In the past i tried to start maybe something like that, but not having the content to search for is making it almost a non-starter (if interested check out http://pubcentral.net or http://noteplz.com)

Re: Open science: why is it so hard?

#40

Post by larrydag »

I am an Engineer and an Operations Research professional. Yet I have mostly worked for companies that do not do engineering or are very small organizations. They do not want to allocate me the resources to research or software. So I've had to rely on what is open. I've used Free Software as a toolset to perform a lot of my work. Yet access to the research behind a lot of those tools is very hard to come by. Places like Penn State's Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index and R-Project http://r-project.org have been a great haven for open research for my work.

I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.

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