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Should All Research Papers Be Free?

nytimes.com

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Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#321

Post by robotresearcher »

biehl wrote: post #264
mattlutze wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But they provide a lousy and expensive filtering. So-called "high impact" journals suffer more retractions. http://peterdedmonds.blogspot.dk/2015/06/retractions-and-hig... Society is most definitely well-served by completely decimating [legacy publishers] economic model. Legacy journals stand in the way of progress and they are laughably inefficient in what they do (filtering / online storage / layout (really!) )

It's not suffer from retractions, but benefit from them. No one bothers to find errors in weak papers and weak journals don't bother to publish retractions. You would expect more retractions for the best journals because they still have decent standards.

Related anecdote: I had a confererence publish a completely plagiarized article of mine, changing only the names of the authors. The paper still contained recognizable photos of my students performing the experiments. I reported this to the confererence and to the IEEE which owned the copyright to our original paper. No action of any kind was taken. Not even a 'knock it off' email.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#322

Post by sekou »

Providing more open access to existing research information is just as important as empowering people to share and distribute the findings of their research in formats that both machines and people can understand. I believe we have already produced large amounts of data in wildly different fields of study that can potentially be used with the help of machines (and the diverse perspectives of many humans) to solve problems for which we currently don't have answers.

It looks like the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill linked in the article would be a step in the right direction for US citizens. I wonder how other forces (like Sci-Hub) will affect the direction of things to come.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#325

Post by slang800 »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #285
amelius wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic. In other words, filtering can be done per…

One difference between HN and, say, math is that in this community most readers are probably interested in at least a sizable minority of the topics that get posted here, whereas in a hypothetical community of mathematicians discussing papers, I find it hard to believe that most people will be interested in more than about 1% of the literature.

Then you just use more specialized content aggregators or more specific searches. To make an analogy to reddit - rather than following r/math, you'd follow a specific topic like r/compling.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#326

Post by mvaliente2001 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #304
mvaliente2001 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero. One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis ha…

The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.

Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.

Re: Should All Research Papers Be Free?

#327

Post by godzillabrennus »

mvaliente2001 wrote: post #326
godzillabrennus wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.

Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.

That's coming soon.
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