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Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

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Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#41

Post by dougmccune »

philip1209 wrote: post #40
dougmccune wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…

I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like platform using PGP. You could then use a graph model to quantitatively determine reputation based on who reviews which article.

The biggest problem is how to get the people doing the hiring to care about your new magic metric. You could devise some amazing algorithm to calculate a researcher's impact, but if nobody on a tenure committee thinks it's a valid way to rank researchers then it's not going to go anywhere. This is where you hit the most inertia in the industry. The people making hiring decisions look at which journals you publish in and they care about the journal's impact factor and historical prestige. It's the fast/lazy way to judge a candidate. It's going to be hard for a technical solution to the problem to address that sociological problem.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#42

Post by jonknee »

eli wrote: post #22
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Isn't that what this is http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ ? "The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."

That's a step, but that's just NIH and isn't instant access. I'd like to see instant access for all government funded research (which would count NSF, DOE, NASA all public universities, etc etc).

The journals are a racket supported by government research. Peer review can be financed outside of locking out people from being able to read the final product.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#43

Post by sillysaurus3 »

jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.

This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?

You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.

The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html

That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?

To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#44

Post by pm90 »

philip1209 wrote: post #40
dougmccune wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't the technical implementation of such a system, it's getting the reputation prestige. eLife is an example of a journal attempting to go from zero to elite right out of the gate, but the solution to that is to throw a ton of money at the problem. Their last financials show it cost them about $14k/article to publish. So either you spend A LOT of money and make the prestige play quickly, or you do it ch…

I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like platform using PGP. You could then use a graph model to quantitatively determine reputation based on who reviews which article.

This is actually the idea that started Google, and its something that Google Scholar does.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#45

Post by dougmccune »

markbao wrote: post #35
dougmccune wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all publishers and journals have adopted a "hybrid" model, where you can publish in a paywall journal but pay a fee to have your particular article made available OA. I think if you want to publish in Cell and get your article OA all you have to do is pay $5k. At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pd…

That's what I thought at first, but the language from the original post seemed ambiguous—that it could only be published in Open Access Journals, and I also couldn't find OA costs for Cell or Science . I did find this page from Elsevier, though, and it looks like it ranges from $500 to $5,000: http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/open-access-option... Thanks for the first-hand knowledge about Sage. Presumably, t…

Not sure what you mean by "weren't making much from keeping them closed-access". Paywall publishers earn the bulk of their revenue from charging academic libraries subscriptions to the journal content. This subscription revenue can only exist if the content is not freely available to all. So there's definitely a big pile of cash that keeping articles closed access brings in. The worry about having OA articles isn't that you might miss out on the $30 pay per view charge that you or me run into when we hit the paywall, that's almost inconsequential from a revenue standpoint. It's the worry that they won't be able to charge a library a yearly subscription fee.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#46

Post by jonknee »

hotgoldminer wrote: post #19

Fence sitting. The journals need a way to cover operating expenses. On the other hand, if a more efficient and cost effective model exists, this is good disruption. Nothings free tho, right?

Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#47

Post by jonknee »

hotgoldminer wrote: post #19

Fence sitting. The journals need a way to cover operating expenses. On the other hand, if a more efficient and cost effective model exists, this is good disruption. Nothings free tho, right?

Many journals make very handsome profits, covering operating expenses often isn't the goal. For profit journals should be limited to privately funded research.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#48

Post by rhino369 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #43
jonknee wrote: post #7

Bravo. It would be really neat if the US Government could get on the same bandwagon. Our tax dollars being used to fund research that we can't access is insane.

Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you. This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be…

No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles.

Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics.

The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright.

Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access.

I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.

Re: Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

#49

Post by niels_olson »

dougmccune wrote: post #37
dang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surprising what a big deal "author fees" are. A historian told me recently that when submitting articles to one major journal, there's a checkbox saying "I want this work to be in the public domain". If you select it, the system automatically adds $5,432 to your bill. That wasn't the exact number, but it was about $5k. In his field, and surely for most academics, that's prohibitive, and an odd way to treat peopl…

$5k is about the top of the scale. Nature, Cell, etc can get that. More typical is the $1,500 range (OA publisher PLoS One is about that). One of the most interesting things to see is that the big winner of the APC (article processing charge) landrush is Elsevier. The Wellcome Trust published data about who they are paying APCs to, and the biggest player was Elsevier: http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/03/28/the-cost-of…

Can you imagine if every scientist sent Wikipedia 20% of their journal fees? What would they do with that much money?
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