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Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

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Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#51

Post by bo1024 »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…

Harvard has an open-access policy[1] and it may be that other institutions do as well. When submitting to a journal with a copyright agreement, authors attach a modification to the agreement, giving the university rights to distribute the research for non-commercial purposes. I do not know how universally-used this is across the institution or if there are journals refusing to accept this modification or not.

[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#52

Post by burkaman »

atom-morgan wrote: post #35
ThomPete wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.

But they only exist because the government has the power to create those laws. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

You can still hate the player, especially when they have more power than you. "It's legal" doesn't mean it's right.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#53

Post by bubtubgub »

andrey_utkin wrote: post #27
mkane848 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you. Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.

CS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.

Steam doesn't work on 'any Linux' without jumping through many many hoops for most distros.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#55

Post by nxzero »

mhurron wrote: post #43
ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…

> civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.

"Feeling" like you've helped more often then not does more harm than good unless it leads to action; signing petition unless there's an expressed count required for action that's enforceable is often meaningless.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#56

Post by jcranmer »

roadnottaken wrote: post #25

If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.

You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.

Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.

[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#57

Post by tdaltonc »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #42
ThePhysicist wrote: post #11

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…

There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued: * Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent. * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. * Promote open-access submissions by your researchers:…

> a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.

Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#58

Post by peter303 »

Journals act as the Yahoo of scientific papers. That is they are an index of certain topical relevance and editorial quality. (The original idea of Yahoo was a vetted directory to web pages) I am not sure if papers scattered around random university servers would be easily found.

A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#59

Post by d0lph »

bubtubgub wrote: post #53
andrey_utkin wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.

Steam doesn't work on 'any Linux' without jumping through many many hoops for most distros.

While this used to be the case, with Valve's steam machines they seem to have a native client now[0].

[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux

Re: Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available

#60

Post by astazangasta »

ashitlerferad wrote: post #32
tma-1 wrote: post #7

I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?

Bioinformatics is close.

A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.
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