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European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

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Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#51

Post by bjornsing »

bubblethink wrote: post #27

This probably comes up all the time in these discussions, but any change in this area has to be top down. i.e., People with influence and job security like tenured faculty need to signal a change and move to open access. A grad student or an assistant professor isn't going to put his/her career on the line for ideals. I'm not too familiar with the journal culture, but at least in CS with conferences, all the critical…

Shouldn't this come from the political level (as it does in OP)? I mean we finance this work with taxes, why not just make it a (grant) requirement that all results need to be made publicly available? (And everyone would be uploading shit to the internet so fast it would make all our heads spin...)

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#52

Post by a3_nm »

a_bonobo wrote: post #15
xamuel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most fields, referees are volunteers, and the editors who coordinate them are volunteers or get some trivially tiny recompensation. Distribution costs of a paper should be about as high as those of a blog post.

There's more to running a journal than that - you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example). The actual per-paper costs seem to be a few hundred dollars, as written in this article: http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... Profit margins are amazin…

> you have formatting editors who make the PDF look good and give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example).

This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.

In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge.

But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#53

Post by detaro »

roadnottaken wrote: post #29

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. The fact that much of the research is funded by taxpayers is not relevant -- scientists have voluntarily submitted their work to private publishers for publication. Going forward, perhaps they should stop doing that. But for work that was previously published? It's rightly owned by th…

I don't think many are talking about undoing copyright protection for past papers (it's not impossible, but harder to achieve and likely fraught with legal issues), so I think you are arguing against a strawman there.

For the future, submitting to OA(-friendly)-publications can be demanded or be part of the conditions for public funding.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#54

Post by a3_nm »

beevai142 wrote: post #40
bubblethink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist). This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestig…

Let's say that you suddely start caring once your library drops subscriptions to journals that you need.

Then you just use Sci-Hub, like you do when working from home.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#55

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

a3_nm wrote: post #49
roadnottaken wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#56

Post by a3_nm »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #55
a3_nm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.

I have heard this argument and I don't think it's valid. We are stuck in a broken system where researchers are pressured to publish in closed-access venues. It's hard to act against this at the publication level, because you may need to publish in such venues (for career reasons), and (more importantly, at least for me) you often co-author papers with other people who may not share your dislike of closed access.

By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level.

This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#57

Post by vanviegen »

a3_nm wrote: post #49
roadnottaken wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. These stories always make it sound like it's the big bad private journals that are trying to steal all the taxpayer-funded research which should belong to the people. But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications. They could instead chose to send it to OA journals, and some do.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#58

Post by bostik »

Keverw wrote: post #20

Awesome. I do think all publicly funded research papers should be available. Research done by private companies using their own funds however shouldn't be. Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(

When I did my master's, I explicitly chose 2-clause BSD as the license for all the code I had produced as part of the thesis. My thesis project was done with, and paid for, by the university I attended. Since my work was being funded with public money, I felt it only fair to release everything with a liberal license.

The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to include source code with my thesis. Every copy came with a CD-ROM. (I even made sure to upload the same archive to the digital library so access to print copies was not required.)

And two: the review board made a point of mentioning that I released the sources for my thesis project with a very liberal license. What I had considered only fair, the board considered out of the ordinary.

Footnote - I didn't include just the sources. I included the entire .svn/ hierarchy to provide complete editing history.

Footnote 2 - I picked up git in 2007. Thesis was done in 2006.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#59

Post by a3_nm »

vanviegen wrote: post #57
a3_nm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the scientists are the ones that are (still) sending their results to private journals for publications Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.

Systematically refusing to do reviews really doesn't help your changes of getting your own papers (and those of your grad students) accepted in the future. Editors have a lot of freedom in deciding what's on topic for their journal.

In my field (theoretical CS), I have never heard about a journal refusing papers from authors that have declined to review for the journal. In fact I would consider this extremely shady: journals shouldn't handle papers differently depending on the identity of the authors, no matter the reason.

Re: European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)

#60

Post by raarts »

a3_nm wrote: post #50
denzil_correa wrote: post #25

I am ambivalent about this. "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? The costs for OA in Elsevier (for example) could easily go beyond 1000$ [0]. Open Access does not mean access to articles at a higher costs. OA is to access articles for which you already paid for. Here, I see a sort of double payment - tax payer research funds + article access. Why should we pay exorbitant arti…

> "Open Access" would definitely mean more access to articles but at what costs? This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.

I thought the 'double payment' refers to people paying for the research through the tax system, and then paying again to look at the resulting paper?
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