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Open science: why is it so hard?
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#52It'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…
Why is it interesting to argue for open publishing, even if one can't necessarily win in one's lifetime? Because it compels the status quo to state its position over and over again, in clearer and clearer terms.
If you want to understand science as it is presently organized, read the above summary several times; it's good and it's accurate.
Scientists live in a tight community in which everyone shares with everyone else below the radar, via personal networks linked by patronage, mutual favors, and email. This is acceptable, for many within the community, because scientists don't seriously expect anyone who isn't currently a professional scientist to follow anything that they do, and they don't care, so long as the money rolls in.
Then they complain that the public can't seem to tell the difference between the scientific establishment and a priesthood. Inexplicable!
If nothing else, open publishing is an act of good-faith public relations. The entire point of science is that it has nothing to hide - you have to be able to trace all the interconnections - so when the scientific establishment is seen to be explicitly hiding stuff behind paywalls it sends a jarring message. And, while printed journals available for popular subscription were the gold standard of openness as recently as the 1980s, this is the twenty-first century and that won't cut it anymore.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I was aghast when I found out about this. Perhaps it is just the departments that my friends work in, but I've seen similar murmurings on the internet. I actually found out because I wanted to build a startup that used biomedical literature and biopharmaceutical companies. I basically axed the idea after talking to my friends. To be fair, the decision to cut R&D in big Pharma is unrelated to the decision to rem…
Is it mismanagement? The medium term outlook of the pharma industry is not that good. This is true for various reasons - a lot of low hanging fruit has been plucked, regulatory requirements are becoming more burdensome, political risk is high, and older (read: out of patent) drugs are increasingly competing with newer drugs. Under these circumstances, it just seems like a good idea to cut back on R&D and focus on exp…
It's a complex problem to be sure, and not entirely mismanagement. In some cases it is, like the links I posted. E.g:
-Where one successful project is put on hold so the scientist can prove to management the dud is really a dud.
-Or another where his project was simultaneously outsourced to India, which failed. But it made management look bad, so they wrote it off his department's expenses. When their formulation worked, it was rejected because it was over-budget per/pill (but only because the India outsourcing was added to their tab), otherwise they would have been fine.
Other times it's just the pharma ecosystem - I wrote about this a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376428
I think the big problem with exploiting existing revenue streams is that A) most of the blockbusters developed last decade are going off patent very soon, with nothing to replace them and B) you can only develop so many "reformulations" before people realize what is going on.
Pharma is going to hit a point in the very near future where their revenue drops by multiple-billions. They are scared silly over this (rightfully so). I see two options:
1) Actually start doing science again, instead of firing scientists and reformulating the same pills over and over. This isn't going to happen and the time to do it was ten years ago. They are way behind the curve now.
2) Embrace the fact they are glorified marketing firms, fire all their scientists and use their accumulated wealth to purchase drugs from small companies, then push them through clinical trials. They also need to stop thinking about blockbuster hits - those days are over. This is basically what you are suggesting.
Realistically, Pharma is moving towards option 2. But they are moving towards it so slowly that they are cannibalizing themselves along the way. It is never pleasant to realize your model is obsolete, but the days of Big Pharma and billion dollar blockbusters is (probably) over.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also: "Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use." OK, I'm imagining it. Now what? Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. (Most) everybody today whose success in advancing the state of the art depends on having access to libraries already has a…
Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. Yeah, what a laugh. Can you imagine if Albert the Patent Clerk started writing science papers?
I wasn't going to use this example because he's such an outlier and not representative, but you're basically making my point for me: if Einstein managed to 'get into research' without having 'open science' or libraries or whatever (I don't know to which extent he had access, but he certainly didn't have the access that everybody with an internet connection nowadays has), then why would not having 'open science' be an issue today? Even if there are for-pay article databases, it's still possible to get access to vastly more information than back then.
Additionally, one counterexample doesn't disprove a general concept. The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of people don't give a hoot about having access to research papers.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#55It'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.
What? I'm not talking about that at all. I'm saying that most papers are already available to everybody who wants them, whether they're from the US, Hungary or Botswana (as long as they have an internet connection and basic research skills).
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#56It'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…
No! The whole point is that most researchers don't care about those things. You're saying "oh everybody should change because a few people want to be "data miners" or "change the publishing business'. But apparently, as evidenced by the closed system still existing, the majority doesn't see enough benefits in that for themselves to be willing to change the system. The academic community already has access to papers, and they don't care about the other things you're talking about.
I'm not talking about how things should be or any such trite; I'm just saying how it is and why I don't see any reasons it will change. Whereas the article is implying all sorts of oppression by publishers etc. Please, we're all grown-ups here, there is a much simpler explanation for why "open science" isn't catching on: it's the lack of incentives for researchers.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#57Earlier 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…
No! The whole point is that most researchers don't care about those things. You're saying "oh everybody should change because a few people want to be "data miners" or "change the publishing business'. But apparently, as evidenced by the closed system still existing, the majority doesn't see enough benefits in that for themselves to be willing to change the system. The academic community already has access to papers,…
I would go even further to suggest that some scientists find the fact that they are not required to publish their methods and data openly convenient, as they avoid scrutiny that might falsify their claims. Bloomberg has an interesting article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-10/scientists-share-se...
Regarding incentives: incentives are created, it's not like the current status quo is not based on incentives, researchers seek prestige journals because they want to get funding, and in effect public funding bodies enable these incentives by inaction.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
Just to clarify, individual IEEE membership is much less expensive. Full membership in the U.S. is $181/year and includes online access to all IEEE articles, dues for other parts of the world are even lower (for whatever reasons) [1]. For students it's $32/year. [1] https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/j...
I may be wrong, but I don't believe that membership provides journal access. It's not mentioned in the membership benefits and there are separate prices listed below for individual societies.
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to clarify, individual IEEE membership is much less expensive. Full membership in the U.S. is $181/year and includes online access to all IEEE articles, dues for other parts of the world are even lower (for whatever reasons) [1]. For students it's $32/year. [1] https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/j...
I may be wrong, but I don't believe that membership provides journal access. It's not mentioned in the membership benefits and there are separate prices listed below for individual societies.
I apologize, you are right. I misinterpreted the information given on the membership benefits page (about the IEEE Member Digital Library).
Apparently membership to individual societies (add $9-$53/year, depending on the society) may give you access to several journals via IEEEXplore (IEEE Trans. Image Proc.; Audio Speech Lang. Proc., etc. for Signal Processing Society).
As I can't find a reliable source to quote (their page is a mess), I can only speak for myself. I became a student member because of the ridiculously high conference fees they charge, which are heavily reduced if you are a member and/or student (Conference pricing deserves a rant of its own. But I digress.).
Re: Open science: why is it so hard?
#60One of the reasons the status quo is very hard to change is that academia is built on reputation and prestige, and there is really no other measure of success. That means that if we are at some stable steady state going outside the system and doing something like opening up your data to everyone versus trying to publish in a brand name journal will be a disadvantage to you since the number of publications in these types of journals are they way that you are judged. The issue isn't about whether the journals charge for content or not. Journal subscriptions are cheap compared to labor and reagents and, as always with third-party payer systems, the incentives aren't really aligned to skimp on them. The real question are there better ways of giving people credit for their work in a way that enhances their career in a proportional way to their achievement? Are alternative systems better for rewarding the right people faster, and thus moving research faster? The answer may be yes, but there is a significant energy of activation barrier to making any kind of switch from the publishing-as-a-measure-of-achievement model.