Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

news.sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 154 posts

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

#51

Post by sre_ops »

p4bl0 wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk

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

#52

Post by pkaye »

sre_ops wrote: post #51
p4bl0 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

Yes, publishers should work for free. plonk

yes, tax payers should fund publishers for free. plonk.

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

#53

Post by icelancer »

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…

>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.

Awesome. Thanks for the heads-up.

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

#55

Post by w1ntermute »

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.

> I wonder if you could have peers sign others' research on a Github-like platform using PGP.

When the majority of influential scientists don't know and don't care what GitHub or PGP are? I don't think so.

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

#57

Post by michael_nielsen »

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."

The NIH open access policy is being expanded to nearly all US Government-funded research (including NSF, DOE and NASA): http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce...

Similar policies are or soon will be in place at many of the largest grant agencies in other countries (Wellcome Trust, the UK Research Councils, etc), and more are coming online. I expect we'll see this become near-universal by the end of the decade.

The Gates policy is unusual in that it has no embargo period. That's not true of many of the other policies, including the NIH policy and the broader US policy. It'll be interesting to see if Gates causes other grant agencies to shorten or eliminate their embargo periods.

Another unusual feature of the Gates policy: it requires a CC-BY license on the paper. That means that, at least in principle, some other publisher could simply republish the paper immediately, perhaps enriching it in various ways. It's a very interesting move.

Incidentally, if anyone is interested: the best source of news about open access is Peter Suber's open access tracking project. It can be followed on Twitter at @oatp. Another good account is @SPARC_NA - SPARC has done a lot of the ground work preparing the way for open access policies.

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

#58

Post by IndianAstronaut »

sre_ops wrote: post #50

Oh this is going to be fantastic. I cannot wait until the public see what kind of junk is produced by these "researchers" in their original form.

It is amazing how much junk gets published in academia and how many shady practices there are. One professor in my old department used to make slight changes to a paper and methodologies and publish to another journal. He had dozens of publications this way.

Another professor that was a friend of my professor asked us to cite his paper. I was never able to replicate his results, but we still sited it anyways.

One professor used to hunt around for different statistical tests until she found one which gave her the desired p values so she could publish.

One of the PhD students I worked with would draw absurd conclusions from the data. He would see an effect when there wasn't one. He was regularly shown to be wrong when we did statistical analysis, but he never changed his ways. He is currently doing his postdoc at a very well known institution.

The worst part though is that I have also come across many genuine and hard working professors and labs who take time to scrutinize their work and produce good results. They end up losing the tenure battle.

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

#59

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

ujjwalg wrote: post #39

I love what they are trying to do. The entire scientific publishing industry is messed up and can use any help it can get. I wrote a blog about how terrible the scientific publishing system is sometime back. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20140922193017-368522...

The entire academic publishing industry is messed up. There's just as much of a cost issue with arts and humanities journals.

After health care, journal publishing fees are one of the biggest and most regressive 'free market' choke-point costs ever levied on human civilisation.

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

#60

Post by scott_s »

p4bl0 wrote: post #13
philip1209 wrote: post #2

> "The Gates Foundation will also pay the author fees charged by many open-access journals."

That's where the remaining problem is. Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks m…

I think there is some confusion here.

Some open access journals charge authors. But these open access journals are not the publishers we hear about (such as Elsevier). In some ways, it's accurate to say that the old model with publishers is "reader pays", and the open access model is "author pays".

The good thing about open access journals is that they are typically not a for-profit endeavor. This means that what they will charge to the authors is, hopefully, reasonable.

Post reply on HN