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Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

sciencemag.org

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Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#61

Post by franga2000 »

manquer wrote: post #57
franga2000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this comment, I assumed PACER was a private provider who sells access to otherwise freely available material which originally might be scattered and unorganised as government things usually are. Charging for access would therefore be reasonable. But a quick search reveals that this is in fact a government-provided service. So your government charges you 10 cents per page to download PDFs from a glorified file…

Going down the cost rabbit hole is problematic, the costs are not just for the service infra. Even for the service you need project managers , product owners, devs, SREs, QAs and data entry operators who collate or atleast update the DB . Easily costs that can run in millions/year. Typically such revenue streams cover other holes in the budget not related to this service as well, and there is indirect overhead costs…

I generally agree and my estimates were of course the bare minumum, but the "we already pay tax" argument doesn't really work since, well, this service clearly isn't tax-funded given the fact that it isn't free. It might be tax-subsidised, which often makes sense for things that are very expensive and have limited usefulness to individual citizens (like many services governments render to businesses are). If we consider accessing court records to be something with very limited usefulness to most people and primarily used by companies to make money (which I do, despite having done it myself on a few occasions), how expensive it actually is to run becomes very important when convincing "the people" to fund it 100%.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#62

Post by nerdponx »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #49
AlbertCory wrote: post #36

Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per "page" even now that you get things electronically and the cost is near zero: There's a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can install a browser extension which automatically copies anything you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays, and the rest get it free…

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains. Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil ) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Bl…

> And the journals are providing real due diligence happening in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has to pay for that process.

Both things can be true. They can be providing valuable due diligence and also sucking a lot of value (much of it funded by public/taxpayer money) along the way.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#63

Post by throwaway984393 »

AlbertCory wrote: post #54
throwaway984393 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains. Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil ) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Bl…

as for Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell: yeah, them too. Forgot to mention those. The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for with public or non-profit money, and hide it behind paywalls. You can't avoid this fact. Their "reputation" is mostly just a legacy, like the New York Times'. At one time they sent out paper journals, which was the only way information could be disseminated, and cha…

Who is paying and who has access is only one part of the puzzle. Most people only care about access, but they don't understand why that access continues to be limited.

Why do journals exist? It's not to provide information. Ever since the Internet was invented, we can distribute information virtually for free. Everybody knows this. Yet the journals persist for decades. So their purpose is not to provide information.

Yes, of course, their reputation is invented and legacy. It's been shown time and again that papers published in "reputable journals" can be quite problematic. But everybody knows this too. It's not like academic institutes are completely brainless. They know they could have somebody "less reputable" publish their information and it would have the same scientific merit, or that they could even publish it themselves on a blog. But they don't; they publish on the "reputable journals", even though the reputation is clearly not impacting the research results.

So why do these publishers exist? The true purpose of paid, "reputable" journals is to provide an excuse for research institutions to dole out money to people who meet a quasi-arbitrary barrier to the money. They know they don't have any good system of how to assign money, or who to promote, because in general it's hard to quantify. So they hide behind "the reputable journal" and thus the "reputation" of their researchers. This way they can receive more money (because "our scientists are published by reputable journals") and they can dole it out just as easily.

Opening access and reducing cost is a great idea. But shunting money away from journals will result in the entire research industry scrambling to put together a replacement that will allow them to continue being funded, determine how to dole out that funding, organize journals "for free", and retain some sort of rigor/due-diligence/quality from the publishing process. Can this be done? Sure! But we should make that our goal and not ignore the big pink elephant in the room, which is that journals are still a necessary evil for research funding. If we want to get rid of paid journals, let's actually think through the resulting impact and build a resilient system to replace them. Imploding them and "hoping for the best" is just going to hurt research.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#64

Post by mjn »

wolverine876 wrote: post #31
cs702 wrote: post #9

Slowly and almost imperceptibly if you look at it day-to-day, public research repositories like arxiv and biorxiv, along with public code repositories like github and gitlab, are becoming or maybe already are the world's most important academic "journals." All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. Reviews take place over the Int…

> All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. What is the basis for all these claims? Who is giving it the quick once-over? Crowd-sourced review and information, despite some strengths and high initial hopes, has a record of extraordinary misinformation and disinformation. Why would we want to use that system for scientific resear…

> good work gets the attention it deserves

I'm not sure I'd go that far with the optimism, at least in my field (artificial intelligence). Some obviously bad work does immediately fade into obscurity, and better work probably does on average get more attention, but the variation is huge. There is so much stuff on arXiv, that to get attention you need some kind of PR push so people notice it in the firehose, or a dice-roll around a viral tweet or science journalist noticing it. Some of the better funded university and corporate research groups have actual professional PR and science-comm teams doing coordinated social-media blitzes, press releases, and blog posts around new arXiv papers! That's a huge factor in determining whether a given paper gets attention.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#65

Post by light_hue_1 »

treesprite82 wrote: post #35
wolverine876 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All research and code posted on them gets a quick once-over; good work gets the attention it deserves; bad work is quickly ignored. What is the basis for all these claims? Who is giving it the quick once-over? Crowd-sourced review and information, despite some strengths and high initial hopes, has a record of extraordinary misinformation and disinformation. Why would we want to use that system for scientific resear…

> Who is giving it the quick once-over? arXiv has 200 expert moderators spread through different fields to filter out papers that are blatantly misleading, unoriginal, non-substantive, or in need of significant review and revision. It's not a peer-review, but it's not a complete free-for-all either.

This is completely false! Please stop telling people that arXiv moderators judge the technical content of papers. That's not their role and it leads to people trusting arXiv when they should not.

It's a complete-free-for-all.

arXiv moderators do not judge the technical content. They don't filter misleading submissions. They don't filter work in need of revision. This is literally described on the arXiv website: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "What policies guide moderation before public announcement? "

They filter spammers, check for total obvious nutjobs ("My grilled cheese said P=NP"), for crazy formatting, for blatant copyright violations.

Publishing junk on arXiv is trivial if you're not too crazy and know a little bit how to use the right words. You can publish anything.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#66

Post by matthewdgreen »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #49
AlbertCory wrote: post #36

Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per "page" even now that you get things electronically and the cost is near zero: There's a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can install a browser extension which automatically copies anything you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays, and the rest get it free…

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains. Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil ) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Bl…

With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.) went away tomorrow Science would not “be fucked”. We would be forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted. But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don’t replace the journals now is because of (huge amounts of) path dependence and because nobody can solve the coordination problem of getting everyone to drop everything and do it. But if those publishers went away tomorrow, you’d solve both those problems in an instant.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#67

Post by treesprite82 »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #65
treesprite82 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who is giving it the quick once-over? arXiv has 200 expert moderators spread through different fields to filter out papers that are blatantly misleading, unoriginal, non-substantive, or in need of significant review and revision. It's not a peer-review, but it's not a complete free-for-all either.

This is completely false! Please stop telling people that arXiv moderators judge the technical content of papers. That's not their role and it leads to people trusting arXiv when they should not. It's a complete-free-for-all. arXiv moderators do not judge the technical content. They don't filter misleading submissions. They don't filter work in need of revision. This is literally described on the arXiv website: https…

> They don't filter work in need of revision. This is literally described on the arXiv website: https://arxiv.org/help/moderation "What policies guide moderation before public announcement? "

The page you're linking backs up what I've listed. The third subheader in that section for example:

> A submission may be declined if the moderators determine it lacks originality, novelty, or significance.

> Submissions that do not contain original or substantive research, including undergraduate research, course projects, and research proposals, news, or information about political causes (even those with potential special interest to the academic community) may be declined.

> Papers that contain inflammatory or fictitious content, papers that use highly dramatic and misrepresentative titles/abstracts/introductions, or papers in need of significant review and revision may be declined.

---

> it leads to people trusting arXiv when they should not

I'm only claiming that their moderation is a quick once-over to filter out papers blatantly in violation of those policies (like the "total obvious nutjobs" you describe), while being clear that it's not a peer review.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#68

Post by syshum »

ipaddr wrote: post #46
AlbertCory wrote: post #36

Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. That said: in the legal world, where PACER extracts $0.10 per "page" even now that you get things electronically and the cost is near zero: There's a service RECAP (PACER spelled backwards), where you can install a browser extension which automatically copies anything you download from PACER to a free archive. So one person pays, and the rest get it free…

Curious if the backup service is legal?

In the case of PACER, they are public records, and have no copy right attached to them as they are government documents, the government can not hold copyrights by definition everything the US government produces public domain.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#69

Post by AlbertCory »

One point to my others and pretty orthogonal to them:

I was a tech assistant in Google Patent Litigation. Part of my job was to bust patents (a dream job, right?), and for that, I would scour the Internet for literature to invalidate a patent being asserted against us.

I would constantly see articles behind some paywall, and I would never, never click through. There are reasons you can imagine, like (1) I didn't want the hassle of justifying the expense, and (2) I hate those publishers. Both true.

However, the biggest reason was:

I don't know if it's any good until I read it.

The vast majority of articles are not helpful for my purpose. I can't tell if they really are until I read them. If it turns out that some article is the killer, then of course Google would pay for it. But for the 1000's that are not -- well, why waste the money? I can almost always find the same information somewhere else, for free.

Re: Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free

#70

Post by AlbertCory »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #66
throwaway984393 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live. Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains. Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil ) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Bl…

With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.) went away tomorrow Science would not “be fucked”. We would be forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted. But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don’t r…

Thanks, the question isn't "do they still provide a service?" but "what would happen if they disappeared?"

As you showed, research might be unsettled for a while, but pretty soon they'd just be a bad memory.

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