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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

#71

Post by systemBuilder »

This is so right. It used to be theoretically justified to charge a cost for editing, reviewing management, and printing costs of a paper journal but most paper journals have disappeared and the paper format is useless today. High tech has made these journal companies giant vampire squids poking their blood funnels into academia to suck the life out of mankind's progress!

But down the road I can see that academic research publication will become like Facebook - loaded with bullshit promoted by hypesters - wasting time and killing thousands - and no one to enforce sanity in that lunatic wilderness!

If the 19th century journals would get with a program they would become science repos with a much smaller stuff and light fees (enough to support one staff managing editor per journal) for the review process! Publishing a paper in this model should probably cost about $1000 - $2,000, about the same as it cost the last time I was in academia...

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

#72

Post by Vinnl »

sfgweilr4f wrote: post #40
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…

I'm idly curious: does arxiv show who reviewed it? credentials etc? Is there a trust scoring mechanism or some such? is there some way to show a graph of reviewing? Is there a restriction on who can post a paper? (I'm not saying any of these are needed to make it "respectable" or even that they should be... just wondering how arxiv does its thing) Personally I like the overall concept of arxiv. Even with no one neces…

Speaking of which, if anyone knows someone at arXiv, would be great if you could prod someone to get back to me about this PR or the associated email I sent them about it: https://github.com/arXiv/arxiv-browse/pull/197

It would add the ability for people to state that they have reviewed a given work. Might not be the direction they want to go in, or it might not be - but so far I'm not even sure if someone's seen it, unfortunately.

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

#73

Post by Vinnl »

bearbin wrote: post #6

Seemingly as part of the same push, the UKRI announced funding for an open research project I've worked on before: Dr Alex Freeman's Octopus [0], a more radical software platform that splits research projects into smaller components. It's good to see that the openess of research is finally getting to be a priority of the funding bodies. [0]: https://science-octopus.org/

Alex has been working on that for so long; it was really gratifying to see that she finally got some traction and serious funding to get it to go somewhere. Really looking forward to seeing what will come out of it.

Funding announcement: https://www.ukri.org/news/funding-agreed-for-a-platform-that...

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

#74

Post by Vinnl »

wolverine876 wrote: post #33

In case someone has some direct knowledge or credible sources: I'm not sure what is stopping reform at a political level. Who is the political constituency that obstructs open access? The publishers seem too small, and the science and higher ed constituency too large.

Funders have been relying on publishers to tell them (by means of who they publish) what researchers are worth funding. This is keeping up the pressure for academics to keep publishing in paywalled journals.

There is some pressure to both make research not paywalled (Plan S is the strongest) and less costly. However, given that most of the funders' researchers can access most relevant research (albeit rather clumsily, thanks to the access mechanisms, and not 100%, hence Sci-Hub even being popular among those who do have access), and that the extracted rent on the scale of a country budget isn't that much, the pressure isn't particularly strong. Additionally, it's hard for a single funder/country to move on its own without ruining their academics' careers (hence Plan S's focus on signing on more funders).

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

#75

Post by Vinnl »

jszymborski wrote: post #32
sprafa wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s truly horrific that as an interested layman I am completely UNABLE to read most scientific papers. And to think about what they did to Aaron Schwartz…

It is truly awful that publishers do this, however there is a certain website-that-shalt-not-be-named that is papering over that gap while we researchers get our shit together.

It's called Sci-Hub.

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

#76

Post by Someone »

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…

> 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.

Commercial publishers have paywalls, but for new research they no longer have to be the only source for publications.

Nowadays, I think it’s often the indifference/laziness/whatever of the authors that prevent accepted manuscripts (same text, but different layout) from also being freely accessible.

For example https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing allows putting accepted manuscripts on arXiv.

The way I read it, the main limitations are:

- you can’t put your paper on a commercial site.

- you have to mention the DOI, which, I guess, resolves to Elsevier’s site.

Reading https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting (“Sites or repositories that provide a service to other organizations or agencies, even if those other organizations or agencies are themselves non-commercial entities, are considered to be providing a commercial service, and this service activity will also require a commercial arrangement with Elsevier”), they make special exceptions for arXiv and RePEc.

So, that’s not optimal, but (for new papers) also not as bleak as it typically is described.

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

#78

Post by tialaramex »

adam0c wrote: post #27

Can we get ISO to make all papers free next...? You know since moat industries need to abide by their standards but they refuse to freely make available these standards...

ISO exists at the whim of the sovereign entities. You are most likely a citizen of one (or perhaps even more) of the entities that ensure ISO continues to exist, and could ask them to get ISO to give away the standards documents.

Of course if the money does not come from ISO selling documents, it would need to come from tax revenue. In reality however it was scheduled the real money comes from the richest countries, as they're most able to afford it, your politicians may have the opinion that even a modest sum expended in this way would be justified by their opponents as profligate...

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

#79

Post by wolverine876 »

gzer0 wrote: post #45
wolverine876 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! I will look that up (but if you happen to have any links ...).

Here you go! [1] https://arxiv.org/moderators/ [2] https://arxiv.org/help/moderation

Thank you. And I found this one too:

https://blog.arxiv.org/2019/08/29/our-moderation-process/

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

#80

Post by wolverine876 »

mjn wrote: post #64
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…

> 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…

Thanks for the perspectives. One important nitpick:

> Some obviously bad work does immediately fade into obscurity, and better work probably does on average get more attention

You don't know what you haven't seen, which is just a restatement of the core problem. You'd need a study of the entire population to know about the correlation between paper 'quality' and outcomes.

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