Major U.K. science funder to require grantees to make papers immediately free • Hacker News Board

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

#81

Post by wolverine876 » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 8:47 PM UTC

oakfr wrote: post #59

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…

The problem is that careful (conference) reviews don’t scale. Large conferences end up suffering from a highly stochastic behavior where excellent work is borderline rejected on a regular basis while mediocre/incorrect work gets accepted every so often. github/arxiv are no silver bullet but offer an interesting alternative (with their own set of challenges, though).

Every solution has flaws, as you say. The careful reviews have worked very well - science is one of the great triumphs of humanity.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't look for improvements, of course.

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

#82

Post by aurizon » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #37

andi999 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Any sources for their opinion? Probably I shd read the copyright release form in more detail, but if you think terms of copyright this won't fly.

Even if it is potentially technically illegal, I don't know about anyone who tried to stop it. Note that some release forms explicitly allow author's versions of the covered work for download on the author's website. There's usually a stipulation that they need to be different in some way, for example by not using the same formatting template as the journal/conference version of the paper.

The journals always want their 'pound of flesh' as Shakespeare spins in his grave.... Some insights:- https://www.editage.com/insights/what-are-the-differences-be...

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

#83

Post by YetAnotherNick » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

Are there any incentive for the researcher to not make the research paper free? AFAIK most prestigious journals allows researchers to publish their preprint papers in arxiv/the researcher's site.

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

#84

Post by shapefrog » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #43

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...

Yes!! Why do these things even cost money to begin with? It's like they want people to not follow the standards.

ISO666 sets the acceptable limits on how much you should charge people to get a copy of the standards. /s

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

#85

Post by gmueckl » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

aurizon wrote: post #82

gmueckl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it is potentially technically illegal, I don't know about anyone who tried to stop it. Note that some release forms explicitly allow author's versions of the covered work for download on the author's website. There's usually a stipulation that they need to be different in some way, for example by not using the same formatting template as the journal/conference version of the paper.

The journals always want their 'pound of flesh' as Shakespeare spins in his grave.... Some insights:- https://www.editage.com/insights/what-are-the-differences-be...

I don't see any new insights on the page that you linked. I personally signed copyright transfer forms that allowed for author's versions. There were some conditions that I don't remember in detail. But the gist is that a commercial publisher still allowed me to have a version of the article text online.

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

#86

Post by bishoprook2 » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:11 PM UTC

question.

Do peer reviewed papers make the reviewers public?

That would be an interesting angle if not. Allow anyone to publish, but they compete for high-status reviewers. Also, the reviewers have some skin in the game so far as correctness.

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

#87

Post by robwwilliams » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

treesprite82 wrote: post #67

light_hue_1 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

“May” is the key word in that long sentence. bioRxiv certainly does not review content of submissions using the standard definition of the word “review”. They may scan for style and general content type—for example rejecting reviews.

But I agree with the parent comment that these archives are extremely valuable.

I disagree that informal community comments are of much critical value. In most cases twitter comments and micro-reviews are relatively trivial and are usually based on quick reads rather than deep perusals.

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

#88

Post by robwwilliams » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

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…

Absolutely agree. The loss of prestige journals would be salutary and force researchers to focus on content, not cover.

GK Marinov, BJ Wold, and colleagues analyzed the quality of nearly 800 ChIP-seq datasets in the NIH GEO database (see figure S8 in their 2014 G3 paper: https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.113.008680 ). They independently scored the quality of data generation and analysis and then compare their summary quality scores to the journal impact factor in which each dataset was published.

Can you guess the polarity of the correlation? Yes, it was negative, and consistently so over a five year span.

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

#89

Post by sombremesa » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 11:59 PM UTC

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…