Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter
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Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
For the most part, I don't think scientists care about the issue, except for being a bit annoyed with Elsevier. Most people don't care about most things that don't affect them directly. Scientists are people too. So rather than invest effort in activism, they mostly focus on their jobs and their families and stuff.
But won't every university you apply to tell you that that isn't the case?
Scientists don't love giving up their rights to Elsevier. Elsevier owns many high IF journals in a number of fields, and publishing in high IF journals is part of how you "prove your worth" and get grants. Scientists give up their rights to Elsevier because that's how the "scientific economy" of their field of study is currently structured.
As you say, to do this as a young researcher is career suicide.
The only thing "will and guts" do when all your field's high IF journals are big publishers is give you the boot.
> Gower has said "no"
Gower was a Fields medalist, Royal Society fellow and Shaw selection committee member before saying no, his stand is nice but he's not what I'm talking about.
> how about a few others?
Many have signed the petition and possibly more have actually done the work of trying to set up or raise the profile of open-access journals.
Changing tenure policies is also an important component in getting a culture shift towards open research.
You may be angry but the scientist needs a future.
I'm not affiliated, just a fan of their work.
[0] http://cos.io
Some fields (like math) seem to be pulling it off, but it takes a group of leaders in the field to coordinate a change in publishing models.
Couldn't the scientist refuse to peer review non-openly published papers?
Refusing to review non-open work sounds like a good way to burn political capital for those early in their careers.
> So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism.
As far as we can tell, Galileo was persecuted by the Pope not because of science, but because Galileo was basically an asshole, who abused his friendship with the Pope and then kept venting out against him. The issue was strictly political. See [0] and especially the top comment[1] under the article.
Also, apparently, Galileo was right for the wrong reasons - he lucked into the right theory even though evidence available at the time didn't substantiate his views.
[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
[1] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
That is very, very true. That PR fuckup carried on to this day and age. Three and a half centuries later, people still blame them for that.
In fact, that'd be almost as reasonable as modern commercial interests arguing against some kind of theory that proposed humans were impacting the climate of the planet...
But the anwser to your question, "How many decades of astronomical progress did we lose to Urban VII?", given the sources referenced upthread is: apparently zero. Neither Urban VIII nor the rest of papacy seem to have held back Kepler or Newton.
It would have been surprising if the papacy were able to hold back Kepler and Newton, since they both lived in Protestant lands. That might be a coincidence. But maybe there were potential Keplers and Newtons living in Rome, or Madrid, or Tuscany, or even Paris¹, who were simply intimidated out of doing research.
¹ Even if they were Huguenots, who were still experiencing religious assassinations at the time, despite Henry IV; but especially if they were Catholics whose friends and family might suspect them of Huguenot sympathies.
Good question. I've never thought of astronomy as characterized by a constant stream of progress building mainly on the work of past astronomers; instead, I've seen it as more in line with the model of "technology advances, with ancillary benefits to all sorts of different fields including astronomy". For example, radio telescopes owe a lot to progress in physics, but not very much to progress in astronomy specifically.
If that's the case, "none" is a very plausible answer to your question.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. For Galileo, his observations that Venus had phases, like the Moon, and that Jupiter had its own moons, and more, were enough to convince him that the Copernican theory was more likely to be correct than the geocentric model. We now know that he interpreted the evidence correctly.
TL;DR: The models that were popular in times of Galileo weren't stories told to poor villagers by the Evil Church; they were precise mathematical tools that could be used to predict in advance the positions of planets, eclipses, etc. They also had an elaborate explanations for what the parts of their models mean. And then comes Galileo with a theory that's inferior, built on arbitrary assumptions, doesn't agree with observation and fails to match the predictive capabilities of established models.
The strength of a model is its ability to predict the future, and therefore no sane, rational person could accept Galileo's model over the common ones based on the evidence they collected and analyzed so far. That's what I mean by "enough evidence to promote one model over another". It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff, and b) mathematical model that spat out better predictions than the previous models did while being also simpler. And only then scientific world moved to accept the new picture - when it became the one that matched available evidence the best (it still took a few hundred years to sort out the kinks though).
People in times of Galileo weren't stupid, the Church wasn't supressing astronomy, and Galileo himself got sacked for being an ass to authority.
I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mass). That's not much of an explanation.
You can make a judgment call about the relative merits of "new theory, doesn't make numeric predictions well" and "very old theory, makes numeric predictions almost flawlessly, additionally predicts things that we know to be false".
What, specifically did the Tychonic system predict that was known to be false in the early 17th century? As far as I know, the interpretations of its model were kind of a mess, but the model itself was fine, up to the precision of then-known instruments.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system :
> Tycho admired aspects of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system, but felt that it had problems as concerned physics, astronomical observations of stars, and religion. Regarding the Copernican system Tycho wrote,
>> This innovation expertly and completely circumvents all that is superfluous or discordant in the system of Ptolemy. On no point does it offend the principle of mathematics. Yet it ascribes to the Earth, that hulking, lazy body, unfit for motion, a motion as quick as that of the aethereal torches, and a triple motion at that.
> In regard to physics, Tycho held that the Earth was just too sluggish and heavy to be continuously in motion. According to the accepted Aristotelian physics of the time, the heavens (whose motions and cycles were continuous and unending) were made of "Aether" or "Quintessence"; this substance, not found on Earth, was light, strong, and unchanging, and its natural state was circular motion. By contrast, the Earth (where objects seem to have motion only when moved) and things on it were composed of substances that were heavy and whose natural state was rest
So, the Copernican system was acknowledged to be mathematically superior, and the Ptolemaic system was acknowledged to be a particularly obvious case of special pleading. The Earth was considered exceptional under the Tychonian system because it was too heavy to be constantly in motion -- as a large terrestrial object, its natural state was rest.
Interestingly enough, I remember learning about a Renaissance scientist who did several experiments to the effect that there is no such thing as a "natural state of rest" for terrestrial objects...
Furthermore, the idea that the Earth is exceptional is severely undermined by the moons of Jupiter. From them, you would see exactly what you see from Earth, and you could readily fit a Tychonian model with a sun going around Jupiter -- but why would you? (This is what I was referring to originally, but this particular argument is slightly weaker than I was thinking of.)
I'll also note that, as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the Tychonic system wasn't exactly well-established at the time:
> It was chiefly through the influence of the Jesuit scientists that the Roman Catholic Church adopted the Tychonic system, over a period of nine years (from 1611 to 1620), in a process directly prompted by the Galilean telescopic discoveries.
But that was Newton, not Galileo. (And the notation of course is more or less modern, except to the extent I've screwed it up.)
The main problem with Copernicus's new theory in Galileo's time, as I understand it, was not that it didn't make numeric predictions well; the problem was that it predicted qualitative phenomena that were "known" to be false, like stellar parallax.
And everything you've said about Newton refers to answering the question of how much stuff is attracted to other stuff, not why it is. He was able to show that the natural motion of everything is circular (unless it's in perfect stasis), and to describe with great precision the form of the circles involved (and how they deform into ellipses), but there's no why anywhere. Newton can't justify the force of gravity varying with the square of distance except by observing that it happens to work in practice. He certainly can't explain why it's not zero -- it could have been zero. (Sure, it's very fair to say he told us why Kepler's laws obtained. But that wasn't the question, the question was "why is stuff attracted to other stuff?")
The reason that it was preferred over the Copernican system was that it additionally predicted that parallax of the stars should not be observed. At the time astronomers had looked for parallax as a way to test the Copernican system, and had not observed it. This was the strongest point in favor of the Tychonic system. As it happened, the stars were much further away than astronomers at the time realized, so the parallax was much smaller than they could have detected with the instruments of the time. (In fact, it took more than two centuries before parallax was detected.)
But the point is that I think that if any of us were alive at the time and took careful stock of all the evidence most of us would probably come to the same conclusion that most of the astronomers of time did. Namely that, while interesting, the Copernican system did not have as much evidence supporting it as the Tychonic system did. But if Galileo had built a Foucault pendulum instead, it would have been a very different story!
(Not affiliated with. Just discovered it recently and found out, that 2 of my papers very cited without my knowledge.)
> We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
> Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.
Now it looks like Elsevier is not going to cooperate, so there's hoping that linguists will now show solidarity and refuse to take on editorial roles with Elsevier [2]. The Association of Dutch Universities is also negotiating open access conditions with various publishers. Interesting times!
[0] https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/773059302822316
[1] http://www.lingoa.eu/about/aims/
[2] https://www.facebook.com/marc.vanoostendorp/posts/1020623886...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Graphics_Tools
[1] http://casual-effects.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-journal-of-co...
[2] http://jcgt.org/
Are we really surprised? How would you feel if some of your customers demanded you turn your business over to them for zero compensation?
I wish the linguists all the luck in the world starting their new, open-access journal.
The journals provide a service, but Elsevier is a rent-seeking entity, it buys up/takes over publications and hikes up prices.
http://imechanica.org/node/1531#comment-3251 estimates that the International Journal of Solids and Structures cost about $0.5m/year to run and had revenues of about $3.5m, or a net profit of $3m going to Elsevier for owning the journal and little else.
And that's exactly what you see happening here. The linguists are saying that they'll be able to provide the product for a lesser price, but being nice and offering to let Elsevier continue to compete. If Elsevier refuses, and the linguists go ahead and start their own journal, then the free market has triumphed.
What's happening with #icanhazpdf is that researchers are innovating to find ways to provide the product (access to research papers) at a much lower cost than Elsevier provides it — free, in fact. However, Elsevier, rather than compete with them, seeks to enforce government-granted monopolies on providing this service, known as copyrights, in order to protect their profits, at the cost of providing benefits to society.
High prestige journals offer value to both authors and readers. Apparently both authors and readers feel it's worth the money.
And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
This is a very odd situation that I suspect isn't really amenable to normal economic analysis, at least outside of very simplistic models.
The value that journals offer is, over the medium term, due to the editorial staff and the authors that submit articles. Remove those two, and the journal will cease to be "high prestige" and will likely fold. In the short term, however, the value is in the journal's name: you could replace the editors of Lancet with a crop of corn husks and it would still be "high prestige" for quite a while---at least until the third or fourth major screw-up. (Losing the authors is harder, but hold that thought for another paragraph.)
On the other hand, over the long term, the value lies entirely in the readers. No major academic is going to waste their professional capital on a journal that isn't read by their colleagues, and ultimately, an academic's articles need to be read, not just published, for them to advance more than locally.
In the same way, new journals have issues: In the short term, it's hard to get over the name recognition hump; in the medium term, they have to have consistently good editors and authors to attract more than momentary attention. But once they have attracted a readership, they have an inertia that makes other factors less important.
A couple of examples:
* Anyone heard from Software: Practice and Experience lately? It was one of my favorite journals, and was being edited by Douglas Comer the last time I interacted with it. But I haven't seen an issue in more than a decade, mostly because it is (was?) hideously expensive, and haven't seen any references to it, either.
* How about PLOS? Seems to be high prestige now, judging by the number of references I hear on the Science and Nature podcasts.
My personal suspicion is that a better analogy for Elsevier and company is the mining business: extracting as much wealth as possible from academic journals, as cheaply as possible, before the ore runs out and the town dries up and blows away.
> And again, there is nothing stopping anyone else from starting their own journal. If they fail, then authors and readers must find some value in the current situation.
Publishing in a journal with a low impact factor isn't nearly as worthwhile as publishing in one with a higher impact factor, which implies a strong lock-in effect which works on Elsevier's favor. Even if Elsevier weren't around, a new journal would have a hard time getting off the ground.
Probably the same way encyclopedia companies felt as wikipedia grew. Bad news for them.
A more accurate title would have been: "Scientists forced to break the law to access the research they need in order to advance scientific knowledge."
A more provocative but still accurate title would have been: "Scientific progress impeded by corporations extracting economic rents from scientists and taxpayers, to the detriment of humankind."
Because that is what is happening.
I'm surprised that we don't have a P2P variant strictly for academia. What a boon it would be to the dissemination of knowledge.
See: https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-...
Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.
I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.
I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.
I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
> https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM...
https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...
I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time.
Just bemused.
Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint.
The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'.
When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could.
Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
It's an open secret that Adobe and Microsoft had a model of non-enforcing piracy for private use, and I think it's pretty good. It's totally fair to charge business licenses, but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race.
Greed is trying to capture all the value you create. Don't do it. Let others have some, and then they'll happily let you have some of theirs.
Although I doubt Adobe and Microsoft did this out of altruism: By allowing piracy of their software for private use, it became widely used, and at work people wanted to continue using the software they knew -- this time paying for it.
> https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-communit...
Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.
But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.
They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.
The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet.
Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know.
People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions.
Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download.
Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard.
[0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
Google Scholar is also great for finding PDFs of papers.
Some libraries also have copying services. I've been trying track down a paper for the Tanimoto similarity. Quoting Wikipedia, "many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference", where [4] is: Tanimoto, T. (17 Nov 1957). "An Elementary Mathematical theory of Classification and Prediction". Internal IBM Technical Report 1957 (8?).
Worldcat says that 10 page report is on a few library shelves. One of them provides scanning services, for about 50 cents per page, and $7 minimum. I should get it in the mail soon.
If the same fees were to apply to your ACM articles, it would cost about $10(!).
That cost difference makes me mad.
Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.
Regarding the English library system, as JupiterMoon pointed out, the British library provides interlibrary loan services, which is the topic at hand. In fact, I've used it from Sweden.
If I am wrong about my interpretation, let me point out that the US system isn't especially better than other developed countries in this respect.
For example, the local college library to where I went to high school in Miami requires a fee to enter the library. http://library.miami.edu/policies/non-um-patron-access/ . (As a student in an advanced class, we got a special pass to allow us to do research in the library.) A member of the public can only visit the Stanford university library for free for 7 days of the year (http://library.stanford.edu/using/access-and-privileges/visi... ).
You mention open stacks, and I fully appreciate the joy of being able to browse. However, your enthusiasm about any US experience must be tempered. Many US academic libraries have off-campus shelving (eg, https://bioethics.georgetown.edu/using-the-library/request-b... and http://www.library.yale.edu/Administration/junk.Shelving/Wor... ). Quoting from the last of those two URLs:
> Many universities, including Harvard, have successfully adopted off-campus shelving as a way to meet both their shelving and preservation needs.* Such shelving costs a tenth of what on-campus shelving costs, and it provides nearly ideal conditions for the long-term preservation of library materials. The principal disadvantage of off-campus shelving is that readers cannot browse the material at these facilities.
Perhaps it's more like using gopher than a web brower. ;)
My disappointment in the library systems of other countries that I've visited is composed of two parts: first, there are many fewer and poorer public libraries than in the US; second, there are many fewer and poorer universities than in the US, which limits the available university libraries sharply.
It wouldn't surprise me if Sweden were better than the US in this regard. Sweden has an excellent welfare state, a world-class university system, and if I'm not mistaken, a centuries-long tradition of universal literacy.
But much of the developed world does not have this advantage; Germany, Norway, Benelux, Finland, Switzerland, Canada, Iceland, Israel, and possibly Austria share these attributes, but the US and UK do not have a reasonable welfare state, and Ireland, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Japan do not have the long tradition of universal literacy, although of course their educated elites have been literate for over a millennium, producing a rich literature¹. Countries outside this group (except possibly Singapore and Taiwan) do not even have a world-class university system.
That means that in Brazil, mainland China, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Turkey, Brunei, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Saudi, Oman, Czech, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Malaysia, Poland, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, and even Hungary, Russia, and Greece, you won't even find the kind of university where you're thinking to look for a good library, let alone the kind of university library you're thinking of. Maybe they have good public libraries (I hear Estonia's public library system is particularly good) but generally I expect not. But these are surely developed countries.
¹ Yes, before a century or two ago the educated elite of Australia and New Zealand lived in England, so perhaps that's a bit of a stretch.
These comments started because of an article about scientists working around copyright restrictions. This thread started off as a complaint about the cost of getting access to foundational papers in a research field. I pointed out a cheaper mechanism for getting access, via the local library.
Hence, I thought that's what you were talking about, which is why my examples were to research libraries in the US.
I'm going to go back to your original statement, which is "I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!"
I think most people are aware that the US is a wealthy country, and therefore expect that the US library system should be above the world average. That is what you elaborated on now.
But your original statement suggested that the library quality in the US was appreciably above what one would expect for a country as rich as the US.
Yet you listed a number of countries which are comparable in wealth to the US, and which have comparable library systems. (Germany, the Nordic countries, etc.)
Therefore, it doesn't seem like the US's library system is better than what most people would expect.
Had you said "The US has a good library system", I would not have asked for clarification. But you said people in the US don't know just how good it is, even when compared to countries on a similar economic level. Which doesn't appear to be the case.
Source: I don't live in the US and I use interlibrary loan from the local library.
I get a little irked every time this topic comes up, and people go on and on about the $30 for every paper. Nobody pays that. Who pays sticker for a car? Yes yes publishers are evil, down with the system, bring out the pitchforks - in the mean time, nobody except a very tiny but very vocal minority in the research community gives a shit. If you'd ask 100 people in the offices around me which one they'd prefer: all journals in the world 'open access' and no more big publishers, or a less crap coffee machine in the staff room, 95 of them would go for the coffee machine.
What's more, you might be amazed at the lengths librarians will go to help you. Just because it's not on the shelf doesn't mean they don't have access to it or won't get access to it. real science journals are a special case too, they take a lot of space, they get very little actual use, the librarians want them to be read, they'll go above and beyond for a reader.
My friend who lives in Lahore, like 6 million other people, is not so lucky; his National Library has only some 0.2 million books, and it's a couple of hours away by car. Unlike many of his countrymen, at least he has a car and doesn't live in a part of the country where "Islamist" highwaymen might kidnap you off the highway for ransom.
Maybe you think he's stupid for not moving to the US. But I assure you that it is not as easy as all that. I haven't seen my parents in five years, and I miss them.
It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
Scientific journals used to haven an important role in distributing and coordinating scientific work. A large part of that reason is gone in the age of near instantaneous and free distribution.
The coordination of the process could be done cheaply and pay for a bunch more PhDs instead of a useless middleman.
The market price is
- say 30 $, if you want to get a legal copy
- about 0 $, if you can accept the moral and legal dilemma
Let the market decide...
---
Seriously, because of the copyright laws the market is strongly skewed. I really can't understand how one can believe in free markets and copyright at the same time.
This is not free market doctrine. This is econ 101 on how to subvert the free market.
You argue that the side scientists - publisher is a free market. I consider this as dubious because of, say, impact factors, but for the sake of argumentation, I'll accept it for now.
But the really interesting side of the market is not scientist - publisher, but publisher - reader (this is what the original article is all about). And this is part of the two-sided market clearly is a monopoly, since there is no competition between publishers for a given paper, but there is only one publisher that is allowed to sell access to a paper (thanks to the copyright laws).
TLDR: Thanks to the copyright laws one side of the two-sided market is a monopoly.
The yearly expenses for arXiv https://confluence.cornell.edu/download/attachments/12711648... are about US$780k. This supports http://arxiv.org/stats/get_monthly_downloads about 11 million copies of papers produced per month, or 132 million per year, for a cost of US$0.006 per paper. These are the same kinds of papers Elsevier tries to charge you US$30 for.
When two different providers of an identical service are charging you amounts that vary by a factor of 5000, you can see that the market is failing to promote public welfare, and so markets are not a good way to organize that part of society.
I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.
The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).
That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access world like on arXiv.org.
At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1. Count the citations. 2. Make a list. 3. Profit.
You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better system.
Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...
I'll admit my comment was influenced by some proposed models (e.g. in the UK), arguing for the allocation of taxpayer resources to "buy" open access for research.
I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with good reputation on it, that's an even better piece of evidence. If a paper has interesting content, it will be shared in the community. Also, Google isn't just ranking by a explicit measures, but mostly by PageRank, i.e. a measure how how well a certain item is woven into the network of links (plus possibly hundreds of heuristics). PageRank could likely be applied to a publication system as well. In that case the network links could be co-authorships, associations with accredited universities, and perhaps other things. And let us not forget that the vast majority of researchers are actually truth seeking and concerned about the impact they make on the world. Things might become a little bit noisier, but at the same time the feedback-loops become shorter, as we're seeing it in the machine learning field.
What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to establish relevance, such a model is much less effective at gauging quality (which is the problem, if you want to use bibliometric scores as a way to establish whose careers are to advance). In other term, the outcome of a search for "cloud computing" is certainly pertinent with the subject. That is not how you would choose which cloud service to use.
Of course, it may well be possible that the human judgment component is codifiable in a few hundred/thousand of heustics (sounds like a hard problem, but it's not my field), thus allowing the construction of a good model.
With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy".
[0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy
Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?
The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
I actually think this would be fairly trivial.
For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then, anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely download plugins.
This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement ("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and distributes the task of hosting the files.
Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.
Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by Elsevier journals: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html
Hopefully we see more academics collectively abandoning such journals like Knuth and the Journal of Algorithms board and these other examples from Ted's website: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html
Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy
How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?
Then again, as per your article
> Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative
And the problem outlined with TFA has little to do with peer-review, it has to do with open access which is largely orthogonal.
So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say they are doing us a service.
That is flawed.
Orthogonal means independent, not opposing. You can have free and open, you can have free and closed, you can have non-free and open and you can have non-free and closed.
> IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
Be as it may, even with mostly volunteers running a peer-reviewed journal has costs, so unless governments start journal grants of sorts...
I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that.
A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.
For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact.
Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.
I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work.
Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process.
Still loving the initiative though ;)
True, and in open access journals that cost is supported mostly by the authors: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/
I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues.
Where the money goes to?
Nobody needs to pay more, but the publishers should certainly be making less profit. What really needs to happen is the publishers need to be replaced by more efficient ones. See for example Scholastica, who provide the entire journal infrastructure for $10/article. Or the PeerJ, charge just $99/year to publish with them.
The reason is that a scientist not doing this would (rightly or wrongly) have fewer publications in the 'best' journals as considered by the rest of their field and by impact and citation measurements, would therefore be less well known and well cited, and would struggle more to succeed. This is wrong and bad and so on, but it's probably widely true.
Ask PLoS, they charge $3k/article for open access publications. How much cheaper do you think Elsevier can be than PLoS?
The reviewers work for free. Printing is almost free, and dispensable - nobody actually uses the printed journals and everyone prefers to print out PDFs themselves.
- Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in contrast to grant proposal for which we are sometimes paid)
- I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view section, not that much for the academic papers at the end)
- Copy editors never did anything useful to my papers. In CS, we usually submit a nice latex file and they do not really do any work on the layout (it might be different in other fields, where people submit crappy MS Word files).
... so, let's say that the added value of the publisher (even for PLOS) is marginal...
- Some of us like printed journals. I subscribe to at least three.
Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.
My answer, from there:
They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals, if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending their conferences.
They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something that is not necessarily an academic skill set.
They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field" and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues - popularity and quality.
Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far more weight because of the associated journals.
Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in addition to targeted searches of the literature.
The other trick I recommend people try if they frequently have trouble finding papers is to try EndNote. It is a little expensive, but I found it to be great at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources with my school's access.
A government publication house would overly centralize things, and would organize research by geography and politics rather than subject matter. Science is a worldwide endeavor, and ought to be insulated from political influence as much as we are able to do so.
And we certainly don't need any more juicy nexus points, dripping with extractable rents, throbbing and pulsating for the benefit of the leeches.
One academic publications office per university or independent lab would certainly cost a bit more in overhead, but nowhere near as much as what is currently lost to the publisher conglomerates for both publication and access.
The aggregation function of the journals could be fulfilled by a nomination and community moderation process among the researchers and students of any particular discipline.
Publishing via university web site would also allow linking to related files, such as the raw data, conference video, audio, or transcripts, executable simulator or demonstration programs, and related research, all with permanent, canonical URLs.
While I am not an academic, I notice that many of the journal-curated publications (that I can read for free) have only static diagrams, whereas if you go to the researcher's web site, you can see animated illustrations, executable programs, and lecture slide decks or videos. When the mission of science is to not only advance the frontiers of human knowledge, but also explain what you did and to disseminate the new knowledge to others, a plain old PDF locked up behind a paywall might not be the best way to do that.
The lowly human desires - prestige, career advancement, money, power. Achieving publications with highly ranked journal is necessary for keeping contracts with university and for grant money coming in your direction. And so lots of researchers get complacent and try not to think too hard about the current system. Changing it for better one may require legal action by the government. Compulsory free copy of publicly funded research paper would be great start.
Even better, publish your articles 'for free'
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable.
The right information in the right place just changes your life.
On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting
it out is getting lower and lower all the time.
So you have these two fighting against each other."