Australian academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific publishing
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Even more, it is student tuition that underwrites for the exorbitant annual license fees the university libraries are forced to pay.
I always pondered how much of my tuition was going toward these subscriptions.
I was probably one of the library's top users of expensive journals by volume; I knew how much it cost the library to provide access and I knew I was paying for it. At one point one of the scientific journal search engines gave me a prize. Students: use the library's journal subscriptions. You are paying for it. Download PDF's like there is no tomorrow.
There are exceptions, but for most students, after you graduate, you will never again have such access to so much peer-reviewed research.
TB hard drives are cheap nowadays. :-)
Obviously it becomes easier the more you understand the subject area. As student you might have little understanding. That's why you are studying!
In my case, initial downloads were readings for my courses or papers referenced in handouts. I just let my curiousity guide me from there. But I'll admit I also had some background knowledge to begin with, gleaned from work experience.
In some (most) scientific discplines, every paper begins by citing background material. You should gather and save those papers. No matter how old.
When you read the more general papers, and the other background material, in chronological order, you are in a better position to understand more specific, recent work.
Basically you are building a foundation for understanding the current state of research in a subject area. At least you will always be able to get up to speed more easily by having the proper foundation.
Of course, when you're at university you may be busy with other pursuits and you may not have the time nor inclination to read all those older papers. This is what you download and save. Sometimes there are scientific "encyclopedias" or other compilations. These can be good in their own right and also a further source for references pointing to more worthy downloads.
When in doubt a general rule is to download papers that are highly cited.
There is a vast amount of general knowledge that will never be offered on Wikipedia.[1] It is the best kind: peer-reviewed. Wikipedia and clones (Knol, etc.) wanted or tried to become "peer-reviewed" sources but this idea has never really succceeded on the open web. That is why this issue with academic publishing will continue to simmer.
1. At least, not until academic publishing undergos some changes.
Citations indices, bibliographies, etc., are hugely useful. Finding widely-cited and influential papers is a good start.
The better approach IMO is to simply download it all, though selecting for corpii of more relevance. Journals which are embargoed, for example, as a first target. That was pretty much Aaron Swarz's approach.
As a potential solution, you could only cite papers submitted to those journals before some cut-off date. The cut-off date could be in the near future, and could be advertised in advance as part of a campaign to get other researchers to do the same thing.
Ultimately, I suspect we'll see a dynamic emerge by which pressures against for-profit publication and increased alternatives will hit a tipping point. I first started hearing about the public-access publishing world in the late 1990s. A decade and a half later, it's a thing, though still small.
And figuring out how to compensate both research and editorialship remains a challenge.
Most academics don't care that much, because they tend to assume anyone worthy of reading their paper is someone with an affiliation to a university that has a subscription.
One is to reference clearly foundational work. Here, you've got a limited set of choices, but also, directly consequent, the total number of works is small. The key here is to ensure that they're made publicly available -- SciLib, LibGen, etc.
I've found myself frustrated by researchers who don't cite key foundational works -- case in point is Fischer-Tropsch based fuel synthesis from electricity. I'd run across several studies from the US Naval Research Lab none of which cited research prior to the mid 1990s. Turns out the field is actually over 50 years old, with early work at Brookhaven National Labs -- not some sketchy fly-by-night. The lack of citations here was egregious.
The other purpose, and far more common, is simply to show documentation of established claims or facts in a field. Here, virtually any credible source will do, and it's for this type of citation that open-access pubs can and should be strongly favoured.
So you mandate a 30% discount on the KPI for any journal that isn't open access. Suddenly prestigious open access journals spring up and attract the best papers thereby getting more prestige points and so on.
It's really that easy. Most academics I've noticed are more interested in their careers for which they're more than willing to exploit graduate students, holding them back a lot more than 3 years and so on to care which is why the problem continues to exist. Academics need to look firmly in the mirror when they ask why the journal publishing racket exists.
What we really need to think about is decreasing the number of journals. But nope, spammy new for-profit journals are launched every week.
Overall science funding is a separate issue, and so is the flawed metrics we use to determine who gets it.
There's a Randall Munroe comic (not published on xkcd) which shows the growth in academic publishing. As with many of his infographic strips, this one is stunningly effective at conveying quantity:
http://m.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/infographic.jpg
Much of the growth in publishing followed the explicit formulation that science and technology were the path to an endless frontier, explicitly stated in Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, "Science, the Endless Frontier", and accelerating through the Sputnik crisis, space race, and expanded academic funding of the 1960s-1980s. By the end of that period, academic research was increasingly privately funded and seen as a profit center for large research institutions.
"Australian academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific publishing"