I feel especially strongly that papers that result from taxpayer-funded research should be free.
Honest to god and on the grave of my mother this happened to a friend. He was going over some old Fortran 88 code, filled with GOTO statements. The code, at best, was a rat's nest. Only a deep and long fight could get it into your brain. At about 3 am after a long day in the lab, she finally gets to a line in the code that says GOTO LINE 12345 with the comment 'HAHA MADE YOU LOOK' . Her boss bought her a new computer after she threw that one off the roof.
That experience is universal with Biologist code.
That's not actually the point. The point is reproducibility. If you write your own code and get a different result, why? If the reason is the code then having the other code, no matter how terrible it is, allows you to figure out what the difference is. And then somebody is wrong and you know why and can publish that result.
The end result is that empires are built, reproducibility is (paradoxically) harmed, and we're someday going to end up finding out that some big, high-profile projects were built on pillars of sand.
From what I've seen when supporting EEs? People who are that much smarter than I am don't have this limitation. They can write thousands of lines of spaghetti perl and bash and as long as nobody touches the damn thing, it works fine. God help you, though, if you make a change.
But... there is an established job role for this; I mean, you don't want to make your EEs sysadmin their own LSF cluster, either.
Or need to add functionality. Or, just wait a year.
I think sometimes you just get so caught up in your field of expertise that you miss some of the tools that could drastically help you entirely. You have to wonder how much of an efficiency drain that adds up to over the course of even just individual research projects. And that's before you get to bad code.
I got access to the source code, and the super complicated algorithm added almost nothing to the results, the glossed over / hand waved past data normalization worked so well that there wasn't a need for any further classification. This paper was pretty well received and cited, despite it basically not work.
I think a central hub for public comments, with source, and available PDF would be incredibly useful for CS as a field. For most papers I had access to, to get the source I'd have to go through at least one person. So I tried for quite a while to replicate the result before even trying to get access. If it was available, on say github, I'd have grabbed the source code as a resource to understand the paper, and with something like publicly available commenting, I think it'd have been a non-issue.
The problem is, I can see how such a system would be incredibly constructive to the field and the community, but it could be a liability to the authors, and would make publishers meaningless, so I doubt it happens anytime soon.
To be fair, a lot of people do publish their working code with the paper. It helps people like me understand how to do the work.
Bad code is fine, good code is better, great code is great. Stick to fine and I can do my job and you can write papers knowing that your work will be used by many.
The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license http://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/
A much bigger problem is that grantsmanship strongly incentivizes against verifying your methodology and being diligent in your construction of null hypotheses.
Well, if you're embarrassed by your terrible handwriting, maybe it's a time to put some effort to improve it.
Especially because if you are forced to publish your code, it will be better.
Academic code sometimes only has been made to work on one machine (the author's). Someone reproducing the results should still have access to the source, even if they have to hack it to work on their system.
;)
But seriously.
Really, a lot of the comments to this and the downvotes seem to betray a lack of understanding of what cs research is like, which is understandable I guess. CS research is not like creating physics experiments, there are methods, techniques, and algorithms. When there is an experimental result, CS researchers do not treat those as sacrosanct and do have an informed skepticism but we are generally able to determine and discern the bulk is what is important from the content of the paper itself, in most cases.
Yeah, if you look at the experimental results section from papers in SOSP, you could come up with all kinds of complaints probably all day long but there is more to it and the community than is being taken for granted here.
The alternative has way, way too much potential for rent seeking. You'll get private interests who connive a way to have the government pay to do the hard/uncertain/expensive part while they don't put in their dime until they're already sure it's going to pan out, at which point they swoop in and claim the full IP monopoly to the detriment of the public.
The second is a completely separate problem from the research. If you have a promising drug that people have been using in other countries for a thousand years but has never been FDA approved, it never gets FDA approved because nobody can patent the prior art so nobody will pay for the drug trials even if no research is required whatsoever.
Two possible solutions are to have the government fund the FDA trials or to give the party who does a temporary monopoly on the drug regardless of patentability. And if two parties offer to fund the trials in exchange for the monopoly, let them bid for the right.
If so, why should nations give away their expensive research that potentially give them an edge either military or commercially?
Personally I almost never traded technology when I played civilization, let alone give it away!
Yes. The answer is unequivocally yes. Your country will benefit vastly more from the research being freely available than other people having a better world on your dime will disadvantage you.
And here's the thing. Other countries face the same calculus. Scientific research brings the greatest return on investment of anything ever. It's why we have electricity and computers and satellites and penicillin. At the national level you can pay for it and give it away and still come out ahead regardless of what anybody else does.
Since every country benefits from doing it by more than it costs them, everybody can "cooperate" by doing research and giving it away without having to worry about anybody else defecting -- because defectors can't hurt you, they can only not help you. The sooner everybody realizes that the sooner everybody can choose to cooperate and the better off the whole world will be.
And the returns when every country publishes research for free are... large.
Good point about the current situation.
"We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. "
- And especially when public policy often demanding massive input from the taxpayer depends on it.
This is one of the easiest ways to manipulate the AI players...
>But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
Edit: also, I don't expect margins of 30% from companies producing very low value. Do you really think that if they'd lower their margin to 0, with prices of around 30% less, everyone would stop complaining?
1. Their margins are extremely high, 90% range. 2. Open access journals can charge orders of magnitude less
Neither is broadly correct.
Regarding the claim that ~30% margins are excessive: do you think that if their prices went down by 30%, everybody would be happy?
It is insane that they go after people who wrote the paper when they try to give it away on their own website.
A little reading goes a long way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier
Claiming that they're just extracting rent ignores the cost, which even at a 40% margin is still 60% of what they charge.
Do you have any information on their legal costs that would reduce the cost above?
Do you think everyone complaining about prices would be happy if they would reduce prices by 35% across the board, thus making no profit? Or would you still want it to be free? If the latter, your complaint is not solely based in Elsevier's "rent extraction", but in something else.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/16/academic-pub...
It's hardly surprising that publishers would fight dirty to hang on to a business model where scientists do research that is largely publicly funded, and write manuscripts and prepare figures at no cost to the journal; other scientists perform peer-review for free; and other scientists handle the editorial tasks for free or for token stipends. The result of all this free and far-below-minimum-wage professional work is journal articles in which the publisher, which has done almost nothing, owns the copyright and is able to sell copies back to libraries at monopolistic costs, and to individuals at $30 or more per view.
Given that peers review a paper for free and it costs fractions of a penny to host a pdf, why should we care about the publishers? What value do they ultimately bring to the table?
We should be rethinking how this is done entirely.
This is off the cuff, but...
Perhaps researchers applying for public funding should be required to register as peers. Each researcher submits their publication to a public service like data.gov (maybe research.gov?). Peers are automatically assigned according to area of expertise. The peering process proceeds much like it does today.
On completion of review and approval, the paper and any materials needed to reproduce the research is made public and available to anyone.
The cost for all of that would be relatively trivial.
Also, many of those journal fees are paid for with tax dollars to begin with. An expense that would no longer be necessary.
It seems much more likely that PLOS simply charges the "$1000 or so" because they can, and it's easy enough to piggyback on the traditional publisher narrative that they are actually providing this amount of added value.
People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage.
There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
Proper formatting makes it possible to automatically extract bibliographic reference data, text-mine the contents for whatever interesting purposes you might think of, display it in apps and new formats, and store it for decades in a stable format.
Nice value added by the MSRI style right here.
There's a slow-moving Scholarly Markdown project, but I don't know what its status is. http://scholarlymarkdown.com/
I agree with the sentiment, though. If there were some markup language that supported what academics do with LaTeX and Word, and converted cleanly to JATS XML and to nice-looking PDFs, it would be enormously useful.
Do you have any evidence of such economies of scale in existing publishers? As the article says, their margins are around 30%. That means the maximum they could reduce the price without losing money (with simplifying assumptions) is in the 30% range. If you have a way to be significantly more efficient than the status quo, go ahead, I'm sure everyone will be thrilled.
>As a taxpayer, you already pay state universities to access those papers.
That's a fair point. Is the government paying more in access fees than they're saving by not using open access journals?
Here's an example of how to do it on the cheap:
"Scholastica charges us $10 per submission. We have a grant to cover this and our other costs, which are very low. Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article. Therefore, there are no charges for authors, and obviously there are no charges for readers either. A typical article processing charge for one article published in a traditional journal would keep us going for around 50 published articles."
https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-...
Additionally, these journals really do provide more services than most specialized journals. In particular, the editorial service at Nature or Science is of much higher quality than your typical specialized journal. The editing includes editing the text for language and clarity, typesetting, and commissioning third-party high-level summaries (Nature's "News and Views" section). In contrast, at least in computer science and mathematics, most journals do minimal, if any, editing. The editors of prestigious journals do add value, and this helps to maintain the journals' relatively broad audiences.
And for a lab that's publishing a lot, it can add up. Some labs are putting out 10+ pubs a year. And depending on the field, that $10-20k can be a big deal.
Other open access journals are similar. Publication rates are high, because the vast majority of published research is NOT open access.
>But that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.
They may have pulled it out of thin air (although I've seen similar numbers elsewhere, this doesn't seem to be in dispute).
And furthermore, they're minuscule compared to costs of journal access.
Edit: I'm wrong on the second point. They're actually comparable. See comment below.
Research costs may be correct. Do you know where I can find data on average funding for published studies? Or how many government funded studies were published at what budget?
Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access.
So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.