Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
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In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.
* Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent.
* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.
* Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.
* Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus.
[1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.
Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology; ISSN: 2330-1643.
Scientometrics; ISSN: 0138-9130.
Journal of Informetrics; ISSN: 1751-1577.
Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.
Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.
I know at uni, our tutors told us to politely email researchers for a copy in case our subscription didn't cover their research. I didn't bother with this as booksc (libgen) and sci-hub are faster.
Reminds me of the pre-netflix era.
Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access submission fee.
University pays for journal subscriptions.
Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.
These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.
This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.
[1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees
Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.
But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.
Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.
My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.
As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.
Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.
You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.
And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.
As a PhD student myself, I have observed the hiring process at my department many times. Here teaching experience counts, and teaching skills are evaluated: the candidate has to give a talk, which is used to evaluate how well the person can teach. I'm pretty sure it's the same in other universities.
Also, if you're interviewing for a teaching professor position, then you have to give a mock lecture with actual students in attendance.
I sympathize with your ideals about how things should be, but at some point one needs to accept the reality. There's no way to magically find time in professors' time for a review of papers "out of the left field". There aren't any incentives for that, and I don't imagine any universities investing extra money into that. I mean, most professors aren't formally paid for administrative tasks, unless they hold some kind of official title (Department Director, Dean etc.). What they're paid for is research and teaching.
One relatively easy way to fix that would be to publish reviews along with the papers. While you and I would both agree that many reviews are rubbish, many others still are quite insightful and can serve a more expressive indicator of quality than journal/conference ranking and citation count.
Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.
The University of California has already done this.*
Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*
* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...
FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.
I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.
[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication.
I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .)
Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher.
This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources.
("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bi... .)
Bioinformatics is fatally infected by the associated culture of biology. Tools get squirreled away until published in a non-open venue, then eventually dumped online in some difficult to install manner.
But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.
Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.
You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.
If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.
You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.
As long as they are at a university being funded by the public, the public has a claim to the research. If they want to do private research, they can switch to the private.
If a person is being paid by the public, why should they be able to spend their time and resources working in private? Think of it like a general IP ownership agreement at work. Anything you create at work, using the tools your work provides, belongs to the one paying you. Now claims like any similar work you do even after you leave, or work you do on your own equipment on your own time are unreasonable, but I see nothing wrong with that requirement while being paid by the public and using equipment paid for by the public.
"The university" is not funded by the public. It's funded by Federal money, and State money, and tuition, and commercial grants and donations. Just claiming that's "being funded by the public" is claiming 100% of the output, while not providing 100% of the input.
Similarly, I'm not paid from a single source. I'm paid through a mix of state money, federal money, and yes, some commercial grants. If a commercial entity wants to pay for a portion of my lab's expenses and salary, why should "the public" be entitled to the proceeds?
That's the problem being argued against - not that public money should mean public access, but that "some public money" (no matter how small) suddenly entitles the public to everything.
Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately?
Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?
"The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available."
(as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there will be less grants, it's just math.
(Previously I was told that the cost is minuscule compared to the cost of the study itself in general, in which it won't have a large effect. But I haven't seen data.)
If we decide we want the government to also pay the cost of publication, as opposed to having readers pay, great. But it might be expensive, again, data would be helpful.
Blanket statements like "taxpayers paid for it, therefore it should be open" ignore the reality that publishers subsidize publication precisely because they charge for access.
But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.
Rent-seekers gonna seek rent.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
>The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009). The law states:
>The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.
I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.
It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.
There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.
http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html
The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.
I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.
The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.
So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.
I don't hate the player I simply observe how the game is played.
I believe that's the point. "Big corporations lobbying government for rent-seeking legislation" isn't capitalism, it's corruption.
So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
Fraudulent is one of the terms used to describe what corruption is it's adequate here.
buying drugs abroad just skirts ip price fixing. we can skirt price fixing here by making drugs and not paying the ransom costs.
should the government be able to pull eminent domain on lifesaving drugs?
should all drugs purchased with public funds (ex medicare) be exempt from any cost/margin past manufacturing?
it feels to me like importing from canada is having cake and eating it too. we either agree that full drug prices are legitimate or we agree they are unethical. you cant pretend both are compatible worldviews.
How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs that don't get approved?
If you compare the NIH budget vs. the major pharmaceutical companies, it's a 2 to 1 ration. And not all the NIH budget is spent on drug research. It's mostly basic science.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/
I guess this is different country by country.
The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.
Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?
Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.
Besides, those that actually do the research also get other benefits, like having people already familiar at a high level with it, getting to derive and manufacture/patent etc stuff based on the research sooner, etc.
I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.
I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.
The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide.
In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide.
it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.
This FASTR proposal shouldn't be a big deal, since a lot of funding sources already have that requirement. I'm not sure why some funding gets not to be public.
(part of my job is uploading data to pubchem)
[1]http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
Congresscritters care most about votes. They'll take campaign donations if thats all they can get, but they then need to figure out how to turn those campaign donations into votes.
That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.
Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.
[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."
This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.
A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.
Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar:
* do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar).
In addition, I also read papers :-).
For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.
>classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent