Open access: All human knowledge is there, so why can’t everybody access it?
arstechnica.co.uk
arstechnica.co.uk
Nonfiction and scientific work should be treated differently than fictional works. I don't really care if Mickey Mouse goes into the public domain. But it's crazy that 100 year old scientific works can still be under copyright and illegal to distribute. These objectively have value to society, and the argument for the existence of the public domain is much stronger.
It shouldn't last indefinitely. Maybe only 10 or 15 years. I believe 99% of all works make most of their money in the first few years. Having copyright last a lifetime, let alone much longer, is just crazy.
Put a cost on renewing copyright. This is actually how it used to be. Half way through, you could pay a fee to have copyright extended. Very few people paid this fee (because most works aren't economically valuable), so most works went into public domain much sooner. Journals charge $30 to access obscure ancient papers. But I bet they wouldn't pay even $30 to keep the rights to those same papers.
Don't put everything into copyright by default. And again especially works of nonfiction or scientific papers. If the authors want that, then sure. This wouldn't fix the issues with big journals that demand it. But it still seems like a sensible idea to have copyright opt-in, not opt-out.
I disagree, scientists generally aren't seeking to get money by people buying a copy of their paper (if anything they're currently paying so people can read it) there's no need for them to invoke copyright law at all, in fact that would be against their own interest.
The problem is that the current system forces scientists to publish in journals, which will happily charge an arm and a leg for the privilege, and invoke whatever law they can to make more money, even if this goes directly against the interests of the scientists who wrote the papers.
1. Scientists aren't at the heart of the scientific Open Access problem. Journals are.
2. The fact that copyright exists means that journals can then request it be transferred (or licensed) to the journal. For what's effectively forever.
3. Journals exercise gatekeeper access over scientists' careers, in that publishing in prestige journals is how scientists advance academically. This is de facto* coercive control over scientists.
4. With that control, journals compell publication of articles in controlled journals, for scientists to advance, require subscriptions of libraries (who otherwise forgo access to the material), and maintain a bank of virtually all scientific papers published since 1924 as an absolute monopoly.
Hence: no copyright, or a far-less-rediculous copyright, say, 14, 28, or 54 years (as was historically the case, via registration(s) and/or renewals), and much the problem would disappear.
The additional factor of deadweight costs of denied access to virtually all of humanity for this material is the other cost.
As much as I feel that science---especially publicly funded science (which almost all of it is)---ought to be freely available fairly quickly, I think making a distinction for the purposes of copyright law between fiction and non-fiction is fairly hairy. Clearly "A Streetcar Named Desire" is fiction, but what about memoirs? Poetry? The Onion? Dianetics? The output of human writing spans a continuum of factual-ness, and it's not obvious to me that there's a good way to draw a line.
Even in the hardest of sciences, it's often underappreciated how much interpretation and creative energy goes into a paper.
Two examples on the top of my head:
1. The strange cave of Ali Baba (or how to explain Zero-Knowledge protocols to your children) - Jean-Jacques Quisquater - Advances in Cryptology - 1990.
2. The fable of the Tyrant Dragon - Nick Bostrom - Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005¹. This is a work of fiction designed to make a statement about the stance of society towards fighting aging.
However given the context of an allegory in a larger work of nonfiction, or it's publication in a nonfiction scientific journal, I would lean towards saying it should be nonfiction.
But what about
- popular scientific books
- popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
or
- science fiction books
- "hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
- a description of a highly experimental physical theory embedded in a nice framework of how alien civilizations might take use of technology that this theory enables
or
- Books about historical facts
- Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago).
- Novels that are based on historical facts that nevertheless take some literary license to make the story more exciting
- Fictional story that is occured in some concrete non-fictional historic time
or
- A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment, where in the story some academic person gives a quite scientifically accurate description of the thought experiment
- A novel that is based on some ethical thought experiment
>popular scientific books
Certainly nonfiction.
>popular scientific books that embed the science into a nice story
Not sure what you mean, but that sounds like fiction even if it has some science in it.
>hard" science fiction books, which are strongly oriented on physical theories
Same thing.
>Novels that are strongly based on historical facts and even interviews with contemporary witnesses, that nevertheless use some little literary license (for example The Gulag Archipelago
Well your own wikipedia link classifies it as fiction at the bottom. In fact all the examples of novels that are loosely based on truth are fiction.
But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
>A scientific description of some ethical thought experiment
This seems like the only fuzzy example. But such a thought experiment will almost always be in the context of a larger nonfiction work. And it will be published in a place like a scientific journal with other nonfiction, and be placed in the nonfiction section of a library. So that seems like the most practical and natural classification, legally.
Non-fiction pop sci isn't funded in the same way as scientific research.
Authors are paid to write pop sci, and it's very hard to produce a good book without getting paid an advance which allows a significant amount of full-time research.
If you create a system that can't pay advances, you're limiting pop sci to amateur efforts and short Wikipedia articles.
It's true a lot of pop sci isn't all that great. But the best books are literally life changing, and it's really not the best idea in the world to make it impossible to fund them.
>But no one is ever going to claim a scientific paper is a work of fiction, and should be protected for 100+ years.
There should be no question that scientific papers should be public, because the public has already paid for them.
Private research can be protected by patents, so there's no reason not to share the research with the public as long as commercial implementations are protected.
It's utterly ridiculous that an out of print 1950's textbook by a dead author, is still protected by copyright. How is society benefiting from this arrangement at all?
1) a technical or research article
2) produced with public funding
Could receive more limited (shorter-term) copyrights etc.
For example you could have a rule that anybody who makes a work available "in good faith" in the belief that it is a scientific paper out of copyright is not liable to damages. Then all edge cases would be cleared in the context of take-down requests, which is not very high stakes...
That's a very US-centric (or to be precise, Anglo-Saxon centric) statement. The vast majority of countries in the world uses a civil-law system instead of common-law system. In civil-law system, codes and statutes are designed and supposed to cover all edge cases and eventualities
For example, the whole German tort law is basically: "A person who, intentionally or negligently, unlawfully injures the life, body, health, freedom, property or another right of another person is liable to make compensation to the other party for the damage arising from this."
When is a behavior negligent? What falls under the "another right of another person" (your reputation, your privacy?)? Does the owner of a highway-restaurant get damages if a negligent chemicals transport company does not secure its load properly, leading to dangerous chemicals spilled on the highway, leading to closure of the highway for a week = meaning no customers for a week? [damage to property???] These are all questions that are totally up for a judge to decide.
Classifying if a work is a scientific or a non-scientific publication - or at least if somebody might have classified it as scientific in good faith - is nothing that a civil law jurisdiction can't deal with. Other areas of law have much harder conceptual distinctions. (E.G. Are parent and subsidiary company having an "at arms length" relationship as required in transfer pricing tax law?)
Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane.
I've said it before, and many of us will inevitably say it again, but this is not 1800. Charge for what is valuable and scarce, your creativity (or in the case of a scientist, their knowledge), not what is not valuable or scarce, which is bits on a hard drive.
There is a alternate vein which doesn't have to do with value or scarcity, but which has to do with rivalrousness (that is a very subtle distinction):
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2011/07/09/culture-is-anti-rivalro...
You may find it interesting.
I do think at some point in the future historians will look back and see the catastrophic death of culture permanent copyright wrought throughout the 20th / 21st centuries as a huge crime against humanity. We are sad we have few historical recounts of ancient Egyptian / Greek / Roman living, or even moreso ancient Mesoamerican peoples, or the Babylonians, but we seem perfectly complacent in how some ~95% of all music, film, photography, writing, and even probably code is lost forever because of copyright meaning if the owners take it to their grave it stays dead with them. It is just a tremendous disservice to humanity to just let so much creative work die like that, and how generations have now grown and died without any of the commercial works of their childhood ever being accessible to their own creativeness in their lifetimes.
Either that, or I fear we face a future as described in Idiocracy.
From what I understand, Stallman is concerned about making sure our infrastructure is free (as in freedom). The simplicity of copying is almost a tangential issue. His point is that for a society to be considered free (democratic, empowered, etc.) the people need access in a meaningful way to the infrastructure that helps create that society. To me, his point is a natural extension of forcing government documents to be under public domain and providing architectural blueprints for public scrutiny.
Maybe I'm wrong and mis-interpreting Stallman's point. Do you have a reference that would support your claimed stance on Stallman's 'ease of copying = moral justification against copyright' interpretation?
If you can only make money off people paying you to write the software, having the broadest audience becomes crucial, and in such a world (much in the same way most developer tools work outside the MS ecosystem) not being free software would mean nobody would fathom using your software.
The author states that cultural works increase in value the more they are shared. At the risk of debating semantics ("shared", "value") — would Disney still be a $50B company if anyone had been allowed to release a Mickey Mouse cartoon?
Copyright is intended to incentivize people to create things by giving them a limited monopoly on the ability to copy/distribute it. I write a book, no one else can print and sell copies without my permission. Thus I have a chance to make some money off it. If I write a book and anyone can sell it, I'm less likely to make money off it.
If that argument was true in 1800 when some other guy had to physically print out my book, why is it somehow not true today when you can upload a torrent of it?
(I do think current copyright terms are absolutely absurd. If they were 10 years or renewable with fees or anything else that would solve 95% of the problems.)
In practice, even that explanation reflects on the insanity of copyright, in that you should never get to the point where you have done free work and now need the state to assist you in making a living off it. You should be seeking compensation for the act of creation, not for the act of copying.
Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator.
Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself.
It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.
"Remember, today, there are millions of people using their computer to voluntarily and entirely charitably give away information for free, that other people want to stop them from doing. That is so absurd and insane."
Only until you remember that what they're trying to share wasn't theirs in the first place.
If you create something, great, share it with everyone you want. But don't you dare force others into doing the same thing with what they created.
So, for example, if you invented Viagara, and every pharma company in the world figured out how to make it cheaper in their own way, they're free to make it but they have to pay the creator (individual or corporation) a royalty fee to do so.
I think royalties are a better way to incentivize innovation while not allowing patent protections to stifle the market as a whole.
Ridiculous.
That's 10 or 15 years potentially holding back humanity and preventing Shit Getting Done.
I'm a shareholder and board member of SAGE Publications, which was founded by my grandparents. SAGE is about the 5th largest journal publisher and is and will remain a private family-owned company. I know it's hard to believe, but publishers aren't one homogenous evil entity plotting how to rip off the public. There are lots of fucked up things about the journal system, many of which publishers have caused or been complicit in. But there are also a lot of complicated factors that are entirely outside publishers' ability to change. Academia is a mess in a lot of ways, and much of the overall dysfunction of the whole system has manifested in what has become the hard to comprehend journal publishing system of today.
I live in Oakland and would love to meet up with anyone who happens to be in the Bay Area, or just have Skype calls no matter where you are. My contact info is in my HN profile. Drop me an email and I'd love to pick your brain to hear about how you're approaching academic publishing.
We've funded two startups in the last few years. PeerJ is an open access journal undercutting the traditional publishers AND most OA publishers (like PLOS) on price. Publons is trying to provide incentives for peer review and encourage openness in the peer review process. We'd love to find a few more good companies doing truly innovative stuff that will have an impact on academic publishing.
Make contact with Alexandra Elbakyan. She clearly tries to bring innovation to the academic journal space (though not legal one).
And here we are today, where the best knowledge is locked up behind paywalls and "cute" and "the new sincerity" (what a load of crap...) reign supreme.
TL;DR: "We got tired of being sarcastic all the time, so this time we decided to say something we actually mean."
I've seen it called it 'The New Sincerity' in the sense that it is supposed to be about craftsmen displaying sincere (in the sense that they believe in its 'awesomeness') enthusiasm for their work; unfortunately in the process it has been co-opted by spin doctors and marketing people, filtered down to its emotional essence (cute, happy, lies about friendship, lots of awesomeness), and then used repeatedly until the next fad comes.
One of the largest examples I can think of is the hipster-y, craft aesthetic (crossed arrows are particularly overused cliche). Come to think of it I think the SF hipster clique were some of its original proponents.
http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2006/02/manifesto-for-new-sin... ... notice the writer's enthusiasm
I've noticed this, and have found it relatively innocuous.
The largest corporate instances I can think of are Snapple or Ben and Jerry's, would you agree? Or am I thinking of a different phenomenon?
No - you really need benevolent dictatorship at the site/content level.
When reproducing findings of an openly accessible paper it's extremely frustrating when some of the references are unreachable.
I'm not in academia so for one I don't have university access to papers and for two I often need to trickle down the references to fill knowledge gaps.
Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Seeing that I must normally believe it to be a 50/50 thing makes it a great way to calibrate my mood out of my decision making process.
More on topic: I wonder if we'll see countries take a stance in these battles. Why isn't Ecuador Hosting a Sci-Hub Mirror for their citizens? The naive observer might think there is only upsides for countries like these to such an action.
Even if in the future universal open access is implemented, this will not solve the problem. To quote Aaron Swartz (https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...):
"The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay."
The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about theoretical cheap costs.
So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.
People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well, summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)
You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..." but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is some cost.
Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions. So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on 19 others.
I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and their fees as they're a non-profit.
> SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers.
Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar.
Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount of papers.
"Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar."
Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
> Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost. PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting.
[0] http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science
If we look at non-profit publishers like PLoS we see processing charges between $1,500 - $3,000 per article. And you have to realize that there are multiple kinds of peer review, at a basic level it breaks down to two categories, what I'll call "methodological review" and "impact review". PLoS One, for example, only does methodological review. So at no point in that process is anyone trying to assess the importance of the paper. eLife is a newer open access publisher going a bit the other way, trying to have a journal selecting for importance of the caliber of Nature, Cell, etc. Their initial costs (these numbers are a few years old) came out to be about $14,000 per article.
Depending on how you approach peer review and what services you are trying to provide you can certainly get the cost down, but I have yet to see a model that can get down below about $700 per article (still only doing methodological review). Sci-Hub can be cheap because it piggy backs on the process after the vetting and curation are done. But that's like comparing apple to oranges.
Thats actually the most important counter in your post. It's a good point as they do effectively piggyback on the curation process. I think there's still a smaller comparison to be made if we look at the web. All kinds of people post all kinds of stuff. Good stuff eventually makes it into paid or free places that curate it for various communities. Yet, I can access any of these public sites at any time. I can look myself, follow a recommendation made on a forum, go to a free site offering links to good resources, or go to paid site claiming higher quality. Whereas, with main publishers in academia, I have no such options: paid, expensive, and for a long time. Let's get to the costs you describe, though, as it's the meat of your counter.
"If we look at non-profit publishers like PLoS"
Doing that was going to be my proposal as they filter out the fat that comes with management-heavy for-profits. Good you beat me to it.
""methodological review" and "impact review". "
Do you have a link to what goes into methodological review, esp good review, so I can try to assess how to reduce its cost?
"processing charges between $1,500 - $3,000 per article"
That should be easy to cover with non-exhorbitant, subscription models plus some charge to submitting organization. Such articles, after costs recovered, should become free with journal subscription. I think your organization is already doing something like that with one of the startups, though.
"came out to be about $14,000 per article."
This is where publishers won't be able to absorb the costs unless they're charging an arm and a leg. I think the article's recommendation of it coming out of grant money of submitting organization is best one. Want to get prestige? Then review is a cost of doing it. Could be uphill battle but I agree nobody can offer anything free unless such costs are covered externally or with charges for a period of time.
You can read PLOS One's criteria here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/criteria-for-publication or their reviewer guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/reviewer-guidelines which states:
Unlike many journals which attempt to use the peer review process to determine whether or not an article reaches the level of 'importance' required by a given journal, PLOS ONE uses peer review to determine whether a paper is technically sound and worthy of inclusion in the published scientific record.
So basically they've removed any assessment whatsoever about the "importance" of the work, but keep the aspect that assesses for scientific soundness. One note on that is that it allows you to use a broader pool of reviewers. If I'm looking for reviewers to assess the impact of a certain study, I'm going to need potentially very specific people who deeply know the field and how this particular study falls in the context of other noteworthy studies. However, if I only need reviewers to assess scientific soundness I can include a larger pool of reviewers for each paper, since theoretically someone's ability to assess scientific method doesn't require quite the same deep expertise (obviously there's still a good amount of expertise required, just not within the specific micro sub-specialty).
So the theory is that that allows you to do faster peer review and accept more papers because 1) you don't have to be so specific with regard to finding the right reviewers, 2) the review itself is faster because the reviewer can focus purely on methodology, not on importance, and 3) you can accept everything that meets the methodology bar. And remember that the revenue of these types of journals is directly related to how many articles are accepted because it's purely author pays upon acceptance.
But other than those distinctions in general the peer review process is the same as a traditional journal. Typically at least 2 reviewers, and either single-blind (which is the case for PLOS and others like PeerJ) or double-blind. And typically the process can take a few rounds, because the reviewers can reject a paper in its current form but ask for a revision and then re-review the new version.
The PLOS pricing is listed here: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ PLOS One is their megajournal that does the type of methodological review discussed above. Other PLOS journals, like PLOS Biology have different review criteria (and higher author charges) that does include importance as a factor (http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/editorial-and-peer-re...).
I fall into the latter camp. In other words, I believe that by sharing and cooperating, we all can advance.
And, I find myself increasingly thinking and experiencing that the zero-sum-gainers are my opposition. They take as much as they can get away with, and they give as little as they can get away with.
Personal advancement, versus communal.
I can't cooperate with them.
And, I no longer want to engage with them.
I cannot afford to do things that lend or provide them power. For it is only ever turned against me, to leverage further advantage.
Now... for "the community" to come to realize this, and act upon it.
People like to say this, but they are only okay with sharing things they approve of. By your logic, aren't you morally obligated to let me have something of yours if I ask for it? I'm not criticizing cooperation, just the idealism that falls apart in practice.
The best course of action is a complex blend of the two camps you mentioned.
All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020
http://english.eu2016.nl/latest/news/2016/05/27/all-european...
I'm trying it for now, you could, too.
http://www.jonaseinarsson.se/2016/only-open-access-peer-revi...
It's the dumbed down version of them that should be more proactively shared. And if interested, one can dig deep into the subject at hand.
Next, finding the material on the Internet, say, 1 trillion or so Web pages, is too often from difficult to much worse. My startup is intended to help with that.
I've developed a new Internet search engine except it's very different from any other search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) and is more for discovery, recommendation, curation, notification, and subscription. Mostly it's for discovery and recommendation.
What Google, etc. do is part of what long ago the field of information retrieval characterized as just part of the problem, the part where the user knows that the content exists, knows they will like the content, and has keywords/phrases that characterize that content. For that part, Google, Bing, etc. work great. But, again, as has been known for decades, that's only part of the problem.
I'm attacking the rest of the problem, that is, where a user knows less about what they want. For that I derived some new mathematics, with some advanced prerequisites, with theorems and proofs, designed the business model, the user interface, the Web pages, the SQL database, the software and server farm architecture and the code, wrote the code, for the production code, 20,000 programming language statements in 80,000 lines of typing. The code is darned fast and appears to run as intended. Currently the code is in alpha test. Then beta test and going live.
and libgen (the latter one really isn't mentioned).
Exactly that happened.
But I think it's ironic for an article about open access to make itself essentially unprintable in this way. It's too long for me to read on the screen. A "page of HTML" would be demonstrably superior for that purpose.