Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samfisher83 | Hacker News Reader

I think is a key part of the article:

The foundation, which is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, stipulates that the researchers whom it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data sets immediately upon publication. And papers must be published under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse — including for commercial purposes.

But some journals do not offer this kind of open-access (OA) publishing. Many of them allow papers to be made free to read after an embargo period, usually of around six months, and let authors upload accepted manuscripts online. But neither policy meets the Gates Foundation’s requirements. And so, for papers submitted from the start of 2017, a few top journals are currently off limits to Gates-funded academics.

“We are having ongoing and fruitful discussions with these publishers,” says Dick Wilder, associate general counsel with the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. Wilder adds that the Gates Foundation does not plan to allow exceptions to its policy.

I greatly applaud the gates foundation.

Yes this specifically excludes Nature, Science, and Cell, which is critical because those are the career-making journals all of us academics must currently bow down to. Please Gates Foundation force their hand!

YOU force their hand. I'm tired of these journals playing gatekeepers in academia. Fuck that noise.

Be honest, do you not go by journal title when you have to choose whether or not to read a paper? It's an imperfect metric, but it's the one we have. 25 years ago I attended a talk (by a representative from Pergamon) about the future of scientific publishing. It was out of control even then, and when in the Q & A session someone suggested ditching journals altogether this Pergamon (!) guy made the same remark: do you not read the journal title? Pergamon, whose best-known journal was Tetrahedron. Pergamon. Uttered by a Pergamon guy.

In some fields arXiv may have improved matters, but most fields still rely on journals.

Sadly, I did go by journal title, but not the way you think. In antibiotic research and microbiology I finally arrived at the point where I assumed anything published in Nature, Science, or Cell was likely to be so fundamentally flawed that the only reason to read it was so I could explain why we shouldn't waste our time in journal club with it.

Lately I have been questioning whether or not we need large-scale peer-reviewed journals anymore.

For example, if I knew that Leonard Susskind read a paper and cited, shared, liked, or bookmarked it, then that could easily replace my fundamental need of having the paper stamped by a trusted authority. If scientists could share, cite, and discuss papers on an open source platform (like Facebook, but for Academia), I believe that we wouldn't need these gatekeepers anymore, and they would become obsolete. The real authority has always been the scientists who are doing good, promising research, not some contrived group of scientists who are solely reviewing papers for the sake of assessing their quality.

An (possibly flawed) analogy: do need CNN/ABC/FOX when we have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to propagate news?

I think we need to force the hand of tenure committees.

Nature and Science are high profile, but due to ridiculous space constraints, I groan whenever a seminal paper is published there. If there is meat to the article, it's in the supplement, which forces a really awkward way of reading articles.

Cell is somewhat better.

But ideally the community would abandon Nature and Science as being the gold standard of publication. Field-specific journals that allow science to be published sensibly would be much better. When was the last time that a molecular biologist benefited from having a physicist brush past their highly technical article on epigenetics because it happened to be in Science? The benefit of these cross-field journals are somewhat limited, IMHO.

Is Nature still taken seriously? When they cover computer science or energy (especially batteries) the articles are heavy on hype. Don't know about life sciences.

There's a large difference between the Nature news website which is on the better side of average, but still average, science journalism and the journal which is a far larger and more complex behemoth.

In bio sciences (I was in neuro), nature is considered a tier one journal and a big deal to get published in.

Not the articles, the peer reviewed academic papers. For those, Nature is a big deal.

The benefit of these cross-field journals are somewhat limited, IMHO.

Complete isolation between disciplines doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. Cross-pollination can be useful in surprising ways.

Further, the point of science isn't to advance the careers of scientists, it's to increase human knowledge and capability. Collecting and distributing research from many disciplines furthers that purpose better than isolating disciplines.

Do Nature and Science really have these cross-pollinated articles?

I of course agree on both counts.

However my point is that Science and Nature do nothing to little to support cross-pollination. And that their main purpose as being the "high profile" journals is that they serve to advance the careers of those that get their paper published there.

The article mentioned journals making special arrangements with the Gates Foundation. I hope that GF doesn't make any of these special arrangements, meaning that unless a journal is OA then they won't get any of these papers at all.

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