European leaders call for open access to all scientific papers by 2020 (2016)
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Meanwhile, a group of Finnish researchers are organizing a review boycott [1] against Elsevier, one of the reasons being Elsevier's unyielding opposition to the Finnish libraries' OA requests [2].
[1] http://www.nodealnoreview.org/
[2] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Scholarly+publications+-...
It is not like the choice is for free..
Most importantly, from the parent comment, senior scientists are the ones that are still volunteering their reviewing efforts to private, closed-access journals, for free. Given that the career penalty for doing less reviews is very small (it might even be negative), to me this is even more puzzling.
By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level.
This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)
Tenured professors are often not the primary authors on papers -- their students and post-docs are and they need to get their papers into good (paywalled) venues. Moreover, they still need to convince people to give them money to hire students and postdocs. If you are a big kahuna, maybe you can get away with taking a moral stand and publishing in OA journals, but it's way easier to sell yourself and maintain your status if you publish where everyone else publishes.
From my experience, there is no doubt that relationships with editors help a scientist publish in better journals. And sour relationships make it harder -- not impossible, but harder. This system is pure meritocracy only in our minds.
The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers (as opposed to the 'open access' 'advocates' who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only all research was downloadable without logging in anywhere) has it through their universities, or you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way. The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers. People jump at the chance of sending their papers to that one person in the world (besides their parents) who actually cares enough to ask about it.
So there is no practical incentive for most people to care enough to put effort into changing the status quo, and the current situation is maybe not optimal but well, neither is the quality of the coffee in the staff room, and if given the choice, most researchers would choose a better coffee machine over all journals being open access.
Note that I don't care one way or another; I don't gain in any way from papers not being publicly accessible. If tomorrow everything is open access, or all open access journals stop existing, won't make one bit of difference to my life. But what I do find annoying is the incessant whining about this topic from people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever, but who will take any opportunity to declare how big bad faceless 'them' is the personification of evil and how everybody else should change to make the world fit their worldview better, while those who are actually affected by this have many other things to worry about and don't care as long at doesn't cause extra work (or change for the sake of it).
Do you have evidence to support this claim? I have heard major open access support coming from very senior and influent members of diverse research communities.
Even assuming that you are right, don't you think that age may be a confounding variable? Of course the opponents to the status quo are not often found among its the most established members. Of course researchers who have always worked with the Internet are more hostile towards editors as they have never known the times where they were providing a useful and nontrivial service.
> elevated numbers of dogmatic purists who don't see the value of interpersonal relations
This is ad hominem, and a weird one at that. I don't see how the "value of interpersonal relations" has any relationship with the issue at hand.
> The thing is that everybody who 'needs' access to research papers [...] has it [...]
Sci-Hub was serving 200k download requests per day in early 2016 (source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...). so it looks like in fact many people need to access scientific articles and are not served well by the current system. (You may say that it doesn't matter as long as Sci-Hub is around, but Sci-Hub cannot get funding easily or be advertised widely, because of the legal insecurity around the precious service that it provides.)
> who like to make up scenarios of how many papers they'd read if only
The issue isn't about how many papers we would read. Open access advocates usually have access to subscriptions. The problem is about people outside academia.
Yes, many papers are actually not read that much at all, and certainly are not read a lot outside of academia. But it's certainly not true that there is zero interest for academic research outside academia. The most obvious example are the numerous HN submissions and comments about stories related to open access, often coming for people who care about getting access to scientific articles but are not academics.
Further, the problem of closed-access is that it perpetuates the disconnection between academia and the rest of the world. If you have to hunt for scientific papers, it's sure that not many people outside academia will want to read them. The same for developing countries: poor universities can't get access to research, so they can't contribute to research, and are locked out of the system. Open-access is about saying that science is not a private club but is open to anyone.
> you send a quick email to the authors and get papers that way
(1.) You have to know that you can do this, most people outside academia do not, and it's not obvious: usually when faced with a paywall on, e.g. an online newspaper, you don't ask the authors. (2.) This only works for authors who have contact information online, are responsive, in particular are alive. (3.) As a researcher I download around a paper a day on average, if I have to find contact info and write and send an email and wait for a reply for each of them, it adds up. (4.) If the authors send you their papers, they may be violating their editor's copyright, so this is still a broken system. You can say it doesn't matter and that I'm a dogmatic purist, but meh, to me it's not OK that a third party can tell me I don't have the right to share my work. It's not OK that distributing my work is an integral part of my job but is a legal minefield because of a problem which shouldn't exist.
> people for whom 9 times out of 10 this makes no difference to their lives whatsoever
As a researcher, I have to sign away to editors the rights to the research that I produce, so that the editors can sell it to unsuspecting people in exchange for having put zero effort in doing the research. Meanwhile I have to work around legal obstacles to put my work online under an open license. I'd like to tell people to do what they want with my work (the way I do with my code with open-source licenses), but I can't, because maybe it's not true and publishers would have the right to object. As a taxpayer, I see the government wasting tens of millions in subscriptions to journals so that universities can buy access to the contents of public research, so I am an accomplice of this if I publish in closed-access journals. I have seen many good students get disgusted of academia when it turned out that they had to give away all rights to their work so that some corporation could make money out of it; many of my non-academic friends blame me and other researchers for their participation to this ridiculous system.
There are some valid points in what you write, but I don't understand the hostility. Even if open access mattered as little as what you seem to think, it's still a step in the right direction, so why so much contempt?
The majority of academics I have talked to about this in real life (let's say... 30-40 out of 50) thought we sorely needed open access in terms of:
- The public pays for science, they should be able to see the result
- Lots of out-of-work and between-jobs academics, scientists-turned-entrepreneur, scientists in small companies etc. that can't access a research library
- It's morally wrong to have the public sector hand so much money to a few private companies like Elsevier for doing very little besides existing and rent-seeking.
- Scientists and the public in developing countries and third world countries have a very limited ability to get involved in global science and engineering when it's paywalled.
- In fields like medicine especially, paywalls are literally preventing the public from knowing how to be healthy.
Have you considered that maybe the reason why for example, "The vast majority of all published papers is read only by the reviewers." is because it's not openly and freely published?
I suspect perhaps the reason you are being downvoted (on other sites presumably) is because most people think your view is wrong or unacceptable i.e. immoral. Have you considered that possibility?
Research Works Act, where Elsevier et al tried to do literally this.
When we pointed out this conflict to superiors, top science administration officials and university directors and asked about legal support, the idea was that we get no legal support whatsoever! If we breach a publisher's contract because we're forced to by the government, we're on our own. And it doesn't stop there. Assessment of tenure track positions is done by committees that are not staffed with science administration people but with independent peer reviewers, of course, so the procedures cannot really be changed. But if they could be changed somehow, e.g. by forcing these panels to disregard closed access publications, we'd get a whole generation of complete crackpot professors and the level of science would go down the gutter nationwide, because there are simply not enough reputable open access journals. Anybody can upload something in an open access repository, whereas the top journals I'm talking about have acceptance rates below 5%.
So for us currently the choice is between ignoring the open access policies and getting into trouble with the local science administration folks, or giving up our careers and any prospects to ever get a fixed position, and most people chose the former for obvious reasons.
Because the senior professor wants his/her students to be successful in their next job search, he/she will continue to submit papers in high impact not open access journals.
Doing otherwise would penalize heavily his students and postdocs.
[0[ https://www.elsevier.com/__data/promis_misc/j.custom97.pdf
This is only for what private publishers like Elsevier call "open access". Reputable publishers like LIPIcs (in computer science) charge 60 EUR per article. Besides, they charge this for all articles (i.e., there is no option to publish closed-access), so they do not sell subscriptions, hence there is no double payment.
Of course, all of this is in addition to the intrinsic cost of doing the research.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/28/eu-ministers...
Right now I'm researching a few studies that have been shown to be... "not 100% forthcoming"... thanks to some court documents, drafts, and collusive emails found in PACER. It has forever changed the way I'll look at any research, government-funded or not.
In the past the cost of papers was paid on the demand side and borne communally, now the cost is paid on the supply side. Science still values paper counts and citation counts - but it seems to me that folks who can afford publication now have an unhealthy advantage that they didn't used to!
http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
Profit margins are amazing though, it really pays to get into publishing. Elsevier (not all open access, and rather dodgy to many) is one of the most profitable businesses in the world: https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier...
Yeah, as in forcing you to submit in an artificially crappy template with horrible double spacing (which is awful as a reviewer) to then apply their standard template and voilà! The paper looks good.
give it a thorough last read (finding for me several errors that peer review never found - missing or switched references, for example)
They do that (with varying quality) but it's quite aggravating that they charge thousands of dollars mostly for that, while peer review, which is much harder, is done for free.
This may depend on the field, but in CS I have never seen this. There is essentially no change made by the publisher to papers, and when they do make changes, more often than not it is to introduce errors.
In any case, the huge profit margins of publishers indicate that the cost of this dubious service is much lower than the charge.
But the most important point is this: doing minor copyediting shouldn't be grounds to own the journal and own copyright on the published articles. The journals should be owned by scientists, or by a nonprofit scientific society. Even assuming that research needs to pay for copyediting services, these should be contractors of the nonprofit (with competition among them), not owners of the journal and articles.
In principle it's great that articles are uniformly in XML -- you could easily write reader software for tablets or phones, data-mine the text, extract references, whatever -- but I haven't seen much software taking advantage of it.
However! Once published and out the door, the shiny XML is available for scraping and transformation, and, if OA, there is no reason the XML can't be made public: https://github.com/elifesciences/elife-article-xml
An excellent bit of software that takes advantage of it is Lens: https://github.com/elifesciences/lens
I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
With the anonymous system we have today, there are no wrong reviews.
Drop a couple of citations and you end up with a 90% probability of getting your desired reviewer...
And many more.
People seem to think that there is no politics in academia and science, and that everybody is automaton-rational people with no ulterior motives. Very, very wrong...
Elsevier et al are nothing but leeches on the back of the academic community. They provide zero benefit and need go to the fuck away.
How about papers in the public domain?
Maybe if America had open access, things would of turned out a lot better for Aaron Swartz :(
Well, "private" and "public" is a fuzzy distinction.
Most of the mega-private companies get so much public money (in the form of subsidies) or avoid paying so much money (in the form of special tax deals and exception laws they lobby and pay under the table for) that end up costing more to a state than lots of its own operations.
When they tanked after decades of gluttony and playing it fast and loose with huge profits (which they didn't share of course), the "private" financial firms got a 1 trillion government bailout (and similar treatment in Europe and elsewhere), whereas no small private business will ever see a dime in such fashion.
The cost is in fact small just compared to the subscription fees. I don't have the statistics for how much countries pay editors in subscription fees (because in fact these deals are often negociated in private and the terms are secret), but I think it is highly likely that this money is several times higher than what it would cost to run everything on private money.
The review board expressly noted two things that were out of the norm with my thesis. One: I chose to include source code with my thesis. Every copy came with a CD-ROM. (I even made sure to upload the same archive to the digital library so access to print copies was not required.)
And two: the review board made a point of mentioning that I released the sources for my thesis project with a very liberal license. What I had considered only fair, the board considered out of the ordinary.
Footnote - I didn't include just the sources. I included the entire .svn/ hierarchy to provide complete editing history.
Footnote 2 - I picked up git in 2007. Thesis was done in 2006.
This requires training up and down the line and it's helpful if authors push for these basic things because if a formal process isn't in place to handle exotic content like code, then it may get dropped from the final submission because it's simply too much of an effort for everybody.
I like it. I'm actually going to toss this idea to the people I still know at my university.
Isn't that reaching too far?
I feel there is a reasonable, decent case for private, for-profit scientific research, is there not?
Just kidding of course, this is great news. The EU should still be the main beneficiary of open access science following this policy.
May. 27, 2016Note, that here the "product" I'm referring to is the final formatted article. If governments want to mandate that universities release internal versions of their published works that seems fine, but that work should be for the universities or governments to undertake. They should not be allowed to release Nature's formatted/published version. This is how Pubmed Central works currently in the US (unformatted manuscripts are released, not the journals' version). When Nature releases an article, they put a lot of work into formatting it for publication so it looks nice. That final product does and should belong to them.
It's fine if people think that publicly-funded research should be freely available. But the fact remains that scientists have been voluntarily publishing their work in private for-profit journals for 100+ years. You can't just "undo" that. And they're still doing it today. If scientists truly felt strongly about these issues they'd only publish in OA journals, but most of them don't care (source: I'm a scientist).
Of course they have the authority. Publishers own these works on the basis of copyright law. Laws can be changed by governments.
That is actually one interesting discrepancy, I think there are some countries where you can not assign away the copyright to your work for someone else in a manner that you loose the copyright yourself. Anyone familiar with this or am I just remembering things incorrectly? In such case how would Elsevier and the like react when someone decides to put their work published in such paper on their blog for free?
yeah, slightly not "voluntarily".
This is sort of the gist of the problem. For one, the researches themselves are shielded from the lack of open access because all major universities have institutional access. Secondly, no one wants to take up the auxiliary work that would be required to publish a journal, even if it's only publishing on the web. And finally, it's hard to replace history and prestige of existing journals. Younger researchers will continue submitting to these journals since they care more about their careers than ideals. Any change in public perception would have to be driven top down by people already established in their fields.
Don't you think that this is of very little added value? Nature could publish the submitted articles as is, and nobody would care. The only value the journal has is the supposed prestige of getting an article published there, which has ridiculous early career effects.
Are you American? I ask because this comment reflects a particularly American notion of property as an immutable, "God-given" right. In this thinking, governments exist to protect private property, not define it.
As someone else pointed out, the concept of intellectual property only exists in law that is inherently mutable. And whether the government can take away someone's property by redefining it as not property -- that's a question over which Americans once fought a bloody civil war.
Nobody is telling publishers what they have to do.
The directives are aimed at publically funded institutions, instructing them how public research funds can be used.
This is about the customer's money, and I imagine also in any capitalist philosophy the government as a customer has the right to decide how its own funds can be used.
For the future, submitting to OA(-friendly)-publications can be demanded or be part of the conditions for public funding.
Sadly, there are many people who believe a centrally planned economy and nationalization are good ideas. Don't let the downvotes get to you.
I suppose each generation has to learn the hard way...
"If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. If you are still a socialist at 30, you have no brain."
But taxpayers' money are spent on journal subscriptions. So there might be people who care.