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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

Here's one thing I don't understand about the call for open access.

Academic papers are not read by the general public because they are dense and usually very technical, accessible to researchers in that field but not really to many others.

Given this, the subtext to arguments for open access that journal fees are stifling scientific awareness or potential research by depriving the public seems incorrect.

Because a relatively small specialist community actually consumes scientific literature, I don't see paid journals as some egregious societal inefficiency.

Universities make so much money nowadays that it's certainly a travesty if researchers have to pay for access to these journals themselves, but the point remains that it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal that the public doesn't have free access to scientific journals.

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> Academic papers are not read by the general public because they are dense and usually very technical, accessible to researchers in that field but not really to many others.

You underestimate how quickly a motivated person with a solid general education can start to understand specialized texts. In my case, I have recently been diagnosed with a chronic disease that changed my life, and that most of the doctors in my area are surprisingly ignorant about

Thanks to sci-hub, I've been able to access the latest research about my condition, and so have helped my doctors understand and offer me some of the latest therapies (in theory, that should be their job, but most doctors seem fairly uninterested, or else just too busy to care). I've been unable to work much since getting sick, so there's no way in hell I would be able to afford $30-40 a pop for journal articles. Besides, I'm already paying for the research in the form of 20+ years of tax payments.

And there are many people like me out there.

Because 1) I paid for it, and denying it to me is as stealing an unused item from my house and 2) laypeople DO use scientific papers. I read the paper about 40Hz light being applied to mice with Alzheimer’s and used it to built a light-flickering headset to try on my mother. Open access is just basic morals for taxpayer funded research.

You paid for the F-35 too. Do you deserve a ride in one?

Are you concerned that your unsupervised human trials might harm your mother? Your anecdote makes a point in favor of restricting access.

I was not concerned about harming my mother as she was dying of Alzheimer’s and used to be a scientist — she wanted to try it herself.

How come only people at universities should get access to knowledge?

$30-40+ per article is, effectively, no access. It's ridiculous. Well, it's access for the wealthy and academia I guess.

I read about a lot of stuff, many different subjects, and a lot of the papers by the people I want to read, and articles mentioned in other books and papers, are of this $30-to-view kind. It sounds like that never happened to you? I think this black-and-white elitist 'researchers vs public' idea is a silly model of reality. Even someone who's never read any papers in their life, may one day have some medical, legal, historical, artistic etc need or desire to become better educated in some area, which is prevented. Or was, before SciHub. But that's not an 'egregious inefficiency' so never mind?! That's a long way from As We May Think.

the journal industry (NPG, elsevier, etc...) are the very definition of rent seeking. They add basically no value on top of the work.

Also the very idea that it's ok to gatekeeper off knowledge that was paid with public funds because you think the general public won't be interested in it is ridiculous and wrong.

LOTS of people regularly read scientific papers - many people in technical fields, people who studied an area of research but are not active researchers, and so on.

I don't think its right to say they add no value. They definitely don't add value anywhere near what they charge (clearly based on their profit margins) but they do provide a service (albeit often minor). They coordinate reviewers (who they don't compensate), certain journals (Nature and Science in my experience) provide typesetting and editorial service beyond just basic copyediting, they provide a website to download the content.

I'm in no way saying these services couldn't easily be replicated at a much lower/negligible cost but they do provide a service.

> They ... provide typesetting and editorial service beyond just basic copyediting.

Not necessarily. For-profit publishers today – perhaps more often than not – expect the unpaid volunteer editors of the journal to do any typesetting or copy-editing, and then just send the publisher a camera-ready PDF to print.

Minor correction: many publishers don't even coordinate the reviewers. That's usually left to editors. Editors are generally unpaid, or are paid some trivial insignificant amount.

Additionally, I am a member of several societies who have outsourced their journal publication to a commercial publisher, and who use the money from those contracts to pay for society activities like travel scholarships, etc.

While I am no longer working in Academia and don't have access to journal subscriptions I'm still able to easily read papers in my discipline (Materials Science) and many others across a wide range of related physical science fields. Granted, PhDs are a minority of the general public, I'm still a member of the public and I'd like to read journal articles that come about as the result of my tax-funded research grants.

Other smart people, with some dedication and effort could learn enough to read scientific journals. People learn to read music or learn other languages. If you wanted to learn science you should have access to the works you helped fund.

There are plenty of researchers who use sci-hub, and I personally know several doctors who were beyond ecstatic when I told them about sci-hub.

So it's not just pedestrians who have problems accessing the most recent research information.

Am a researcher, and I love sci-hub. My institution doesn't have access to Elsevier journals (bless them!), so I happily sci-hub all of their articles.

> Universities make so much money nowadays

It might be true in some countries but that's certainly not the case everywhere.

And even if it were the case everywhere just because they make money doesn't mean some other private company should exist to siphon some of it away we should figure out how to cut back the universities so people can afford it.

My taxes go to funding a lot of this research. I am paying for it already, so why do I need to pay for it again?

In an abstract sense (meaning, not coupled to the current economic situation), the journals provide archival services.

This may include scanning old publications, OCR'ing them, and making them available for search and retrieval; a service which wasn't expected when the research was done.

This may include continuing content curation. I have sent corrections to a journal because their system contained incorrect information, such as in incomplete title. In one case they combined two letters to the editor into a single DOI entry, and needed to break it into two. They have staff which can handle those corrections, and those staff need to be paid.

They may also provide addition search capabilities beyond the free ones available from, say, Google Scholar, and they may update the interfaces for improved usability and for better integration with tools like citation managers.

While I don't see how those activities justify the current high prices, I disagree with the idea that public funding for the original research means there should be no additional funding for continued archiving and access.

There is a realist argument and the argument that wins support.

Realistically, most people won't touch scientific papers. You might get a few people who can wrangle up incredible things from them, but those people would have succeeded in any environment. Most research will continue to be done at major institutions like companies and universities.

But that appeal to the heart is a winning argument, and it's not wrong. Open access in the end is a good thing, even if the arguments for it are stretched, and they are stretched. I don't trust a lot of my own colleagues to bulletproof their papers (get in a graduate course, you'll see how many holes are in most research), the general public with no scientific training is at best limited and at worst dangerous.

It is a natural step, though. Your's won't be a popular question (do we really have to downvote the guy for asking a question, even if you don't like that question?), but it's a good one.

I'll never read my car's technical manual, but I'm damn glad my mechanic is legally permitted to. No stretch needed.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

Thanks for the understanding. I just wonder sometimes, if open everything is always good. I get that complete openness is part of the zeitgeist on this site and within the dominant liberal western social and political philosophy, but openness can sometimes lead to unintended negative consequences.

I believe that specialists in a field are the ones who will actually make use papers. Specialists should have access, that's something I can get behind, but the general public as you say won't make use of research.

I understand what you're saying about appealing to emotion though.

Closedness usually leads to unintended negative consequences, as well-evidenced throughout history. Openness sometimes leads to unintended negative consequences.

Open access isn’t just about making papers available to the general public, it is also about making papers available to students and scholars in the developing world, whose institutions definitely don’t “make so much money nowadays” and often do not subscribe to a wide range of publications.

https://whoneedsaccess.org/

Also consider that of every 200 PhD students, only one ends up with tenure. That means there are a lot of former academics out there.

I wonder if academic papers are usually dense and non-accessible because they are not opened up to the public. Perhaps more effort should be made on the part of the academic to make their findings more accessible without compromising on the science. And this is coming from an ex-academic who have published dense and non-accessible papers.

Will this happen? in a paper about path dependence or international relations, you don't have space to make your argument understandable to people who don't know the basics of the field. As it is, a lot of papers take serious trimming to get into publication.

Many arguments that have wide appeal do end up published as books. no disagreement on your goal, but is it something realistic for much academic work?

Doubtful, you often have very little space to work with and have to get your point across succinctly. You don't have space to summarize the field to get a lay person up to speed adequately to understand the findings of the paper. Some journals, like PNAS, now require a paragraph describing the significance of the work in addition to an abstract that summarizes the work. The significance paragraph is supposed to be aimed towards understandability by a broader audience.

> you often have very little space to work with and have to get your point across succinctly.

Why are century-old obsolete technical limitations taking priority over clear and effective communication?

I don't think eliminating length restrictions would be beneficial even if they are no longer necessary. You can already basically have as much room in a supplemental/supporting section in many journals to include extra data/methods if needed. But if you extend the main article people will ramble on and in my opinion it will make it harder to read the articles for the intended audience (other scientists) with probably only marginal benefit for a broader audience.

Maybe a larger portion of the public would read academic papers if they had access to them.

"Universities make so much money nowadays" - There are a huge number of public universities in the U.S. running on razor thin budgets.

That sounds like something medieval clergy would say. Prepare for Renaissance.

I'm a guy starting my own deep learning startup in my living room. I'm not associated with a university, and I barely make enough money to live off of. There's numerous papers that are relevant to what I'm working on, and at $30 a pop, that adds up quickly. Furthermore, the abstract for a paper is sometimes so vague that you don't know if it is relevant until you read half way through it.

Also, I am diabetic. Pretty much everything in pop science says to eat complex carbs, and avoid fats and simple sugars. There are a number of papers that talk about the benefits of a low carb and high fat diet, but they're behind a paywall.

So it's more than just a small specialist community that consumes scientific literature.

These are weak examples. AI papers are published on arxiv.org long before they are published in journals (by then they are obsolete)

Diabetic "pop science" says plenty about low-carb high-fat diets, the most famous of which may be Gary Taubes's New York Times article from 2002.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-...

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