Comment by lewis500 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lewis500 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Scholars can often make their work free via pre-print. The issue is that the published version isn't free, and the pre-print is hard to find and often not as nice looking.

I made a github repo of my last paper published in an Elsevier journal. This was cool because I could put the latex and simulation code for others to copy. https://github.com/lewis500/distribution-of-trip-lengths

The final version differs a little bit because they had a copy-editor go through and make some good improvements, even after the referees made their comments. Interestingly, the journal was fine with my linking to the repo within the text of the paper, as a way to share the code.

There is nothing like real open access though. This journal has wonderful typesetting and such and is totally free: https://www.jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/835/860

It's funny what tricks they use to justify their existence. Always emailing me about bizarre author features no one will use. Makes me sad to think of the engineers sitting in a big room year-on-year polishing features no one will use.

In the same spirit, our lab is experimenting with a new approach to scientific publishing via Github: https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/965765089373515776

No paywall, no delay, straight to the web. Open data, open code, interactive/animated figures. Transparent, rolling peer review, version control, CC-BY license, citable DOIs. I was worried no one would read it, but it turns out science twitter is awesome. Very positive experience, so far.

That's good, but it is not a substitute for preprint servers. In particular, preprint servers are archival and more discoverable.

Sounds like we're pulling in the same direction re:improving scientific publishing. At the risk of debating an ally, do you mean to imply that preprint servers are "more archival"? I'm guessing you're familiar with CERN/Zenodo; you trust bioArxiv's continued existence more than CERN's? I rate them as similar, arguably with an edge to CERN.

My experience with publishing is that discoverability is a stronger function of advertising and (especially) getting cited than the publication venue. I do agree that bioarxiv and arxiv are nice advertising venues, but there are lots of ways to skin that cat.

I'm actually only familiar with the arXiv, for physics and computer science research. I don't know much about biorxiv or Zenodo, but they both seem much better than a personal website or github page.

The arXiv has overlay sites, such as http://www.arxiv-sanity.com/ or https://scirate.com/ , that improve discoverability over the basic arXiv interface; for example, you can browse all the papers in a given area posted in the last two months, sorted by some proxy for "interest." Of course there is also Google Scholar, and perhaps there are better ways.

It is free if they get publish by PLOS.

Are you sure? I'm nearly certain that PLOS is a publisher that charges manuscript charges for OA papers - most do.

PLOS One fees are $1500 per paper.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/journal-information

Ahh, I'm sorry. I meant Open Access - as in free to read upon publication.

I did some more digging. Turns out they have some leeway for submission fees under some conditions: https://www.plos.org/fee-assistance

Reply on news.ycombinator.com