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Comment by Kognito | Hacker News Reader

As an undergraduate in the UK whose university doesn’t have the greatest subscription collection, Sci-Hub has literally enabled me to write my dissertation as there is no way I could have afforded the individual cost of the papers I’ve needed to reference.

I can only imagine what it is like in poorer parts of the world in terms of access to subscriptions, or lack thereof.

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That's very true. The costs are enormous, and also keeps the research closed off to many non-Western universities. Based on rankings such as [1], the research performance is heavily skewed to the US and UK. To gain a greater global perspective, research needs to push outside of these bounds.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_Ranking_of_Scienti...

Be aware that those rankings are heavily biased.

e.g. they don't count 95% of German research at all.

Yeah if you go to a less than stellar university your data sources and paper sources are not that great.

I went to a poorly ranked undergrad and had most of the standard stuff.

I went to a top 10 for my post grad and we had so much stuff, market research reports that normally only consulting companies can afford, top data sources, virtually every journal subscription imaginable, top level subscriptions to online textbook resources.

Imagine a school which pays for a license so you can download PDF's of the textbooks for free.

Made a huge difference, the fact we all had access to this stuff meant the courses could teach literally from the research papers so we learned cutting edge stuff.

My exams were made up of content from research papers written between 2015-2018. Practically brand new developments.

Compared with the poor university which taught from the standard texts.

I'm a PhD student and my university has a pretty decent subscription. But while downloading a paper from a uni IP is very straightforward, from outside campus one has to jump through so many hoops that sci hub is the most comfortable option.

Not only in poorer countries, but for everyone, including Me, doing research before Sci-Hub !

Let me ask you a provocative question. When you build credibility in your field, will you be reviewing papers for free for open access journals?

What makes you think they plan to become an academic?

There may be other answers to this problem. When someone posts a blog article, it usually gets submitted to an aggregator like HN and it then gets upvoted/downvoted/discussed, all for free. You might say that you need to be an expert in the field to review a paper and, perhaps that is true - or perhaps new publishing constraints will lead to a trend of more readable papers with more background and thorough explanation so as to be understandable to a wider audience. I for one am not afraid to see a little classic SV disruption hitting Academia.

Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed.

While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience.

I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers).

Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.

Agreed. Academia is gradually doing a better job of explaining research to the public, but this is (rightfully) separate from explaining it to other experts in the field. A good example is the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, who among other actions write publicly accessible summaries [1] and infographics [2] of most of their big detections.

Some groups have a (never large enough) budget to fund flyers, posters, videos, websites, etc. for public outreach and visits to public events. It's also usually possible to ask for this kind of fund when applying for research grants - like adding an extra 3% on top of what you ask for in order to publicise the work.

[1] https://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-GW150914/index.php

[2] http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/~daniel/infographics.html

Peer review is unpaid, no matter if the journal has open access or not

Paid journals had a point 20 years ago, but not anymore. Most studies are funded by the tax-payers or collaboration with the industries. The authors are not paid. The reviewers are not paid either. Finally the publisher comes along and claims royalty. It doesn't make sense.

The payment is in cv credentials. It is a great payment, by thr way.

Just a reminder that authors have to pay around $800-1000 to publish an article. Then readers have to pay to read the article.

And you have to submit your work edited and almost ready to print, it's not like they are doing heavy work there either. I remember one time I submitted an image as SVG but they wanted EPS and asked me to do the conversion. Yes, that oneliner with "convert" was enough.

They will be reviewing them for free or, at best, for peanuts.

(Usually, if peanuts are involved, they're literally peanuts)

This was crowdsourcing before it had a name.

Given peer review is unpaid and so is authorship, I am curious as to why you think this is a provocative question?

I would imagine that reviewing papers for free is usually considered part of 'service' to the field and the imagined tradeoff here has far more to do with whether the journal is influential or not, and almost nothing to do with pay or access policies.

When I review an article, I do it for free. If it's short, I do it fast. If it's long and complicated, I notify whoever is requesting it that I need that-many-weeks for that. If they agree, great; if not, they will have no problems finding another reviewer.

I'm not sure if I get your question right. Pretty much everyone in the academy will be reviewing some papers (there are reasons why it's nearly unavoidable, long story), and they're doing that for free.

Are you asking if they will be reviewing papers exclusively for open access journals and avoiding non-open access ones? Or something else?

I'll answer this as a practicing academic: I do, regularly, and with the same willingness and rigor I review papers for other journals.

One thing that's never been clear to me: what benefit do you get from reviewing articles for paid journals? Phrased another way, what stands in the way of a movement where reviewers "go on strike" against anything that isn't open access?

Lets consider the top three paid journals I review for. This is certainly not all of them of course, but the volume of review work is the highest with them:

* The American Journal of Epidemiology * Epidemiology * Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology

Those are the journals of the Society for Epidemiological Research, the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America's journals. I am a member of all of those societies. I would, to be frank, rather like to be on the editorial board of those societies - and certainly wish to be on good terms with their editorial staff. And revenue from those journals does help support the mission of the society.

That's the benefit. "Going on Strike" would harm all that, and in my field, the vast majority of papers will be open access within a year anyway (due to NIH/CDC funding).

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