Don't get me wrong, I think the current publishing model is archiac, exploitative, and needs to change, but this whole "taxpayer funded research should be freely available argument" seems to me to oversimplify the issue and ignore the facts.
Don't get me wrong, I think the current publishing model is archiac, exploitative, and needs to change, but this whole "taxpayer funded research should be freely available argument" seems to me to oversimplify the issue and ignore the facts.
The NIH site links right to PubMed Central from which it seems like it'd be 'easy' to find a paper for which I know the title. None of the pages on the NSF site ever seemed to be intended for someone that's not contributing to the 'public access repository'.
Would you demonstrate your claim and provide a link, for an article published in Nature, to the same freely available version that "must be made"?
It seems pretty fantastic that libraries would spend taxpayer money for access to journals containing papers that are already freely available. I'm very confused why that would be.
Click the first research article they show. It has various public funding sources:
"The collection of the ELC and genetic data for the American samples was supported by direct funding from the Intramural Research Program of the NIMH to the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch (D.R.W., PI, protocol 95-M-0150, NCT00001486, annual report number: ZIA MH002942-05), with supplemental analytic support from the Clinical and Translational Neuroscience Branch (K.F.B., PI). G.U. received partial support from P50MH094268." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0021-y
Check that other site: https://par.nsf.gov/search/term:%22Convergence%20of%20placen...
As long as they put the code on github or a blog or whatever then who really cares? Do people really get that much out of these academic style papers in this field? They are more like a press release.
Or are you saying this embargo also actively prevents them from sharing stuff beyond the document, like the code?
That papers will eventually (and mostly) be freely available is good and I am surprised that that seems to be the case. Thanks for sharing this info!
But an embargo or delay in publishing to the free access sites is probably sufficient for the existing closed-access journals to maintain their value. I can't imagine researchers, and thus universities, forgoing access to current research.
> in most cases I know of (NSF and NIH funded research) US taxpayer funded research must be made freely available
Besides that, you'd be surprised that people and organizations spend money on things they don't actually need to? In my experience that happens constantly in both business and government.
And it's pretty aggravating for you to quote the comment to which I directly replied. It's not even that long!
I was surprised by the implied claim, or what I thought was being implied, because I'd suspect "US taxpayer funded research" would include almost all research done in the U.S. and yet I'm pretty sure that in fact lots of people struggle to find freely available papers and articles and that lots of academic organizations pay lots of money for journal access. The parent seemed to imply that 'everything' really was freely available.
I had this issue, too, but there is a simple search engine at this URL: https://par.nsf.gov
I'm not sure about the NSF, however: this is what is happening in some disciplines. ArXiv is the default method of sharing research in some fields, and also the default method of actually reading and reviewing those articles, yet people still submit their research to the traditional publishers, and people still either pay publishing or subscription charges to those publishers.
That's because the service those publishers provide is not the publishing or making accessible of research, but the academic credentials one needs to advance their academic career. That's the "unspecified reason", and it's an incredible waste of money.
But you didn't explain, relative to how I interpreted the comment to which I initially replied, why, e.g. libraries, are paying so much money to access journals. If the default method for reading those articles is ArXiv, what's the point of paying a subscription to the other journals? My model of academia isn't that it's that dysfunctional. I'd expect enough internal pressure to re-allocate those funds if ('read') access was really unnecessary.
Of course, "need" is already a vague term - preferably, all publicly funded research would be available in the first place, but that's not the world we currently live in.
Unfortunately, that's both the reason why adding a subscription journal instead of an Open Access one is bad, as well as why a boycott doesn't affect much change other than that resulting of its publicity. On the scale of those big deals, saying "we don't need that specific ML journal since interesting research hardly gets submitted there" doesn't drive the collective price down that much.
(In fact, I'd wager that those prices are mostly driven by how far librarians managed to stretch their budgets, rather than by the value provided by the specific included journals or the cost spent producing them.)
Ideally, of course, we'd never have to simplify, but that's life.
I am not involved in this stuff, just read quite some posts on StackExchange Academia.
Furthermore, many people just put pre-prints on arxiv etc. and don't update after peer review. Peer review is painful at best and quite flawed but the median paper is actually better after it, and many papers rightly don't make it through. Having open-access curated journals makes a lot of this better.