Should scientific articles be available free online?
slate.com
slate.com
As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can."
New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.
We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price.
I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).
SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them.
« Your failed business model is not my problem. »
That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.
I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it.
There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.
On the other hand, modern science is incredibly political. When millions of dollars of funding is on the line, tensions run high.
Anonymity is one way to shield reviewers. But the only way to have workable anonymous review is a trusted gatekeeper—and those are expensive.
The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...)
There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process).
EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles.
One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
Of course, publications from the "big guns" go straight to the big journals, and their peer review is more like rubber-stamp if you have the name on your author list.
So the only difference is for the bureaucrats, who want you to show them "proper" papers to be able to move forward, the people doing the actual research only care whether your experiment and explanation is solid or not, can be published anywhere.
(And I'm totally for open journals, even more, use CC-BY on it...)
There are not actually relatively few OSS projects -- like with papers, there are just relatively few that are interesting or important. For example, Github alone claimed to be hosting 2 million repositories. I don't know what fraction of those are private, but . . . if you go looking for OSS projects, there are a lot of them out there.
Most of them -- like most papers -- are not of much interest to anyone (possibly not even the author), and very few are of interest to everyone. I am able to navigate the landscape, though, by observing which projects attract the interest of others, whether through contributions or communities of interest such as this one.
I guess what I am saying is, I like the community acting as a gatekeeper. I think it's more reliable, and it has more brainpower to spend on the job, than a small number of dedicated editors. It's my read that this is the way research works anyways -- when I was in grad school for mathematics, a paper wasn't a proof until most of us had read it, discussed it, and critiqued it among ourselves. My community, not the journal, was the gatekeeper. I think things would be healthier if that were more open and obvious.
To make a change to someone else's article, all you can do is question their methods, and question them again more sternly. It's not trivial to repeat experiments with scientific rigor, but it is (generally) trivial to test out a code change or two.
Another issue is experience - it takes a lot of education to get someone to the point of being able to apply scientific rigor; there's a lot of seductive pitfalls along the way. It's not really something you can be 'amateur' about. That's not really the case with a lot of OSS, where you can successfully contribute without understanding important but subtle issues.
Then you're simply increasing granularity...instead of judging papers by what journals considered them worthy, judge by what individuals considered them worthy...and if you don't know the individuals involved, the reputation system is there to help you.
It'd have to be something similar to pagerank, not a simple vote-count method. High-reputation individuals should be able to contribute more to the reputation of other individuals.
Another idea would be to apply pagerank to article citations, though this would only be useful for older papers.
Pagerank patent expires in 2018. There are some other interesting reputation system out there, too.
I think that's actually pretty similar to what we're doing now. Articles accepted by journals of high reputation get a high reputation, and the journals select high-reputation individuals to do reviews. A good distributed reputation algorithm could perform essentially the same function. Leaving review open to anyone could help preserve net objectivity even if some individual reviewers are biased.
But anonymity could be accomplished by releasing articles initially with a timestamp and a digital signature by a new public key. After review, the authors could reveal that they have the matching private key.
If anything, it's the development behind closed doors that you can "be amateur about". Work done in public is too embarrassing and too unlikely to attract any interest to do a bad job on.
But that's kind of beside the point. Even if the expertise is rarer on research, I don't understand why that matters. Wouldn't that be an argument for pooling the resources you do have? I mean, if there are only four people working in a field, wouldn't it be better if they all could critique a new work, and if they were able to watch it progress and influence its direction (maybe stopping mistakes early!), and if the judgement of a new work came with their written opinions on its worthiness attached?
but in short: It seems you misunderstand me. They both require understanding, but it is easier to effect changes on an OSS project than it is to make an author go back and rewrite or retest their article.
Science aims for truth
While there's a lot of overlap, there's a fundamental difference between the two, and methods to pursue pragmatism are not necessarily the right methods to pursue truth
The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough.
Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers.
(It's a warped system.)
Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
You mean Google Circles! Sorry, I've been brainwashed...
The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.
Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.
But I agree that this is not a good solution to the bigger problem.
Easy to do, but I shouldn't have had to ask in the first place.
Anyway, schools and universities really have a lot of better stuff to do with their money than paying thieves.
So in your country does everybody get a taxpayer-sponsored university VPN for life? Or are you speaking from the highly privileged position of "current university student in a well-funded school?"
In any case, it shows a tremendous impoverishment of imagination to claim that Google Scholar is equivalent to an actual free market in research. I want the footnotes in publication A to be directly hyperlinked to the relevant sections of their associated references. Otherwise we remain in the position where random TV shows on Wikipedia have better public documentation than our taxpayer-funded research.
I'll put your 95% assertion to the test and report back.
Appl. Phys. Lett. 76, 1095 (2000)
Result: no free link on Scholar. I can buy a copy for $29, or there's a new service called "Deepdyve" that will "rent" me a 24-hour glimpse at the paper for $2, no printing allowed.
Papers 2 to 20ish: works by the late Judah Folkman, field: cancer research
Here we have better luck; maybe 50% of the (very well-known) works on the first two pages of this search have free PDFs:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=J+folkman&...
Still not feeling the 95%, though. Of course, I may not have worked in the right fields. This is a big reason why I switched to software, after all.
Medicine, though - that's a problem.
The university VPN thing: yeah, its just awesome that we limit access to research to people who are attending a university...
"Your failed business model is not my problem." <- Yes, people should work effectively for free so I don't have to pay for my professional development tools! Collection, reviewing, editing, and distribution of articles on cutting edge topics, consumed by a tiny audience is not cheap.
Distribution in this case amounts to little more than a file server. Nothing tremendously unique there from a technology perspective.
Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.
But now the journals want you to pay $35 every time you follow a hyperlink.
It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a consumer.
Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you?
Answer: a taxpayer.
That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the copyright, and collects their toll.
There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for years, and we're all over the political spectrum.
Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you controlled the information.
Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours.
Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased informational availability and transparency.
All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold benefits.
So in short. TLDR -- Yes. Absolutely.
If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.
In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount.
The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].
All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it.
I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving".
[1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).
Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?
btw, frontiers (http://frontiersin.org/) is another great open access set of journals