Open science: why is it so hard?
lemire.me
lemire.me
The truth is that only a small (albeit vocal) minority cares about 'open science'. For most researchers, it just doesn't matter, and there is no incentive to pursue it. Actually having time to write papers worth publishing is more of an issue than those that do get published being accessible to people who, in all honesty, have no interested in them (i.e., the general public).
(it's quite interesting to note that (in my statistically undoubtedly non-representative experience) the demographic that advocates 'open access' the most is quite homogeneous - mostly PhD students with a new professor here and there. Maybe it's the cynical me, but I've been in the game long enough to see people I meet at conferences convert from being advocates for open access to not caring about it any more once they get some years of experience and realize it doesn't matter that much.)
The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people?
Also, the current system rewards incestuous island thinking. There isn't a giant catalog of knowledge, and it's a shame. Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use.
[1] http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subs...
[2] http://www.acm.org/membership/dues
[3] http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585...
[4] http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp
[5] http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales...
[1] https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/j...
Apparently membership to individual societies (add $9-$53/year, depending on the society) may give you access to several journals via IEEEXplore (IEEE Trans. Image Proc.; Audio Speech Lang. Proc., etc. for Signal Processing Society).
As I can't find a reliable source to quote (their page is a mess), I can only speak for myself. I became a student member because of the ridiculously high conference fees they charge, which are heavily reduced if you are a member and/or student (Conference pricing deserves a rant of its own. But I digress.).
Furthermore, research and knowledge is always changing and today's categorization might have to be broken up tomorrow.
Probably. Like I said, my impression is based on personal observations only. That said, I don't really have objective reasons (of the cuff) to believe otherwise, nor do I have data (or even an idea of how one would measure it correctly). For example, I don't know anyone except from undergrads who don't know how to use their libraries who have ever been unable to get a certain paper.
Likewise, how hard is it really for a small company or individuals to get access? They can do exactly what everybody else can do - shoot the author an email asking for the paper. I've never had anybody not send it to me, once I got a hold of their current contact details, which with the web nowadays is very easy. How many people really do independent real research, completely disconnected from anybody involved with universities? They may exist but they're such corner cases that they certainly don't have the critical mass to make 'open access' a real issue.
My point is: while 'open access' is a theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are that it's just not a real problem for the vast majority of people. It's a philosophical objection to certain practices at best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things.
It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-)
The disadvantage to being a generalist is that I don't know the terminology of the field I need to research. Take the texsearch example above. Given a LaTeX string I want to find similar strings from a large corpus so I start by googling things like "code search" and "syntax tree search". After scanning a few dozen papers and following links I find that the magic search term is "approximate string matching" which nets me an overview paper. I scan through the links from that paper and dismiss most of the algorithms as unsuitable for my particular problem until I'm left with a few candidates for prototypes.
Back then I had access through my university. Today I wouldn't be able to read half of those papers. For recent math/CS papers I can usually find a preprint but anything else is a struggle.
What you basically say is : "It is the way it is because that is how things are. period"
Do you agree with the complaint? Or do you think it's useless and the complainer should do somethign else instead? Or do you say things are good the way you are? I do generally not understand the point of comments which seem to say "It is like this and now shut up", which you do not say explicitely, but phrasings like , "philosophical objection at best" indicate that you think of this as whining at worst.
I care about easy access to scientific studies for non-PhD's.
No, what I'm saying is "it's irrelevant how we got to where we are, but there just isn't enough demand to drive a change, and therefore I suspect things will remain the way they are for at least a while longer, until the boundary conditions change (more)."
My overall point vis-a-vis the article is that it's wrong in its premises and conclusions - it's not about it being hard, or about some sort of conspiracy where publishers are repressing us (although of course, publishers will try to stop any mass movement to go 'open access', but their power has limits, contrary to what the article seems to suggest); it's simply the market at work. Not enough people care enough about open access for it to happen.
I'm not telling anybody to shut up, just that if they want to change something, they should identify and remedy the correct causes of that something, rather than fighter windmills. Hollow rhetoric like "In effect, we have too much organizational scarring tissue in science. It could be that we need to reboot the system. As a starting point, we should collectively recognize the problem. Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business" is just a misrepresentation of the situation.
Finally, I don't agree nor disagree with the complaint - I just don't care, much like most other researchers I know - and by extension, I suspect, most other researchers tout court. That's my whole point.
Ah, that makes your reaction clearer to me. Thanks for responding.
To further the point, I've worked in both large (rich) and small (poor) universities. At the small universities where access is limited, you just bug the PIs that went to rich universities for grad/post-doc. They hop onto their alumni VPN and can easily get any paper for you.
90% of scientists do not know or care about open science.
I would also state that there is serious stigma against open science. One of my PIs claimed that PLoS wasn't even peer-reviewed (which is false) and that anyone who submitted there was performing career suicide.
This is, sadly, a pervasive viewpoint among many scientists. Especially older and more established PIs.
This is something of a mantra in US culture, but it's a poor model, because in fact the "market" for research papers may be the least "market"-like thing I know. Papers are funded by grants. There's a handful of agencies that give out significantly-sized grants. The most important of them in the USA - NIH, NSF, DoD - are agencies of the federal government, politically driven and centralized. In the research business as it stands today, the public's "demand" for an esoteric manuscript on, say, the mental health of Drosophila is barely relevant. All that matters is the opinions of your peers, and the opinions of your grant administrator. And these groups don't constitute anything like a "market"; they're more like a family, if perhaps a slightly dysfunctional family. Find a researcher with funding, and you'll find that he or she is almost inevitably well-connected to the research community by a web of patronage and mutual favors.
The peers don't care about open publishing, but apathy works both ways: They won't push for it very hard, but they won't push against it very hard either. What does a researcher really care if the paper comes out in Nature or in PLoS? Sure, there are considerations of culture and fashion - impact factor is not irrelevant to your life as a researcher - but fashion is fickle; old scientists are more adaptable than the average old person and in any case they don't live forever.
Meanwhile, if we gathered the bosses of all the grant administrators in the USA into a room, that room would be the size of an elevator. Convince just a critical mass of agencies - say, the NSF and the NIH - to mandate open publishing and only an act of Congress will prevent the rest of the system from falling in line.
Maybe this isn't right. But, tellingly, the opponents of open publishing have just proposed that act of Congress. A threat to deploy such a blunt instrument doesn't seem like a sign of strength. It seems like a last-ditch attempt to hold back the tide.
(Alas, I agree that the act of Congress could well pass, or even just threaten to pass, and that if it does my whole argument could go into reverse and the status quo will tend to dominate.)
"Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use."
OK, I'm imagining it. Now what? Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. (Most) everybody today whose success in advancing the state of the art depends on having access to libraries already has access to one.
This is what I mean by 'philosophical idea' in my post above: yes theoretically it would be nice if everybody had access to the complete body of all research ever done. In practice, however, it wouldn't make more than a tiny shred of difference.
Yeah, what a laugh. Can you imagine if Albert the Patent Clerk started writing science papers?
Additionally, one counterexample doesn't disprove a general concept. The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of people don't give a hoot about having access to research papers.
I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract.
Scary, but true. Management at big Pharma has effectively gutted R&D because it is too expensive.
I actually found out because I wanted to build a startup that used biomedical literature and biopharmaceutical companies. I basically axed the idea after talking to my friends.
To be fair, the decision to cut R&D in big Pharma is unrelated to the decision to remove literature subscriptions. It is just one of the strings of mismanagement episodes that pharma has performed.
If anyone is interested, this thread at SA is pure gold: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
In particular, these are some quality posts to show the absolute inane nature of big Pharma:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...
The medium term outlook of the pharma industry is not that good. This is true for various reasons - a lot of low hanging fruit has been plucked, regulatory requirements are becoming more burdensome, political risk is high, and older (read: out of patent) drugs are increasingly competing with newer drugs.
Under these circumstances, it just seems like a good idea to cut back on R&D and focus on exploiting existing revenue streams. I've advocated that a lot of other companies in other industries should do this as well (e.g., MS should scrap Bing, pay dividends, and shareholders can spend the dividends on GOOG if they want a long position in search).
-Where one successful project is put on hold so the scientist can prove to management the dud is really a dud.
-Or another where his project was simultaneously outsourced to India, which failed. But it made management look bad, so they wrote it off his department's expenses. When their formulation worked, it was rejected because it was over-budget per/pill (but only because the India outsourcing was added to their tab), otherwise they would have been fine.
Other times it's just the pharma ecosystem - I wrote about this a few weeks ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3376428
I think the big problem with exploiting existing revenue streams is that A) most of the blockbusters developed last decade are going off patent very soon, with nothing to replace them and B) you can only develop so many "reformulations" before people realize what is going on.
Pharma is going to hit a point in the very near future where their revenue drops by multiple-billions. They are scared silly over this (rightfully so). I see two options:
1) Actually start doing science again, instead of firing scientists and reformulating the same pills over and over. This isn't going to happen and the time to do it was ten years ago. They are way behind the curve now.
2) Embrace the fact they are glorified marketing firms, fire all their scientists and use their accumulated wealth to purchase drugs from small companies, then push them through clinical trials. They also need to stop thinking about blockbuster hits - those days are over. This is basically what you are suggesting.
Realistically, Pharma is moving towards option 2. But they are moving towards it so slowly that they are cannibalizing themselves along the way. It is never pleasant to realize your model is obsolete, but the days of Big Pharma and billion dollar blockbusters is (probably) over.
If that paper is closed access, the average research does not give two shits. He just wants his paper in a quality journal that will gain him prestige and career advancement. He is not considering how easily data-miners will access the literature, or if researchers in Bulgaria can access it.
I'm sorry if this sounds terrible (it is), but it is also the truth.
For the record, I'm very pro-open-science. And all "he" can easily be replaced with "she" in this post :)
Taking a step back you have to ask: Why are these publishing companies given such power by governments and universities (the power to determine grants and promotions). Why don't governments and universities instead actively promote open science? I argue that the benefits will be greater if we switch, but it's gonna take a quantum leap that's currently unlikely due to inertial forces.
Another thing is that when research article text is as open as a blog post text, you can create aggregators, get scientists to work in online communities. In the past i tried to start maybe something like that, but not having the content to search for is making it almost a non-starter (if interested check out http://pubcentral.net or http://noteplz.com)
The life sciences would be a better place if everything was open-access.
My point is that there is zero incentive for those "in the power" to change. Scientists just want to keep running on the prestige hamster wheel, journals want to get money, universities pay the money because their scientists need the journals.
To break the cycle you need someone to get off the wheel first. Journals obviously won't. Universities can't (imagine a university cutting all of their scientists off from the data....). Government doesn't really play a role in this, they just hand out grant money. And they do require data to be open-access after a certain period of time if funded through the NIH.
So that leaves scientists. And very few are willing to stake their employment, livelihood and reputation on a "cause". The only people who realistically can do that are tenured faculty - and most of these are old PIs that like the system just the way it is, damnit.
So yeah, I agree with you. But I don't see it changing any time soon. Where is the incentive?
Edit: As an aside, you can lease the Medline abstract database from the NIH for free (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/license/license.html). You can also dowload Biomed Central full text archive too (http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/datamining)
The demands for change have to come from outside, and they have to be forceful. I would go further than this article and demand that not only should the papers be available to the public, but so should all of the data from which the conclusions were drawn. And furthermore there should be some open repository of all the data, along with the analysis, with api's etc... If taxpayers are paying for research then why not also pay for a way to actually consume that research?
Publishing companies have not that much power. What they publish is decided based on how many references the paper gets and how prominent in the academic society the authors (or the professors backing them) are. They just enjoy their role as "gatekeepers" - basically, they get paid big money to put a barrier at the entrance of the whole system.
I'm not talking about how things should be or any such trite; I'm just saying how it is and why I don't see any reasons it will change. Whereas the article is implying all sorts of oppression by publishers etc. Please, we're all grown-ups here, there is a much simpler explanation for why "open science" isn't catching on: it's the lack of incentives for researchers.
Regarding incentives: incentives are created, it's not like the current status quo is not based on incentives, researchers seek prestige journals because they want to get funding, and in effect public funding bodies enable these incentives by inaction.
Because i am the only person i know, who want to read scientific papers. Which is probably because I have never seen an university from the inside.
So i am the guy wo would benefit from this.
If you want to understand science as it is presently organized, read the above summary several times; it's good and it's accurate.
Scientists live in a tight community in which everyone shares with everyone else below the radar, via personal networks linked by patronage, mutual favors, and email. This is acceptable, for many within the community, because scientists don't seriously expect anyone who isn't currently a professional scientist to follow anything that they do, and they don't care, so long as the money rolls in.
Then they complain that the public can't seem to tell the difference between the scientific establishment and a priesthood. Inexplicable!
If nothing else, open publishing is an act of good-faith public relations. The entire point of science is that it has nothing to hide - you have to be able to trace all the interconnections - so when the scientific establishment is seen to be explicitly hiding stuff behind paywalls it sends a jarring message. And, while printed journals available for popular subscription were the gold standard of openness as recently as the 1980s, this is the twenty-first century and that won't cut it anymore.
http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html
The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to interpret the data. There are excellent tutorials, some many years old, that you can find.
Open science is hard because science is hard. It takes knowledge to interpret the data. It takes effort to transform the data into something that can be interpreted. And there's a lot of data.
I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say...
See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused than what it took to put together that site. Take your average startup as an example - they're seriously dedicated to outreach, their success depends on it - would you give them even a 1% chance of success if their website looked like that?
So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals.
Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.
After a certain period of time most journals let you publish on your own site (although few authors actually do, which is a different issue)
I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.
This is HUGE. If you work/study at a place with less resources it becomes annoying to try and get papers for journals your instn doesn't subscribe to. This is a barrier to research that just should not be there.
Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself.
I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the only person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition.
Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in expanding their audience (now they're interested in the opposite) then publishing will change accordingly.