Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roel_v | Hacker News Reader

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"I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data)."

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.

> My point is: while ... theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are ... not a real problem for the vast majority of people. ... philosophical objection ... best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things.

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.

"What you basically say is : "It is the way it is because that is how things are. period""

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.

As someone in academic biology, I just want to provide additional support for what roel_v is saying. All of his points are accurate from my personal observations of academia as well.

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.

It's simply the market at work.

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.)

> My overall point vis-a-vis the article is that it's wrong in its premises and conclusions

Ah, that makes your reaction clearer to me. Thanks for responding.

A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper).

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.

But paper abstracts are always free (even with paid journals).

If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-)

> 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.

OK, so how did you do your research in the end? Do you think you missed much because of not being to access certain papers? I mean, it seems that you found a way to access at least that paper, or did you pay for a subscription to a certain journal?

At the time I had access through my university. Since leaving research has become much more time-consuming. My local library doesn't have any subscriptions. If I really need to find something I can take a two hour round-trip to the British Library, although its opening hours align neatly with office hours. In an age where the worlds information is at our fingertips its ridiculous that I have to take time away from work and get on a bus just to do basic research.

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