Why is science behind a paywall?
blog.priceonomics.com
blog.priceonomics.com
That is unacceptable.
What's worse is that what happened to NTRS could happen to basically everything else in science. There's no complete backup and no mirrors. JSTOR has only a fraction of science; and even if Mendelsevier or SpringerKink were to go the way of the dinosaur, we wouldn't be able to get content out of JSTOR anyway, so it's useless in the first place. Heck, there's no lab in the world that has complete access to all of the papers out there. Science is all kinds of broken.
We need to get way more serious about science.
I wish it was scalable because I think going to a website,posting a request for an article behind a pay wall to university students who then will download the file for free and send you the file would help open doors between the academic world and the world everyone else lives in.
How about these:
https://facebook.com/groups/freepapers
https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles
https://groups.google.com/group/getarticles2
https://groups.google.com/group/slwaterflow
https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front
http://www.pirateuniversity.org/
Also you can use (bias disclaimer) https://github.com/kanzure/paperbot
and (more bias) https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia is a good idea for preserving anonymity.
recent comments about mendelsevier vs. zotero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111
Then several generations later when the intellectual education system needs to be restarted after having spent so many years in the "just stay alive education system" it will save thousands of years of scientific progress.
I'm hoping one day our species will find one of these information silos, created by humans billions of years ago, on another planet somewhere, so we can regain what was lost.
The first section, "Fiat Homo", revolves around an abbey in the desert, during a very harsh time in history, several generations after the war. There is almost no technology as man has been thrust back into the dark ages. People are just struggling to survive. The few books and relics of the past are copied by the monks with little to no understanding of what they contain with the hope that one day they may be useful in rebuilding society.
The second section, "Fiat Lux", revolves around the same abbey but now the world is in a period of a second renaissance. Great thinkers akin to Galileo and Copernicus emerge and start rebuilding what we knew of science. One man travels to the abbey who is considered to be one of the great thinkers of the age. When he finds remnants of a physics book on optics in the abbey he is dismayed because he had wasted years of his life re-discovering the principals within the book himself.
The last section of the book, "Fiat Voluntas Tua", takes place when man now has nuclear weapons again and technology has advanced to beyond the point of the first near apocalypse event.
Without spoiling the plot, it takes place at The Library and involves the consequences of what happens when you have 10000 years of scientific history but limit yourself to the most recent 1000 years of publications. It also features a very close approximation of wikipedia, for being written in 1989.
The author was an American bomber pilot in the second world war, and took part in the bombing of ancient church buildings in Italy. After the war, out of guilt, he became a Catholic wrote the book. He seemed to share the same kind of pessimism that George Orwell had, having lived through one destructive war only to see another war come on the horizon.
It's a very good book, and despite its themes it is readable and in parts humourous (especially the first section).
>> Some people escape on rockets,
And one presumes, albeit facetiously, that one of the rockets contained a baby named "Jor-El"? :-)
Well, that's cool and all.. but screw apocalyptic versions of myself. What about just downloading papers for immediate use, for ourselves? So that we can read and use them now? Plus, you can beam up as many copies into the sky as you want once we commit to building this collection. I wouldn't mind. I promise!
Still, it's the cheapest and longest lasting form of back-up available.
Other options:
Dump a couple of titanium cannisters with the current state of the art on golden media on the moon.
You would need to bury most of it though, and have a great deal of redundancy. The moon doesn't have an atmosphere to protect it from meteorites.
It wouldn't have to be terribly expensive, though you would want to add things to make sure it would survive such a long time, which would add to the cost. I don't know how you would store information that long though. At least in a way that would be machine readable and not take up a ton of space.
Machine readable yet long lasting is indeed a big problem.
You'd just have to make multiple copies and put them in various locations. If you're going through the trouble of making 1, you might as make more than 1, in case the primary gets destroyed.
If you only have a single very famous depot then you can perhaps count on it being remembered in legend, particularly if it is somewhere very unique (the south pole perhaps). More depots increase redundancy but could perhaps reduce the "interesting" factor. After a certain point though you could probably have enough depots that, since they are all over the place and constantly being discovered, they would stay in the minds of humanity.
They claim their Rosetta Disk will "easily last and be legible for thousands of years". If humanity was sent back into hunter-gatherer mode for a few decades, the Rosetta Disk would be invaluable in unlocking access to other material this new civilisation would come across (assuming they share at least a passing familiarity with one of the 1000 human languages the Rosetta Disk encodes information in). Thats the closest I've seen to what you talk about.
[1] http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rose...
Why do they have to be off-planet? Assuming a civilization reboot -- by the time the next civ is at the point where they could discover it, wouldn't they have advanced beyond us in many respects? At least in space travel capability.
Why not store it underground, or in orbit and continuously transmitting down to us? The first people to rediscover RF would basically win the lottery.
As for space junk, fill up each Lagrange point so its redundant. Basically hope for the best that all of them don't get hit. Even still, no guarantees.
The two points that would make sense for something like this are in the orbit of the Moon exactly 60 degrees ahead, and 60 degrees behind.
"Hey pre-industrial civilization, did you know that if you pack enough purified
uranium together in a small space, it will chain react and you'll get a big
explosion? I mean REALLY big, huge actually. Don't do that."
If anything it's a reminder that people are cautious about challenging empirical work by academics of sufficient standing even if it's universally available, has significant, controversial implications and is widely cited by high-profile nonacademics. Open access alone doesn't seem to affect that.
One thing folks don't usually mention when talking about science proliferation is that academic and scientific papers served for 100's of years as the only source of science communication. Over time, journals really fit their format as the best way for scientists to communicate - with eachother. However, if you were a layman outside the field, academic papers were not the best way consume science because they were ultimately meant for the colleague in the next city or town over.
The implications I'd like to think are pretty big. Now that science can be freed from this old paper format intended for other scientists, here's hoping that the science content shared in the digital age changes as well. The best possible outcome is actual science content for the masses. The worst, photo filters for gel images (I kid).
This is actually the job of science reporters: you consume the dense content and explain it in a way that laypeople can understand. Unfortunately, the profession has been undermined by, well, everything that has been undermining journalism.
I think the gap is closing (at least it was posted online), but I can't be certain because institutions still want to maintain control.
Now think what happens in countries not that rich as USA. Worse, this is a self-sustaining process. A friend of mine is doing PhD and the university rules are "collect points of vanish". One collects points for publishing in journals: ~10 for minor/local journal, ~20 for known one and ~30-40 for major worldwide-famous journal. If you don't have enough points, i.e. not enough publications or not enough prestigious, they throw you off (the fact that this additionally gives incentives to publish-often instead publish-well is yet another story).
We are trying to get authors to embrace an open access model where they pay a fee of $1500 or so to make their paper Creative Commons licensed and free to read for all. I do think there is a value for peer review and it is harder than commonly thought because science is so specialized these days.
An area which I think is woefully underserved is the science press. In our journals, I can barely understand anything published as it requires specialist knowledge in small areas of study. Just reading papers does not really keep someone knowledgable about anything but their very specialized sub domain. Peer review in itself is nice but it is important to provide accessibility to what is going on in science via non specialist explanations of published works.
So I agree that the model of paywalling a bunch of PDFs is horribly broken, and should be disrupted. I think scholarly publishing in general can really benefit from something like a one time fee to publish your paper and make it accessible to all not only in regards to paywalls, but in regards to the material being accessible to non specialists.
And if we're dealing with a field where there is no objective way to verify a claim, then any claim should be viewed as mere opinion (a more or less valid opinion depending on how mainstream it is). As for fields where all claims are in the realm of opinion... they're not actually part of the scientific family.
Or take the 4th grade test about dinosaurs[1]. Objectively, we can't verify if the world if thousands or millions or billions of years old, and we can't verify if dinosaurs lived concurrent with humans or not. We weren't there. There is evidence, and how we interpret the evidence, and yet the test features a rather forced interpretation of the evidence. Now, numerically there may be a lot of people all over the world who prefer the fundamentalist interpretation, even if they are accredited scientists in universities. In a completely open environment, this opinion would get more weight than it deserves, a weight that does not represent its true standing among scientists who understand all the different implications of the evidence.
From the article - "They argue that the current journal system slows down the publication of science research. Peer review rarely takes less than a month, and journals often ask for papers to be rewritten or new analysis undertaken, which stretches out publication for half a year or more. While quality control is necessary, thanks to the Internet, articles don’t need to be in a final form before they appear. ... “We want to go after peer review,” CEO Toni Gemayel told us."
And I am saying, quality control is essential, and yet an open internet-based process would mean a lot of people with pet theories they want to drive could game the system. I agree with the poster who wrote that you need to take into consideration the author and his caliber even in scientific journals -- the quality control problem is a problem already today really -- but the effort necessary to get an article to publication raises the quality somewhat (and in turn prestige of relevant journals).
You realize that your argument is essentially "the blogosphere is not real journalism", right?
Wikipedia did not grow from Britannica.
OpenSource did not grow from commercial software.
YouTube did not grow from Hollywood or commercial TV.
But plenty of open source is in fact supported by commercial ventures.
I really don't understand why advertising supports so much superficial BS when at the same time their customers want better targeting.
The fact that so much worthless stuff gets supported to me implies there is huge scope for those wasted ad dollars to be redirected to more utilitarian ends.
I think of Cracked when I think of a site that breaks the trend. It's usually informative and entertaining at the same time.
Any company that runs an R&D dept would be happy to advertise.
It's up to academica to choose where to publish.
...(executive's salary+stock+bonuses) `inventive creation' of insatible greed are today's giant shoulders.
Many funding bodies aim to fund the "best" research. How they define "best" is through scientometrics (essentially bibliometrics or page rank for scientific articles) - scientists & the sciences are funded in part on how cited the researcher or the research is. Scientists therefore have a real economic incentive to ensure their work is published in the most popular or prestigious journals as these are the most widely cited. The funding bodies could dismantle the scientific publishing market by awarding grants based on the accessibility of the research rather than the prestige of the journal.
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/27/582...
This bit sticks out:
"Libraries have been facing increasing costs because of these bundling practices and the problem is worse in the developing world. I have had emails from people in Africa and some parts of Asia asking for a copy of an article because their universities have had to cut costs. According to my publishing agreement I would be breaking the law to send it to them – this sticks in my throat, especially after my recent visit to Vietnam."
> Addressing this issue, Toni references the open spirit amongst coders working on open-source software. “There’s no reward system right now for open science. Scientists’ careers don’t benefit from it. But in software, everyone wants to see your GitHub account.”
This got me thinking. First, I think a large reason a lot of people (read: people in my bubble, mostly students / recent CS grads) use GitHub is precisely because of the prestige. I'd say the people who use GitHub without ever contributing to an open repo vastly outnumbers the people who do contribute. Instead, many people start using GitHub as a way to show-off their own projects -- the whole "GitHub as my resume" idea. But as more people do so, having a GitHub becomes a standard, and you get a positive feedback loop.
Second, how could we shift the status quo for science to associating prestige in an open system? I'm not familiar with the history of open source software, but I wonder if there are any parallels from how OSS grew that we could apply to science publishing.
Finally, there's a big systemic difference between doing collaborative science and writing open source software I can think of: the barrier to entry to software is much lower. A lot of hobbyist programmers contribute to open source projects (or at least have a GitHub account, which feeds more attention / prestige to the ecosystem), whereas it's pretty hard to contribute to science without both a graduate education and (in many fields) expensive equipment.
If you're sufficiently motivated to consider actual engagement, you might like to think about lending support to the excellent work being done by the Open Knowledge Foundation (http://okfn.org)
"The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a non-profit organisation founded in 2004 and dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms – including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content."
There's plenty of opportunity to get in there and make a significant contribution, e.g. http://openbiblio.net/ just to pick an example at random.
Another thing missing from this discussion is the style in which scientific papers are written. Invariably, published scientific papers are unhelpfully dense and terse, difficult to understand, full of needlessly obfuscated mathematical notation, and in general they are severely lacking in clarity. There is a stark contrast in the style of these formal papers and the style in which real research is actually shared and understood - through talks, presentations, teaching, textbooks, consultations, etc, where you have some hope of efficiently comprehending what the author is trying to present. I suspect that this obfuscation in papers is driven by the publishers and referees who impose a specific rigid style, combined with the researchers themselves who think that the less comprehensible their papers are to a wide audience, the smarter and more credible they will appear to be on the surface.
Another problem is that one can often identify small groups of researchers who publish papers on the same topic and cite each others and their own papers, but nobody outside of their little bubble cites their research. I think that this phenomenon is due to a combination of the aforementioned lack of trust, lack of academic honestly, lack of transparency and deliberate lack of clarity.
One idea that I had is that the Internet could be used to create public networks of trust, so that researchers can identify other researchers as trusted authorities on specific topics. Academic communities have these implicit networks of trust already, but to an outsider it is very difficult to figure out who the leading innovators are on some obscure topic. A trust network, combined with citation data, could provide a graph that could serve as a useful tool for research as well as a kind of "GitHub" for researchers to increase their prestige and positions.
Another tool for escaping the publishing doldrums is standard benchmarks. In data mining and machine learning, for example, there are some standard data sets and performance measurements, so that anyone who claims to come up with a better statistical predictor can test their theory against the existing data sets and compare results against other approaches. There are also similar performance benchmarks for database query performance, in computer science. I think that there should be more of these.
The real difficulty with all of this is incentivization, as the article points out. I think it goes beyond the issue of for-profit publishing companies and funders. I suspect that there is a large contingent of researchers who are secretly "hacks" and they don't WANT the bright spotlight of transparency to shown onto them, because they would be exposed and would not be able to sustain academic careers and tenures built on publishing worthless papers in obscure journals for "bubble communities." One example of a bubble community is "Fuzzy Logic," which has proven to be intellectually unsound and logically inconsistent, but which continues to fuel academic publishing careers, facilitated by companies like Elsevier who maintain obscure, wacky journals with a for-profit motive. I think the article is entirely appropriate in describing academic publishing as "fraud-lite." Personally, I was permanently turned off from the idea of an academic career after seeing "how the sausage is made" and seeing how worthless and suspect so many published papers are.
Are there any other blogs like that?
[1] http://www.datagenetics.com/blog.html
[2] http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html
[3] http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/november22012/index.html
This is where things get a bit selfish: everyone likes science. Everyone benefits from it. But, to what extent do we make the subsidization of scientific efforts compulsory?
Some people just want to live their life and die happy. Not everyone wants to pay for mars rovers. At this point, I expect a bunch of science lovers to get emotional and downvote my post.
If you can't fully fund science out of philanthropy, then it will be behind a paywall. Who'd have thought you need to pay for some of the most valuable information on the Earth? Wow.
People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP, but if you want to sell a journal on astrophysics the internet gets all riled up about it.
This is an interesting tangent, and just as a corellary, I don't anymore. I find online sample code and community wikis a lot more engrossing and knowledgeable than single authors writing 300 page tomes of dead tree. Knowledge bases like the java and python documentation, qt developers wiki, etc are all much more useful tools for learning new languages, frameworks, etc than a big book on it, and I find wikipedia articles and Stack Overflow answers better explanations of broader concepts like variable capture or shared memory than a book on it conveys.
So I'm not buying books. I read a bunch in college (off the shelf in the CS lab), and a few were great, but I find myself getting much more out of collaborative online works than one mans ideas of the right way to do things (even when they have a dozen editors for reviewing).
But more on topic, and in a broader sense, I think we have finally reduced the cost of information to such an insignificant quantity that writing such books usually isn't a profitable endeavor. It takes radical success selling knowledge on dead tree to make back the time investment to write it all down, and people like myself won't even consider it because people will freely give their knowledge in smaller chunks (usually, there are plenty of books online for free, like Python the Hard Way) that the "industry" of selling knowledge is collapsing, in a good way. The challenge now is organizing the absurd amount of information generated into useful knowledge rather than actively adding more to the pile. It is a distribution problem now, not a creation one.
>People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP, but if you want to sell a journal on astrophysics the internet gets all riled up about it.
Those examples are not analogous at all. Research isn't funded through the subscription fees to the journals, it's funded through tuition (via faculty salaries) and grants.
Giving the possibility of a modern article (only works in chrome for the moment but check out https://www.authorea.com/users/1/articles/1345/_show_article for an example) is one way. Making collaboration easier is another.
Until the incentives are in place researchers will continue to try and boost their careers by publishing in the most highly regarded journals, open or not.
EDIT: fixed link
So in some ways the journals don't care, because they're getting paid. Personally, I don't like an author pays model much either, as it doesn't account for scientists working outside their grants (or God forbid independent scientists).
I don't want to troll, but I'm wondering why this did not happened in the US, and instead in a communist country.
See, e.g. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/sputnik-declassified.h...
Here is some of the transcript from that:
--
> NARRATOR: What Eisenhower most wants is information about the enemy's forces. Early in 1954, he authorizes illegal military over-flights to photograph the Soviet Union.
> R. CARGILL HALL: This was a major presidential decision. These peacetime over-flights of the Soviet Union were very risky, first of all because these aircraft could not operate at altitudes above Soviet air defenses.
> NARRATOR: March, 1954: American fighters photograph Soviet air bases near Vladivostok. In April, American planes again enter Soviet airspace. But in May, Eisenhower's strategy backfires. An American bomber flies into Russia and is attacked by Soviet fighters. The damaged bomber barely makes it home.
> It is 1954, three years before Sputnik. Eisenhower is committed to surveillance of the Soviet Union. But he needs a better way.
--
> By early 1955, Eisenhower is set on creating a reconnaissance satellite. But the Killian Report has pointed out a problem: the legal status of space has not been defined.
> National boundaries extend into the atmosphere, but how far up does territorial airspace go? The answer will be critical to Eisenhower's spy satellite plan.
--
> LEE WEBSTER: When we fired that, we knew we could put a vehicle in orbit, because we had the velocity that it required. If we'd been given the go-ahead, we could have beat Sputnik by a year. We had the hardware over in Redstone, sitting in warehouses ready to go.
> RANDY CLINTON: We could have beat them. And that's the thing that grabbed us, hurt the most, is we knew, ahead of time, that we could have beat them.
--
> Just a few days after Sputnik was launched, Donald Quarles, from the Department of Defense, is in the Oval Office talking to Eisenhower. And one of the points that he makes is that he thinks that the Soviets have done us a good turn. They had established a precedent of over-flight, exactly what Eisenhower wanted to do initially, and now the Soviets had done it for us.
--
I'm not sure this is the complete story (I realize the above may come off as blindly pro-US), but it's an element that was unknown for 50 years while that information was still classified. I think the access to scientific papers is not a key part of that event (and besides, 50 years ago the traditional scientific publishing model still made sense).
Anyway, why can't governments make innovation just happen ? Have they tried torturing scientists to actually get results ? I mean if that doesn't work, what does ? How far did governments bend to scientists so they can do good work ? I'm sure we could start by pioneering in the field of stimulating innovation without money, by hiring managers that specializing in meeting the needs of scientists.
I'm still wondering about what actually makes successful scientists, and if we know, why can't we experiment on kids to breed them into achieving persons. Or just breed orphans ?
Glad I could continue to fund your now-obsolete business.
Sincerely, The Taxpayers