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Comment by eterno | Hacker News Reader

slightly offtopic, but I am fundamentally opposed to this journal-conferences monopoly on published research and the related profiteering by the likes of springer.

Its like the newspaper industry which has outlived its business model.

Someone please youtube the whole thing and kill them already.

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Someone please youtube the whole thing and kill them already.

Ever heard of Google Scholar? As long as researchers put their papers up on their personal websites -- and almost everyone does, these days -- Google will find them. Sure, there isn't 100% coverage; but I'd say that Google Scholar provides much better coverage for published research than youtube provides for TV shows.

Almost everyone does in certain, but not all, disciplines. A lot of papers in subjects like Biology and Chemistry, for example, don't seem to be as accessible.

The problem is not really finding stuff. It's a filtering problem. If the article made it through this process, people's priors are more favorable and they might actually read it or not dismiss it immediately upon the first disagreement. I don't like the process either. I also have no other solution.

As a student that uses Google scholar quite often "almost everyone" is a lot lower than you think it is. At least in computer science and related fields, I have to use my schools access to journals almost every time.

That's odd. I'm a computer scientist who uses Google scholar quite often, and I can't remember when I last needed to read a paper which Google couldn't find for me.

Maybe the situation is different in my fields (algorithms and cryptography) than in yours?

We are already there in a sense: http://arxiv.org/

Interestingly the publishing industry has a firmer hold on the life sciences.

This is good too: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/journals.html

I think arxiv is a great start but still seems to be kind of internet add-on to the old way rather than being a rethink from the ground up to the research business.

I liked the "Cite as" feature, but there are fundamental issues which I think needs to be changed:

1. Anyone should be able to comment/discuss articles. With perhaps karma based user voting to surface the best comments. Each comment should again be citable.

2. The text should be in HTML- shareable simply and acted upon by the community.

3. A reddit style list for each topic listing the recent,high impact papers. High impact is again voted on by the community, again with people who are 'known' to produce better research having more weight.

What you want is Nature Precedings (http://precedings.nature.com/) or any of the PLoS journals (http://www.plos.org/)

Are you familiar with the Open Access movement (http://www.plos.org/oa/index.html) along with the legislation recently passed (and currently under attack) which mandates all NIH funded research be made publicly available within a year of initial publication? Please write to your congressperson to let them know that you support the Open Access initiative!

Check http://arxiv.org/

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