Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles

"The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication."

This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?

You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.

The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html

That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?

To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."

I'm a little nervous about forceful approaches though. There are outcomes that come from a culture of compliance, and there are outcomes that come from more organic dynamics. I think the latter will usually produce better results.

IE, I would prefer that the scientific community just take publications less seriously if the underlying data in not available similarly to how they would treat publications that are not peer reviewed.

The goal is to improve science. But if the actual publications and researchers are motivated by Gates-compliance or Government-compliance, that could get derailed.

This is not to say that the academic publishing isn't a complete mess. I get pissed off every time I have to sign away my copyright to a publisher, or spend a day reviewing a paper without compensation, while the publishers rake in hundreds of millions in profits.

However, realistically the requirement of free access today means nothing more than that I have to pay the journal a couple of $k extra. Also realistically, that money is going to be away from the rest of my budget somehow, which means I can pay less salaries. At the same time, the university is still going to pay the same for access to the digital libraries, so the end result is that a pile of money that was going to pay for a researcher's monthly salary now goes to the publisher instead.

A better use of the tax/donation money would be to establish new open access venues to publish (journals, conferences) to demolish the outdated publisher model.

Funding agencies should really stop kneeling in front of publishers and refuse to pay for this, or at least fix themselves a maximum price per publication. Currently publishers ask for $1000 to $5000 in some cases, which is completely insane. I'm not denying the cost of publication. But there is that actual cost, and then there is the prices demanded by publishers, which looks more like violent theft than it looks like the actual cost.

But once you do find a specific topic of interest, the ability to go directly to high-grade, quality sources on that topic is hugely useful.

I've been pursuing just such a research project over the past several years, and tools such as /r/scholar and Library Genesis (as well as traditional bookstores and libraries) are phenomenally useful.

The problem I increasingly run into in the online world is that first-order sources -- social media, blogs, and for the most part even news media, are of exceeding poor quality. They fail to cite sources, they're often simply memetic rip-offs, or copy highlights from corporate press releases. I highlighted an instance just today concerning a biomethane bus story out of the UK -- as with many renewable energy stories, it was lacking in specific quantification and contextual information, which I've supplied: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/ZmMg...

Worth noting as well: the source of the additional information was 1) Wikipedia (for population measures), my own familiarity with human dietary baselines, the International Energy Agency, and a UK government office which posts its data reports online.

The ability to dig into specific academic articles is huge though. I'm also finding a renewed love of books -- there's something about going through a work that someone spent a few years assembling and citing (books lacking indices, bibliographies, and footnotes or end-notes are not worth having).

What's killer now is to be able to read a book, see a point of interest, follow the citation, and then call up the specific paper or report there and then to see what exactly it says. This both hugely increases the information available to the researcher, and reduces the friction of verifying citations. Often you'll find that there are foundational works, otherwise not generally available, which are very useful.

Those published prior to ~1920 are very frequently freely available. Project Gutenberg and The Internet Archive have wide-ranging collections, but there are other organizations which have their own assemblages of works (including, ironically given my own views on the subjects, many free-market fundamentalist and libertarian organizations).

Among my bigger frustrations is actually managing all of this -- tools to bookmark, reference, cite, annotate, call-up, etc., electronic media are greatly wanting.

When I did my MSc dissertation on methods to improve OCR error correction, and had to pick a set of OCR engines to test, it was illuminating to see just how badly e.g. gocr and ocrad fared vs. Tesseract (which started out closed source) and commercial products (this was years ago so the situation may have changed).

In that field it was clear that even relatively basic methods from the literature had not yet made it into open source "organically" and it was first the open sourcing of Tesseract that appeared to start to make some of the algorithms more widespread.

There are many niches like that, but you can also easily spend the entirety of your software engineering career never touching on areas where the research papers will be particularly critical to you.

It also depends on whether there are many "bridges". E.g. in areas like distributed computing that are hot fields in the tech industry, a lot of the research gets jumped on pretty quickly by people that implement the algorithms presented and/or nicely digests it into blog posts for us, and for most people it's then sufficient to "just" track that, unless you want to be at the true cutting edge of the field.

I like reading research papers, but frankly it is mostly for my own curiosity rather than because it's a necessity.

I took a similar approach to you for quite some time, spending lots of time at the library researching subjects instead (if you are looking for high quality sources, a good library is worth it's weight in gold.) When I became the sysadmin for a next-gen genetics company though, I found myself daily reading journal articles, at first for learning the subject matter I was dealing with, and later I found it useful even for normal sysadmin work.

For example, I recently was debating a private MPLS network vs flat internet using IPSec for interoffice communication. Searching google for MPLS vs IPSec brought up a handful of opinion pieces that were light on data and facts. After a few searches in one of the scholarly databases though, I found a paper with actual testing and benchmarks, which helped me make my decision. (MPLS won, if you are curious)

I find that if you are looking for an erudite and lucid thinker, you need to find the right book. If you are looking for data and statistics and scientific method, papers can't be beat.

Be wary though, I feel as if the scrutiny process has gone downhill, and a lot of questionable science makes it though, so be skeptical.

I also find the history of scientific papers very interesting, particularly The Royal Society and how, originally, it was purposefully used to control the flow of information to the proletariat. I think this pattern has never fully been broken, and it is why we are seeing/will see an increasingly overt attempt to balkanize and paywall the internet. It must be brought under "control", because it's anarchistic freedom of thought model is a threat to TPTB. This was also a passion of A Swartz.

The current system rewards people who publish in the high-impact journals, which means they get the "coolest" papers, which means they remain high impact. The ones at the top now are not generally open access.

At any rate, to 'disrupt' conventional journals, you need to convince the big names to be the editors/reviewers (which is often hard!), in order to give some credibility to your new journal.

I'm not sure anybody in the process looked at that and said to themselves "yup, that looks good". Which is also a problem, but one for which the "show desktop version" checkbox is a good solution.

At Sage our OA fees for hybrid journals range a lot, but are typically either $1,500 or $3,000 (source: http://www.uk.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/SAGE-Choic...). The more prestigious the journal the more the fee is typically. Also, high fees are common in hard sciences (where everything is grant funded, like from Gates, NIH, etc) but the fees are typically much lower in social sciences and humanities where there aren't typically publication fees built into research grants. I don't think we (Sage) publish anything that can command the $5k like Cell and Nature, which is basically the price point where OA fees top out.

So the authors will still want the prestige of the top-tier journals (at least while hiring decisions are still made with that metric), and one byproduct of mandates like these is more APCs flowing to the big publishers.

They would, for example, only publish the backbone structure of a protein as a drawing, and not as 3D coordinates. In response, people would input the 2D coordinates into software that would try to reconstruct the 3D structure. (This was possible because the publication would often be as a split stereoscopic image.)

Finally, in the mid-1990s, the major journals put their feet down and said they would only publish of the coordinates were deposited in a public data collection, which would be released no later than a year of publication.

So yes, the people funding the science, and the people publishing the science, who sometimes have to force the people doing the science to actually be more open.

After health care, journal publishing fees are one of the biggest and most regressive 'free market' choke-point costs ever levied on human civilisation.

The post you link seems a bit confused about, for example, why it's important to publish a finding only once. (Hint: So lazy people can't keep regurgitating their old results to seem productive in the eyes of grant-givers.) It also says the Gates decision goes too far, and then suggests something even farther: that the paper would need to be written twice, separately, for public and commercial consumption.

"Would this change undermine the business academic journals are in? The answer is only if they add no value above the raw knowledge an academic could make available themselves."

And the argument is that they are not adding nearly as much value as they are extracting from the system.

For example, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/ says "Anyone who has access to the [Cambridge] University Library may use this service. The fee for an Inter-Library Loan request is currently £3.00 for members of Cambridge University and £6.00 for all other readers."

And for Sheffield, http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/services/ilcharges suggests it would be £9.40 for an article.

I don't know about the UK, but here in Sweden it's easy to get a library card for the local university library, and access to their ILL services.

Another professor that was a friend of my professor asked us to cite his paper. I was never able to replicate his results, but we still sited it anyways.

One professor used to hunt around for different statistical tests until she found one which gave her the desired p values so she could publish.

One of the PhD students I worked with would draw absurd conclusions from the data. He would see an effect when there wasn't one. He was regularly shown to be wrong when we did statistical analysis, but he never changed his ways. He is currently doing his postdoc at a very well known institution.

The worst part though is that I have also come across many genuine and hard working professors and labs who take time to scrutinize their work and produce good results. They end up losing the tenure battle.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012...