The War to Free Science

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/6/3/18271538/open-access-elsevier-california-sci-hub-academic-paywalls

by rdudekul • 7 years ago

66 23 7 years ago

vox.com

musicale• 7 years ago

Elsevier seems to be a slowly self-correcting problem.

dmitrygr• 7 years ago

They've been around for 139 years so far. Too slow of a correction, methinks

_Ender2• 7 years ago

While open access seems great, and the reasoning behind it is inline with my ideals, I still have problems with "gold" OA, which seems to be what is being referred to within this article:

Put another way: Publishers are still going to get paid. Open access just means the paychecks come at the front end.

Firstly, the fees imposed by journals are thousands of dollars, which is far too much for many researchers to pay. It would seemingly largely prevent the publication of independent research within such journals.

This was mentioned in the article:

In fact, many academics still don’t publish in open access journals. One big reason: Some feel they’re less prestigious and lower quality, and that they push the publishing costs on the scientists.

However, the article seemingly (and contradictorily) earlier implies that Gold OA is a solution to pushing the cost onto the researchers:

Academics are not paid for their article contributions to journals. They often have to pay fees to submit articles to journals and to publish.

However, under Gold OA this is only exacerbated, with large fees being everywhere on the publication-end. The readers don't have to pay, but now the authors do.

Additionally, this may create another pro-industry publication bias, as industry-funded studies may be more likely to have the money to publish in pay-to-publish journals, and this apparently has now been dubbed "e-publication bias" (bottom of https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/340/7753/Letters.full.pdf, also see http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.l1544).

Lastly, the article mentions predatory publishing, however fails to note that this phenomena is caused by Gold OA in the first place. In fact, it is sometimes specifically called "predatory open-access publishing". The idea behind predatory publishers is that Gold OA incentivizes publication (as they now get paid per-paper), leading them to seek out and accept as many papers as possible regardless of quality.

While open science certainly is in-line with my views, I'm not convinced that Gold OA is a good solution here.

mindcrime• 7 years ago

Agreed. Throwing gobs of money at Elsevier, Springer, etc., regardless of whether it's front-end or back-end, doesn't seem like a winning proposition to me.

I'm not going to say that they don't add any value, but the existence of overlay journals like Discrete Analysis, and other high-quality "pure play" open-access journals like JMLR, and JAIR, etc., suggest to me that it's possible to create a journal system where very little money is required on either end. I think our aspiration should be to see most scientific publishing move to such a model.

btrettel• 7 years ago

I tried to negotiate with one journal regarding their OA fees, and I didn't get anywhere. Their journal, which I preferred because it was more specialized (it's not particularly prestigious because few people know about it) charges about 40% more than the cheapest OA journal in my field. The journal staff didn't seem to care how much cheaper their competition is. Not surprisingly, almost no one publishes OA in that journal.

Still, the cheapest in my field is AIAA journal at $2000 per article. That's still outrageous. Given my understanding of what happens behind the scenes I find it hard to believe any journal actually needs that much money to stay profitable.

I'd be happy to pay an order of magnitude less, say $200, if that could ensure the article stays online for a long period of time. I don't know anything about starting new journals, but I hope competition helps this situation. I might start a journal someday...

Vinnl4• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the term Gold Open Access has been co-opted by the publishers. When the OA movement was using the term, they meant "published open access by the publisher, rather than posting alternative editions elsewhere (Green OA)". The publishers then started using it to mean author-pays Open Access.

Thus, when OA advocates use the term Gold OA, that gets interpreted the way you do above - whereas they usually intend for the fees to be low or non-existent, for authors. Some have started to use Diamond or Platinum OA for that, but it's hard to get that to stick now.

The point is: there are definitely Open Access models possible where publishing does not entail thousands of dollars of publication costs. This has been proven by many quality journals already.

_Ender2• 7 years ago

Sure, but unfortunately this is what it's become. I generally use the Green/Gold/Diamond split, where my own preferences go along the lines of diamond > green > gold. 'Diamond' journals exist, but they are rare.

sci-hub2• 7 years ago

One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and hosts more than 50 million academic papers.

Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.

FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/

dTal• 7 years ago

Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the actual DNS system that necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?

kaffee• 7 years ago

So you can't censor sci-hub.now.sh (at least in the US, where linking is typically protected speech). So that's one thing.

Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.

Relevant similar site: https://dark.fail

Vinnl4• 7 years ago

I'd guess it's the same as what makes Wikipedia resilient: they're just links. As long as Wikipedia and Wikidata can link to the current location of Sci-Hub, why can't other sites?

ocschwar• 7 years ago

The actual DNS system is vulnerable to domain registrar takedown requests.

Vinnl4• 7 years ago

Ha, that's interesting - the concept and execution seems almost identical a the project I shared [1] here more than a year ago: https://whereisscihub.now.sh/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591962

sci-hub2• 7 years ago

Looks like it’s based on the same code?

pieter_mj• 7 years ago

This is a war every philanthropist should be waging.

Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody.

There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho).

More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.

Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill, you pay everything, we nothing.

Vinnl4• 7 years ago

The Gates Foundation incidentally is one of the strongest voices in the push for Open Access. As a large and influential scientific funder, they were one of the first to demand research they funded to be OA, and recently one of the first non-founding parties to sign up for the strongest push for OA so far: Plan S.

Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it. It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard, it's doing very well.

chr1• 7 years ago

Github could be crucial in helping to win this war. The problem is not only that journals are behind paywalls (luckily sci-hub is helping here) but also the format we use for publishing and review is from last century. Github could help to make it easier to share articles with the code and data used to obtain it, and to have better process of peer review.

murphysbooks• 7 years ago

I heard arguments where US Government employees were working on creating open access policies for the research they funded. People would lament, "Nobody will work with us if we force them to make their research open access." I would reply, "Who are they going to work with? The US Government is the only place with these big piles of money. Yes, they will take a principled stand until their next mortgage payment is due."

nrf12• 7 years ago

Seriously.

This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."

detaro• 7 years ago

You probably need to explicitly ban publishing in publications with publishing fees, otherwise money from other sources will be used to pad out the difference.

tagh• 7 years ago

But there’s a big thing getting in the way of a revolution: prestige-obsessed scientists who continue to publish in closed-access journals.

That's blaming the victim. It's not the academics who are prestige-obsessed, it's the universities that assess and rank their staff by publication counts within such journals. Most academics I know just want to keep their job.

The War to Free Science

Related Stories