Should scientific articles be available free online?

http://www.slate.com/?id=2111023&

by zoowar • 15 years ago

141 60 15 years ago

slate.com

czDev• 15 years ago

I work for PLoS, it's great to see Open Access become such a high profile subject after the aaronsw story

ak2173• 15 years ago

Out of curiosity, what do you do for PLoS?

dochtman• 15 years ago

So what has become of that effort? We're 7 years in now, did they actually go ahead with their plan?

jessriedel• 15 years ago

Yes, although the time delay between publication and public availability was increased to 12 month.

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

ChuckFrank• 15 years ago

Yes. Absolutely.

Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you controlled the information.

Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours.

Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased informational availability and transparency.

All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold benefits.

So in short. TLDR -- Yes. Absolutely.

younewman• 15 years ago

What an enormous wank.

p4bl03• 15 years ago

Yes. A thousand times yes.

As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can."

New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.

We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price.

I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).

SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them.

« Your failed business model is not my problem. »

lutorm3• 15 years ago

Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might be submitted. If we go to publishing everything on the web, someone needs to perform this function or it will be even more difficult to sort through the flood of stuff that is written.

That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.

Dove3• 15 years ago

I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age.

I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it.

There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.

forkandwait3• 15 years ago

No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free.

The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough.

Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers.

(It's a warped system.)

p4bl03• 15 years ago

Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).

ma2rten• 15 years ago

Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.

xyzzyz• 15 years ago

You don't see a problem because you actually have a subscription to these journals -- via your university. During the school year most of the time I have the same experience -- all articles are freely available when I sit in a library or in my room in students' dormitory. Then the summer holidays come, and bam, my head hits the paywall. It annoys me like hell.

The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.

oasisbob• 15 years ago

Not being associated with a university anymore, Google Scholar saves me about ~70% of the time too. However, many of those links aren't legitimate (i.e., licensed) you see a lot of links like http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf .

Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.

p4bl03• 15 years ago

I can also access some of them via my school. But for instance for SpringerLink and ACM we only have access to recent material and I sometimes want to read stuff I don't have access to even through my school.

Anyway, schools and universities really have a lot of better stuff to do with their money than paying thieves.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Often those are draft copies that are usually very good but occasionally you'll hit one where there's an error corrected in the final version but still in there. Or figures are missing. Etc.

mechanical_fish2• 15 years ago

I simply log in my university VPN...

So in your country does everybody get a taxpayer-sponsored university VPN for life? Or are you speaking from the highly privileged position of "current university student in a well-funded school?"

In any case, it shows a tremendous impoverishment of imagination to claim that Google Scholar is equivalent to an actual free market in research. I want the footnotes in publication A to be directly hyperlinked to the relevant sections of their associated references. Otherwise we remain in the position where random TV shows on Wikipedia have better public documentation than our taxpayer-funded research.

I'll put your 95% assertion to the test and report back.

forkandwait3• 15 years ago

A lot of scholars will put a pdf on their personal website knowing that google scholar will link to it.

The university VPN thing: yeah, its just awesome that we limit access to research to people who are attending a university...

vacri6• 15 years ago

If "We don't need them anymore", why are you "really pissed of each time I found an article.../internet does that better than they could ever do it"?

"Your failed business model is not my problem." <- Yes, people should work effectively for free so I don't have to pay for my professional development tools! Collection, reviewing, editing, and distribution of articles on cutting edge topics, consumed by a tiny audience is not cheap.

ShirtlessRod• 15 years ago

It's a bit disingenuous to include "collection, reviewing, and editing" in that list because it's not these companies that are responsible for the majority of those tasks, especially the reviewing part, which is by far the most time consuming and requires the expertise that is the most in short supply.

Distribution in this case amounts to little more than a file server. Nothing tremendously unique there from a technology perspective.

ak2173• 15 years ago

It's not cheap, and it's done for free by academic professionals in the corresponding fields. Please understand, the publishing houses like Springer or IEEE provide no added value except for their printing and administrative services.

Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.

DennisP3• 15 years ago

What's especially sad: the whole reason Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web was to put scientific articles on it. Hyperlinks were for citations.

But now the journals want you to pay $35 every time you follow a hyperlink.

rjurney• 15 years ago

It is insane for the people to fund research they can't freely view the results of.

PaulHoule• 15 years ago

No question about it.

If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.

rflrob• 15 years ago

Both of your estimates actually seem fairly low.

In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount.

The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].

All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it.

[1]http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php

sorbus• 15 years ago

> The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].

I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving".

[1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).

_delirium• 15 years ago

It's not too clear to me why PLoS journals cost so much to publish in. In computer science, the open-access journals are typically free to publish in, supported by relatively modest funds from a hosting institution. For example, this is probably the top machine-learning journal, and I don't think it even has a budget or employees, just some donated bandwidth: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/

Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?

ristretto• 15 years ago

It's not mostly about the price (you can always find a paper from friends etc if you're determined). It's about the availability of vast amounts of text to analysis and mining. Who knows how many new insights we have already lost (mainly in the life sciences) from this absurd system that everyone seems to hate yet nobody is willing to change.

btw, frontiers (http://frontiersin.org/) is another great open access set of journals

rheide• 15 years ago

Off-topic but boo on slate for detecting that I'm browsing on an iPad, after which they redirect me to an 'iPad-optimized' front page, but not to the article I wanted to read..

rawsyntax• 15 years ago

A lot of the time the full website and the mobile site are not the same backend / system. That said I share your frustration

bauchidgw• 15 years ago

sadly slate.com is not readable on the ipad due to some swipe/touch/die scumware.....

derrickpetzold• 15 years ago

They should be if they are payed for by public funds the same applies to software. Of course that doesn't apply to defense or otherwise potentially dangerous software but the general rule should be to opensource government contracted development because if they don't have a good reason for not doing so they are probably doing it wrong.

ChristianMarks• 15 years ago

As a researcher myself, I completely agree that taxpayers should not be subsidizing for-profit publishers. The government is wrong to fund the production of research papers with taxpayer money and allow the owner of some privately owned pay wall to collect a toll for access to them. Great work if you can get it.

It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a consumer.

Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you?

Answer: a taxpayer.

That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the copyright, and collects their toll.

There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for years, and we're all over the political spectrum.

RK2• 15 years ago

Article from 2004.

cabalamat• 15 years ago

Should the results of taxpayer-funded research be available to those who paid for it, without further payment? Of course they should.

Should scientific articles be available free online?

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