Why is science behind a paywall?

http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall

by twog • 13 years ago

310 108 13 years ago

blog.priceonomics.com

mtgx• 13 years ago

For the same reason the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is not accepted in the world of copyright today anymore - corporate greed.

e3pi• 13 years ago

" ...for the same reason the idea of "standing on the shoulders of giants" is not accepted in the world of copyright today anymore - corporate

...(executive's salary+stock+bonuses) `inventive creation' of insatible greed are today's giant shoulders.

kanzure6• 13 years ago

I am a little upset that all of our "space enthusiasts" (including me) didn't have backups of the content from NTRS (NASA Technical Reports Server). NTRS is now back online after going down due to political pressures weeks ago, except 85% of the content is now missing. Taking NTRS down removed something like a whole 2% of science from the public record, plus the majority of everything we know about becoming a space-faring civilization. Gone.

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.

https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front

dman3• 13 years ago

Ive contacted Elsevier multiple times for setting up something reasonable like 50-100 bucks a month to give access to people who are not academics. Sadly if youre not in a university youre stuck paying per paper.

kanzure6• 13 years ago

You could use http://deepdyve.com/ or http://readcube.com/access but it is still very expensive to read a healthy amount. Still, they have talked with the arms dealers and made prior arrangements, and apparently got better results than your emails did. I read >100 papers/month, and paying $45.95/paper or $4.95/paper or whatever really starts to cut into my mad science budget..

maeon3• 13 years ago

We need an off-planet backup of all data contained on the internet in anticipation of an apocalyptic event sending humanity back into survival hunter-gatherer mode for a few decades.

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.

jessedhillon• 13 years ago

Interesting proposal, I have to wonder though:

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.

polymatter• 13 years ago

Are you aware of the Rosetta project (http://rosettaproject.org/about/)?

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.

Simucal• 13 years ago

This reminds me of the novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz". The novel is broken up into 3 periods, each 600 years apart, following a nuclear war that nearly wiped out humanity.

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.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

Just beam it into space and plot an intercept course. You'll have to deal with signal recovery a bit below the noise floor, the problem is that most likely a civilization in need of those documents would not be able to recover the data.

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.

kanzure6• 13 years ago

> We need an off-planet backup of all data contained on the internet in anticipation of an apocalyptic event

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!

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

I like this idea, but...

  "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."

and the cycle begins a-new.

kirk21• 13 years ago

Any alternatives for Mendeley? I've tried Colwiz and hope http://bohr.launchrock.com will be great.

kanzure6• 13 years ago

> Any alternatives for Mendeley

http://zotero.org/

recent comments about mendelsevier vs. zotero: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5525111

jonmrodriguez• 13 years ago

The loss of NTRS does seem unbelievably sad. Are there any efforts underway to get the 85% put back online through political or NASA-internal means? And is anyone trying to reconstruct the data from Internet caches? I think that at one point, a lot of the text was in Google caches -- idk if it's been evicted yet

new2994• 13 years ago

https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs

new2994• 13 years ago

Did archive.org not grab them at: https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdocs

tjpd• 13 years ago

Good article. One issue that often isn't highlighted enough is the role that funding bodies play. They are complicit in maintaining publishers pricing power & market share.

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.

irollboozers• 13 years ago

This is such a beautifully and elegantly done analysis. The economics (and particularly in this article, the history) of science is such an untouched gem as a fascinating topic. I am so freaking excited to see this post as #1 on HN.

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).

cinquemb2• 13 years ago

Interesting points you make. The last night, one of my friends who is in college did an analysis in python on a couple subway lines in NYC to tell people whether they should wait for the express or not depending on time of day and etc. He published it online via google sites, but not on github or bitbucket, which surprised me.

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.

czr804• 13 years ago

Well, scientists still need a means to communicate with each other - I wouldn't want to mix the needs of professional communication with that of popular communication.

saraid2163• 13 years ago

> The best possible outcome is actual science content for the masses.

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.

drorweiss• 13 years ago

I doubt if change can come from the existing system and institutions.

Wikipedia did not grow from Britannica.

OpenSource did not grow from commercial software.

YouTube did not grow from Hollywood or commercial TV.

kristopolous• 13 years ago

what would this look like? Any ideas?

Sven72• 13 years ago

Ad supported?

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.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

Like this: http://www.doaj.org/

It's up to academica to choose where to publish.

jacquesm2• 13 years ago

> OpenSource did not grow from commercial software.

But plenty of open source is in fact supported by commercial ventures.

Flimm• 13 years ago

Commercial software and open source software are intersecting sets.

jakub_g2• 13 years ago

> In April 2012, the Harvard Library published a letter stating that their subscriptions to academic journals were “financially untenable.” Due to price increases as high as 145% over the past 6 years, the library said that it would soon be forced to cut back on subscriptions.

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).

darxius• 13 years ago

Let me go on a tangent here and say that this is a fantastically written article. I'm continuously impressed with the quality of material coming out of the Priceonomics blog.

notahacker• 13 years ago

I think it's a little unfair to imply the academic publishing model had anything to do with the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle. Their paper was supported by the non-profit NBER who publish it in open access form (the AER version is downloadable from Rogoff's website too) and was never peer-reviewed. The authors shared the dataset with the first person to question the results.

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.

emiliobumachar2• 13 years ago

If one did not need to ask the authors for the dataset, implicitly challenging their work, but could instead just download it from a public website linked to in the paper from day one...

jacoblyles• 13 years ago

I agree with you. But there are a lot of professors that won't share data when asked, so they deserve credit for that.

Brashman• 13 years ago

The open data issue and the paywall issue are separate issues. Even if the publishers opened up the papers for public access, people would still not have had access to the R&R dataset.

nell• 13 years ago

Pricenomics has been writing some interesting data analysis pieces for sometime now. Kudos!! Keep'em coming.

Are there any other blogs like that?

jakub_g2• 13 years ago

I enjoy reading DataGenetics [1] (found it on the front page of HN of course). They write thorough articles on various topics. I've read a couple of it and found them great, e.g. PIN analysis [2] and Distributing passwords [3].

[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

Kliment• 13 years ago

There's always gwern, and there were several interesting ones on the okcupid blog.

jokoon3• 13 years ago

I wonder why it was the soviets who launched the first satellite, and not the americans.

I don't want to troll, but I'm wondering why this did not happened in the US, and instead in a communist country.

jmyc• 13 years ago

According to now-declassified documents, the US had the capability but chose not to launch a satellite due to setting legal precedent. I.e., they wanted to launch spy satellites but were worried that if they initiated this, it could be interpreted as an act of war. If instead the USSR was first to launch a satellite and it flew over the US, then the US could do the same in turn without provoking war.

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).

jokoon3• 13 years ago

What about first man in space ? Was it what the soviets had more data from sputnik to make it happen ?

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 ?

pjmorris• 13 years ago

There were significant efforts made at the end of WW2 by both Russia and the United States, to acquire the best nuclear and rocket engineers that the Germans had (e.g. Werner von Braun's team that built the Saturns for Apollo). There was also an obvious existential threat that Russia felt from the US nuclear power displayed at Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Both the US and Russia invested a great deal in means for responding to these threats. While Russia edged out the US in a handful of things early on, by the 1969 Moon landing (if not sooner) it was clear the US had the lead in rocketry as well as nuclear weapons. You might find 'This New Ocean', Burrows, interesting and useful for perspective.

sherwin• 13 years ago

The says that a big barrier to adopting 'open source science' is the prestige that comes with publishing in heavy weight, closed journals. It then draws the comparison to software, and why open source software is quite successful:

> 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.

s0rce2• 13 years ago

Exactly, I could have published my paper in Plos ONE but I published it in Nature instead. Sorry open source but my career plans won this round.

gjhiggins• 13 years ago

> how could we shift the status quo for science to associating prestige in an open system

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.

mpr3• 13 years ago

A temp way around this is to enrol in a university for one credit, and then drop out shortly after. You'll have full access while you're an official student.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

Simple, science is not a commodity.

scott_karana• 13 years ago

And yet, the article is about how research has been commoditized.

youngerdryas• 13 years ago

If pirate bay was really interested in justice they would take up this cause.

shabble2• 13 years ago

http://thepaperbay.com/ (By HN's jacquesm, I believe[1])

[1] http://jacquesmattheij.com/introducing-thepaperbay

ysapir3• 13 years ago

Quality control is essential. I have an interest in linguistics. But on the internet, some of the linguistics arguments are ridiculous. There are websites that claim that English (and all world languages) are descendant from Turkish. It is rubbish. In all types of subjects you find people with these pet theories, and they can be very prolific, putting their opinion on wikipedia or wikia or wherever, on websites, in discussions, and there can even be a following. In software, you can tell rubbish. It compiles or it does not. It has a lot of bug requests or it does not. This does not map to science. You can't run a scientific article through a compiler to tell if it is good or bad. You can't tell if a new physics theory is reputable or some science fiction. A theory may be 10 years old, and the professor who wrote it unable to respond to all the queries, "bug requests," but it is still valuable. And a prolific pseudo-science author may have little "bug requests" because no one reputable who knows something about the subject has any time to deal with his nonsense. Without effective quality control, there will be no science. The article had no real solution to the problem.

fchollet• 13 years ago

Actually, you can (run a scientific claim through a "compiler"): it's the principle of reproducibility. You should be able to repeat the steps of the researcher (whether it's an algorithm or a biology experiment...) and get the same results.

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.

ysapir3• 13 years ago

Even in natural sciences, there may be experiments that are not easily reproducible. Finding the Higgs can only be done in a long while (decade or more) with great financial investment.

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.

[1] http://www.snopes.com/photos/signs/sciencetest.asp

saraid2163• 13 years ago

The OA is not proposing that we do away with peer review.

ysapir3• 13 years ago

That isn't clear to me, but in any case, they seem to be talking about a new type of peer review process, which is more immediate -- something akin to forking on github or editing a wiki maybe. I'm not sure.

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).

natejenkins• 13 years ago

We (https://www.authorea.com) are trying to be a small part of the solution. The question becomes "How do you incentivize researchers to publish in open science/open data journals?"

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

n00b101• 13 years ago

I think they should have said more about the trust and quality control issues with journals (especially Elsevier, which has hundreds of obscure journals). I'm just a layperson ... but in my brief experience working with academic researchers during my undergrad days (specifically in the area of data mining / machine learning), I was surprised to learn that they did not trust research simply because it was published in a journal - they only trusted people who they knew, people they could speak with through informal channels to get honest opinions from. In data mining, the pattern of most papers is "here is a new mash-up of algorithms A, B and C, with modifications X and Y, and here are some prediction accuracy benchmarks that prove the supposed usefulness of our supposedly new method." Needless to say, the actual code and test data sets are rarely ever shared. I recall coming across an outrageous number of data mining papers, appearing in Elsevier journals, which claimed to be able to predict stock markets (!!!), written by people who did not have any real understanding of finance and I guess did not understand how unlikely it really is to find predictive patterns in liquid, financial markets.

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.

s0rce2• 13 years ago

I think the most effective solution so far is the NIH public access policy, http://publicaccess.nih.gov/. For all NIH funded work the authors have to release the paper. What happens is the Scientists get to publish in high-impact closed-access journals, like Nature/Science and then the pre-press manuscript is made available open access. I'm not sure what would happen to the closed-access journal business model if more federal science funding agencies went this way but I assume everyone would read the free version.

new2994• 13 years ago

I don't know about the NIH specifically but often what happens is journals will charge to make/allow an to be article open access. The NIH will give/include in grants funds for paying journals to make a paper open access (often a few thousand USD).

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).

specialp• 13 years ago

I actually work as a developer for non-profit society. I agree that having paywalls around content is bad and prevents the dissemination and access to fundamental knowledge. We generate most of our operational revenue through journal subscriptions. I know from working here that it does indeed cost a fair amount of money to provide both the IT and editorial support for peer review and archiving/presenting the data forever.

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.

readme2• 13 years ago

So, what's the alternative to paying for science? We fund it either out of philanthropy, or taxes. I think we know we can't fund all of the world's scientific endeavors on philanthropy alone.

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.

klipt• 13 years ago

Actually the issue is that we're currently paying for it twice. Once to fund the research, and then again to read the journal. The actual scientist doesn't get any part of the second cost; only the publishing company does.

readme2• 13 years ago

I see. That is an excellent point. The internet is supposed to enable scientists to share this information for free (that's what it was for, right)

zanny• 13 years ago

> People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP

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.

shirederby• 13 years ago

>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.

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.

crazy1van• 13 years ago

Dear science journals,

Glad I could continue to fund your now-obsolete business.

Sincerely, The Taxpayers

unabridged• 13 years ago

The best way to eliminate pay journals is to start lobbying public/nonprofit grant providers to require all research done to published in open journals, similar to what the NSF is doing right now. Pressure can also be put on the state governments to make public universities require publishing in open journals.

yekko• 13 years ago

Because it's no longer science. It's corruption.

hiharryhere• 13 years ago

Discussed this with my Dad (a doctor) who offered this up. It's a post by a researcher discussing a petition to boycott Elsevier

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."

homosaur• 13 years ago

Spoiler: corruption.

skylan_q• 13 years ago

We need to continue providing non-forgiveable gov't loans to students so that they can continue funneling $8000/year into their schools while also taxing them and their parents to give grants to profs on tenure so that publishers can conceal these publicly-funded works of research from us.

Daniel_Newby• 13 years ago

Ooh, ooh, let's subsidize it with deficit spending!

ccdan• 13 years ago

Not much of a surprise. There's way, way too much not only useless research but totally wrong research (bad data, close to zero use of the scientific method, reliance on fallacies like correlation = causation and so on) Rigor in science must increase and fund should be directed to serious, experimental research based on the scientific method.

Why is science behind a paywall?

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