Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available(eff.org)
eff.org
Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/03/tell-congress-its-time-move-fastr
134 comments
There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued:
* Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent.
* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.
* Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.
* Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus.
[1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.
* Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent.
* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.
* Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.
* Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus.
[1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.
> Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.
Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.
Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.
Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.
Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.
How much is the department paying for those journal subscriptions?
Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access submission fee.
Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access submission fee.
How budgets generally work:
University pays for journal subscriptions.
Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.
These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.
This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.
[1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees
University pays for journal subscriptions.
Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.
These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.
This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.
[1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees
It's not the departments that pay for subscriptions: it's the universities themselves (usually, the library).
Is it possible for you to release a PDF/LaTeX source via other means?
Depends on the publisher. Both ACM and IEEE allow publishing a copy on your website, don't know about Springer or Elsevier. Most authors in CS that I know publish copies as soon as they are accepted for publication.
Then you are running into problems with the commercial journals, and you need their peer-review.
It really depends on your field; as far as I am aware (I am a PhD student in theoretical CS) even Elsevier and Springer do not go against preprints on arXiv.
Am i correct in assuming that getting peer reviewed binds you to their terms, one of which must be to disallow other means of distribution?
I know at uni, our tutors told us to politely email researchers for a copy in case our subscription didn't cover their research. I didn't bother with this as booksc (libgen) and sci-hub are faster.
Reminds me of the pre-netflix era.
I know at uni, our tutors told us to politely email researchers for a copy in case our subscription didn't cover their research. I didn't bother with this as booksc (libgen) and sci-hub are faster.
Reminds me of the pre-netflix era.
> * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.
Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.
But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.
Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.
Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.
But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.
Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.
Rephrasing the gist of your argument: The professors are overloaded, so they cannot do a thorough job when they are on a hiring committee. Therefore, we should use the existing structures that make it trivial to rank applicants, with the unfortunate consequence of us supporting the closed-access journals of today.
My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.
As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.
Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.
You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.
And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.
My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.
As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.
Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.
You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.
And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.
> As a PhD student [..]. The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills [...]
As a PhD student myself, I have observed the hiring process at my department many times. Here teaching experience counts, and teaching skills are evaluated: the candidate has to give a talk, which is used to evaluate how well the person can teach. I'm pretty sure it's the same in other universities.
Also, if you're interviewing for a teaching professor position, then you have to give a mock lecture with actual students in attendance.
I sympathize with your ideals about how things should be, but at some point one needs to accept the reality. There's no way to magically find time in professors' time for a review of papers "out of the left field". There aren't any incentives for that, and I don't imagine any universities investing extra money into that. I mean, most professors aren't formally paid for administrative tasks, unless they hold some kind of official title (Department Director, Dean etc.). What they're paid for is research and teaching.
One relatively easy way to fix that would be to publish reviews along with the papers. While you and I would both agree that many reviews are rubbish, many others still are quite insightful and can serve a more expressive indicator of quality than journal/conference ranking and citation count.
As a PhD student myself, I have observed the hiring process at my department many times. Here teaching experience counts, and teaching skills are evaluated: the candidate has to give a talk, which is used to evaluate how well the person can teach. I'm pretty sure it's the same in other universities.
Also, if you're interviewing for a teaching professor position, then you have to give a mock lecture with actual students in attendance.
I sympathize with your ideals about how things should be, but at some point one needs to accept the reality. There's no way to magically find time in professors' time for a review of papers "out of the left field". There aren't any incentives for that, and I don't imagine any universities investing extra money into that. I mean, most professors aren't formally paid for administrative tasks, unless they hold some kind of official title (Department Director, Dean etc.). What they're paid for is research and teaching.
One relatively easy way to fix that would be to publish reviews along with the papers. While you and I would both agree that many reviews are rubbish, many others still are quite insightful and can serve a more expressive indicator of quality than journal/conference ranking and citation count.
> a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.
Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.
Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.
Try these
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology; ISSN: 2330-1643.
Scientometrics; ISSN: 0138-9130.
Journal of Informetrics; ISSN: 1751-1577.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology; ISSN: 2330-1643.
Scientometrics; ISSN: 0138-9130.
Journal of Informetrics; ISSN: 1751-1577.
Harvard has an open-access policy[1] and it may be that other institutions do as well. When submitting to a journal with a copyright agreement, authors attach a modification to the agreement, giving the university rights to distribute the research for non-commercial purposes. I do not know how universally-used this is across the institution or if there are journals refusing to accept this modification or not.
[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/
[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/
>What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons.
The University of California has already done this.*
Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*
* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...
The University of California has already done this.*
Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*
* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...
Honestly given that sci hub exist and is so simple to use, why not just have the universitites promote the shit out of it?
> civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns
Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.
Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.
"Feeling" like you've helped more often then not does more harm than good unless it leads to action; signing petition unless there's an expressed count required for action that's enforceable is often meaningless.
I have to say, we should all be super grateful for the OSS community. There's so much free non-publicly funded continuously supported OSS available within a click of a button. I am a data scientist, and everyday I am amazed how powerful the anaconda distribution (and its over 150 included packages) is. Is there any industry on Earth that has anything like OSS?
I have wondered this before as well. I can't think of any industry that is as open as FOSS. There is FOSS available for literally everything you could ever want or need[0].
FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.
I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.
[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
FOSS enabled me to learn about programming computers with zero cost (other than the hardware of course). Sure the paid closed source tools are probably "better" (usually that mostly means prettier) but it amazes me that anyone on earth can grab a free Linux distro and it will come with access to a huge collection of software that will allow that person to learn and better themselves. In the developed world that doesn't really seem all that amazing. I mean most people would just buy a Mac and go to an expensive university but in a lot of the world where money and education are close to non-existent it is truly incredible.
I am glad we live in a world with FOSS and with people who are extremely passionate about it (EFF, RMS, etc.). It puts pressure on the big software companies to not be total bastards. Imagine a world where only the elite educated had access to the software tools needed to drive innovation. A world controlled by Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Google, Oracle, etc.
[0] Okay now somebody will point out an edge case ;)
My Counter-Strike addiction would like a word with you.
Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
Although Linux support has been getting a lot better for gaming, admittedly.
CS works just fine from Steam. On any Linux.
Steam doesn't work on 'any Linux' without jumping through many many hoops for most distros.
While this used to be the case, with Valve's steam machines they seem to have a native client now[0].
[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
[0]https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux
This is still the case, they had a native client for a while, but it is 32-bit and only well supported on Ubuntu and very similar distros.
Which have you had problems with.
I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
I work Ubuntu Based, Fedora, and Arch have had no issues on these.
Gentoo to name one.
I had zero issues installing Steam and CS on my Gentoo workstations (two of them). This was 2 years ago.
I've been playing CS on Linux for about 15 years.
Kind of: Take DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) for example which sets standards used in hardware (like normed screws or normed metal alloys). Albeit not free (as in free beer) it guarantees that I can buy eg. screws with guaranteed minimal properties from different vendors. I would see this at least somehow equivalent to open source software, which can be copied at minimal marginal cost and thus is easy to provide for free (as in free beer).
Bioinformatics is close.
I moved from Computer Science into bioinformatics / computational immunology.
Bioinformatics is fatally infected by the associated culture of biology. Tools get squirreled away until published in a non-open venue, then eventually dumped online in some difficult to install manner.
Bioinformatics is fatally infected by the associated culture of biology. Tools get squirreled away until published in a non-open venue, then eventually dumped online in some difficult to install manner.
Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?
It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when modern "bioinformatics" started. Some notable times are 1979 when the Los Alamos Sequence Database started, 1982 when that became GenBank, and certainly by 1990 when the Human Genome Project started.
GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication.
I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .)
Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher.
This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources.
("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bi... .)
GenBank is "an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenBank ). Most journals now require that sequences be entered into GenBank before publication.
I'll add a few historical observations. The early work at Los Alamos was on Sun machines running Sybase (1987, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase ). These are serious Unix fans, who quickly took to perl when it came out. I think some of the support for SybPerl came from bioinformatics; the SybPerl, OraPerl, and other *Perl systems helped create the extension system for perl5. (I am not able to verify that, though the author of SybPerl, Michael Peppler, consulted in the mid-1990s for "Research Genetics" http://www.peppler.org/resume.html .)
Unix people in the early 1990s were serious perl fans. The most popular perl4 library for CGI programming was cgi-lib.pl, by Steven Brenner, a computational biologist/bioinformatics researcher. It was replaced in perl5 by CGI.pm, by Lincoln Stein, another bioinformatics researcher.
This gives a hint that bioinformatics has not only a close connection to the technologies needed for the first dot-com era, but also that the field itself tends towards open resources.
("Tends towards" != "always". See point #3 of https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/the-myths-of-bi... .)
A subset of OSS - the R/Bioconductor community is full of free software fanatics, and anyway all academic software is necessarily, without thought, free software.
Close by a few light years? no, they are terrible
The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consider rapidly dropping funding for our public universities.
But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.
Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.
You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.
If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.
But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.
Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.
You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.
If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.
>Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.
You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.
You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.
I think the suggestion here is more "Because Joe over in Agriculture took USDA money, I suddenly can't do contract work for Large Company because they want to keep it proprietary".
If he has used up the USDA money and switched to private sector, where is the problem? If he wants to do work for Large Company with USDA money, then that is a problem and I see no reason to not ban it.
Again, the post was addressing the absurd proposal that "If your university takes any federal money, all research has to be open."
All research the university does is different than all research the professor does.
As long as they are at a university being funded by the public, the public has a claim to the research. If they want to do private research, they can switch to the private.
If a person is being paid by the public, why should they be able to spend their time and resources working in private? Think of it like a general IP ownership agreement at work. Anything you create at work, using the tools your work provides, belongs to the one paying you. Now claims like any similar work you do even after you leave, or work you do on your own equipment on your own time are unreasonable, but I see nothing wrong with that requirement while being paid by the public and using equipment paid for by the public.
As long as they are at a university being funded by the public, the public has a claim to the research. If they want to do private research, they can switch to the private.
If a person is being paid by the public, why should they be able to spend their time and resources working in private? Think of it like a general IP ownership agreement at work. Anything you create at work, using the tools your work provides, belongs to the one paying you. Now claims like any similar work you do even after you leave, or work you do on your own equipment on your own time are unreasonable, but I see nothing wrong with that requirement while being paid by the public and using equipment paid for by the public.
The thing is how academics are actually paid doesn't work like that.
"The university" is not funded by the public. It's funded by Federal money, and State money, and tuition, and commercial grants and donations. Just claiming that's "being funded by the public" is claiming 100% of the output, while not providing 100% of the input.
Similarly, I'm not paid from a single source. I'm paid through a mix of state money, federal money, and yes, some commercial grants. If a commercial entity wants to pay for a portion of my lab's expenses and salary, why should "the public" be entitled to the proceeds?
That's the problem being argued against - not that public money should mean public access, but that "some public money" (no matter how small) suddenly entitles the public to everything.
"The university" is not funded by the public. It's funded by Federal money, and State money, and tuition, and commercial grants and donations. Just claiming that's "being funded by the public" is claiming 100% of the output, while not providing 100% of the input.
Similarly, I'm not paid from a single source. I'm paid through a mix of state money, federal money, and yes, some commercial grants. If a commercial entity wants to pay for a portion of my lab's expenses and salary, why should "the public" be entitled to the proceeds?
That's the problem being argued against - not that public money should mean public access, but that "some public money" (no matter how small) suddenly entitles the public to everything.
Exactly, it is funny that I never see these advocates for free information fighting to expand our library system. Libraries are the best way to promote access to information because they are by nature distributed, there is no central servers or web-based organization to control how they share information.
published research be available to the public no later than 12 months after publication
Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately?
Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?
Why wait 12 months? Why can't published research be available immediately?
Does anyone know or have a citation for the rationale behind this?
It's because publishers are concerned that if research is available to the public immediately, institutions will stop paying extortionate fees for journal subscriptions. They have considerable lobbying efforts and several Congressmen willing to change legislation to their benefit.
Rent-seekers gonna seek rent.
Rent-seekers gonna seek rent.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ost...
"The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available."
Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
"The Administration also recognizes that publishers provide valuable services, including the coordination of peer review, that are essential for ensuring the high quality and integrity of many scholarly publications. It is critical that these services continue to be made available."
Cf http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1312
If these are valuable services, then customers will pay for them; no need to have a monopoly on access to published research.
(as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
(as a paper author and reviewer, I don't doubt they are valuable services, but given that reviewers do the work for free, and the research has been paid for, I don't see why the access should be limited.)
You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does, or charge the reader customer, which is what non open access does. Insisting that the reader customer not pay just increases the costs elsewhere.
If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there will be less grants, it's just math.
(Previously I was told that the cost is minuscule compared to the cost of the study itself in general, in which it won't have a large effect. But I haven't seen data.)
If we decide we want the government to also pay the cost of publication, as opposed to having readers pay, great. But it might be expensive, again, data would be helpful.
Blanket statements like "taxpayers paid for it, therefore it should be open" ignore the reality that publishers subsidize publication precisely because they charge for access.
If the benefits of open access are considered to be worth more than the amount lost by not charging for access, then you need to fund that from elsewhere. If every grant costs an extra $2,000, there will be less grants, it's just math.
(Previously I was told that the cost is minuscule compared to the cost of the study itself in general, in which it won't have a large effect. But I haven't seen data.)
If we decide we want the government to also pay the cost of publication, as opposed to having readers pay, great. But it might be expensive, again, data would be helpful.
Blanket statements like "taxpayers paid for it, therefore it should be open" ignore the reality that publishers subsidize publication precisely because they charge for access.
> You can either charge the author customer, which is what open access does...
But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.
But non open access does it too! You have to pay to get published.
Journal articles from NIH funded research are already required to be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
>The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009). The law states:
>The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
>The NIH Public Access Policy implements Division F Section 217 of PL 111-8 (Omnibus Appropriations Act, 2009). The law states:
>The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
Would it be legal to write a Twitter bot that detects mentions of pay-walled academic papers and responds with a SciHub link?
This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.
This seems like it would be a good way of promoting the service to the wider masses.
You could probably just search it on google scholar and post the free version link.
I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it.
I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.
I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.
Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.
That isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.
http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html
The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.
http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html
The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.
I suspected the all-government-employees thing but wasn't aware of the journal copyright aspect. Thanks for clarifying with sources!
Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up...
It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.
It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html
There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.
There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.
I don't think that's a winning argument. Your tax dollars pay for space rockets and fighter planes too, but you don't get to ride them. There are many such things that you pay for, and that you get some indirect benefits from, including the pay-walled research. And in many fields the researchers take big pay cuts compared to what they'd make in the industry, meaning they are effectively paying a large chunk of the cost of creating the research themselves.
I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.
The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.
I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.
The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.
Sure, I'll agree we can't have a completely open-door policy for everything because that would be chaos, but for stuff that's easy to make copies of I think we should.
So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.
So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.
Funny that some of the pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money yet the results are IPd by the company.
60-70% public money
How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs that don't get approved?
How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs that don't get approved?
You can read here about the process in the US more:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/
I guess this is different country by country.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50972/
I guess this is different country by country.
Nothing in that link says pharmaceutical research is 60-70% public money.
According to somebody who works in this industry it is the standard contribution. Does not matter if the drug does not get approved, the money is for the research, as far as I know.
Uhhh... no.
If you compare the NIH budget vs. the major pharmaceutical companies, it's a 2 to 1 ration. And not all the NIH budget is spent on drug research. It's mostly basic science.
If you compare the NIH budget vs. the major pharmaceutical companies, it's a 2 to 1 ration. And not all the NIH budget is spent on drug research. It's mostly basic science.
I find it funny that people blame this on greed/capitalism/profit instead of IP laws.
The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.
> The IP laws are based on greed/capitalism/profit. No one besides the big corps want this just ask Mickey Mouse.
I believe that's the point. "Big corporations lobbying government for rent-seeking legislation" isn't capitalism, it's corruption.
I believe that's the point. "Big corporations lobbying government for rent-seeking legislation" isn't capitalism, it's corruption.
Lobbyism is legal so no.
Corrupt doesn't mean illegal, it means dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity, etc.
Or fraudulent which is the right word in this context. Lobbyism is legal whether it's dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity.
So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
So corruption in this context should be understood as fraudulent which is illegal.
In what sense is it fraudulent? A straightforward exchange of money for policy doesn't require anybody to lie. The harm is from the disloyalty and lack of integrity of the elected representative. And making policies in order to get money is disloyal regardless of whether it's illegal.
Lobbyism is legal so in this context corruption to be anything meaningful is illegal. Otherwise it's just lobbyism.
Fraudulent is one of the terms used to describe what corruption is it's adequate here.
Fraudulent is one of the terms used to describe what corruption is it's adequate here.
If there are multiple meanings for a word, I think the author (AnthonyMouse) would get the final word on which meaning he intended. And he made it clear he intended it to mean "dishonest, disloyal, lacking in integrity" not "fradulent" or "illegal".
Yes there are multiple meanings. Since lobbyism is legal in this context corruption would mean fraudulent.
But they only exist because the government has the power to create those laws. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
You can still hate the player, especially when they have more power than you. "It's legal" doesn't mean it's right.
I definitely didn't mean to imply that. I simply believe people target their outrage at the wrong party in this instance.
Its also reasonable to both blame the laws and the insert "greedy" player here. It usually takes two parties to mutually benefit off a partnership
They still exist because companies lobby to keep them alive.
I don't hate the player I simply observe how the game is played.
I don't hate the player I simply observe how the game is played.
True. Point is I think the government should be the focus here, not the players who take advantage of the rules they create.
I think both should be at the focus as they are often two pieces of the same part.
Think of segregation/separate but equal. Nothing can really stop someone from choosing not to associate with another person because of their race or gender. And that's generally okay. But the second it becomes law of the land, through government, it's a problem. IP is no different.
There is plenty of lobbyism that's ok. The problem is when it's conspiring against the interest of the society as a whole. So both should of course be monitored closely.
which is why I dont understand the "let's just buy them from canada" mentality
buying drugs abroad just skirts ip price fixing. we can skirt price fixing here by making drugs and not paying the ransom costs.
should the government be able to pull eminent domain on lifesaving drugs?
should all drugs purchased with public funds (ex medicare) be exempt from any cost/margin past manufacturing?
it feels to me like importing from canada is having cake and eating it too. we either agree that full drug prices are legitimate or we agree they are unethical. you cant pretend both are compatible worldviews.
buying drugs abroad just skirts ip price fixing. we can skirt price fixing here by making drugs and not paying the ransom costs.
should the government be able to pull eminent domain on lifesaving drugs?
should all drugs purchased with public funds (ex medicare) be exempt from any cost/margin past manufacturing?
it feels to me like importing from canada is having cake and eating it too. we either agree that full drug prices are legitimate or we agree they are unethical. you cant pretend both are compatible worldviews.
"Be publicly available" you mean available to everybody on earth even though they have not funded it ?
In an ideal system sure. Country A funds research into Subject A. Country B funds research into Subject B. Then everyone has access to everything and can work better towards Subject A+B or whatever.
I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.
I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.
Yeah, why not?
Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?
Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?
The usual reason is that then there is an incentive to not spend your own money on research and to just wait for someone else to do it for you.
Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.
Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.
Well, it worked well well all research was open back in the Newton, Leibniz, Kelvin, Maxwell, etc times. I don't see why it can't work now.
Besides, those that actually do the research also get other benefits, like having people already familiar at a high level with it, getting to derive and manufacture/patent etc stuff based on the research sooner, etc.
Besides, those that actually do the research also get other benefits, like having people already familiar at a high level with it, getting to derive and manufacture/patent etc stuff based on the research sooner, etc.
Likely.
The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.
The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.
Why not? Aside from the obvious altruistic reasons, the cost of restricting it is probably more than the cost of not bothering to do so.
I'm ok with that. I would think of it as a charitable contribution to humankind.
I think that's appropriate for taxes. Some people pay virtually no tax, are we going to demand to see their W2's before we give them access if they want to read? If you want it to be fair we can't pretend the current system is a free market, because it's not. I don't think the public should fund things that benefit a single company - the whole point of forcing people to pay it through taxes is because it's supposed to benefit society as a whole. If that's not true, I want to stop funding it.
Sharing research is a benefit to everyone. On a pure cost basis, the US gives out billions in the form of cash all over the world. Including access to US funded research in what the US gives away would likely do more to help the US in the long term than much of the money.
I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.
I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.
I asked a similar question a few weeks earlier.
The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide.
In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide.
it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.
The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide.
In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide.
it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.
NIH has a Public Access Policy already[1], so anything NIH funded is public. Lots of stuff is already available (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).
Other agencies have public data to AHRQ, CDC, FDA, HHMI, NIST, VA (see link for acronym clarification)[2]
This FASTR proposal shouldn't be a big deal, since a lot of funding sources already have that requirement. I'm not sure why some funding gets not to be public.
(part of my job is uploading data to pubchem)
[1]http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
This FASTR proposal shouldn't be a big deal, since a lot of funding sources already have that requirement. I'm not sure why some funding gets not to be public.
(part of my job is uploading data to pubchem)
[1]http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
I sent a letter. I really want to know how effective these mass stock-email campaigns are.
I've heard from a few people who work in politics in state and national congresses that (non-form) physical letters and phone calls from concerned constituents can have a surprising amount of weight on the decisions of congresspeople. I imagine it's less true for form emails like this, but still probably worth a go.
I think the basic way to judge this is "Is this a signal that the person who sent it is motivated to pay attention and vote based on this?"
Congresscritters care most about votes. They'll take campaign donations if thats all they can get, but they then need to figure out how to turn those campaign donations into votes.
Congresscritters care most about votes. They'll take campaign donations if thats all they can get, but they then need to figure out how to turn those campaign donations into votes.
If researchers would stop voluntarily sending their papers to private, for-profit journals then this wouldn't be an issue.
If employers and funding agencies would stop using publications in private, for-profit journals to evaluate whether researchers should get to keep their job or have their grants renewed, then this wouldn't be an issue.
This is a good point, but it actually goes further up the chain. The universities in UK, a lot of their funding is driven from publication record of their staff. So they too are just responding to incentives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework
The major UK research funding councils have an open access policy for the next REF - http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/openaccess/policy/
Nice, that is good to see.
That sounds doable, actually. Have the NSF only base their grants on publications in open access journals.
Or even just weight any open access journal more than any closed journal.
That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.
That way you can still use historical publications to evaluate researchers on day one, and the evaluations will be accurate assuming most researchers historically each published the same percentage of articles in open access journals, but nobody will want to publish in anything but an open access journal going forward.
And if experts would stop reviewing articles for free...
You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.
Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.
[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."
Journal reputation is a rather effective filter on paper quality, and the open access journal business model has a very uphill battle to fight, since it looks very close to the scumbag, predatory "you pay, we publish, no questions asked" [1] model of garbage.
[1] Really scumbag: "You just literally copy-pasted someone else's entire research paper and slapped your name on it? We don't care."
> You mean, if researchers would voluntarily send their papers to black holes that won't get read until someone who is duplicating their work does a literature search.
This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.
This argument is quite common. I actually don't agree with it. Right now there are many second-tier and third-tier outlets that lock up research that nobody reads. Nobody would be denied tenure or refused promotion for not publishing in those journals. By publishing your lesser research in open access journals, there's a chance someone might read it. You could build an open-access infrastructure there.
Even worse private journals which have higher super insane rates just to get access to the database with the journal. Look at JsTor
FWIW, all research funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the major funding body behind STEM research in the UK) is required to be Open Access, including data collected. In the next REF (the process through which UK universities including Oxford and Cambridge receive funding) only papers that are open access will be assessed. This puts immense pressure on both academics and UK universities to ensure their works are open access.
Journals act as the Yahoo of scientific papers. That is they are an index of certain topical relevance and editorial quality. (The original idea of Yahoo was a vetted directory to web pages) I am not sure if papers scattered around random university servers would be easily found.
A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.
A case in point is the annual proceedings of the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. ACM sells a wonderfully color printed volume of these papers for nearly a hundred dollars. However an individual keeps a web index to the half of these papers posted on private laboratory websites. The index is free, but the quality of printing varies. This private index has already been vetted by SIGGRAPH for conference quality- the only accept about 1 in 15 submissions. Occasionally I poke around distinguished computer graphics labsvwesites. But their quality is variable. Sometimes the website is abandoned when the grad student care taker moves on.
Somehow, physics does not appear to need such extensive vetting - to me (as an outsider) it seems like physicists can find what they need on arxiv.org
Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar:
* do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar).
In addition, I also read papers :-).
Hope that model successfully crosses over to biology (biorxiv.org). For now, I use the following heuristic after finding an article on google/google scholar:
* do I know the journal at all (to filter out vanity journals) * do I know the researchers involved (and I learn of new researchers through citations in papers, through presentations online or at conferences and through twitter) * I look at the number of citations of the paper (using google scholar) and relevance of the papers that already cite the paper of interest (using google scholar).
In addition, I also read papers :-).
I don't understand how research can possibly be published and properly evaluated without everyone who can contribute to it not having access.
For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.
For CS, some of the best minds of our generation are not tied to a university. These people who could otherwise help the world are barred from some level of introspection for papers.
Aaron Schwartz would agree, from the grave where fighting this fight put him.
If this was the case WWII would have looked much different. We need exceptions.
FASTR specifically applies to research being published in peer-reviewed journals and specifically excludes:
>classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent
>classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent
[deleted]
This world is so surreal it's actually amazing. How the people running our countries can be this incompetent, slow, and unintelligent is beyond me.
Run for office. Your competence, speed and intelligence should make you a shoo-in and you can help fix things.
In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.