Slashdot Log In
Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu May 12, 2005 04:46 AM
from the free-knowledge dept.
from the free-knowledge dept.
houghi writes "The register reports how the Dutch open up their research to the rest of the world.
It goes on to tell that commercial scientific publishers such as Elsevier Science are not happy with it.
Will other countries and universities follow, or will they stick to the idea that knowledge is a commodity?"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
knowledge is power (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:knowledge is power (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that many journals are struggling economically these days is not a good thing. And the fact that the information is not "free" does not mean that the information is closed off to the public. It just means that you (or your university, company etc.) need to contribute a small amount to part of the scientific process in order to access it.
Anyone who has ever written a scientific article knows that citing something you've pulled of some internet site does not carry much weigth. I'm not saying this Dutch solution is just "some internet site" (the article does no give much detail); I'm just making a general statement about the important role played by scientific journals.
Parent
Re:knowledge is power (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:knowledge is power (Score:3, Insightful)
There is also not an easy avenue for feedback. Not rating scheme -- nothing. Just
Reviewers work for free (Score:5, Insightful)
The barrier to a better system is that many of the established "high prestige" journals are the culprits who are skimming money from universities in this way, and getting in the way of open communication among researchers. What's needed is for the top reviewers and submitters to emigrate en masse to more responsible academic publishers. Yeah, unlikely - unless something major like this goes down and kick-starts the process.
Parent
Re:knowledge is power (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:knowledge is power (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Shows what I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all up for the Dutch research talked of, and I hope that this trend does continue. There is only one thing worse than capitalism - capitalism of knowledge.
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh - OK. But your copyright notice reads: "Copyright Notice - The contents of this site are the intellectual property of David McKenzie. Personal use of this property is permitted without restriction. Commercial use is strictly unauthorised without written permission."
While that's well and good, aren't you depending on what you hate in order to prohibit "commercial use"?
Interesting you should prohibit free use of your material while expecting researchers open up their's.
BTW I wouldn't touch your material with a 10-foot pole because of the term "commercial use"; as far as I'm concerned that prohibits any use of it for all practical purposes. Suppose an ISP puts a Google ad on a personal page in exchange for a free web site? Suddenly it becomes "commercial use." Suppose I want to use some of it (with proper acknowledgement, of course) in an open-source GPL'ed project that I've volunteered my time for. Oops, the GPL allows its software to be used by a commercial company, no can do. I might be able to get permission from you, but the hassle usually isn't worth it. So I'll pass on your offer, thanks.
Parent
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is only one thing worse than capitalism
That's a very ignorant statement. Hitler, Stalin, Mao - can you name any "worse" capitalist? Can you show me any modern society of people who have shown progress by adhering to non-capitalist ideology?
You are mistakenly equating greed with capitalism. There will always be greedy people in both capitalist and non-capitalist systems. The greedy will always abuse the system to take advantage of the weak. If you think non-capitalist societies protect the weak, you are sadly mistaken. There isn't a single non-capitalist system that hasn't either resorted to brutal oppression of the people - or to free-market policies to dig themselves out of the poverty ditch.
The Dutch have a capitalist system, do you think their research would even exist without it?
Parent
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Shows what I know... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Library's Freedom severely limited (Score:4, Insightful)
1) All periodicals are copyrighted and priced. Libraries pay for a subscription and the right to make the infomation accessible. Right now they (even the best scientific libraries such as the British Library) face soaring subscription costs and fixed budgets. Now imagine the situation for second-tier libraries
The point is that availability and dissemination is much lower than it would have been had all the content been available on the Web, and searcheable through e.g. Google.
2) In order to protect copyright, most articles are copy-protected. I.E. what you get from a library is either a printed copy or a
This sort of copy protection is perfectly reasonable from a commercial point of view
Having said this
Personally I do not think so, for the following reasons:
1) The articles published are by and large generated by publicly funded research institutions and universities.
2) The articles are all labouriously peer-reviewed, practically at zero cost to the publishers, by researchers working for publicly funded research institutions and universities.
3) The publisher obtains the copyrights from the author (again at zero cost)
4) The publisher produces paper prints and electronic copies of the articles
5) The publisher charges the public, publicly funded research institutions and universities premium prices for their valuable intellectual property
This would have been reasonable if the publishers provided a large added-value to the articles
So in summary, I believe that:
- that putting the results of publicly funded research in the public domain is a reasonable thing to do
- the Dutch initiative is a good way to start
Parent
Make the world a better place (Score:5, Insightful)
When knowledge is a commodity, you'll see a vast upsurge in new knowledge. Well, at least when Google starts to index all the available knowledge, of course.
Re:Make the world a better place (Score:3, Informative)
I'll crawl back into my hole now.
Re:Make the world a better place (Score:3, Interesting)
"Those who keep knowledge from you are setting a trap"
This attributation courtesy of google.
It's... (Score:3, Informative)
DAREnet (Score:3, Funny)
Taxpayers' money (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this raises the question whether anyone from countries other than Netherlands should be able to get it for free (gratis) -- but, the free (as in unhindered) exchange of ideas is pretty much what the ideals of science are about.
If a corporation wants a monopoly for knowledge, no one forbids it from paying for the research.
Re:Taxpayers' money (Score:5, Informative)
The real bad part about the magazine prints is that the distribution cost is very high, the selection of articles is done by a editor who has to keep a certain format, resulting in a medium interesting magazine which is mainly sold to companies and schools.
The real advantage of a system like darenet (at moment when it is not being
Parent
Re:Taxpayers' money (Score:4, Insightful)
You really have no clue who funds research do you? Do you think academics sit around and think Hmmmm...I'll have the gubermunt pay for my research? We do, but it doesn't work that way.
Here in the states we are all about No Chil' Left Buhind, but when we want to make sure this is happening, we need to go to an outside corporation and beg for money. Why? Because this administration hadn't given us anything to actually pay for it (and the last one wasn't much better).
That is something that was a direct commandment of the gov't that we make sure this happened (I was on a team that went into rural schools to evaluate how the were faring with this and if any of their programs, such as experimental cross curriculum alignment of education was actually working better than others...its not my area of expertise, but it got me away from the office for 6 weeks to help out). And guess who paid for it...not the tax payers.
And then for other research projects? Generally you get a grant to do this. The last grant I was on, paid for my position, part of my bosses position, a fraction of his bosses, and a few ancellary positions that had nothing to do with the research other than we needed their ok to go on with it, and my team and fair market rent on my office. Oh yeah, it paid for our day to day activities for about 2 years. You know, the stuff that the gubermunt and da taxpayers 'were paying'.
All in all, we worked extended hours, got a good name for the department and the school, and didn't waste a single dollar of the tax payers money because we did what we were 'being paid to do' by the state and far more. We brought in 10x what the gov't was paying us, and subsudized the department in doing so -- and since our budget was so top heavy those two years, the state budget controllers decided that my department didn't need any raises (even though even if we bring in outside money, we have to fund our raises though base funds -- I could bring in new people and pay them 2x what I get from the grant, but I had to *BEG* for a 2% raise...to do so from the grant would be a 'conflict of interest'), our standard budget was slashed -- meaning that after our grant was over, we needed to immediately get another grant or our office was sunk and it was a game of politics, gotta get a much smaller grant this time so we can build up our base budget again so that we can use the tax payer money again to do our jobs -- smaller grant means we can ask for a little more next year, they can slash out budget by 70%, but we can only ask for 15% increase. The last 5 years, my budget for what is considered an invaluable department, has been paid for by someone other than the taxpayers...
Ok, I'm just rambling at this point, but my point is taxpayers RARELY pay for research. Taxpayers rarely pay for research that directly effects them. Taxpayers NEVER pay for research that is outside of the direct tasks infront of them (teaching you and your kids). Research, however, makes it possible for the departments that you cherish in your universities to actually exist and so that top researchers can sit in your classroom for 4 hours a week even though they could be making much more in the private sector and so that you can get real world hands on knowledge of working with technologies that don't formally exist yet and maybe contribute to society that way.
I think about saying fuck this every day and joining the corporate world. Everytime I work on a grant, I'm offered a job (my grants or others). Generally paying 4x what the university is paying (and thats without negotiation...probably much higher if I just went for it), but some of us feel we are making a difference where we are at where as we wouldn't make any difference elsewhere. I know any research I work on gets 49% of the royalties going back to XYZ University and 51% Big Corp, Inc, so its helping out (and thats another reason we can't j
Parent
Re:Taxpayers' money (Score:5, Insightful)
Third parties (read: corporations) fund some projects, but I have never read about a case where a scientific journal funded research. I don't mind if the employers of the researchers get some kind of preferred access to the results. But if they are employed by the taxpayers, the results of their research should be public.
Parent
Wasn't this to be expected? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 'old days', the only way to spread your work to all your peers was through the estabjournals.
The publishers of those journals could ask a premium price for this service.
With the advent of the Internet, this barrier has fallen.
Publishers should find new ways of keeping their subscribers.
Re:Wasn't this to be expected? (Score:3, Interesting)
Salute the Dutch (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough of the fucking Doctor Evil posts...
The Dutch should be singled out as a great example of the scientific and engineering devolopment entity that made the Renaissance possible. Without the open participation and sharing of knowledge social and cultural progress would be at a standstill.
If you don't believe me, think where we would be without the Guttenburg printing press or how much information was flowing on the internet when it first came out and was an open community of academians and researchers.
When commercial jet airlines first developed, the BOAC had a plane called the Comet. It was the first plane to experience problems with metal fatigue and stress cracks. The industry at that time was very involved in finding solutions to problems and making better planes. As the direct result of this, the companies involved would share any and all information available in terms of problems and solutions in order to develop the entire industry rather than attempt to promote their own agendas.
This is a significant, albeit old, example of the synergy that can exist when information is shared freely rather than traded as a commodity. Unfortunately US industry, judicial, and legislation seem to have forgotten some of these lessons.
These Dutch aren't so "Freaky Deaky" but truely a credit and an example. Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause. The contrast makes me ill.
Re:Salute the Dutch (Score:5, Informative)
Bombing, perhaps. The USA army has planned [amicc.org] to invade the Netherlands in case a US soldier is tried in the internation court in the Hague.
Parent
Re:Salute the Dutch (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Salute the Dutch (Score:3, Informative)
You seem to forget entirely about the arXiv [arxiv.org], which is a freely accessible scientific database of papers that's been around for many years now. It's also been at least partly funded by US tax dollars, ever since it's inception.
free market at work (Score:5, Interesting)
That is partly balanced by the fact that papers published in well-marketed journals with recognizable brand names will be cited more frequently. But they still have to be well-known, which is why even expensive journals tolerate "illegal" copies of scientific papers (this is similar to software companies tolerating some piracy and low-cost versions in order to keep low-cost competitors from entering the market).
On balance, I think academic publishers are going to lose this one for the most part. In the end, they don't offer any value, since all the hard work is already volunteer work. All the academic publishers do is marketing, printing, type setting, and mailing to libraries, and none of those are essential for academic journals anymore. Some journals will probably continue to be proprietary and expensive, but most will probably not be.
headline incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
DAREnet harvests all digital available material from the local repositories, making it searchable. But it limits the harvest to those objects that are full content available to everyone. Tollgated objects (e.g. publications at publishers who only allow access through expensive licenses) can only be found in the local repository.
Let's not forget that most scientific papers are not available for free.
Re:headline incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
I am working at one of the involved universities, and since a few years ago we do have an official policy of never signing over any copyrights to publishers in preparation of this move.
In reality things don't work that way: since the university still judges our productivity by tracking publications, we do sign any form we have to to get our stuff into the important journals. Both the university and the big publishers have been ignoring this inconsistency for some years. As you may have noted, I am posting AC because I am terrified of publisher's copyright lawyers.
This way of measuring productivity is simply wrong: I never directly use the library anymore. I depend completely on Google Scholar. On my computer Google Scholar includes the university subscriptions to publishers, of course, but publications of the last 5 years are usually also available for free.
Most of my publications are freely available online, and they are representative of the things I have been doing over the last decade. They are also the things that get referenced most often. One usually writes two or three versions of essentially the same story in a period of 2-4 years, and the best one ends up in an article (and will never be read, and rarely referenced).
Parent
Re:headline incorrect (Score:3, Insightful)
It's now obvious to most
Re:headline incorrect (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not a flip question, I'm wondering if this could really be a valid metric. Of course, it would be subject to the same scams to which Google page ranking has already been subject.
Parent
Before the communists whip themselves into a froth (Score:3, Informative)
The Dutch sure are funny (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The Dutch sure are funny (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing funny about it. Listening to music is ungood. Reading scientific papers is doubleplusgood. This is the 'knowledge economy' policy our government talks about in action.
Look at the double digit economic growth rates in China: access to science and information good, access to porn, political rambling, etc ungood. QED
Parent
The way to do collaborative research is changing (Score:5, Interesting)
In the old days if you wanted to read a particular paper in a journal your library didn't carry you had to contact one of the authors and ask for a reprint of the article, which you would receive by snail-mail a few weeks later.
Now you just look it up on Google, most of the time it's there, or the author will send you a PDF a few hours later.
The main contribution of journals to research is no longer diffusion, now people usually don't go to the library to read a journal. They receive a summary of the month's issue by email and then go and consult it online. Clearly this could be replaced by informal web publication just as easily.
However the editorial board work is still essential. They make sure the peer-review process runs smoothly and that each paper looks nice in the end. This is not so easily replaced, even though the editors do a volunteer job.
What is definitely not clear is why journal should be allowed to charge scientist huge premiums for the privilege of having those same scientist work for them for free.
Over the next few years we should see the reactive journal boards realize this, and propose a very cheap online-only service. The IEEE is already thinking about this very hard. When others realize this works fine, the era of expensive printed journal will simply come to an end.
Next will be the issue of books. Scientists are already realizing that it is now extremely cheap to self-publish. Even a top-quality, 500 pages book costs less than $40 to print in small quantities. Yet publishing houses typically sell them $200 a piece or more. Then they go out of print but since the publisher has the copyright everybody is screwed.
For conferences, self-publishing is now more cost effective, and authors get to keep their copyright. Soon the era of expensive conference proceedings will also come to an end.
The last remaining bastion will be reference books or textbooks. These will remain in print for the next few years, because people appreciate having a nice book in hand rather than reading hundreds of pages online, but as the cost, speed and quality of desktop printers improve, we should see a new era of freely available, high-quality online textbooks. There are lots of them online already, ready for printing.
All of this will be good for science. No one will be able to claim in a paper they didn't know about so and so's work and don't have access to it. It will be increasingly easy to do dilettante science without the backing of a huge academic institution.
People will be able to follow a field of science extremely easily. Cross-fertilization will become the obvious way to make progress.
I can't wait, and I want to make that happen.
Re:The way to do collaborative research is changin (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I'd say the solution is to get the universities to do that job, in a kind of peer-2-peer style. Say a researcher at uni UofX creates a paper on say quantum transportation: then just send it round the Internet2 to all the other faculties of quantum transportation around the world and have at least 25% of all those people peer-review it.
That way, you have instant distribution to all places that need it (maybe force 'em to have a webserver open to the public with all the publications) and peer review by the people who can do it. Hell, you could send the paper to different faculties and get a prof of statistics to have a look at the statistical methods used, and make that kind of cross-peer-review mandatory nfor a stamp of credibility (and make participation in that peer-review process a job requirement for being attached to a university.)
Parent
Re:The way to do collaborative research is changin (Score:4, Insightful)
Top scientists are usually editors of journals or series. They do their bit with regards to the peer review process. Young scientists can do most of the actual peer reviewing, this is not a problem as there are more of them, and it's not clear who is more afraid of novelty, whether it's old or young scientists.
Since the equilibrium has been disturbed we are in a time of change, and so lots of things are in a state of flux. I think journals will continue, they have the peer-review in place and that is the only thing that distinguishes science from crap. They will just become cheaper and more easily available, not the other way around.
Parent
journal price resistance (Score:5, Informative)
As you can see, the hard part of the labor (writing, reviewing, refereeing) is not done by anyone at the publisher-- various universities pay the salaries of those folks and they pay again for the journal in dead-tree form.
So you can see that there may be some objection to the arrangement. In the old days, the journal staff actually typset things and dead-trees were the only game in town, but most of the typesetting is done by the author.
The choice is hard for some people that really need to publish in the expensive journals to get tenure, recognition, grants, etc. But for people who already have tenure, some are resistant to the journal extortion. Some may have a policy like mine- I do not submit to expensive journals or agree to referee for expensive journals, now that I have the advantage of tenure.
There have been some successes of editorial boards that resigned wholesale, then started a free/inexpensive journal. Hopefully this becomes more common.
Re:journal price resistance (Score:5, Interesting)
And I wouldn't have to much faith in someone who can't write LaTeX correctly... ;-) Anyway, LaTeX is highly popular among mathematicians and CS people. In physics is it somewhat popular, mainly among those who have to deal with a lot of math. As you move to fields where the emphasis is more and more on experimental issues rather than calculations, such as chemical physics, physical chemistry, chemistry, microbiology, and so on, people make less and less use of LaTeX. Word rules, unfortunately. Apparently, if you spend your day dealing with practical issues rather than deriving abstract generalized formalisms, it is less appealing to apply abstract generalizations to document preparation.
Parent
History will laugh at IP (Score:3, Insightful)
accept intellectual property as a concept.
google scholar? (Score:3, Informative)
Elsivier Bad, Societys Good (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not so sure about the "informations needs to be free" stuff when it comes to peer reviewed science. Elsevier does run a racket, especially when it comes to the archive articles, if your university library doesn't purchase the extended subscription it can be $30 per article.
But as a member of the American Physical Society http://www.aps.org/ [aps.org] I have access to pdf's of Einsteins original articles just for the cost of my membership, every article published in the Physical Review series is available.
APS publishes many phonebooks (about 1/10000000 LOC) worth of articles a month, this has got to be expensive. Furthermore maintaining and adminstering a network of peers to review articles is costly as well. Most of the articles deal with small minutia of physics that maybe dozens of people on earth would completely appreciate.
I'm also of the opinion that there should be some sort of cost of entry to access the complete tome of science. Something has to set it off from blogs and wikpedia's, furthermore if every crackpot had access to every conversation in physics my inbox would overflow with "Quantum Mechanics is Wrong! Ny New Theory of Nature" trash.
-- Brandon
Reminds me of MIT's Open Courseware Project (Score:5, Insightful)
By now, OCW has over 900 MIT classes available, and is an amazing success. I hope that the Dutch will succeed in a similar fashion.
Going to drag out a Heinlein quote... (Score:3, Insightful)
[Have nothing to add to this]
Related US news (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It IS a commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
Only peer review can assure quality of some specific knowledge, that's the academic principle for longer more than two millenia. With knowledge, sharing with others is a fundamental condition for top quality.
Re:That's why I love the Dutch (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Today the Netherlands. Tommorow, the world! (Score:5, Informative)
The major problem is a) that it's often hard to find somebody willing to put in the time to populate archives like these, and b) several of the arsier publishers won't agree with the online distribution of preprint papers.
I think the question to ask is not so much how long it will take before the rest of the EU follows suit, since there are parallel efforts going on all over the place, most of which use the same basic technology set (OAI - open archives initiative). There's a paper about DAREnet that remains unslashdotted, here [ariadne.ac.uk]. If anything, the question is "How long will it take each group to get a move on and implement something?" and the answer to that is something between "how long is a piece of string?" and "How much does the group in question enjoy politics?"
Parent