Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All

A user 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?"

headline incorrect

[lovebyte]

This is not all research papers, but only research papers already available for free to everyone. I quote:
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.

Before the communists whip themselves into a froth

[SilentSage]

If 3\4 of the posters had RTFA they would have seen that it is about the cost of PUBLISHING research not disclosing Intellectual Property free of charge. Most Universities around the world and a lot of corporations do this for "free" anyway. The article said nothing about patents or copyright or anything remotely on that topic. This article should be used as an idiot filter for future postings on IP.

Re:Make the world a better place

[Xner]

The quote is "he wishes himself your master".

I'll crawl back into my hole now.

Re:knowledge is power

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sure you all know this but, just look up the titles in a journal index and get the full text here,
Physics, Maths, CS, Bio papers [arxiv.org]

Re:Taxpayers' money

[jurt1235]

The information was already freely available only the print was done by Elsevier ea which charge for the distribution cost (like GPL: Information is free, but someone is allowed to charge you for the distribution cost).
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 /.ed) is the ability to find all the articles which did not make it into the magazines, and it is better seachrable. The last point is way interesting for everybody in the scientific world who had to go through magazine indices to find the information relevant to his or her project. It will hopefully prevent more double work and give more scientific progress.

Re:Salute the Dutch

[lovebyte]

Knowing the US, we'll probably bomb them because of some bullshit Patriot Act IP terrorist clause.
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.

journal price resistance

[call -151]

Many researchers have complained about the high price of academic research journals and some of us are doing something about it. The fundamental problem is that there are some prestigious, very expensive journals that libraries feel like they must subscribe to and authors feel compelled to submit there because they are prestigious. But things are changing at least in some disciplines. The cost of a journal is not so much for distribution- there are other costs, but those are largely actually borne by universities. A typical life story of a research article:

1. Brilliant researcher at Oxbridge University (who pays his salary) comes up with great idea, writes it up, submits it electronically by emailing it to an editor at the Snooty Journal,
   
2. The editor, a professor at Enormus State University (who pays his salary and has him teach a little less because of his prestigous editorship) thinks of an appropriate anonymous referee and sends off the article to be refereed. Snooty Journal may give ESU some money to cover part of the cost of a secretary, but does not pay his salary.
   
3. Professor at IviedHalls University (who pays his salary) receives the article to refereee, reads it, sends it back with comments after letting it molder on his desk/inbox for a bit.
   
4. Editor accepts or rejects the paper, possibly asking for modifications based upon the referee's recommendation, possibly some iteration at this step
   
5. Original author prepares the article in electronic format using LaTeX with Snooty Journal's style files and uploads it to their web site.
   
6. Snooty Journal staff typeset the paper, messing a few things up because they are not experts in the appropriate field, and send the "galley proofs" to the author to review.
   
7. Original author points out typos introduced in their typsetting process, sends back corrected galleys.
   
8. Snooty Jounal releases the article on their paid-subscription webpage and prints it as a dead-tree volume to send to libraries around the world that can afford it.
   
   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.
   

   • Some related links:
   • Journal prices in Econ [ucsb.edu]
     
   • Rob Kirby calling for better pricing for math journals [berkeley.edu]
     
   • Journal of Algorithms editorial board resignation to start a cheap prestigious journal [colorado.edu]
     
   • Knuth's letter [stanford.edu] about that resignation
     

Re:Shows what I know...

[thesp]

Yes, but with subscription fees for institutions what they are, even here at Oxford University, the Radcliffe Science Library does not carry electronic subscriptions for all specialist journals. To take a couple of examples, the journals "Applied Magnetic Resonance" and "Nanotechnology" are not available here, in paper or in electronic form. Back issues of several APS journals are not available past a certain point in time, due to subscription fees.

Re:That's why I love the Dutch

[Jack Taylor]

This may have been intended as flamebait, but there are probably a lot of Dutch inventions that the author isn't aware of. The Dutch had the first stock exchange to trade continuously [wikipedia.org]; Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutchman, built the first submarine [dutchsubmarines.com]; and I'm sure I don't need to say too much about Christiaan Huygens [wikipedia.org]. And without Coenraad Johannes Van Houten we wouldn't have cocoa powder - think of that when you're chewing on your next Mars Bar :P. (Also maybe next time you won't assume that all the important things were invented in America...)

google scholar?

[krunk4ever]

is this what Google Scholar [google.com] is trying to do?

What is Google Scholar? Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Re:Today the Netherlands. Tommorow, the world!

[kaiidth]

It's already happening; thus all the eprints [eprints.org] installations, the RDN [rdn.ac.uk] and so on. There's a lot of this stuff going on throughout Europe. No scientist particularly enjoys being behind a subscription-only system, so it generally catches on to some extent.

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?"

It's...

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

M.I.T. - All Courses Free Online

[cannuck]

MIT is offering all of its courses for free online (has been doing so for a yr. or more) - evenutally all 10,000 courses will be online. Included are notes, videos, assignments, projects, projects results, software, books etc. - all free! Most universities guard their stuff - even more so that some corporations - what do those universities have to hide? http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html [mit.edu]

Re:Salute the Dutch

[Quantum Fizz]

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.

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.

Re:knowledge is power

[TedCheshireAcad]

Google Scholar [google.com]: I can't stress how cool this is.

Related US news

[alansz]

In the US, the National Institutes of Health [nih.gov] recently announced [nih.gov] that NIH-funded researchers will now be required to submit final copies of their published manuscripts to PubMed Central [nih.gov] providing free access. For folks in the health sciences, this will have a substantial impact (and journals will adjust their copyright rules to permit it if they want to get submissions from folks successful enough to get NIH funding.)

Lets hope it becomes a trend...

[tuxmd]

Elsevier isn't happy 'cause they've made lotsa money sucking at the academic tit.

I hope that this will nudge more medical journals in the direction of freely available. The Canadian Medical Association Journal (http://www.cmaj.ca/ [www.cmaj.ca]) is currently the only major open access journal (CMAJ March 1, 2005; 172 (5).) (http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/172/5/621 [www.cmaj.ca]). The British Medical Journal experimented with the idea for a while but decided to close up again... perhaps they'll now reconsider.

If you read the CMAJ article above... you'll know that Nature Publishing Group is okay with authors making the final version of their articles available six months post-publication. Things are moving in the right direction. :)

Re:knowledge is power

[RWerp]

There is no peer review on arXiv.