Open Access For Research Gaining Steam 64
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports
that open access to research is gaining steam as more than 20,000
people, including Nobel Prize winners, have signed a petition calling
for greater access to publicly-funded research. While publishers are
fighting open access, a growing number of funding agencies and
universities are making it a mandatory requirement."
Isn't this a dupe? (Score:3)
Re:Isn't this a dupe? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
In future, I'd ask you to refrain from reading the article before commenting. You then won't notice the dupes or make the rest of us look ignorant.
Thank you.
Meat and potatoes. (Score:1, Insightful)
OK so let's cut to the chase. Ignoring money for a moment. Let's compare the open-access sites and the closed journals. How do they compare strictly on results? More accurate? Less accurate? More depth? Less depth?
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"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment."
TRM (Taco Rights Managment)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is crap. Thise "closed" journals are not closed, they are abailable, for a fee. And yes, those journals generally provide higher quality papers, better written, better presented, and generally more relevant to the topic it covers. People spend time and resources in developing those results and then another amount of time and resrouces to write them, then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings and then some money
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The problem is it is the same people: scientists write papers, and review each other papers. They get paid ve
Re:Meat and potatoes. (Score:5, Informative)
Of course the private publishers are against it. Until now they had the monopoly and complete control on scientific publications and their content's distribution. As soon as the gross of it's content can be made available to the general public they start to get forced out of the loop. Heck, as soon as someone creates a central public repository of scientific publications where anyone and everyone can access, which will reinforce the peer-review process (which is naturally hindered by the way the old style scientific publications work), the publishers, as they currently are, will become totally irrelevant.
All your articles are belong to us. (Score:1)
...People spend time and resources in developing those results and then another amount of time and resrouces to write them, then another pack of people spend an amount of time and resources to review those wtitings and then some money to publish them. ... This is stupid.
Yes. It is stupid. Let's look at why it is so stupid, point by point:
People spend time and resources in developing those results
- and that's paid for by research grants, maybe with a handful of change from the researcher's institution, publishers are not financially involved.
then another amount of time and resrouces to write them
- that's usually also covered in the research grant, reports are part of the deliverables. Followup papers or re-writes may be funded by the researcher's institution because part of salaried staff's job is to "publish or perish". Again, publishers are not financially involve
Because .... (Score:1)
It is not the interest of those people (academics) who spend time and resources to obtain and write up
Re: (Score:1)
Seen it (Score:5, Informative)
It's just like this story [slashdot.org] on Slashdot this morning. Even links to the same story [bbc.co.uk] on BBC.
Moo (Score:5, Funny)
First steam, maybe they'll get electricity soon?
On the one hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, why the hell should it cost anything for someone to read the research that their taxpayer dollars are funding? And why should there be gatekeepers of knowledge, or perceived knowledge? My grandfather had a paper that was rejected from the New England Journal of Medicine because he'd done the research before one of the editors, who came out with his own substantially similar paper later. Information should not be subjected to politics--especially information that saves lives. Restricting information increases corruption.
Re: (Score:2)
On the one hand, peer review and editing (things which closed journals often provide) are important.
Oh, I don't know, slashdot seems to manage just fine with incompetent, dupe-posting editors...
Re:On the one hand... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:On the one hand...Raising a bar. (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody said that the publisher has to be handsomely paid to have an unpaid editors and unpaid reviewer that they have now.
Re:On the one hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
What gets me the most is that currently publishers make you sign the copyright waver to transfer rights to them. All such forms that I have seen start with "The copyright law requires that you transfer the copyright..." which is a complete bullshit. I could have held the copyright and just given them permission to publish it once, there's nothing in any law that requires copyright transfer for publishing.
But if I don't sign that form then I don't get published, and then I don't get funded for research because I have no publications. Catch-22.
Re:On the one hand... (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple solution is an internet-based taxpayer-sponsored library.
It avoids de-privatizing the journals.
It gives the public the access they want for the price they want.
Just hotlink them through Entrez Pubmed, or whatever other search engines people use, and collect use statistics to pay the journals.
The way this query is worded "Free public access to science" suggests that the peer review process and distribution process are inherently worthless. That could not be farther from true. But giving the public access to scientific work is a great idea.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
It is inspiring and educational in an entirely different way from peer review papers. You can find them in the library, up through the mid 1960s (at least I can find them).
I suspect an open-source model peer review will work well for some high profile journals. The editor would post the manuscript publicly, specifically email a half dozen key people in the field, and use the commentary/f
Re: (Score:2)
But if I don't sign that form then I don't get published, and then I don't get funded for research becau
Re:On the one hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
YIIAS, and YILT (I love TEX)
Oh, most of your post is correct. I'm just peer-reviewing your statement that journals let the authors do the typesetting in TEX.
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Paid by the word, are we we?
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:On the one hand... (Score:5, Informative)
These, however, do not have to be exclusive. For example, the Public Library of Science (Plos) now has a number of journals which are peer reviewed. But they are freely accessible through the internet. In addition the authors maintain the copyright through use of the Creative Commons license. And their goal is to be at the level of Science or Nature. See http://www.plos.org/ [plos.org]
Re:On the one hand... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who pays the money... (Score:1)
In traditional journals it is the reader who pays (and sometimes an author). But this effectively makes publications not available for general public, unless they are ready to shell out $30 for 10-page PDF with DRM restrictions (valid for two days only) or you know the author in person.
In open access journal it is author who p
Dupes like this... (Score:1)
I stand on the shoulders of giants (Score:3, Informative)
Gaining Steam...? (Score:2, Funny)
FireHose (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Bioinformatics has been open from the beginning (Score:3, Insightful)
Do NOT blame the scientists. (Score:5, Insightful)
On another note, many researchers have partial funding from agencies which are not taxpayer funded, like Howard Hughes, American Cancer Society, Alzheimer's Foundation, etc. This is also very common for postdoctoral fellow or graduate student fellowships. So just because a particular area of research got a dime of taxpayer money, does that automatically mean it should all be open access? It's not often easy to figure out the final contribution from multiple funding sources to a specific project.
Most journals actually provide free access to articles after a certain time frame (like six months, or a year). Additionally, most articles that have broad interest are typically well publicized by news outlets (the applicable conclusions from the research, at least). Frankly, I don't think most of Joe. Q. Public gives a damn about the details of 99% of the research articles published, or could even understand it. As a biologist, I'm not sure I could understand most physics papers, for example. This whole bruhaha seems more about some principle that important to some vocal minority than a genuine public concern. In the end, important taxpayer funded research finds the light of day at the appropriate juncture.
Personally, as someone who is proud of his work and wants it to be widely known, open access is great. Practically, I don't think it's THAT big a deal. And I think most journals are doing enough to publicize the broad picture.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm new to the research game, just how much does it cost to publish a paper compared to the cost of the research? For example, an alzheimers study I'm working on involves MRI scanning. Each scan takes up a 1 hour slot and costs 600 dollars. The study will take possibly up to 200 scans or more. Will it really cost a significant amount to journals to publish this study compared to the over 100 thousand it cost to create in scan time alone?
As far as peer review, what better peer review then to have the resea
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just about the money... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even today in the advent of electronic publishing, it is still a gigantic cost to print each issue; yes, we pay (sometimes hundreds of dollars) per page for things like color micrographs and the like, but considering that many times these journals have readerships that are less than ten thousand (sometimes considerably less) in the entire WORLD, to make these things self-sustaining is difficult at best.
Let us not forget also that the journal editors orchestrate peer review. Certainly you might say that would be simple to resolve, but there are often good reasons why editors will avoid candidates for peer review that might look good to someone who hasn't been doing the job for years. Doctor X might work with Doctor Y, for example. Editors often have an eye to catch situations that might represent conflict of interest and avoid them. This also works in reverse as well. Without some sort of oversight, the less scrupulous researcher could simply send all his or her publications to be peer-reviewed by a friend, who would give them great ratings and send them on to be published online. The problem is that most researchers live in a bit of a vacuum. They work in a rather narrow margin within a field and sometimes get to know others just by the work they've published if it falls along close lines. That would make it very, very hard to objectively self-review (among themselves, that is) publications.
Does it still happen in the current system? I'm sure it does. I also know that bad papers still get published, and good papers are rejected because one of the peer reviewers is working along similar lines and wants to be first to get it out (I've seen this happen).
The system is imperfect, but it provides a structure under which we can have some sort of independent review. Simply tossing everything out in the open sounds good, but would be quite a different issue in practice.
Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, but what is the general public going to do with all of this? The Federal government has required for a long time that the titles of all NSF (maybe NIH too) grants are made available to the public. What happened? People objected because studies were being done with cannibis, or other 'bad' drugs for purely medical reasons. Now we are specifically taught how to word grants so that they don't inflame the 'layperson' and get funding rejected because someone didn't like the title. What do you think will happen when we start touting all the 'free and open access' to papers? People who have no idea what is going on will raise holy hell because mice are being used for experiments or god forbid we're using heroin to test it's effect on X or Y.
I'm all for freedom of information, but I don't see what good this will accomplish.
dupe (Score:1)
We should bring an end to this publisher thing (Score:2)
Publishing in society journals (Score:1)
Also, these publishers have consistentl
The Old Way of Scientific Publishing Needs to Go! (Score:1)
Re:The Old Way of Scientific Publishing Needs to G (Score:1)
Re:The Old Way of Scientific Publishing Needs to G (Score:1)
Information wants to be as free as possible. Advertisers want information to be as expensive as possible. The Internet kinda turns the model of traditional publishing "inside out" in that it does not discriminate between the two: information can be advertising, and advertising can be information. Most advertising is useless, hyped, glam. There are some companies that have built their entire brand off of advertising alone.
I think one of the things that has
Some do even more (Score:1)
Get rid of research patents!!! (Score:1)
Highly frustrated researcher (Score:1)
This even in cases where the research as government funded and done say, in 1935 --
Re: (Score:1)
In most cases there will also be a list of authors with their respective e-mail addresses, many of whom would be only happy to send you a copy of the paper.