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Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter

234 points by RobAley 11y ago

OlafLostViking 11y ago
I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so. Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download. Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so. Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard. [0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    FWIW, googling for your example paper has a link to a scanned PDF of part 1 as first result: http://fi.ort.edu.uy/innovaportal/file/20124/1/22-landin_correspondence-between-algol-60-and-churchs-lambda-notation.pdf http://fi.ort.edu.uy/innovaportal/file/20124/1/22-landin_cor... Part 2 is at http://www.vex.net/~trebla/tmp/p158-landin.pdf http://www.vex.net/~trebla/tmp/p158-landin.pdf Both are quite legible. Google Scholar is also great for finding PDFs of papers.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      Oh yes I know about the "haz PDF" option, I was talking about the "legitimate" one (best case scenario under the UCC copyright is life + 25, we lost Peter Landin in 2009, so there's absolutely no chance this stuff is in the public domain)
  - dalke 11y ago
    There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Some libraries also have copying services. I've been trying track down a paper for the Tanimoto similarity. Quoting Wikipedia, "many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference", where [4] is: Tanimoto, T. (17 Nov 1957). "An Elementary Mathematical theory of Classification and Prediction". Internal IBM Technical Report 1957 (8?). Worldcat says that 10 page report is on a few library shelves. One of them provides scanning services, for about 50 cents per page, and $7 minimum. I should get it in the mail soon. If the same fees were to apply to your ACM articles, it would cost about $10(!). That cost difference makes me mad.
    - Natsu 11y ago
      Hopefully the next person after you won't have to search as hard for it, though...
      - dalke 11y ago
        They won't. The next person will easily find it in WorldCat. When I started looking, WorldCat didn't have the record.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.
      - kragen 11y ago
        I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!
        dalke 11y ago
        Could you elaborate? I haven't seen any differences in the Swedish library system compared to the US one, and my experiences with the German libraries have also been good.
- esseti 11y ago
  And the things is (at least where i leave) that Uni pays the fees for the access. The money for the fees come from the govern (and EU). The same govern that also finances the research. Basically the govern pays twice (if not more) the same thing.
- Asbostos 11y ago
  Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees. It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
  - Brotkrumen 11y ago
    Ah, I cant criticise a marketstructure that is coinincidental for flaws because there are prices. I should criticise one market participant over another due to reasons. Got it. Scientific journals used to haven an important role in distributing and coordinating scientific work. A large part of that reason is gone in the age of near instantaneous and free distribution. The coordination of the process could be done cheaply and pay for a bunch more PhDs instead of a useless middleman.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees. The market price is - say 30 $, if you want to get a legal copy - about 0 $, if you can accept the moral and legal dilemma Let the market decide... --- Seriously, because of the copyright laws the market is strongly skewed. I really can't understand how one can believe in free markets and copyright at the same time.
  - arbitrage 11y ago
    The market is being unfairly controlled by oligopolists, if not straight out monopolists in many areas. This is not free market doctrine. This is econ 101 on how to subvert the free market.
    - refurb 11y ago
      How is it a monopoly situation? There are multiple journals out there where scientists can publish their work. They could also start their own journal (open-access if they like) without many barriers.
ajuc 11y ago
Good for them. Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  Mmm. As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint. The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'. When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could. Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I concur. I owe my whole career to piracy[0]. Now that I earn money I am happy to buy stuff I need and give back to society, creators, etc. But to a teenager from a middle-class family of a developing country, piracy was strictly about access to otherwise unavailable educational material. It's an open secret that Adobe and Microsoft had a model of non-enforcing piracy for private use, and I think it's pretty good. It's totally fair to charge business licenses, but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race. Greed is trying to capture all the value you create. Don't do it. Let others have some, and then they'll happily let you have some of theirs. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397694
    - Kristine1975 11y ago
      > but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race. Although I doubt Adobe and Microsoft did this out of altruism: By allowing piracy of their software for private use, it became widely used, and at work people wanted to continue using the software they knew -- this time paying for it.
Kristine1975 11y ago
The hashtag seems to have originated in 2012: http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behind-icanhazpdf/ http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behin...
raverbashing 11y ago
Good! Even better, publish your articles 'for free'
imrehg 11y ago
There's also /r/scholar[1], which does the same thing, and so far working really very well (for me as a physicist out of academia at the moment) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar
- monort 11y ago
  And they have a link to a certain indispensable service, which uses university proxies to download scientific papers.
omginternets 11y ago
I'd love to see "popcorn time for scientific publications". Hint, hint.
- DaveWalk 11y ago
  An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting movies, TV shows or music.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    >It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there I actually think this would be fairly trivial. For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then, anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely download plugins. This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement ("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and distributes the task of hosting the files. Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.
kragen 11y ago
The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who paid Elsevier page fees to publish it. Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even Elsevier's very name is a theft: they are attempting to free-ride on the goodwill of the Elzevir family of Renaissance publishers, who have no connection with them.) Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
- unexistance 11y ago
  VERY good analogy, the law could be wrong :D
- Asbostos 11y ago
  Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as much to blame as the publisher. Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
  - kragen 11y ago
    One problem with that is that, as I understand it (I'm not an academic), not citing a relevant paper makes you look ignorant and can lead to accusations of plagiarism or attempts to steal credit; more subtly, it can lead to the reviewer whose paper you didn't cite recommending that your paper not be published. So it's not about being competitive, exactly; it's more about being cooperative. If you don't cooperate, other researchers won't cooperate with you, and your career will founder. For the most part, I don't think scientists care about the issue, except for being a bit annoyed with Elsevier. Most people don't care about most things that don't affect them directly. Scientists are people too. So rather than invest effort in activism, they mostly focus on their jobs and their families and stuff.
fermigier 11y ago
In France, there is a proposal, backed by an overwhelming majority of scientists, to mandate free and open access to scientific research results. See: https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-loi-numerique/consultation/consultation/opinions/section-2-travaux-de-recherche-et-de-statistique/article-9-acces-aux-travaux-de-la-recherche-financee-par-des-fonds-publics/versions/proteger-le-droit-des-auteurs-d-articles-scientifiques-pour-permettre-le-libre-acces-a-la-recherche-scientifique https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-... Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.
- mandor 11y ago
  ... with a 6 months embargo (at best).
  - fermigier 11y ago
    No. Please read the amendment.
ckozlowski 11y ago
Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such. I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time. Just bemused.
- anon4 11y ago
  They delete the tweets right after, so it's absolutely secure, don't worry about it.
wolfgke 11y ago
Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto > https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM... > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
  That first link will probably 404 within the year. The next time, you should right click and copy the link, which hasn't been redirected. https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    Thanks.
schoen 11y ago
It's funny to see something of the outside view. I suspect people reading this on HN are much more likely to understand "I can haz", as well as easily relate to the scientists' point of view.
alkonaut 11y ago
I don't see any problem with having Elsevier manage publications that prevent people from copying their content. Just as long as that content is also available elsewhere for free, if it's publicly funded research. I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that. A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
teekert 11y ago
I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself. I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work. Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process. Still loving the initiative though ;)
- stefantalpalaru 11y ago
  > I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. True, and in open access journals that cost is supported mostly by the authors: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/
- knlje 11y ago
  > I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues. Where the money goes to?
  - teekert 11y ago
    You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.
xefer 11y ago
I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me. I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc. I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work. I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
- Blahah 11y ago
  That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard copy...
  - montecarl 11y ago
    Several professors I know publish all their papers on their university/government lab hosted website and have never received any take down notices. When you use Google scholar to search for one of their papers there is a link directly to the pdf hosted by them. Many professors feel that the papers are theirs to redistribute as they wish even if copyright says otherwise. But I do understand why some authors might feel wary of this.
Blahah 11y ago
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress. Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote. But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists. They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success. The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  >Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet. Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know. People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
baldfat 11y ago
Peer Review = Flawed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?
- masklinn 11y ago
  > Peer Review = Flawed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ Then again, as per your article > Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative And the problem outlined with TFA has little to do with peer-review, it has to do with open access which is largely orthogonal.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    The opposing argument to Open and Free is that the main argument is that they need money for journals because they are peer reviewed. Peer reviews cost money. The integrity of the journal and science cost money. Therefore we are befitting science by having a pay wall. So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say they are doing us a service. That is flawed.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      Again Open (access) and Free (publication) are largely orthogonal. For instance PLOS journals are Open Access but not Free Publication, the publication fees funding edition and review.
      - baldfat 11y ago
        Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Now there is the option of being Free as in Beer but I really believe with the Internet we can have free and open. IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.
robotkilla 11y ago
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
- anon4 11y ago
  If I were making a secure file request/dropoff operation, I would host a chat room on a TOR hidden service where you could ask for the material in question, and a separate file server where you could upload the file. There would be a client that encrypts the file client-side and uploads it to the service and a client that downloads and decrypts. The uploader would post a link with the key to the forum after uploading. Once the file is downloaded, it's deleted. The two services would share no data with each other and appear as two completely separate services. Of course, then you run into the problem of having to moderate the thing, since you don't want to become a facilitator of child pornography etc.
  - ohashi 11y ago
    https://securesha.re/ https://securesha.re/
dombili 11y ago
It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their time dealing with crap like this. I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
baghira 11y ago
It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles. This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software. The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho). That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
- sawwit 11y ago
  > … it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles. I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access world like on arXiv.org.
  - baghira 11y ago
    Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function. Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way one decides who to promote. At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1. Count the citations. 2. Make a list. 3. Profit. You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better system. Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?
mikegerwitz 11y ago
Fundamentally, we're talking about the dissemination of knowledge. Yes, it is copyright infringement, but calling this "piracy" immediately associates this act with both theft and brutal disregard for the law.[0] That is not what is happening here. With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy". [0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy
- webXL 11y ago
  > "I don't think it can be equated very easily to theft. Theft is when you take something and the owner loses possession. But in copyright infringement, you don't take anything from other people," Elbakya says. "Many university researchers need access to these papers because subscriptions are very expensive." Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?
bluerobotcat 11y ago
I was expecting the secret codeword to be 'preprint'. When I was in academia not too long ago, I would often ask authors for the preprint of this or that paper, and they'd usually send it back promptly.
deleted 11y ago
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chrisBob 11y ago
I upload my papers through Researchgate. I know that it may not be legal to do so, but it is password protected, and hasn't been challenged by too many publishers. Sharing this way makes great sense for the author. You want people to read your paper, and it gives a way to do so. You must create an account, but many papers that would otherwise be blocked can be found this way. The other trick I recommend people try if they frequently have trouble finding papers is to try EndNote. It is a little expensive, but I found it to be great at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources with my school's access.
c3534l 11y ago
Aww. Scientists are adorable.
RUG3Y 11y ago
This is the age of the internet. We have no need for these publishing middlemen. Knowledge like this should be shared freely for the public good.
yati 11y ago
I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
  To be concise, your qualifications for a university may depend on what journals you publish your articles in, and how "prestigious" they are.
  - johansch 11y ago
    The obvious solution would be for countries to pass laws that force any publicly funded research to be published for free download in addition to whatever fancy journal the researches submits them to.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  If each academic research institution can run its own website, there is no particular reason they could not publish every last research report they produce themselves, and use a common, open-source program to handle the draft commentary, editing, and peer review. A government publication house would overly centralize things, and would organize research by geography and politics rather than subject matter. Science is a worldwide endeavor, and ought to be insulated from political influence as much as we are able to do so. And we certainly don't need any more juicy nexus points, dripping with extractable rents, throbbing and pulsating for the benefit of the leeches. One academic publications office per university or independent lab would certainly cost a bit more in overhead, but nowhere near as much as what is currently lost to the publisher conglomerates for both publication and access. The aggregation function of the journals could be fulfilled by a nomination and community moderation process among the researchers and students of any particular discipline. Publishing via university web site would also allow linking to related files, such as the raw data, conference video, audio, or transcripts, executable simulator or demonstration programs, and related research, all with permanent, canonical URLs. While I am not an academic, I notice that many of the journal-curated publications (that I can read for free) have only static diagrams, whereas if you go to the researcher's web site, you can see animated illustrations, executable programs, and lecture slide decks or videos. When the mission of science is to not only advance the frontiers of human knowledge, but also explain what you did and to disseminate the new knowledge to others, a plain old PDF locked up behind a paywall might not be the best way to do that.
deleted 11y ago
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amateurpolymath 11y ago
Economists Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee (currently at Microsoft) have long studied journal pricing. Here is Ted's page on the matter: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by Elsevier journals: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html Hopefully we see more academics collectively abandoning such journals like Knuth and the Journal of Algorithms board and these other examples from Ted's website: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html
joesmo 11y ago
This is an excellent argument for piracy as a learning tool and against the current trend in copyright law (see TPP, etc.). I really see no difference between this and someone pirating content with the intent to learn (like my teenage self). I wish our society did more to encourage the extremely few people who actually want to learn, want to better themselves, and have something to contribute to society instead of criminalizing their activities. It'd be one thing if the government provided alternatives, but at least in the US, you won't even get taught basic math properly in many schools, let alone anything that might actually stimulate minds. Is it any wonder then that the government does so much to protect the "intellectual property" (whatever that means) rights of corporations but does nothing to protect the IP rights to scientific research, including research paid for? Even a simple law, requiring government funded research to be publicly, freely available would go a long way, assuming it actually was freely available, not 'freely available for $50 / paper' or whatever the lawmakers want to redefine 'freely' to mean.
oxide 11y ago
This is 2015. The idea that we need to make sure a company is steeped in ill-gotten profit so that information can be disseminated is absolutely laughable. The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
- cheepin 11y ago
  Grasping at straws is a strange way to say rolling in money. The Journals are relics for sure, but with the internet their costs went down, and they make a ton of money financed by tax-funded research.
xacaxulu 11y ago
Information wants to be free.
- krapp 11y ago
  "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." ... would be the actual quote in its entirety, which describes an inherent conflict between the value of information and the cost of distribution, not "information freedom" as being a law of nature in and of itself.
DaveWalk 11y ago
For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around. In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless. [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/
- Fomite 11y ago
  I wouldn't say nearly useless. For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact. Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.
astaroth360 11y ago
What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist? Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.
- Fomite 11y ago
  There was a Academia Stack Exchange question on this very thing: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-the-point-of-journals-nowadays http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-th... My answer, from there: They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals, if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending their conferences. They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something that is not necessarily an academic skill set. They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field" and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues - popularity and quality. Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far more weight because of the associated journals. Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in addition to targeted searches of the literature.
norswap 11y ago
Nowadays there's also http://booksc.com http://booksc.com

234 points by RobAley 11y ago

I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so. Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download. Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.

masklinn 11y ago
> I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so. Obtaining foundational CS papers for intellectual curiosity reasons is pretty bad, they cost inane prices[0] and for that you get barely legible PDF scans of the original print. In the best case there might be some badly synchronised ORC included so you can try to select way too much text and hope you'll find what you wanted somewhere in your clipboard. [0] ACM wants $30 for the 1965 "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notations" (two parts, $15 each, ~20 pages total)
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  FWIW, googling for your example paper has a link to a scanned PDF of part 1 as first result: http://fi.ort.edu.uy/innovaportal/file/20124/1/22-landin_correspondence-between-algol-60-and-churchs-lambda-notation.pdf http://fi.ort.edu.uy/innovaportal/file/20124/1/22-landin_cor... Part 2 is at http://www.vex.net/~trebla/tmp/p158-landin.pdf http://www.vex.net/~trebla/tmp/p158-landin.pdf Both are quite legible. Google Scholar is also great for finding PDFs of papers.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Oh yes I know about the "haz PDF" option, I was talking about the "legitimate" one (best case scenario under the UCC copyright is life + 25, we lost Peter Landin in 2009, so there's absolutely no chance this stuff is in the public domain)
- dalke 11y ago
  There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Some libraries also have copying services. I've been trying track down a paper for the Tanimoto similarity. Quoting Wikipedia, "many sources[3] cite an unavailable IBM Technical Report[4] as the seminal reference", where [4] is: Tanimoto, T. (17 Nov 1957). "An Elementary Mathematical theory of Classification and Prediction". Internal IBM Technical Report 1957 (8?). Worldcat says that 10 page report is on a few library shelves. One of them provides scanning services, for about 50 cents per page, and $7 minimum. I should get it in the mail soon. If the same fees were to apply to your ACM articles, it would cost about $10(!). That cost difference makes me mad.
  - Natsu 11y ago
    Hopefully the next person after you won't have to search as hard for it, though...
    - dalke 11y ago
      They won't. The next person will easily find it in WorldCat. When I started looking, WorldCat didn't have the record.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > There's a cheaper solution for foundational papers. Go to your library and use interlibrary loan. Not sure that's really an option when not in the US.
    - kragen 11y ago
      I think people in the US don't realize how much better the US library system is than most of the rest of the world. Even the developed world!
      - dalke 11y ago
        Could you elaborate? I haven't seen any differences in the Swedish library system compared to the US one, and my experiences with the German libraries have also been good.
esseti 11y ago
And the things is (at least where i leave) that Uni pays the fees for the access. The money for the fees come from the govern (and EU). The same govern that also finances the research. Basically the govern pays twice (if not more) the same thing.
Asbostos 11y ago
Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees. It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview" process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a side effect.
- Brotkrumen 11y ago
  Ah, I cant criticise a marketstructure that is coinincidental for flaws because there are prices. I should criticise one market participant over another due to reasons. Got it. Scientific journals used to haven an important role in distributing and coordinating scientific work. A large part of that reason is gone in the age of near instantaneous and free distribution. The coordination of the process could be done cheaply and pay for a bunch more PhDs instead of a useless middleman.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  > Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge high fees. The market price is - say 30 $, if you want to get a legal copy - about 0 $, if you can accept the moral and legal dilemma Let the market decide... --- Seriously, because of the copyright laws the market is strongly skewed. I really can't understand how one can believe in free markets and copyright at the same time.
- arbitrage 11y ago
  The market is being unfairly controlled by oligopolists, if not straight out monopolists in many areas. This is not free market doctrine. This is econ 101 on how to subvert the free market.
  - refurb 11y ago
    How is it a monopoly situation? There are multiple journals out there where scientists can publish their work. They could also start their own journal (open-access if they like) without many barriers.

ajuc 11y ago

Good for them. Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.

stegosaurus 11y ago
Mmm. As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint. The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'. When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all, none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way. Would I download a car? Sure, if I could. Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an 18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I concur. I owe my whole career to piracy[0]. Now that I earn money I am happy to buy stuff I need and give back to society, creators, etc. But to a teenager from a middle-class family of a developing country, piracy was strictly about access to otherwise unavailable educational material. It's an open secret that Adobe and Microsoft had a model of non-enforcing piracy for private use, and I think it's pretty good. It's totally fair to charge business licenses, but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race. Greed is trying to capture all the value you create. Don't do it. Let others have some, and then they'll happily let you have some of theirs. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397694
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    > but in the area of education and science, limiting access is holding back the progress of the entire human race. Although I doubt Adobe and Microsoft did this out of altruism: By allowing piracy of their software for private use, it became widely used, and at work people wanted to continue using the software they knew -- this time paying for it.

Kristine1975 11y ago

The hashtag seems to have originated in 2012: http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behind-icanhazpdf/ http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behin...

raverbashing 11y ago

Good! Even better, publish your articles 'for free'

imrehg 11y ago

There's also /r/scholar[1], which does the same thing, and so far working really very well (for me as a physicist out of academia at the moment) [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar

monort 11y ago
And they have a link to a certain indispensable service, which uses university proxies to download scientific papers.

omginternets 11y ago

I'd love to see "popcorn time for scientific publications". Hint, hint.

DaveWalk 11y ago
An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting movies, TV shows or music.
- omginternets 11y ago
  >It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there I actually think this would be fairly trivial. For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then, anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely download plugins. This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement ("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and distributes the task of hosting the files. Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.

kragen 11y ago

The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who paid Elsevier page fees to publish it. Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even Elsevier's very name is a theft: they are attempting to free-ride on the goodwill of the Elzevir family of Renaissance publishers, who have no connection with them.) Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.

unexistance 11y ago
VERY good analogy, the law could be wrong :D
Asbostos 11y ago
Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as much to blame as the publisher. Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.
- kragen 11y ago
  One problem with that is that, as I understand it (I'm not an academic), not citing a relevant paper makes you look ignorant and can lead to accusations of plagiarism or attempts to steal credit; more subtly, it can lead to the reviewer whose paper you didn't cite recommending that your paper not be published. So it's not about being competitive, exactly; it's more about being cooperative. If you don't cooperate, other researchers won't cooperate with you, and your career will founder. For the most part, I don't think scientists care about the issue, except for being a bit annoyed with Elsevier. Most people don't care about most things that don't affect them directly. Scientists are people too. So rather than invest effort in activism, they mostly focus on their jobs and their families and stuff.

fermigier 11y ago

In France, there is a proposal, backed by an overwhelming majority of scientists, to mandate free and open access to scientific research results. See: https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-loi-numerique/consultation/consultation/opinions/section-2-travaux-de-recherche-et-de-statistique/article-9-acces-aux-travaux-de-la-recherche-financee-par-des-fonds-publics/versions/proteger-le-droit-des-auteurs-d-articles-scientifiques-pour-permettre-le-libre-acces-a-la-recherche-scientifique https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-... Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.

mandor 11y ago
... with a 6 months embargo (at best).
- fermigier 11y ago
  No. Please read the amendment.

ckozlowski 11y ago

Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such. I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time. Just bemused.

anon4 11y ago
They delete the tweets right after, so it's absolutely secure, don't worry about it.

wolfgke 11y ago

Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto > https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM... > https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto

DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
That first link will probably 404 within the year. The next time, you should right click and copy the link, which hasn't been redirected. https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...
- wolfgke 11y ago
  Thanks.

schoen 11y ago

It's funny to see something of the outside view. I suspect people reading this on HN are much more likely to understand "I can haz", as well as easily relate to the scientists' point of view.

alkonaut 11y ago

I don't see any problem with having Elsevier manage publications that prevent people from copying their content. Just as long as that content is also available elsewhere for free, if it's publicly funded research. I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content or just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that. A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be how hard to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?

teekert 11y ago

I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself. I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work. Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process. Still loving the initiative though ;)

stefantalpalaru 11y ago
> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. True, and in open access journals that cost is supported mostly by the authors: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/ https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/
knlje 11y ago
> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. I have peer reviewed various academic papers for Elsevier without receiving any monetary compensation. Moreover, quite small amount of academic papers is read in a printed form, at least among my colleagues. Where the money goes to?
- teekert 11y ago
  You think the paper is free? You think the editors, typesetters etc are free? I'm not saying it should be as expensive as it is, I'm saying if you want to distribute for free, the publishing party (the research group) will have to pay more or the journal will have to take less profits.

xefer 11y ago

I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me. I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc. I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work. I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.

Blahah 11y ago
That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.
JupiterMoon 11y ago
When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard copy...
- montecarl 11y ago
  Several professors I know publish all their papers on their university/government lab hosted website and have never received any take down notices. When you use Google scholar to search for one of their papers there is a link directly to the pdf hosted by them. Many professors feel that the papers are theirs to redistribute as they wish even if copyright says otherwise. But I do understand why some authors might feel wary of this.

Blahah 11y ago

#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress. Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us thousands of dollars to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote. But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists. They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success. The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.

cinquemb 11y ago
>Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet, rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only possible because of the internet. Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship, which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only one in his position who didn't know. People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the place to in the past. People are just routing around their present institutions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project

baldfat 11y ago

Peer Review = Flawed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?

masklinn 11y ago
> Peer Review = Flawed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ Then again, as per your article > Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because there is no obvious alternative And the problem outlined with TFA has little to do with peer-review, it has to do with open access which is largely orthogonal.
- baldfat 11y ago
  The opposing argument to Open and Free is that the main argument is that they need money for journals because they are peer reviewed. Peer reviews cost money. The integrity of the journal and science cost money. Therefore we are befitting science by having a pay wall. So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say they are doing us a service. That is flawed.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    Again Open (access) and Free (publication) are largely orthogonal. For instance PLOS journals are Open Access but not Free Publication, the publication fees funding edition and review.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Now there is the option of being Free as in Beer but I really believe with the Internet we can have free and open. IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid wall.

robotkilla 11y ago

> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.

anon4 11y ago
If I were making a secure file request/dropoff operation, I would host a chat room on a TOR hidden service where you could ask for the material in question, and a separate file server where you could upload the file. There would be a client that encrypts the file client-side and uploads it to the service and a client that downloads and decrypts. The uploader would post a link with the key to the forum after uploading. Once the file is downloaded, it's deleted. The two services would share no data with each other and appear as two completely separate services. Of course, then you run into the problem of having to moderate the thing, since you don't want to become a facilitator of child pornography etc.
- ohashi 11y ago
  https://securesha.re/ https://securesha.re/

dombili 11y ago

It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their time dealing with crap like this. I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.

baghira 11y ago

It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles. This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software. The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho). That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.

sawwit 11y ago
> … it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles. I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access world like on arXiv.org.
- baghira 11y ago
  Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function. Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way one decides who to promote. At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1. Count the citations. 2. Make a list. 3. Profit. You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better system. Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?

mikegerwitz 11y ago

Fundamentally, we're talking about the dissemination of knowledge. Yes, it is copyright infringement, but calling this "piracy" immediately associates this act with both theft and brutal disregard for the law.[0] That is not what is happening here. With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy". [0]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy

webXL 11y ago
> "I don't think it can be equated very easily to theft. Theft is when you take something and the owner loses possession. But in copyright infringement, you don't take anything from other people," Elbakya says. "Many university researchers need access to these papers because subscriptions are very expensive." Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the law to get it?

bluerobotcat 11y ago

I was expecting the secret codeword to be 'preprint'. When I was in academia not too long ago, I would often ask authors for the preprint of this or that paper, and they'd usually send it back promptly.

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chrisBob 11y ago

I upload my papers through Researchgate. I know that it may not be legal to do so, but it is password protected, and hasn't been challenged by too many publishers. Sharing this way makes great sense for the author. You want people to read your paper, and it gives a way to do so. You must create an account, but many papers that would otherwise be blocked can be found this way. The other trick I recommend people try if they frequently have trouble finding papers is to try EndNote. It is a little expensive, but I found it to be great at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources with my school's access.

c3534l 11y ago

Aww. Scientists are adorable.

RUG3Y 11y ago

This is the age of the internet. We have no need for these publishing middlemen. Knowledge like this should be shared freely for the public good.

yati 11y ago

I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?

DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
To be concise, your qualifications for a university may depend on what journals you publish your articles in, and how "prestigious" they are.
- johansch 11y ago
  The obvious solution would be for countries to pass laws that force any publicly funded research to be published for free download in addition to whatever fancy journal the researches submits them to.
logfromblammo 11y ago
If each academic research institution can run its own website, there is no particular reason they could not publish every last research report they produce themselves, and use a common, open-source program to handle the draft commentary, editing, and peer review. A government publication house would overly centralize things, and would organize research by geography and politics rather than subject matter. Science is a worldwide endeavor, and ought to be insulated from political influence as much as we are able to do so. And we certainly don't need any more juicy nexus points, dripping with extractable rents, throbbing and pulsating for the benefit of the leeches. One academic publications office per university or independent lab would certainly cost a bit more in overhead, but nowhere near as much as what is currently lost to the publisher conglomerates for both publication and access. The aggregation function of the journals could be fulfilled by a nomination and community moderation process among the researchers and students of any particular discipline. Publishing via university web site would also allow linking to related files, such as the raw data, conference video, audio, or transcripts, executable simulator or demonstration programs, and related research, all with permanent, canonical URLs. While I am not an academic, I notice that many of the journal-curated publications (that I can read for free) have only static diagrams, whereas if you go to the researcher's web site, you can see animated illustrations, executable programs, and lecture slide decks or videos. When the mission of science is to not only advance the frontiers of human knowledge, but also explain what you did and to disseminate the new knowledge to others, a plain old PDF locked up behind a paywall might not be the best way to do that.

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amateurpolymath 11y ago

Economists Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee (currently at Microsoft) have long studied journal pricing. Here is Ted's page on the matter: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by Elsevier journals: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html Hopefully we see more academics collectively abandoning such journals like Knuth and the Journal of Algorithms board and these other examples from Ted's website: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html

joesmo 11y ago

This is an excellent argument for piracy as a learning tool and against the current trend in copyright law (see TPP, etc.). I really see no difference between this and someone pirating content with the intent to learn (like my teenage self). I wish our society did more to encourage the extremely few people who actually want to learn, want to better themselves, and have something to contribute to society instead of criminalizing their activities. It'd be one thing if the government provided alternatives, but at least in the US, you won't even get taught basic math properly in many schools, let alone anything that might actually stimulate minds. Is it any wonder then that the government does so much to protect the "intellectual property" (whatever that means) rights of corporations but does nothing to protect the IP rights to scientific research, including research paid for? Even a simple law, requiring government funded research to be publicly, freely available would go a long way, assuming it actually was freely available, not 'freely available for $50 / paper' or whatever the lawmakers want to redefine 'freely' to mean.

oxide 11y ago

This is 2015. The idea that we need to make sure a company is steeped in ill-gotten profit so that information can be disseminated is absolutely laughable. The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.

cheepin 11y ago
Grasping at straws is a strange way to say rolling in money. The Journals are relics for sure, but with the internet their costs went down, and they make a ton of money financed by tax-funded research.

xacaxulu 11y ago

Information wants to be free.

krapp 11y ago
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." ... would be the actual quote in its entirety, which describes an inherent conflict between the value of information and the cost of distribution, not "information freedom" as being a law of nature in and of itself.

DaveWalk 11y ago

For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around. In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], one year after publication. For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless. [0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

Fomite 11y ago
I wouldn't say nearly useless. For my "most cited" paper, the vast bulk of the citations from said paper took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper - peak citation is several years after the fact. Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.

astaroth360 11y ago

What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist? Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.

Fomite 11y ago
There was a Academia Stack Exchange question on this very thing: http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-the-point-of-journals-nowadays http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-th... My answer, from there: They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals, if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending their conferences. They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something that is not necessarily an academic skill set. They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field" and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues - popularity and quality. Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far more weight because of the associated journals. Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in addition to targeted searches of the literature.

norswap 11y ago

Nowadays there's also http://booksc.com http://booksc.com