9 ms·

If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax

by kriro 11y ago

If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case. I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to basically approve of the academic standards in the paper. I also think the static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of "want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.

_pmf_ 11y ago
Some research grants are industry subsidies. Taking this away results in pure, accessible research that is absolutely useless.
doppioandante 11y ago
Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.
- adrianN 11y ago
  This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.
  - doppioandante 11y ago
    Thanks for clarifying, I was replying to the technological insight in kriro's post however. Btw, is technology here completely irrelevant? The way to access content is pretty important after all. In a decentralized publishing system, what is reputation? Maybe it could be an intrinsic measure with a ranking system of some sort. But this is pretty hard. Maybe the "natural" way to publish content has no unique or sensical way to quantify prestige. The following question arises: is prestige a good criterion to judge science?
  - kriro 11y ago
    I completely agree (I am currently a scientist). It's a very hard problem to solve. I'd love working on it and in many ways it can be framed as a tech startup type of problem since it is essentially trying to build a consensus network. In a theoretical world in which I have retirement level money that would probably be the issue I'd try to fix for the rest of my life (unfortunately expecting no progress). Mathematics seems like the most promising field to start with if you follow a bowling pin type of strategy. There have been some boycotts of Elsevier etc. from math departments and they have somewhat of a "free publishing" tradition at least from my outside point of view. It's also an excellent viral starting point because you can infiltrate other disciplines that tend to cite math papers (physics, machine learning, economics etc.)
  - jakub_g 11y ago
    AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal. If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you're more likely to not have your contract extended etc. The ministry reevaluates the (journal's IF<->points per publication) mapping each year, but it takes a few years for a new journal to get significant number of points. Publishing in low-IF journals if your paper could be accepted by a major one is a career suicide. The hidden implication is that the system reinforces the power of the all-powerful top journals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
mattlutze 11y ago
I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading. Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.
- Luc 11y ago
  The publishing of academic journals generates billions of profit per year. One could easily decimate these profits and still have a viable industry, whatever definition of decimate one cares to use. Profit margins around 40% if I recall...
  - kilotaras 11y ago
    Profit margins doesn't mean much in this case. Most science related work (e.g peer review) is done for free. Typesetting costs around $30 per article [1]. It looks like big part of spending is administration and lawyers for taking down copies of the articles. [1] https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-to-discrete-analysis https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-... (ctrl+f $30)
- maruhan2 11y ago
  If there's a demand, there will be a solution. With proper review sorting mechanism, I'm sure that can be solved
- amelius 11y ago
  > I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic. In other words, filtering can be done perfectly well by communities and third-party organizations.
mathattack 11y ago
I agree with your first premise - yes, they should be free. In this sense, the peer review process should be paid for by whoever funds the research, rather than whoever wants to read it.
amelius 11y ago
And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors? (Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).
- adrinavarro 11y ago
  Well, they are the ones funding the research teams and equipment, so it's a different scenario IMHO. I think we can agree though that knowledge should converge into being easily accessible, all while reducing the collateral effects of doing so (as the article explains: tenure, promotions, prestige…).
mrdrozdov 11y ago
I am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.
- michaelhoffman 11y ago
  Almost all published biomedical research is government-funded. "Private" universities in the U.S. get massive federal grants for research.
- huac 11y ago
  lots of private university papers are still paid for with govt research funds
- _fizz_buzz_ 11y ago
  Companies and private universities publish obviously a lot of research papers. These are still more often than not somehow funded by governments e.g. Darpa, EU funds (Horizon 2020) etc. I am not aware of many projects that are truly completely, privately funded.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  U.S. private universities get plenty of public funding.
mvaliente2001 11y ago
Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero. One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis has been proved wrong in a recent paper, or suggest improvements in his methodology. Others can chip in and offer to replicate the experiment to increase the sample size. Mathematicians could observe and correct the statistical analysis before the conclusion are published. I think that will improve the quality of the results. Of course, the bigger problem is that most papers would have dozens or hundreds of authors, diluting the individual contribution of each one. On the other hand, finished reasearch already would be peer reviewed and corrected.
- DaveWalk 11y ago
  You're definitely on to something; the parallels between science and open software are tantalizingly close. From my experience a main problem is real estate; you can't do most science experiments without a proper lab. We could probably brainstorm some creative solutions (like operating an "open" contract research organization to be the hands for everyone's ideas), but at the moment this is too big of a barrier. With real estate comes cost, then funding, then jockeying for funding, and finally journal impact factors as a measurement of worthiness. It's also why one can't make a science-related "hackathon" without changing the concept.
- godzillabrennus 11y ago
  The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.
  - mvaliente2001 11y ago
    Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.

by kriro 11y ago

_pmf_ 11y ago

Some research grants are industry subsidies. Taking this away results in pure, accessible research that is absolutely useless.

doppioandante 11y ago

Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.

adrianN 11y ago
This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.
- doppioandante 11y ago
  Thanks for clarifying, I was replying to the technological insight in kriro's post however. Btw, is technology here completely irrelevant? The way to access content is pretty important after all. In a decentralized publishing system, what is reputation? Maybe it could be an intrinsic measure with a ranking system of some sort. But this is pretty hard. Maybe the "natural" way to publish content has no unique or sensical way to quantify prestige. The following question arises: is prestige a good criterion to judge science?
- kriro 11y ago
  I completely agree (I am currently a scientist). It's a very hard problem to solve. I'd love working on it and in many ways it can be framed as a tech startup type of problem since it is essentially trying to build a consensus network. In a theoretical world in which I have retirement level money that would probably be the issue I'd try to fix for the rest of my life (unfortunately expecting no progress). Mathematics seems like the most promising field to start with if you follow a bowling pin type of strategy. There have been some boycotts of Elsevier etc. from math departments and they have somewhat of a "free publishing" tradition at least from my outside point of view. It's also an excellent viral starting point because you can infiltrate other disciplines that tend to cite math papers (physics, machine learning, economics etc.)
- jakub_g 11y ago
  AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal. If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you're more likely to not have your contract extended etc. The ministry reevaluates the (journal's IF<->points per publication) mapping each year, but it takes a few years for a new journal to get significant number of points. Publishing in low-IF journals if your paper could be accepted by a major one is a career suicide. The hidden implication is that the system reinforces the power of the all-powerful top journals. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

mattlutze 11y ago

I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading. Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.

Luc 11y ago
The publishing of academic journals generates billions of profit per year. One could easily decimate these profits and still have a viable industry, whatever definition of decimate one cares to use. Profit margins around 40% if I recall...
- kilotaras 11y ago
  Profit margins doesn't mean much in this case. Most science related work (e.g peer review) is done for free. Typesetting costs around $30 per article [1]. It looks like big part of spending is administration and lawyers for taking down copies of the articles. [1] https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-to-discrete-analysis https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-... (ctrl+f $30)
maruhan2 11y ago
If there's a demand, there will be a solution. With proper review sorting mechanism, I'm sure that can be solved
amelius 11y ago
> I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic. In other words, filtering can be done perfectly well by communities and third-party organizations.

mathattack 11y ago

I agree with your first premise - yes, they should be free. In this sense, the peer review process should be paid for by whoever funds the research, rather than whoever wants to read it.

amelius 11y ago

And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors? (Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).

adrinavarro 11y ago
Well, they are the ones funding the research teams and equipment, so it's a different scenario IMHO. I think we can agree though that knowledge should converge into being easily accessible, all while reducing the collateral effects of doing so (as the article explains: tenure, promotions, prestige…).

mrdrozdov 11y ago

I am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

michaelhoffman 11y ago
Almost all published biomedical research is government-funded. "Private" universities in the U.S. get massive federal grants for research.
huac 11y ago
lots of private university papers are still paid for with govt research funds
_fizz_buzz_ 11y ago
Companies and private universities publish obviously a lot of research papers. These are still more often than not somehow funded by governments e.g. Darpa, EU funds (Horizon 2020) etc. I am not aware of many projects that are truly completely, privately funded.
tosseraccount 11y ago
U.S. private universities get plenty of public funding.

mvaliente2001 11y ago

Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero. One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis has been proved wrong in a recent paper, or suggest improvements in his methodology. Others can chip in and offer to replicate the experiment to increase the sample size. Mathematicians could observe and correct the statistical analysis before the conclusion are published. I think that will improve the quality of the results. Of course, the bigger problem is that most papers would have dozens or hundreds of authors, diluting the individual contribution of each one. On the other hand, finished reasearch already would be peer reviewed and corrected.

DaveWalk 11y ago
You're definitely on to something; the parallels between science and open software are tantalizingly close. From my experience a main problem is real estate; you can't do most science experiments without a proper lab. We could probably brainstorm some creative solutions (like operating an "open" contract research organization to be the hands for everyone's ideas), but at the moment this is too big of a barrier. With real estate comes cost, then funding, then jockeying for funding, and finally journal impact factors as a measurement of worthiness. It's also why one can't make a science-related "hackathon" without changing the concept.
godzillabrennus 11y ago
The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.
- mvaliente2001 11y ago
  Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.