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I consider my belief how this particular battle will turn out a good litmus test for my pessimism/optimism. Some days I can't imagine a future where universal

I consider my belief how this particular battle will turn out a good litmus test for my pessimism/optimism. Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Seeing that I must normally believe it to be a 50/50 thing makes it a great way to calibrate my mood out of my decision making process. More on topic: I wonder if we'll see countries take a stance in these battles. Why isn't Ecuador Hosting a Sci-Hub Mirror for their citizens? The naive observer might think there is only upsides for countries like these to such an action.

wolfgke 10y ago
> Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Even if in the future universal open access is implemented, this will not solve the problem. To quote Aaron Swartz (https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...): "The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay."
dougmccune 10y ago
I hope you're OK with a compromise between your pessimism and optimism. I think what you'll see over the next few years is continued movement (with increased velocity) toward open access for well-funded research areas (ie bio and other hard sciences, etc). If you're getting decent grant money from the government or a funding body (like Wellcome Trust or Gates) then your research will be highly likely to be open access, and not just after an embargo period. But in disciplines that aren't well funded it's going to be a different story. Humanities and much of Social Science doesn't have the same funding situation, and so therefore the existing system is going to stick around for quite a while. The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about theoretical cheap costs. So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.
- koide 10y ago
  Isn't it true then that most work is provided for free by the peers?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Didn't the article say the vetting was mostly academics doing it for free? Shouldn't cost much then. Curating can be a paid service as was the case in the article. Whereas, I know what the cost is: SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Distribution to a world-wide audience would cost more but could be absorbed by universities mirroring things and using storage appliances like that OSS one that shows up here periodically. Not to mention cheap boxes that cache the hot docs in RAM. People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well, summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)
  - IanCal 10y ago
    Peer review is done for free yes, but you also need to manage that process and there's a filtering step before you send things to peer review. Then there are checks like someone going through the references and making sure they're all there, that dois are assigned and assigned correctly, etc. There's the software for managing all this process too, and then all the extra cost around hiring people like management, HR, office space, etc. You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..." but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is some cost. Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions. So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on 19 others. I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and their fees as they're a non-profit. > SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar.

wolfgke 10y ago

> Some days I can't imagine a future where universal open access is implemented, at other times it seems inevitable. Even if in the future universal open access is implemented, this will not solve the problem. To quote Aaron Swartz (https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...): "The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. That is too high a price to pay."

dougmccune 10y ago

I hope you're OK with a compromise between your pessimism and optimism. I think what you'll see over the next few years is continued movement (with increased velocity) toward open access for well-funded research areas (ie bio and other hard sciences, etc). If you're getting decent grant money from the government or a funding body (like Wellcome Trust or Gates) then your research will be highly likely to be open access, and not just after an embargo period. But in disciplines that aren't well funded it's going to be a different story. Humanities and much of Social Science doesn't have the same funding situation, and so therefore the existing system is going to stick around for quite a while. The zealots will argue that every service a traditional publisher provides should only cost $20 a paper (or whatever other number you pull form thin air). Except if that was true you'd have a bunch of startups offering compelling publishing services for that price point, which you don't. Vetting and curating scientific literature has real costs, and those who say it doesn't don't have defensible models they can point to to show that it can work without real money flowing. It's always just hand-wavey arguments about theoretical cheap costs. So I think your optimism will be proven right (or at least more right than wrong) when it comes to well-funded research areas. And your pessimism will be proven right when it comes to fields without the same funding structure.

koide 10y ago
Isn't it true then that most work is provided for free by the peers?
nickpsecurity 10y ago
Didn't the article say the vetting was mostly academics doing it for free? Shouldn't cost much then. Curating can be a paid service as was the case in the article. Whereas, I know what the cost is: SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Distribution to a world-wide audience would cost more but could be absorbed by universities mirroring things and using storage appliances like that OSS one that shows up here periodically. Not to mention cheap boxes that cache the hot docs in RAM. People that want fancy shit can pay for it. Meanwhile, I got 16,000 papers on IT and INFOSEC out of ACM and IEEE through my university just using a search box with titles, authors, abstracts, and PDF download button. All I need to bring cutting-edge and prior good work to Hacker News regularly. Well, summaries of it unless I find a public download that allows me to share. Esp CiteSeerX, a perfect example of what I'm proposing. It's the bomb. :)
- IanCal 10y ago
  Peer review is done for free yes, but you also need to manage that process and there's a filtering step before you send things to peer review. Then there are checks like someone going through the references and making sure they're all there, that dois are assigned and assigned correctly, etc. There's the software for managing all this process too, and then all the extra cost around hiring people like management, HR, office space, etc. You can look at all of these and say "yes but that's not hard it's just..." but the fact is someone does work and that'll need to be paid for, so there is some cost. Often only papers that are accepted actually pay the cost, so they're effectively paying for all the work done on papers that don't make the final cut. Nature, if I remember the figures right, accept about 5% of submissions. So for every paper, there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done on 19 others. I'm not justifying any particular cost, but it'd be worth looking at PLOS and their fees as they're a non-profit. > SciHub is $5,000/mo to operate if all one does is provide a collection of papers. Is it reasonable to put the cost of running a publication at near or under one FTE? You'd at least have to do more if you had search and weren't just piggybacking on google scholar.