4 ms·

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 ve

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.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    "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." Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount 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." Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
    - IanCal 10y ago
      Ah search appears to be down, and possibly since Feb. Most news articles talked about them using google scholar and I'm sure I remember using it and it taking me to a google scholar page but with altered hyperlinks. If you search around you'll find other people describing something similar. I assumed it was still like that but apparently google have blocked them [0] > Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities. Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost. PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting. [0] http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science

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.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "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." Where did you find they're just piggybacking on Google Scholar? I know nothing of the implementation outside what she spends for a specific amount 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." Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities.
  - IanCal 10y ago
    Ah search appears to be down, and possibly since Feb. Most news articles talked about them using google scholar and I'm sure I remember using it and it taking me to a google scholar page but with altered hyperlinks. If you search around you'll find other people describing something similar. I assumed it was still like that but apparently google have blocked them [0] > Oh yeah, I agree. A survey of many looking at various attributes with associated costs is probably in order to help establish a baseline when predicting costs of larger activities. Yeah it'd be very interesting to know how much something like this might cost. PubMed might be a good analogy, if there was an EU or worldwide version run like that which had proper backups, etc that'd be very interesting. [0] http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science