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Gates Foundation research can’t be published in top journals
- jswrenn 10y agoThis title is a little editorialized. Gates Foundation research cannot be published in non-open-access journals—"top" or otherwise.
- eganist 10y agoSeems much more drastically editorialized, to be honest. My first impression reading the headline was that there was some sort of ethical dispute resulting in a ban (why else would you be unable to publish in "top journals?"). This bit of data regarding the open access requirement--also present in the opening paragraph of the article--offers a ton of clarity, but given the conflict of interest, the title itself is pretty rich.
- AsyncAwait 10y agoNature wants to push the notion that open-access is not where "top" papers are published in order to protect its aging business model, so from their perespective, it makes perfect sense.
- ksk 10y agoLink? I haven't seen Nature claim or try to push any FUD that open-access publications do not have top papers.
- HarryHirsch 10y agoThey don't make the claim that "open access"==Wire Transfer Letters". Trouble is, Wire Transfer Letters not only exist, they are on the rise, and if the promotion committee at your unranked regional university accepts papers published there for Promotion & Tenure the problem has been shifted around.
- geobmx540 10y agoSorry, what's a Wire Transfer Letter in this context?
- Senji 10y agoNot snail mail.
- HarryHirsch 10y ago"Letters" in this context mean short communications, publications shorter than a full-length paper. Back in the day, Tetrahedron (then published by Pergamon Press, founded by the scintillating fraud and far-seeing visionary [1] Robert Maxwell, and now owned by Elsevier, and that isn't a step up) was the gutter journal that would print anything. But if something was too damn awful and thin even for Tetrahedron, then Tetrahedron Letters would surely print it. Wire Transfer Letters because you must wire-transfer them the page charges for your paper that was generated by a Markov chain before they print it, and because the sketchy publisher sits far away in a country known for sketchy dealings. OMICS Publishers, we are looking at you! Can someone enlighten the audience about what happened to Beall's List?! Another suit? [1] Pergamon was founded in 1951
- apathy 10y agoThis was such a beautiful comment. Elsevirus is a step down from Weekly World News. The graphical abstracts would make Jack Chick proud.
- davidgerard 10y ago> Can someone enlighten the audience about what happened to Beall's List?! Another suit? Trying to track this down. People are taking cache copies right now, ready to put up at a second's notice (or just do so anyway).
- biehl 10y agoYes! A title change is warranted. A proper title would be something like "Gates Foundation to require immediate open access to supported research" And Peter Suber has a good analysis here https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV
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- patrickyeon 10y agoIt is very editorialized. "Nature and other top journals refuse to consider papers with Open Access requirements" is just as truthful, but presents a different antagonist.
- davidgerard 10y agoThis is Nature trying to make out that their problem is something wrong with the Gates policy. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> the discussions could result in influential journals making special arrangements with the Gates Foundation to permit OA publishing On one hand, such a deal would send a powerful signal. On the other hand, it does feel like it compromises the spirit of supporting open access.
- antman 10y agoOne day this article is flagged and dead, the other day its first on HN. I think something is wrong with the system lately.
- TillE 10y agoI'm not generally a fan of arbitrarily "disrupting" things, but the whole academia publishing system is a creaky historical relic that's going to come crashing down sooner or later. There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet.
- FabHK 10y agoAbsolutely. And in the meantime, Elsevier and the other cynical crooks are making some unparalleled 30+% return on equity. Disgusting. Hope they come crashing down sooner rather than later.
- cwilkes 10y agoWhat do you think is an acceptable return on equity (I'm not sure what "equity" means in this sense)?
- FabHK 10y agoROE is a financial performance indicator. They're generally in the single digits, low double digits is considered good. In a competitive market, they should converge to round about the same number on average, even across industries (module riskyness, correlation with market as a whole, and such factors). The ROE of academic publishers is abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure. In this case, scientists do almost all of the work (write, typeset (mostly), referee) for free (or nominal amounts), so expenses are low. The publishers charge libraries inordinate amounts for subscriptions (dollars per page). And scientist need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles, it is hard for competitors to enter.
- digler999 10y agoany return obtained by legitimate means. what makes their gains illegitimate is the market manipulation combined with abuse of IP law. Their "license" (who needs a "license" to print pages of information to be distributed to other humans, anyway?) lets them "own" the IP that was created by funding public institutions. Thus, their gains are illegitimate. That 30% ultimately comes from taxpayers (which is then ultimately pocketed by shareholders).
- Bost 10y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+headstand https://www.google.com/search?q=bill+gates+headstand And then click on "Images". However YMMV ...
- doikor 10y agoAnd if you are taking money from the foundation you should have known this. The change was announced in 2014 to come into effect in 2017.
- neonkiwi 10y agoNo, the Gates Foundation just has open access requirements. Sorry Nature and Science. I hope this sets the stage for all grant funding sources to institute similar requirements, and we'll get even more absurd clickbait headlines as a result.
- ddebernardy 10y agoEurope is getting there, if it's not already - not sure which, but it's been in the air for a while.
- brianwawok 10y agoEthical question: if using closed source and harmful closed standards and extend, embrace, extinguish eventually leads to more open health care research and millions of lives saved, was it a net win or loss for the world?
- fortytw2 10y agoDoes the end justify the means?
- Senji 10y agoI'd say yes. But it depends on the ends.
- brianwawok 10y agoAnd the means
- adrienne 10y ago"There are no ends. There are only means." -U.K. Le Guin
- davidgerard 10y agoSpeaking as an unreconstructed Stallmanite, I do sometimes wonder if Microsoft will actually turn out to have been worth it.
- SkyMarshal 10y agoDitto. One of the greatest cognitive dissonances of our field.
- LarryMade2 10y agoMore like "Open access research publishing a challenge to top journals."
- craigyk 10y agoGood. Can't wait to see further editorials in Nature talking about all the problems in science (as a community, career, and funding) whilst the whole time meandering around the elephant in the room: they are a _big_ part of the problem.
- carreau 10y agoIt's good to see this. As a single researcher it's hard to have an impact and force yourself not to publish to these journals when you have the chance to. But it's horrifying to see that often you even have to pay an extra fee for your online figures to be in color ! That's ridiculous. I hope that other funding sources not only follow the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation move, but go even further.
- ksk 10y agoYou can always publish the paper on your own website. Publishing in a top journal like science or nature is primarily for getting the social capital of having gone through a difficult selection process. People need to get paid to see if the science done in the paper was good, whether it was plagiarized, peer-review, etc etc. Simply.. more selective = more effort = more cost.
- ci5er 10y agoMany journals (IEEE comes to mind, but surely they are not alone) used to prohibit the author from independently publishing substantially similar papers on their own (or the institution's) websites or ArXiv. I suspect they still do.
- ksk 10y agoYes what you said is completely true. I misread the original comment.
- carreau 10y agoOf course I _can_ publish to my own website, and I do, with my code in git, data available... etc. Though, even if _I_ am the author, I give away the rights of the final form, meaning that I am not allowed to publish the exact figures and form of the paper I publish, and have to redo them with enough change to be different. Also _I_ review for these journal _for free_ with ridiculous timeline (review that for tomorrow), and _I_ also have to find a place to host the dataset and code, potentially pay for it. And when I pay $3k for a paper to be Open Access and it still cost $35 to read I'm wondering where is this money going to ? If the journal were to offer the kind of services and actual guaranties that you mention, then I would be fine to pay more. But that's far from being the case, and even in top journals you end up having to send corrections for changes made by clueless editors. During my PhD we had to complain as the final version of our paper "A 1mW IR laser..." was changed to "A laser (model 1mW-IR)..." without or consent, or even writing to us. And you know what, even if it was the journal fault we ended up paying for the correction.
- samfisher83 10y agoI think is a key part of the article: The foundation, which is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, stipulates that the researchers whom it funds must make open their resulting papers and underlying data sets immediately upon publication. And papers must be published under a licence that allows unrestricted reuse — including for commercial purposes. But some journals do not offer this kind of open-access (OA) publishing. Many of them allow papers to be made free to read after an embargo period, usually of around six months, and let authors upload accepted manuscripts online. But neither policy meets the Gates Foundation’s requirements. And so, for papers submitted from the start of 2017, a few top journals are currently off limits to Gates-funded academics. “We are having ongoing and fruitful discussions with these publishers,” says Dick Wilder, associate general counsel with the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program. Wilder adds that the Gates Foundation does not plan to allow exceptions to its policy. I greatly applaud the gates foundation.
- untilHellbanned 10y agoYes this specifically excludes Nature, Science, and Cell, which is critical because those are the career-making journals all of us academics must currently bow down to. Please Gates Foundation force their hand!
- Senji 10y agoYOU force their hand. I'm tired of these journals playing gatekeepers in academia. Fuck that noise.
- HarryHirsch 10y agoBe honest, do you not go by journal title when you have to choose whether or not to read a paper? It's an imperfect metric, but it's the one we have. 25 years ago I attended a talk (by a representative from Pergamon) about the future of scientific publishing. It was out of control even then, and when in the Q & A session someone suggested ditching journals altogether this Pergamon (!) guy made the same remark: do you not read the journal title? Pergamon, whose best-known journal was Tetrahedron. Pergamon. Uttered by a Pergamon guy. In some fields arXiv may have improved matters, but most fields still rely on journals.
- et2o 10y agoThank god that someone with real power is finally starting to demand change. If the NIH could avoid the politics, they would require that all NIH-funded research be published in open-access journals (now there is a requirement one year after publication) that it be made available. Elsevier's revenues last year were about 20 billion, almost the same as the entire NIH budget.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> If the NIH could avoid the politic Alternatively, if academics and their supporters organised and made their case a priority...
- et2o 10y agoThere is a relatively organized "opposition." See PLoS, etc. But it's difficult–generally, advancing your career enough to actually stay in academia requires that you publish in non open-access journals. Doubly so in medicine. This is something which really has to come from the funding agencies and foundations in order to be effective.
- freyir 10y ago> This is something which really has to come from the funding agencies and foundations in order to be effective. Yes. A great deal of science and engineering funding comes from the U.S. government, which ultimately is derived from the taxpayers. If taxpayers demanded access to the research they've already funded, rather than having to pay an arbitrary third-party middleman an exorbitant fee, things might change very rapidly. Unfortunately, this is pretty low on the average citizen's list of issues. There won't be a march on Washington for open access journals any time soon.
- biehl 10y agoPeter Suber has a good analysis here https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV https://plus.google.com/u/1/+PeterSuber/posts/dU6tWcorZEV
- misterhtmlcss 10y agoFirstly this is a complex issue because from what I understand these papers validate and ensure quality in the publishing of the article. This is a value add because it filters the garbage found on the web and I for one don't want to see what has happened to the news e.g. fake and or poor quality being published, happen to science research. However I may have a solution that suits the organization's need for funds which they need to continue to do their valuable work and also satisfies funders and that is to publish a totally unrefined version in a bulk WikiLeaks manner and then publish their properly edited and refined article within their magazine. Not a very knowledgeable guy on the topic, but this could be a great way to retain the primary value and also satisfy other stakeholders. To those who think their role as gatekeepers is no longer valid, I have to wonder what planet you are on that you don't think independent journals that compete are not a valid vehicle for ensuring claims are at least minimally justifiable AND that paying those professionals to do that kind of work is somehow wrong. Such a silly way of thinking.
- davidgerard 10y ago> Firstly this is a complex issue because from what I understand these papers validate and ensure quality in the publishing of the article. I think you'd seriously have to show your working there, in detail. Nobody who does that work is paid, AIUI. The publisher probably does a bang-up job of the typesetting ...
- kerrynusticeNkJ 10y agoGreat bill research —yes melinda grass.
- forkandwait 10y agoI wonder if the Gates Foundation could fund journals or otherwise try to help fix the (fundamentally rotten) academic publishing ecosystem.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoThat sounds like the prologue to a near-future sci-fi story: "The year is 2017. You can run Linux on Windows, .Net, Visual Studio and powershell in Linux and Bill Gates is the champion of open access in scientific journals. Oh and- .Net and the C# compiler are open-source.". What the hell is happening with the world? :)
- NotSammyHagar 10y agoAnd Donald Trump is the president. It is the apocalypse.
- Roritharr 10y agoThe best theory I've heard is that ever since the invention of the atomic bomb, all timelines that make sense and act according to logic have since stopped being habitable to humans so we are left with the weird one that doesn't make sense.
- dnautics 10y agoI'll believe he's serious when the gates foundation requires all of their products to be unpatented or patented with zero-cost non-exclusive licenses.
- marincounty 10y agoO.k. here goes--What are some of HN'ers predictions about the future? Maybe just five years from now? I predict it will become bad manners to stare into a phone screen while in a social setting. (People will sneak off to glance, like some smokers now.)
- delinka 10y ago"At the moment we believe the subscription model is still the best way to provide [...] access to journals" Well ... of course. But how about access to the research? Because that's what this is all about: the science. We don't need access to "journals," we need access to scientific research.
- MikeTaylor 10y agoA better headline would be "Some journals refuse to meet conditions for publishing Gates-funded research, which is their own stupid fault",
- woodandsteel 10y agoI wonder if there is any truth to the rumor that Elsevier is planning on bringing a lawsuit against the Gates Foundation on its OA policy.
- neuromantik8086 10y agoNow you're just making me equate Elsevier with SCO in my mental model of proprietary vs open legal conflicts.
- davidgerard 10y agoWe're all just waiting for that moment Elsevier chooses to go full SCO.
- cowsandmilk 10y agothe title shows what Nature News thinks of eLife? I currently push for papers to be published there on the principle of OA.
- Fomite 10y agoAs fond as I am of eLife, it aspires to be a top tier journal. I have never heard it mentioned in the same sentence as what are currently top tier journals.
- untilHellbanned 10y agoSo if the journals must be made available instantly isn't the business model gone? Why would anyone have to subscribe anymore?
- WhitneyLand 10y agoWhy can't a standard reputation/quality system be designed to replace the value of impact factor and other journal specific metrics?
- sampo 10y agoSome journals agree to publish your article as open access, if you pay them an extra fee (which is in line with full open access journals usually also charging a publication fee). Nothing would stop Nature also offering this option if they really wanted to publish Gates-founded research.