5 ms·

Can someone explain to me why the norm for scientific research is to lock papers behind paywalls? That kind of thing has never made sense to me. Isn't a lot of

Can someone explain to me why the norm for scientific research is to lock papers behind paywalls? That kind of thing has never made sense to me. Isn't a lot of this research publicly funded by the NSF or state universities in the first place?

abrax3141 9y ago
All you need to do is email the corresponding author and they'll send you a PDF. (Works a bit less well when the author is dead.)
- pokemongoaway 9y ago
  This is the best method - but many don't check email often, don't respond, or aren't at that university anymore. My success rate is ~%50, which probably says something about the age of research I'm looking at.
- vog 9y ago
  You usually don't have to go that far. Why don't we talk about the elephant in the room, that is, Sci-Hub?
IanCal 9y ago
It's certainly moving away from this. Anyway, here's the short of it (this is not a justification of the approach, merely an explanation): 1. Researchers are supposed to be judged by their ability to deliver high quality research. 2. A current way of measuring this is a modified form of how many papers they publish. The modification is to look at how many times a paper is cited, but this takes a long time to see. To speed this up, you can use an average measure from other papers in the same journal. This is called the "impact factor". 3. Therefore, people want to publish their research in journals with high impact factors instead of hosting them somewhere for free. Journals act, essentially, as a badge of quality. Journals do actually spend money on the publishing process [0] (disagreements around the actual cost side, I think we can at least agree that there is a non-zero cost). They need to therefore recoup this from someone. Making things simply openly available means you can't charge the end user, so the alternative is to charge the researchers. Unless your grant has money for paying these fees, or you can apply for money from someone, the choice is either pay for it personally or let the publishers recoup the costs. edit - I forgot to add a key reason this is changing. Grant funders are now largely requiring people to make their research open, and giving them the money in the grant in order to actually do this. [0] http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...
pokemongoaway 9y ago
Why isn't it obviously motivated by money? Is evidence lacking?
a_bonobo 9y ago
Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. The funding committee will look at my CV, see I published 'only' in PLOS ONE, will think 'this guy publishes only in low IF journals, so his research must be mediocre, so he isn't suitable to receive our money' and pass the money on to someone else. Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss.
- IanCal 9y ago
  > Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. This is also a somewhat circular problem. You need to be publishing where other big papers go, increasing the strength of those journals, so others then also need to publish where you went and so on. The lag in this system can be huge, as we're talking about slow updating numbers (citations happen over many years) and publishing timescales themselves can be months to several years for a single paper. > Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss. One fix to this is the funding agencies requiring open access which is happening more and more. A mitigation is policies with journals like Nature Genetics, which allows you to place the paper in your institutions repository (or funders repository) 6 months after publication. [0] [0] http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html
nonbel 9y ago
Because if "the public" (people without a vested interest in perpetuating a given field of research) had easy access to the data, methods, etc rather than needing to rely on press releases, they might come to different conclusions.
upvotinglurker 9y ago
IanCal's and a_bonobo's answers are correct, but to go further back along the line of causality: all of this is a holdover from the pre-internet days, when publication in paper journals was arguably the only or most efficient way to disseminate research results. Journal publishers were thus able to establish themselves as the gatekeepers in all the ways IanCal and a_bonobo described.

abrax3141 9y ago

All you need to do is email the corresponding author and they'll send you a PDF. (Works a bit less well when the author is dead.)

pokemongoaway 9y ago
This is the best method - but many don't check email often, don't respond, or aren't at that university anymore. My success rate is ~%50, which probably says something about the age of research I'm looking at.
vog 9y ago
You usually don't have to go that far. Why don't we talk about the elephant in the room, that is, Sci-Hub?

IanCal 9y ago

It's certainly moving away from this. Anyway, here's the short of it (this is not a justification of the approach, merely an explanation): 1. Researchers are supposed to be judged by their ability to deliver high quality research. 2. A current way of measuring this is a modified form of how many papers they publish. The modification is to look at how many times a paper is cited, but this takes a long time to see. To speed this up, you can use an average measure from other papers in the same journal. This is called the "impact factor". 3. Therefore, people want to publish their research in journals with high impact factors instead of hosting them somewhere for free. Journals act, essentially, as a badge of quality. Journals do actually spend money on the publishing process [0] (disagreements around the actual cost side, I think we can at least agree that there is a non-zero cost). They need to therefore recoup this from someone. Making things simply openly available means you can't charge the end user, so the alternative is to charge the researchers. Unless your grant has money for paying these fees, or you can apply for money from someone, the choice is either pay for it personally or let the publishers recoup the costs. edit - I forgot to add a key reason this is changing. Grant funders are now largely requiring people to make their research open, and giving them the money in the grant in order to actually do this. [0] http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie...

pokemongoaway 9y ago

Why isn't it obviously motivated by money? Is evidence lacking?

a_bonobo 9y ago

Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. The funding committee will look at my CV, see I published 'only' in PLOS ONE, will think 'this guy publishes only in low IF journals, so his research must be mediocre, so he isn't suitable to receive our money' and pass the money on to someone else. Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss.

IanCal 9y ago
> Essentially you're locked into the system - The people who give you money (grant foundations, universities) judge you almost entirely based on your publications, and in how 'high' of a journal your publications are. As an early career researcher, you only have enough material to publish maybe one to three papers per year, so you have to make the most of it. Let's say I have a paper and I can get it into Nature Genetics (high impact factor, not Open Access) and into PLOS ONE (low impact factor, OA) it would be almost career suicide to put it into PLOS ONE. This is also a somewhat circular problem. You need to be publishing where other big papers go, increasing the strength of those journals, so others then also need to publish where you went and so on. The lag in this system can be huge, as we're talking about slow updating numbers (citations happen over many years) and publishing timescales themselves can be months to several years for a single paper. > Some high impact journals offer OA publishing if you pay extra - $2000 to $5000. For the CV, funding committee it doesn't matter whether it's OA or not, that's not a bonus (usually!). But again, as an early career or PhD student you don't have that much money, $3000 is better spent on going to a conference to find your future boss. One fix to this is the funding agencies requiring open access which is happening more and more. A mitigation is policies with journals like Nature Genetics, which allows you to place the paper in your institutions repository (or funders repository) 6 months after publication. [0] [0] http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html http://www.nature.com/reprints/permission-requests.html

nonbel 9y ago

Because if "the public" (people without a vested interest in perpetuating a given field of research) had easy access to the data, methods, etc rather than needing to rely on press releases, they might come to different conclusions.

upvotinglurker 9y ago

IanCal's and a_bonobo's answers are correct, but to go further back along the line of causality: all of this is a holdover from the pre-internet days, when publication in paper journals was arguably the only or most efficient way to disseminate research results. Journal publishers were thus able to establish themselves as the gatekeepers in all the ways IanCal and a_bonobo described.