5 ms·

So, fundamental question here - if scientific articles (or anything that can be copy protected, etc.) can be released online in this manner to "free the knowled

So, fundamental question here - if scientific articles (or anything that can be copy protected, etc.) can be released online in this manner to "free the knowledge", and yet, given such free access, there are still people that will pay for a subscription to access the same scientific articles, wouldn't that be the best solution? I see people commenting that just because of this release, universities won't cancel their subscriptions to the journals. Well, that would be great - let them keep paying, while the content also gets out for free. This is like the trend where you can pay what you want for stuff, or nothing. I wonder if that model would apply to scientific research - pay what you want for the paper, or nothing - but if you want to support that research.. hopefully people would still pay. Just thinking out loud... probably already been thought of or wouldn't work (or I'm just self-defeatist). :)

JoshTriplett 9y ago
I'd rather see that money put into actual research rather than paying for access to free things. And approximately none of those funds go to pay for research.
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  Agreed.. is that like saying that researchers should do a "pay what you want for my paper" online and self publish/host the knowledge? Maybe somebody just needs to provide a standard "pay what you want" feature that academics can embed easily into their own site, and then self-publish / host.
  - Spivak 9y ago
    Do you think pay to cite would be a good model?
    - sixdimensional 9y ago
      Hmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the author citing the source? Combining the two thoughts, "suggested payment to cite" with a "pay what you want" model could interesting too. I suppose this would be a direct transfer of value from those who want to build knowledge on other people's work, to those who did the work. As long as it was not unduly expensive to do so, maybe - after all, the saying goes "paying my dues". I would think you wouldn't want to inhibit or slow down people from building on knowledge either (which is what things like Sci-Hub seem to be trying to avoid). I wrote a few published papers some time ago, and I was told that without citations, a paper would be rejected as academic research should always be based on enhancements or references to prior work. So it seems kind of built in to the mechanism that citations are the requirement to build knowledge on top of when creating such works. It would be interesting to see how a model like this could work. Since the value created by the researcher is essentially part of a web of value, it might be hard to determine who should get credit. For example, we have 3 existing papers, A, B and C, and one new paper, D. Paper A cites paper B, which cites paper C - and all of them are additive to our knowledge base. Therefore, as the author of paper D, if we were to pay to cite paper A, should that also include some payment to the authors of paper B and C too? I suppose one addition you could add to this - payment to only LIVING researcher(s)/author(s). If the researcher/author is deceased, then the payment stops. In this regard, it sounds like royalty/licensing fees.
    - JoshTriplett 9y ago
      No, not at all. Nor would models like "pay into a pool and get paid based on citations", either. That'd create perverse incentives, not least of which more incentive to push for citations to your own works when doing review.
      - Spivak 9y ago
        Sure, but if you're paid based on the number of people citing your work doesn't that create the right incentives? People making more money are precisely those providing valuable information/methods to other researchers. Sure, there's an ethics problem during reviews to push additional citations for people in your university or something but that's not too different from the current situation with grant applications, just more direct.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  in a way researchers paying for reading research is an absurd inflation.
  - sixdimensional 9y ago
    Therefore, should the results of all research be made free and public? I was hoping we could allow people to pay if they wanted but also get it for free, and have both be legitimate.
    - agumonkey 9y ago
      Big and famous universities have deals, but not the rest, which is the reason why scihub exists in the first place. Maybe publishers should up their game and provide near free access to any PhD student or higher and a better uptime (people laughed at the fact that scihub+libgen hack was more reliable than springerlink). Students would pay a little fee, if that doesn't impede their research too much. Also I was thinking of a time based value. Papers / Journals older than X years, or that have already received a fair amount of fees could fall into free access. That could make students looking for alternative or forgotten ideas more motivated.
notyourday 9y ago
Let me give you an unpopular answer - - outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. - the manuscripts received by EICs are garbage. EICs themselves rarely touch anything, or edit anything. - "peer review" process in all non-the-most-upper-tier publication is a joke. - copy-editing and proofreading is non-existent. About 15 years ago a lot of journals that are now owned by the major publishers were society publications. This means that societies owned the title, owned the copyright and owned the process. Societies could not find people capable and willing to run a journal for $5k or so a paper including distribution and printing. So the societies went to the likes of Springer, Informa, T&F, Elsevier etc. Those said "Ok, sure. $2k per paper and we produce and distribute it or $5k per paper and we do everything". That was too much for societies. Instead the societies said said "Hey, what if we sold you the rights to the journal? Would you in that case do all of it for free, and let our EIC suck his or her thumb while still being the man/woman on the title page?" "Of course" said the publishers. And so now we are here. Production costs did not go down. Distribution costs did not go down. In fact, distribution costs increased because before that the journals were printed by a little printers in the US as the volume of most of journals is microscopic ( later printing went to China in the same microscopic quantities ). Now, however, journals also need to be distributed in all kinds of wacky XML formats on all stages of production, which needs to be coded, in most cases by hand. So unless every Joe, Jack and Jill, the scientist, wants to go back into the publishing world nothing is going to change. [Source: pillow talk]
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  A root cause there would be the opportunity cost the scientist/society calculates to publish themselves vs have a publisher do it. The equation today isn't the same - with open source / community effort, I suspect the cost/effort of publication today doesn't even come close. I was just randomly looking at what it would cost (rough estimate) for 25TB of S3 storage - 2,000,000 put requests a month, 2,000,000 get requests, 25TB bandwidth OUT and 25TB bandwidth IN - and it's less than $3,500 per month. So the cost of hosting the published item seems actually quite reasonable... reducing the cost of the rest of the "publication" plumbing are problems that technology also helps address.

JoshTriplett 9y ago

I'd rather see that money put into actual research rather than paying for access to free things. And approximately none of those funds go to pay for research.

sixdimensional 9y ago
Agreed.. is that like saying that researchers should do a "pay what you want for my paper" online and self publish/host the knowledge? Maybe somebody just needs to provide a standard "pay what you want" feature that academics can embed easily into their own site, and then self-publish / host.
- Spivak 9y ago
  Do you think pay to cite would be a good model?
  - sixdimensional 9y ago
    Hmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the author citing the source? Combining the two thoughts, "suggested payment to cite" with a "pay what you want" model could interesting too. I suppose this would be a direct transfer of value from those who want to build knowledge on other people's work, to those who did the work. As long as it was not unduly expensive to do so, maybe - after all, the saying goes "paying my dues". I would think you wouldn't want to inhibit or slow down people from building on knowledge either (which is what things like Sci-Hub seem to be trying to avoid). I wrote a few published papers some time ago, and I was told that without citations, a paper would be rejected as academic research should always be based on enhancements or references to prior work. So it seems kind of built in to the mechanism that citations are the requirement to build knowledge on top of when creating such works. It would be interesting to see how a model like this could work. Since the value created by the researcher is essentially part of a web of value, it might be hard to determine who should get credit. For example, we have 3 existing papers, A, B and C, and one new paper, D. Paper A cites paper B, which cites paper C - and all of them are additive to our knowledge base. Therefore, as the author of paper D, if we were to pay to cite paper A, should that also include some payment to the authors of paper B and C too? I suppose one addition you could add to this - payment to only LIVING researcher(s)/author(s). If the researcher/author is deceased, then the payment stops. In this regard, it sounds like royalty/licensing fees.
  - JoshTriplett 9y ago
    No, not at all. Nor would models like "pay into a pool and get paid based on citations", either. That'd create perverse incentives, not least of which more incentive to push for citations to your own works when doing review.
    - Spivak 9y ago
      Sure, but if you're paid based on the number of people citing your work doesn't that create the right incentives? People making more money are precisely those providing valuable information/methods to other researchers. Sure, there's an ethics problem during reviews to push additional citations for people in your university or something but that's not too different from the current situation with grant applications, just more direct.
agumonkey 9y ago
in a way researchers paying for reading research is an absurd inflation.
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  Therefore, should the results of all research be made free and public? I was hoping we could allow people to pay if they wanted but also get it for free, and have both be legitimate.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Big and famous universities have deals, but not the rest, which is the reason why scihub exists in the first place. Maybe publishers should up their game and provide near free access to any PhD student or higher and a better uptime (people laughed at the fact that scihub+libgen hack was more reliable than springerlink). Students would pay a little fee, if that doesn't impede their research too much. Also I was thinking of a time based value. Papers / Journals older than X years, or that have already received a fair amount of fees could fall into free access. That could make students looking for alternative or forgotten ideas more motivated.

notyourday 9y ago

Let me give you an unpopular answer - - outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. - the manuscripts received by EICs are garbage. EICs themselves rarely touch anything, or edit anything. - "peer review" process in all non-the-most-upper-tier publication is a joke. - copy-editing and proofreading is non-existent. About 15 years ago a lot of journals that are now owned by the major publishers were society publications. This means that societies owned the title, owned the copyright and owned the process. Societies could not find people capable and willing to run a journal for $5k or so a paper including distribution and printing. So the societies went to the likes of Springer, Informa, T&F, Elsevier etc. Those said "Ok, sure. $2k per paper and we produce and distribute it or $5k per paper and we do everything". That was too much for societies. Instead the societies said said "Hey, what if we sold you the rights to the journal? Would you in that case do all of it for free, and let our EIC suck his or her thumb while still being the man/woman on the title page?" "Of course" said the publishers. And so now we are here. Production costs did not go down. Distribution costs did not go down. In fact, distribution costs increased because before that the journals were printed by a little printers in the US as the volume of most of journals is microscopic ( later printing went to China in the same microscopic quantities ). Now, however, journals also need to be distributed in all kinds of wacky XML formats on all stages of production, which needs to be coded, in most cases by hand. So unless every Joe, Jack and Jill, the scientist, wants to go back into the publishing world nothing is going to change. [Source: pillow talk]

sixdimensional 9y ago
A root cause there would be the opportunity cost the scientist/society calculates to publish themselves vs have a publisher do it. The equation today isn't the same - with open source / community effort, I suspect the cost/effort of publication today doesn't even come close. I was just randomly looking at what it would cost (rough estimate) for 25TB of S3 storage - 2,000,000 put requests a month, 2,000,000 get requests, 25TB bandwidth OUT and 25TB bandwidth IN - and it's less than $3,500 per month. So the cost of hosting the published item seems actually quite reasonable... reducing the cost of the rest of the "publication" plumbing are problems that technology also helps address.