8 ms·

Paywalls for scientific research are evil. http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf (I intend t

Paywalls for scientific research are evil. http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf (I intend to do this regularly; see bio.)

Ardit20 16y ago
Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?
- sprout 16y ago
  Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students. See http://arxiv.org http://arxiv.org.
  - ericd 16y ago
    There's still a scarcity of validation via reputation that is hard to get rid of.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student. A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld. If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from. There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.
    - c1sc0 16y ago
      I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.
      - Ardit20 16y ago
        "old bloated system" You mean the same one that google uses for, amongst other things, to measure authority? I am fine with kicking the old system into oblivion. I am not fine with doing so before suggesting a new system however. I simply do not see how, in this chaotic internet where everyone has an opinion and is able to communicate it to the entire world, we can differentiate between objective solid stuff, and mere speculation. If we are for freedom, then lets us have such freedom. Let us not frown at wikileaks if they publish deep and damaging secrets, let us not be defensive when our own content is concerned and copied, let us so too resist any attempts of the real law, say the law of defamation to apply to the internet, let us be cool with bittorrent and the way it distributes freely our content. If that is the internet we wish, then fine, let us be the pioneers and disrupt all older notions. If the above is extreme however, then let us be impartial and judge where the line ought to be not from a selfish perspective, not from an emotional or ideological perspective, but from a rational, detached, without favour or fear perspective. That is the choice of our generation, but I submit, we can have only one of them. We can not be hypocrites when our own interests are concerned and guard them ferociously, yet fight to undermine the interests of others.
    - sprout 16y ago
      >Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student. That's entirely false. If there was a single distribution point that charged a nominal fee, that would be one thing, but to do any significant research you need at least 5 such £30 monthly subscriptions, and no school subscribes to all journals a student might want. >If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I'd like to meet the professionals that buy these papers. I get the distinct impression it's mostly professors, students, and universities paying these outrageous fees. Personally, I'm a professional now and if I needed a paper relevant to my work I would buy it. But I don't need it. Very few professionals need any sort of academic papers, especially in CS. We've got the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Github to this very site to get information about trends, and we offer it for free because we know that hiding information is more trouble than it's worth (and it's much easier for us to work when those around us freely share.)
- jonknee 16y ago
  > Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article: > The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution for papers originating out of publicly funded research.
  - Ardit20 16y ago
    I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld. I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it. The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast. I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.
    - jonknee 16y ago
      Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.
      - Ardit20 16y ago
        Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition? This is only one article, amongst thousands of which we do not care of. We do not care of them because they have nothing to do with the field we have chosen to focus on, be that computer science, medicine, history, physics, law, or artificial intelligence. I would rather the money goes into research, than to provide some randomer with the pleasure of reading something they hardly can understand anyway. I did not read the peer reviewed journal, I do not care to read it, I know little about medicine besides what I was taught in school. The terminology used is different, one word contains entire concepts, there is an entirely different way of thinking in that field, and frankly, it adds no value to me personally. If it did and I could afford it, I would buy it. £30 is what one spends on a Saturday night! Now if we wished to live in a paranoid world where we do not trust the experts in their field and wish to validate everything our self, then that is a personal choice of perspective. One can well choose to spend his entire life to learn of every field in this earth. Most people, if not the vast majority of people, if not 99% of people, sooner or later, focus on one field, and perhaps focus further on that field, especially if such field is medicine, or computer science, or law. That is how we work, that is the best system we have found of operating. I personally do not see anything wrong with the way the system currently works, not wrong in such a way as to justify throwing it out entirely. If you are a doctor, you subscribe, if you are not, then buy the one article you want to read, if you do not want to buy it, then you do not need it.
- akshayubhat 16y ago
  Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. >> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? >> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site. I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year. E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.
tocomment 16y ago
If you really want to free research you should do this: Investigate whether there is an inverse correlation between the freeness of the journal a paper is published in and its popularity (number of citations?). You should control for the reputation of the journal since that could throw off the results. If you find such a correlation and get it publicized, perhaps that would encourage more researchers to submit to free journals.
- aphyr 16y ago
  Impact factor (# of citations per article in journal) tends to be lower for free journals, since a.) the threshold for publication tends to be lower, and b.) the established journals still have prestige, which largely remains the currency on which scientific reputations and tenure are built. Because most of the big journals don't allow you to retain publication rights after publishing with them, anyone who does big-impact research worthy of publication in those journals faces an exclusive choice between prestige, exposure, and selectivity, or opening their work to the public at the cost of "devaluing" their work. It's a real dilemma--one which publishers are trying to exploit for all they can. The picture is changing (look at the amazing success of the Arxiv), but I think for-profit, paywalled journals are going to be alive and kicking for quite a while.
jacquesm 16y ago
Hehe, 'DON'T pay the knowledge cartels' put in to practice.
shiven 16y ago
Thanks. But this being NIH funded research, the publication will be made available in its entirety, eventually, either via PubMed Central or by the authors themselves. However, the journal's version of the article (custom designed format and layout) is indeed copyrighted by the journal's publisher. The version that eventually becomes freely available will be a more or less standard format (double spaced, Microsoft Word formatted), albeit, with all the information present. :-)

Paywalls for scientific research are evil. http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf (I intend to do this regularly; see bio.)

Ardit20 16y ago

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

sprout 16y ago
Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students. See http://arxiv.org http://arxiv.org.
- ericd 16y ago
  There's still a scarcity of validation via reputation that is hard to get rid of.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student. A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld. If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from. There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.
  - c1sc0 16y ago
    I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.
    - Ardit20 16y ago
      "old bloated system" You mean the same one that google uses for, amongst other things, to measure authority? I am fine with kicking the old system into oblivion. I am not fine with doing so before suggesting a new system however. I simply do not see how, in this chaotic internet where everyone has an opinion and is able to communicate it to the entire world, we can differentiate between objective solid stuff, and mere speculation. If we are for freedom, then lets us have such freedom. Let us not frown at wikileaks if they publish deep and damaging secrets, let us not be defensive when our own content is concerned and copied, let us so too resist any attempts of the real law, say the law of defamation to apply to the internet, let us be cool with bittorrent and the way it distributes freely our content. If that is the internet we wish, then fine, let us be the pioneers and disrupt all older notions. If the above is extreme however, then let us be impartial and judge where the line ought to be not from a selfish perspective, not from an emotional or ideological perspective, but from a rational, detached, without favour or fear perspective. That is the choice of our generation, but I submit, we can have only one of them. We can not be hypocrites when our own interests are concerned and guard them ferociously, yet fight to undermine the interests of others.
  - sprout 16y ago
    >Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student. That's entirely false. If there was a single distribution point that charged a nominal fee, that would be one thing, but to do any significant research you need at least 5 such £30 monthly subscriptions, and no school subscribes to all journals a student might want. >If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I'd like to meet the professionals that buy these papers. I get the distinct impression it's mostly professors, students, and universities paying these outrageous fees. Personally, I'm a professional now and if I needed a paper relevant to my work I would buy it. But I don't need it. Very few professionals need any sort of academic papers, especially in CS. We've got the whole Internet, from Wikipedia to Github to this very site to get information about trends, and we offer it for free because we know that hiding information is more trouble than it's worth (and it's much easier for us to work when those around us freely share.)
jonknee 16y ago
> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article: > The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution for papers originating out of publicly funded research.
- Ardit20 16y ago
  I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld. I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it. The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast. I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.
  - jonknee 16y ago
    Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.
    - Ardit20 16y ago
      Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition? This is only one article, amongst thousands of which we do not care of. We do not care of them because they have nothing to do with the field we have chosen to focus on, be that computer science, medicine, history, physics, law, or artificial intelligence. I would rather the money goes into research, than to provide some randomer with the pleasure of reading something they hardly can understand anyway. I did not read the peer reviewed journal, I do not care to read it, I know little about medicine besides what I was taught in school. The terminology used is different, one word contains entire concepts, there is an entirely different way of thinking in that field, and frankly, it adds no value to me personally. If it did and I could afford it, I would buy it. £30 is what one spends on a Saturday night! Now if we wished to live in a paranoid world where we do not trust the experts in their field and wish to validate everything our self, then that is a personal choice of perspective. One can well choose to spend his entire life to learn of every field in this earth. Most people, if not the vast majority of people, if not 99% of people, sooner or later, focus on one field, and perhaps focus further on that field, especially if such field is medicine, or computer science, or law. That is how we work, that is the best system we have found of operating. I personally do not see anything wrong with the way the system currently works, not wrong in such a way as to justify throwing it out entirely. If you are a doctor, you subscribe, if you are not, then buy the one article you want to read, if you do not want to buy it, then you do not need it.
akshayubhat 16y ago
Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. >> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? >> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site. I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year. E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.

tocomment 16y ago

If you really want to free research you should do this: Investigate whether there is an inverse correlation between the freeness of the journal a paper is published in and its popularity (number of citations?). You should control for the reputation of the journal since that could throw off the results. If you find such a correlation and get it publicized, perhaps that would encourage more researchers to submit to free journals.

aphyr 16y ago
Impact factor (# of citations per article in journal) tends to be lower for free journals, since a.) the threshold for publication tends to be lower, and b.) the established journals still have prestige, which largely remains the currency on which scientific reputations and tenure are built. Because most of the big journals don't allow you to retain publication rights after publishing with them, anyone who does big-impact research worthy of publication in those journals faces an exclusive choice between prestige, exposure, and selectivity, or opening their work to the public at the cost of "devaluing" their work. It's a real dilemma--one which publishers are trying to exploit for all they can. The picture is changing (look at the amazing success of the Arxiv), but I think for-profit, paywalled journals are going to be alive and kicking for quite a while.

jacquesm 16y ago

Hehe, 'DON'T pay the knowledge cartels' put in to practice.

shiven 16y ago

Thanks. But this being NIH funded research, the publication will be made available in its entirety, eventually, either via PubMed Central or by the authors themselves. However, the journal's version of the article (custom designed format and layout) is indeed copyrighted by the journal's publisher. The version that eventually becomes freely available will be a more or less standard format (double spaced, Microsoft Word formatted), albeit, with all the information present. :-)