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Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. They have profited greatly from locking up access to academic papers in their most prestigi
by lotia 8y ago
Seeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. They have profited greatly from locking up access to academic papers in their most prestigious journals.
The article includes the following tweet:
“Open Science is not compatible with one corporation owning the platform used to collaborate on code. I hope that expert coders in #openscience have a viable alternative to #github,” tweeted Tom Johnstone, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Reading, UK.
Github's current position is to be default open with a paid option for private. Nature's default position was to lock up journal articles and sell them for extortionate prices.
It's surprising to see them post an article noting that scientists feel MS will change that for the worse. They have been good participants in the open source community of late specially under Mr. Nadella's leadership.
- bonesss 8y agoSee I hope that "expert" coders understand that 'git push' works even on non-MS controlled endpoints, and how to setup a damned wiki if need be... GitHub is stupid valuable for MS, and will make their dev tools offerings much stronger (TFS is a dog, bringing GitHub Enterprise into MS Enterprise support & sales cycle is gonna make a loooot of scratch). But the value of the GitHub community persists only so long as the community is present. MS can't start destroying Open Science, because Open Science will be open any- and everywhere. Frankly, disciplines should be creating their own community hubs and portals based on Git and the publishing standards of GitHub: leveraging GitHubs infrastructure and standards while capturing and engaging with the relevant users. That way they can always migrate and maintain the community. Besides, even cynically MS is more likely to do a bad job of community management trying to upsell related services moreso than poop on things for the sake of pooping on them. If it becomes offensive you'll have a nice window to find a superior collaboration hub.
- mattmanser 8y agoYou can already use GitHub in visual studio. MS didn't have to buy GitHub to integrate with it. Pretty much the best that can happen is GitHub will now get worse as MS puts in functionality to do with their tools. The worst is they really fuck it up like they did with Skype.
- bobjordan 8y agoThere is not much to be gained by defending Microsoft. But from my view, my appreciation for their tooling is highly correlated with my own technical maturity. I spent about a decade primarily Mac, ran several Linux servers and developed from my Mac environment. But in the last few years I have switched to surface book and a windows development environment. It does not totally suck. Especially, now that I’ve got an Ubuntu logo in my taskbar. Actually, it’s awesome. Now, I’m running our production web app on python with gevent on windows server OS using IIS with a reverse proxy. Dead simple to setup. With windows server 2019 we can even use the subsystem for Linux in production. It’s just awesome while Apple only gives a damn if I’m building IOS crap. Did I ever think I’d be doing it like this? Hell no. But it works great. To me, people that bash anything and everything Microsoft tooling leads me to believe they have a lack of technical maturity.
- ethanwillis 8y agoTo be fair, you have to have a high level of technical maturity to understand the Microsoft stack. The intricacy of Microsoft's software and philosophy is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of MCSE basics most of the concepts will go over the typical code monkey's head. There's also Satya Nadella's enterprise outlook, which is deftly woven into every email he sends. His signature draws from the Steve Ballmer speeches, for instance. The .NET guys understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to understand the depth of these software stacks, to realise that they're not just boilerplate - they say something deep about CRUD As a consequence people who dislike Microsoft truly ARE idiots - of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the FUD in Bill's anti-consumer catchphrase, "Embrace extend and extinguish," which itself is a cryptic reference to how Microsoft ruined consumer computing. And yes, by the way, i DO have a Microsoft logo tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the MS fanboys eyes only. And even they have to demonstrate that they love Microsoft's stack as much as I do by showing me their MS certifications beforehand. Nothing personal kids.
- sangnoir 8y agoBravo on deftly treading the fine line between fanboi-zealotry and sarcasm: I couldn't tell which it was until the very end...I hope.
- icelancer 8y agoNature is also not an Open Access or Open Science journal at all, and furthermore, does not require authors to publish all of their data for replication purposes. It's incredibly hypocritical. If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature.
- amelius 8y ago> If people cared about Open Science, they'd publish in PeerJ or PLOS One, but they care a lot more about saying they have pub credits in Nature. True, but perhaps the thinking goes: we'll publish another paper in an open journal, so we can have our cake and eat it too.
- n4r9 8y agoWhen I was an academic, the thinking was: if I manage to publish in Nature then I might actually be able to get a postdoc when my current one / PhD runs out. Otherwise I'll go open.
- robotresearcher 8y agoNature expressly allows preprints. You can put your Nature paper on arXiv at any point, before or after review. Authors are perfectly able to open their papers themselves. Authors also retain all copyrights. https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html https://www.nature.com/authors/policies/license.html I’m no fan of big publishing, but Nature’s policy is ok in this respect, and better than eg. IEEE.
- sorokod 8y agoDoes the publishing platform invalidates the message? As to a corporations changing their ways, they do it all the time to accommodate their changing view on profit maximisation.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thearn4 8y agoGreat point contrasting Nature with GH, it was the first thing that came to my mind as well.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoSeeing this published on Nature's website is quite thick with irony. 1. Pointing fingers at someone else as The Bad Guy is a common tactic for diverting attention away from one's own behavior. 2. If Nature is not positioning itself as open source, then they aren't really doing anything ironic. There is nothing inconsistent with not being open source yourself while calling out a threat to open source stuff.
- mlazos 8y agoIn addition to Microsoft’s evolving attitude toward open source I want to add that I’m surprised at that tweet because Microsoft Research is extraordinarily open and has contributed a lot of freely accessible basic research to society now and in past decades.
- frogdog55 8y agoIt's not just Nature magazine. GitHub was a corporation before. Maybe not as big as Microsoft, but a corporation none-the-less. We're just moving from one company owning the repository to another one. Big Deal.