5 ms·

Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult i

Those of us in academia are (mostly) pushing hard for open access policies. We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! What makes it difficult is that publications and journal reputation are still used as a measure of success for promotions, tenure, grants, etc. If you have a finding that can be published in Nature or NEJM, it's really hard to go elsewhere out of principle, when you know that it may hurt your future prospects. This thinking is slowly beginning to change, and the rapid growth of preprints in biology is helping a lot as well. There is growing recognition that journals in their traditional form may not be a great thing for science. There are a lot of different ideas about what the future of publishing and scholarly communication look like, and lots of experiments are being done right now.

miketery 8y ago
What's stops people from publishing in both?
- celrod 8y ago
  You're only allowed to publish in one. When you submit an article, you're normally specifically asked to confirm that the work hasn't been accepted / isn't under review elsewhere.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - drb91 8y ago
    That seems like it would necessarily lower the quality of the journal, not to mention your own paper.
  - rainbowmverse 8y ago
    Sounds a lot like traditional fiction publishing. They want exclusivity, sometimes indefinitely.
  - machiavelli1024 8y ago
    That’s only a problem if they can prove that you published it elsewhere. “Oh no! Someone uploaded my paper to SciHub! What a pity :((((“
ivan_gammel 8y ago
The publication infrastructure should be implemented and funded by the governments, preferably, as part of some international agreement to share the costs. The only valuable service that traditional publishers do provide is acting as a trusted authority that verifies publications. The rest (distribution etc) is already provided almost at no cost by the internet. Apparently, when there's such an oligopoly of few for-profit organizations, there's no good for anyone except them. Since a big part of research is paid by the taxpayers' money, they have the right to replace the dysfunctional market with a niche communism and run their own government publication agency.
amelius 8y ago
Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?
- Misdicorl 8y ago
  Its only been a viable option to self publish for about 30 years, and more like 10 if you didn't want to invest large amounts of personal resources. Open access review and channelization is still an open problem. The for profit journals actually do provide a service of worth and note.
- chronic3u9 8y ago
  > Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out? The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it. And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.
  - haeffin 8y ago
    Physics and other disciplines were broadly using arxiv before ML did it. When I switched from physics to ML (CS) I was surprised that arxiv isn't used more.
  - Kliment 8y ago
    From an outside perspective it appeared to me that the leaders in this were actually the physics and mathematics community, rather than ML.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    CS may be the faster growing field in the arXiv over the last decade but it was relatively late to the party. https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index
- tomkat0789 8y ago
  There's also sort of an issue from a bunch of open access publishers acting like con-artists - charging researchers made up fees to publish in their made up journals. A certain librarian made a rather useful list of "predatory" open access publishers: https://beallslist.weebly.com/ https://beallslist.weebly.com/
_rpd 8y ago
> We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
Well, work cannot be cited, if it cannot be accessed. I would be surprised if any researcher would not support open access.
buboard 8y ago
> This thinking is slowly beginning to change it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.

miketery 8y ago

What's stops people from publishing in both?

celrod 8y ago
You're only allowed to publish in one. When you submit an article, you're normally specifically asked to confirm that the work hasn't been accepted / isn't under review elsewhere.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- drb91 8y ago
  That seems like it would necessarily lower the quality of the journal, not to mention your own paper.
- rainbowmverse 8y ago
  Sounds a lot like traditional fiction publishing. They want exclusivity, sometimes indefinitely.
- machiavelli1024 8y ago
  That’s only a problem if they can prove that you published it elsewhere. “Oh no! Someone uploaded my paper to SciHub! What a pity :((((“

ivan_gammel 8y ago

The publication infrastructure should be implemented and funded by the governments, preferably, as part of some international agreement to share the costs. The only valuable service that traditional publishers do provide is acting as a trusted authority that verifies publications. The rest (distribution etc) is already provided almost at no cost by the internet. Apparently, when there's such an oligopoly of few for-profit organizations, there's no good for anyone except them. Since a big part of research is paid by the taxpayers' money, they have the right to replace the dysfunctional market with a niche communism and run their own government publication agency.

amelius 8y ago

Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out?

Misdicorl 8y ago
Its only been a viable option to self publish for about 30 years, and more like 10 if you didn't want to invest large amounts of personal resources. Open access review and channelization is still an open problem. The for profit journals actually do provide a service of worth and note.
chronic3u9 8y ago
> Perhaps a blunt question, but what took scientists so long to figure this out? The other science disciplines (mostly the life sciences), saw the AI/ML field greatly advance with their open research (e.g. arxiv, Github) and now want to copy it. And yes, it was specifically AI/ML. Look at IEEE -- they're holding back the entire EE field. The ACM holds back the other areas of CS.
- haeffin 8y ago
  Physics and other disciplines were broadly using arxiv before ML did it. When I switched from physics to ML (CS) I was surprised that arxiv isn't used more.
- Kliment 8y ago
  From an outside perspective it appeared to me that the leaders in this were actually the physics and mathematics community, rather than ML.
- kgwgk 8y ago
  CS may be the faster growing field in the arXiv over the last decade but it was relatively late to the party. https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2017_by_area/index
tomkat0789 8y ago
There's also sort of an issue from a bunch of open access publishers acting like con-artists - charging researchers made up fees to publish in their made up journals. A certain librarian made a rather useful list of "predatory" open access publishers: https://beallslist.weebly.com/ https://beallslist.weebly.com/

_rpd 8y ago

> We want our work to be disseminated as widely as possible! Of course! So few people in the world read these papers already, it is absurd to deny access to interested minds. Publicly funded research needs to come with open access strings.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

Well, work cannot be cited, if it cannot be accessed. I would be surprised if any researcher would not support open access.

buboard 8y ago

> This thinking is slowly beginning to change it has been "beginning to change" for 20 years now. The fundamentals of how prestige/significance is allocated have not changed however, apart from the fact that there are a few reputable open access publishers like elife.