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China backs bold plan to tear down journal paywalls
- paraditedc 8y agoIt's interesting to see China aligning EU with on issues like this in the context of US-China war of words. Somewhat related, I remember watching Japanese animes where the the world is divided to imaginary nations that resembles US (big Western super power), China (big Eastern super power) and EU (group of countries combined to form a substantial power). In these animes, nations form alliances but turn against each other the moment their interests are no longer aligned. I am starting to see how this is also true in real world.
- zavi 8y agoI wonder if EU is also going to align with China w.r.t. the Social Credit Score. Want to to business with us? Just make sure every European uses WeChat so we can read everything they say online.
- Vinnl 8y agoNo need, we'll get pretty close by ourselves. Want to contact customer support? Sure, but only through Twitter - and obviously, we'll prioritise those with most followers, as they'll be most able to damage our brand.
- Waterluvian 8y agoThe animes got those themes from the real world. Pretty cool to see how the learning pattern can go full circle!
- mpweiher 8y ago> EU aligning with China Hmm...isn't this the other way around, China aligning with "European funders"? (EU is coordinating, individual organisations within countries are actually doing).
- paraditedc 8y agoYeah in this case it is like what you described. Updated.
- decentralised 8y agoOceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. 1984 had it right
- paraditedc 8y agoI didn't know 1984 had it first, interesting. Maybe it is finally the time for me to read it.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoYesterday is the best time to have read 1984.
- isostatic 8y agoIf you ever plan on entering politics don't read it. Today's politicians seem to think it's a manual, not a warning.
- jmnicolas 8y agoWhat makes you think it's a warning and not a manual ?
- freedomben 8y agoWhy not both? I think for most of the working class, it's a dystopian novel with a warning. For most of our politicians and the ruling class (and oddly, many of the big tech companies), it's a utopian novel filled with great ideas.
- isostatic 8y agoOrwell certainly meant it as a cautionary tale.
- paraditedc 8y agoVery interesting perspective. Actually I've read The Prince and I got carried away by the ideas in the book. Maybe I shouldn't read 1984 after all? Anyway, I'm just interested in politics, but not planning to enter politics.
- _Nat_ 8y agoIs there any evidence that this is connected to other political issues? I mean, the open-access movement is widely hailed as an important progressive step in improving the academic world, regardless of nationality. Hopefully it's just a matter of time before the US's own agencies join in similar demands, assuming that there isn't already such a plan.
- vatueil 8y agoAgreed. Many countries already require publicly funded research be made available for open access. A list of US government agencies that require such access after an embargo period is presented here: https://scholcomm.columbia.edu/open-access/public-access-mandates-for-federally-funded-research/ https://scholcomm.columbia.edu/open-access/public-access-man...
- paraditedc 8y ago> Is there any evidence that this is connected to other political issues? No, there isn't in this specific instance. However, reading news for the past year did give me a overall feeling that ties between China and EU are getting closer while ties between China and US, as well as EU and US are getting more strained.
- joejerryronnie 8y agoIt’s interesting because, on the surface, it appears that China is exerting more control over its population while the EU seems to be giving back control to its population. But reading between the lines, the EU is actually moving toward more political control over its member countries, just like China but in a more progressively palatable format.
- natechols 8y agoThe NIH's decision to require open access a year after publication was actually a huge step forward, and that must have been a decade ago now. Pretty much everyone who isn't a publisher would prefer it be immediate, but there's a limit to what the funding agencies can do without congressional approval (or interference).
- jancsika 8y agoI can imagine an anime plot where China/EU go back on their plan. But if they truly end up instituting this plan I'm not seeing any plausible plot line. Are there really anime stories where a Barbara Streisand character roars at telepathic sourcerers who just stay silent and motionless for the rest of the episode?
- SubiculumCode 8y agoWhy wouldn't China support it for other countries? THey'd benefit from the knowledge but would not pay for it. Meanwhile, I can imagine that they'd follow a more restrictive policy that would limit the viewing of Chinese research publications to Chines scientists. Edit: The latter statement is speculative, relative, and probably topic-dependent.
- Vinnl 8y agoThe idea behind this is that they don't just voice support for this from other countries, but adopt it themselves as well, i.e. researchers funded by these funders would be required to submit their work to fully Open Access journals as well.
- cat199 8y ago> on issues like this in the context of US-China war of words. well, it does reduce the chinese cost of acquiring foreign IP, and so the decision seems pretty internally consistent
- lamarpye 8y agoChina is always in favor of making it easier to steal IP. I hope I live long enough to see them complaining that other nations don't respect their inventions.
- smarttack 8y agoPretty similar to 1984 where Orwell split the world up into Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- xvilka 8y agoMaking a good search facilities like Sci-Hub or even steps further is also very important. Not only paywalling is a problem - even if you have a subscription number of clicks to reach the article is usually more than one, not to speak about awful, unintuitive interfaces depending on publisher/journal.
- Vinnl 8y agoFor Open Access articles, Unpaywall [1] (or at least its API) usually can find a direct link to the PDF (or HTML if available). For example, this is what I use in Flockademic [2] to be able to directly link to the articles themselves for researchers that have added the DOIs of the Open Access articles to their ORCID iDs. Point being, if articles can be freely distributed, that paves the way for discovery services to provide better interfaces to the research. [1] https://unpaywall.org https://unpaywall.org [2] https://flockademic.com https://flockademic.com
- Bartweiss 8y agoIt's striking how many academics admit (usually anonymously, online) to using Sci-Hub for content they do have legitimate access to. Sci-Hub appears to be pretty much flawless at looking up articles across all publishers by ID or even title, and quickly returning the right thing if it's available. The systems provided by publishers are, um, not. They're at the usual quality of bad corporate software, but more strikingly their anti-piracy changes have only served to make the gap worse. There are anti-crawler features which freeze access to entire universities when a hidden link is followed. There are view-in-app and download-disabled restrictions, often associated with no-searchable-text. (Which are especially idiotic, of course, because you can't actually restrict access to static content once you serve it. Using screenshots and OCR is irritating, but not hard to apply.) And in the worst cases, there's "available on request" via a library or some other human-interaction delivery mechanism. Which actually would limit bulk piracy, but only by crippling access altogether. Every time I've tried to get a background in a topic or write about it, there's been a step where I check a dozen papers and discard 80% of them as being irrelevant for my purpose (or simply bad). Assuming that's common, it's hard to imagine how silos with custom access mechanisms can endure against a single, searchable repository at any price.
- Vinnl 8y agoSome commentary: if large Chinese funders decide to throw their weight behind Plan S, that would be great news. Those who follow the Open Access world will have seen that the traditional publishers are in full swing trying to discredit it, crying foul about academic freedom and reporting widely about the petition by academics concerned about Plan S [1] and not as much about the one by its supporters [2] - the latter of which I'd encourage all supporters to sign. The main goal of Plan S is to transform the publishing industry, whereas the main fear of concerned academics will be that they will be unable to publish in the journals that are (currently) important for their career perspectives. That fear is mostly rooted in a) fear that Plan S will not achieve its goals, i.e. that the "big name" journals will not go open access and that they will be blocked from publishing there, and b) that non-European funders will be less likely to give them tenure/grants due to them not having published in said journals. A major foreign funder helps alleviate both concerns, and will put additional pressure on the US to follow suit - which would all but put the concerns to rest. Except for the traditional publishers, of course. [1] https://sites.google.com/view/plansopenletter/open-letter https://sites.google.com/view/plansopenletter/open-letter [2] http://michaeleisen.org/petition/ http://michaeleisen.org/petition/
- jancsika 8y agoThere's no loophole in Plan S that would prohibit redistribution of unmodified copies, is there? These articles keep referring to the ability to "immediately read." Sounds great but I wanted to make sure there's nothing up the term's sleeve that I'm missing.
- Vinnl 8y ago> Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY. https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Plan_S.pdf https://www.scienceeurope.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Pla...
- nicodjimenez 8y agoNo need for a paywall when you have a firewall
- mac01021 8y ago[PREMISE:] These scientific journals hail from a time before the web was widespread and universally accessible. In the present day, it is technologically feasible for every scientist to self-publish on their own blog (we'd probably want some new tooling for tracking and counting citations distributed across the web, but that's just details for some programmers to work out). [QUESTION:] Given the premise, I wonder the following. If we were to simply disband the existing publishers today, rather than trying to regulate them, what system would emerge to fill their place? Would it be similar to the existing system? Or would it be something more free-and-webby as described in the premise? Or something else entirely?
- natechols 8y agoI've thought about this for years, and the fundamental problem I keep running up against is that you'd need to reinvent academic culture and incentives to have any hope of replacing the publication system with something better.
- mac01021 8y agoSo your answer is that, if we disbanded the existing publishers, a new set of nearly-identical publishers would pop up in there place and our system for the dissemination of scientific knowledge would continue to operate just as it does today? I don't know that you're wrong, but: Right now, I really want an article in Nature or some other prestigious journal, in order to advance my career as a scientist. If those prestigious publications were suddenly gone, there might be other publications that would spring up to fill the vaccuum, but the new ones would have no track record and no prestige. So wouldn't everyone just as soon either self-publish or else favor non-exploitative, open-access journals?
- matheusmoreira 8y agoIn my understanding, the most valuable service academic journals provide is peer review. If reviewers start accepting online submissions, people could simply send them links to their online articles hosted on their site or blog. Content would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA. If it passes peer review, the journal would simply link to it and also provide a PDF copy. Journals would become a directory of peer reviewed works.
- thro_a_way 8y agoWhat about tearing down some other walls...
- AlexCoventry 8y agoThis is good for legitimizing Open Access as a principle, but as a practical matter, it seems like sci-hub has solved the problem, at least for now.
- cultus 8y agoThe fact that it is illegal makes it a problem to use for many people I know, especially in government. That in the TLD changes like every week.
- gnicholas 8y agoWhen policies that require scientists to publish in journals that either give open access or permit simultaneous open publication, does it affect previously-published works? That is, will this mean that more new research will be freely available, but that old research will still be behind paywalls? If so, it would be interesting if researchers could push journals to not only allow open access for their new work, but also require that previous papers also be made available.
- Vinnl 8y agoNo, it doesn't. Making previously published work available would still be an open problem - although of course, the pressure to fix that is lower as long as Sci-Hub exists. (Also, often subscriptions by university libraries to include the provision that they maintain access to already-published work, so together with inter-library loan, it's not that much of a problem.)
- Ninjaneered 8y agoWhat would be a components of an "ideal" solution? I'd love to hear improvements or corrections to my assumptions. 1) Free to view all approved papers (possibly run by a non-profit and funded by grants around the world) 2) Establish reputations for scientists (giving scientists access to future grants) 3) Peer review handled autonomously (submitted papers are automatically distributed autonomously by the system to other scientists in the related field with a high enough reputation) 4) Easy searching for articles (articles have semantic structure, are categorized by author, title, subject, citations, etc.) 5) Removal of "scientific silos" (all articles published to the same site, categories define content rather than publishing brand)
- Vinnl 8y ago1) There already exist many platforms where one can freely view peer reviewed papers. The main problem is that only a small section of researchers submit their work there. 2) This, I think, is the crux. We should move away from using journal names as a proxy for quality (which, luckily, is an explicit goal of Plan S), and find an alternative. Altmetrics is an example of a company that attempts to establish one such alternative, I'm part of a project that attempts another. 3) This would be nice, but I don't think that's be necessary for making them open access? Given how conservative much of academia appears to be, I'm not sure if this would actually make a transition more likely. 4) Metadata for research is often already really good, also for Open Access research. Finding the actual article itself usually is the main challenge, but the only reason for that is because those articles can be behind a paywall. With them freely available, discovery is practically solved. 5) This too should be fixed if all research is published under an open license such as CC-By, which would allow everybody to mirror articles. (Like this project does: https://oalibrary.org/ https://oalibrary.org/)