6 ms·

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. Fundamentally, I think TAX PAYERS have a right to access all funded resear

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. Fundamentally, I think TAX PAYERS have a right to access all funded research!

geezerjay 8y ago
That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Which is fine. Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity. Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money. Simples.
  - rusticpenn 8y ago
    Researchers dont get any money for writing papers in those journals, Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      Pay out of their research budget with your tax dollars
      - krull10 8y ago
        Not all researchers have thousands of dollars available in grants to cover the types of publishing fees that have become common as the burden of payment shifts from readers to researchers. Graduate students, postdocs or even professors may end up having to pay out of their own pocket to get a publication in a high-profile journal that is necessary to advance their career.
      - pvaldes 8y ago
        Or not. Or advance the money for a year and, maybe baby, recover the funds one year later... you would be surprised.
    - JadeNB 8y ago
      > Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals. Is this true? Most Elsevier journals in mathematics (my field) do not have publication fees. In fact, I think of publication fees as one of the hallmarks of an open-access model.
  - currymj 8y ago
    For the most part, researchers would prefer to publish open access, and agree with your stance about public money 100%, but with the current state of things, it would have a negative effect on their careers. You have to publish in certain highly-regarded journals to advance. In some countries this is basically enshrined in law: there's a big table of journals ranked from high to low, and you need a certain number of publications in the high-ranked journals to keep your job with a public institution. Many of the high-ranking journals are closed access, for-profit.
    - apetresc 8y ago
      Wow, seriously? Which countries?
      - currymj 8y ago
        The first explicit reference I found was the Norwegian Scientific Index but I believe other countries have a similar system. Literally, each journal article is worth points, the points are divided among the coauthors, and then the points have a monetary value which is given in grants to the respective institutions. http://blog.boletsis.net/level-1-level-2-publications-norwegian-scientific-index/ http://blog.boletsis.net/level-1-level-2-publications-norweg...
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        > Wow, seriously? Which countries? Pretty much any developed country. Research funding is guided by metrics and publishing is a very strong component. As anyone can create their own personal journal, only the leading and established ones count.
    - baldfat 8y ago
      Laws are meaningless though USA has a law but it really just is a hurdle. NIH Public Access Policy 2008 (Within 12 months the public must have access of all publicly funded research. (NIH = National Institute of Health) The law is bellow: "The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy Three times Congress has tried to over turn this rule and academic protest keep the law in place. Sadly I still think most don't know about it.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    So you're down with your medical records being made public in perpetuity for all intents and purposes? Because if all my data needs to be made available, identifiable health data is part of that.
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free. I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. Which is why you can find all of my "preprints" online. It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall, which sends money to a corporation that did not fund the authors of the paper.
  - baldfat 8y ago
    Former Systems Librarian at a University. My budget was over $80,000 per year just to gain access to the journals. Before this happened we had journals out on racks and boxes with previous journals behind them for as many as I could cram there. Then I had these journals in a backroom which I would have someone go get something for a student maybe two times a month. Usually the new Journals are not even available in digital for anywhere from 12 to 48 months. So we still had to buy the journals at full price (Looking at you Nature (It's over $100 a month) then pay thousands to get access to journals that would not have ever made a profit before. Main reason I left the field is Librarian would defend these parasites and bad mouth Open Source projects. I would pay $150,000 for my content management system and portal for version releases and about $40,000 a year maintenance fee. It averaged about $0.50 a year per book to have them in a maintained database and public portal. These systems were absolutely garbage technically (I had to reboot my servers daily according to contract) and the interface was backwards. So glad I left what should have been a position to champion for fair use and equal access but found out that librarian for the most part were the police of copy right and closed source projects. Rant Over
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. By "some copy editing", what you surely mean is "a blind search and replace that introduces last-minute errors", which is the main effect of this copy-editing that I've seen.

> Fundamentally, I think authors have the right to determine how their work is used. Fundamentally, I think TAX PAYERS have a right to access all funded research!

geezerjay 8y ago

That's very true, but in practice these corporations argue that that particular paper is their copyright, not the research. Thus, just because the general public need to pay to access a particular document, that doesn't mean they are barred from the research.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Which is fine. Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity. Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money. Simples.
- rusticpenn 8y ago
  Researchers dont get any money for writing papers in those journals, Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    Pay out of their research budget with your tax dollars
    - krull10 8y ago
      Not all researchers have thousands of dollars available in grants to cover the types of publishing fees that have become common as the burden of payment shifts from readers to researchers. Graduate students, postdocs or even professors may end up having to pay out of their own pocket to get a publication in a high-profile journal that is necessary to advance their career.
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      Or not. Or advance the money for a year and, maybe baby, recover the funds one year later... you would be surprised.
  - JadeNB 8y ago
    > Infact, researchers have to pay to get their paper published in most of these journals. Is this true? Most Elsevier journals in mathematics (my field) do not have publication fees. In fact, I think of publication fees as one of the hallmarks of an open-access model.
- currymj 8y ago
  For the most part, researchers would prefer to publish open access, and agree with your stance about public money 100%, but with the current state of things, it would have a negative effect on their careers. You have to publish in certain highly-regarded journals to advance. In some countries this is basically enshrined in law: there's a big table of journals ranked from high to low, and you need a certain number of publications in the high-ranked journals to keep your job with a public institution. Many of the high-ranking journals are closed access, for-profit.
  - apetresc 8y ago
    Wow, seriously? Which countries?
    - currymj 8y ago
      The first explicit reference I found was the Norwegian Scientific Index but I believe other countries have a similar system. Literally, each journal article is worth points, the points are divided among the coauthors, and then the points have a monetary value which is given in grants to the respective institutions. http://blog.boletsis.net/level-1-level-2-publications-norwegian-scientific-index/ http://blog.boletsis.net/level-1-level-2-publications-norweg...
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      > Wow, seriously? Which countries? Pretty much any developed country. Research funding is guided by metrics and publishing is a very strong component. As anyone can create their own personal journal, only the leading and established ones count.
  - baldfat 8y ago
    Laws are meaningless though USA has a law but it really just is a hurdle. NIH Public Access Policy 2008 (Within 12 months the public must have access of all publicly funded research. (NIH = National Institute of Health) The law is bellow: "The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008,[1] requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIH_Public_Access_Policy Three times Congress has tried to over turn this rule and academic protest keep the law in place. Sadly I still think most don't know about it.
- Fomite 8y ago
  So you're down with your medical records being made public in perpetuity for all intents and purposes? Because if all my data needs to be made available, identifiable health data is part of that.
justinpombrio 8y ago
Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free. I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. Which is why you can find all of my "preprints" online. It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall, which sends money to a corporation that did not fund the authors of the paper.
- baldfat 8y ago
  Former Systems Librarian at a University. My budget was over $80,000 per year just to gain access to the journals. Before this happened we had journals out on racks and boxes with previous journals behind them for as many as I could cram there. Then I had these journals in a backroom which I would have someone go get something for a student maybe two times a month. Usually the new Journals are not even available in digital for anywhere from 12 to 48 months. So we still had to buy the journals at full price (Looking at you Nature (It's over $100 a month) then pay thousands to get access to journals that would not have ever made a profit before. Main reason I left the field is Librarian would defend these parasites and bad mouth Open Source projects. I would pay $150,000 for my content management system and portal for version releases and about $40,000 a year maintenance fee. It averaged about $0.50 a year per book to have them in a maintained database and public portal. These systems were absolutely garbage technically (I had to reboot my servers daily according to contract) and the interface was backwards. So glad I left what should have been a position to champion for fair use and equal access but found out that librarian for the most part were the police of copy right and closed source projects. Rant Over
- JadeNB 8y ago
  > I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks. By "some copy editing", what you surely mean is "a blind search and replace that introduces last-minute errors", which is the main effect of this copy-editing that I've seen.