4 ms·

In a delicious piece of irony[1], the paper that this post refers to appears to be behind a paywall, illustrating one of the causes of the problem. (Edit: since

In a delicious piece of irony[1], the paper that this post refers to appears to be behind a paywall, illustrating one of the causes of the problem. (Edit: since the post is erroring out, the link to the abstract is: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/19/1/115 http://pus.sagepub.com/content/19/1/115) My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad. Public communication, however, remains quite bad. It is very unfortunate that in the current system, researchers have no incentive to communicate with the public or do anything except rack up publications and citations. I write a blog about my research (http://33bits.org http://33bits.org) and I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of public interest. In my ideal world, research grants would come with some strings attached to get scientists to fulfill some of their social responsibility. In related news, if you're in the Bay Area there's an Open Science event next week with Michael Nielsen that I'm really excited about. http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2011/06/15/%E2%80%9Cwhy-the-net-doesnt-work-for-science-and-how-to-fix-it%E2%80%9D-a-talk-by-michael-nielsen-at-plos-san-francisco-hq-june-29th-at-6-pm/ http://blogs.plos.org/everyone/2011/06/15/%E2%80%9Cwhy-the-n... [1] Is it irony? The word is so overused I can't even tell anymore.

toddh 15y ago
That's not my experience random walker. A huge number of papers are hidden inside journals, and sites like the ACM. I run into this problem constantly.
- beza1e1 15y ago
  You have to look for personal or institute pages. For example, one of my papers is behind the ACM paywall [0], but you can also get the pdf at our institute website [1], where we publish everything [2]. As a last resort, mail to the authors. [0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 [1] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald10cases http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald1... [2] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&lang=en http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&#...
- randomwalker 15y ago
  No, the publishers don't make it availble; you need to look for it on the authors' home pages. Most of the time, if you Google the title with "filetype:pdf", it'll show up. In the last several years there's been maybe half a dozen times that I failed to find a computer science paper online. I'd estimate that less than 1% of papers in the top conferences are unavailable freely online.
  - toddh 15y ago
    Sorry, that's not my experience. And I read a lot of papers. Most of the time they'll link to a walled site or have no link at all.
  - maaku 15y ago
    Computer science journals are pretty unique in that they let authors get away with that. In any other industry the papers are owned by the publisher, not the author, and putting a link to your own paper on your own website is a copyright violation they will take you to court for (or just blacklist you so you never publish again).
    - lutorm 15y ago
      Not true. In astrophysics, at least, all journals I know of let you keep rights to noncommercial publication like putting the paper on arXiv and on your web page.
- igrekel 15y ago
  And even if you have ACM digital library membership, sometimes the paper refered to in the ACM DL is hosted over at Springer or the like and you must pay 30$ or more to access the paper.
  - toddh 15y ago
    I rejoined ACM specifically to get one particular paper only to realize exactly this. The next two papers I looked for the exact same thing happened.
PaulHoule 15y ago
Paywalls for scientific papers burn me up. The US government pays at least $50,000 in grant money for each paper, but it can't find $5 to make it available for the public in perpetuity, as does the arXiv.org preprint server. (arXiv.org looks, on the surface, to be a success, but always been functioning on operating budgets that are meant for something else... It's existence has hung on a thread more than once It still struggles to find a sustainable funding model, despite the fact that it costs 1/200-1/1000 as much to make papers available on arXiv.org as does a peer reviewed paper) Frankly it seems to be an insult to the taxpayer that we pay for research and can't read it/
- randomwalker 15y ago
  Completely agree. $50k/paper is about right. I was surprised to find that even my colleagues didn't know this figure. If only more people were aware of it, perhaps they'd take things more seriously. The feeling of powerlessness as an individual trapped in the system is only exacerbated by the apparent callousness of those around you.
- crocowhile 15y ago
  Things are changing. Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. This does not mean that the actual final version of the paper will be available to everybody though: normally it's the unedited copy, the manuscript as it was submitted to the journal before publication. This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?
  - kd0amg 15y ago
    Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. I think this rule is specific to the funding agency.
  - maaku 15y ago
    That may apply where you work, but it is not universal. I work at NASA and almost all the papers we generate are (regrettably) published behind paywalls. And the consequences are far worse than having to fork over a few (thousands of) dollars to read them--our scientists are contractually bound NOT to discuss their research during the blackout period prior to publication. It's stifling to research and the community.
jacques_chester 15y ago
> My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad. This depends very much on the age of the paper. The older it is, the less likely that it is on the web. If anything it reinforces the profound cyclical amnesia of our industry (never mind academia).
allending 15y ago
Good reason to have a couple friends at large universities that have institutional subscriptions to journals and the like who can hook you up when needed. Shhh. :x

toddh 15y ago

That's not my experience random walker. A huge number of papers are hidden inside journals, and sites like the ACM. I run into this problem constantly.

beza1e1 15y ago
You have to look for personal or institute pages. For example, one of my papers is behind the ACM paywall [0], but you can also get the pdf at our institute website [1], where we publish everything [2]. As a last resort, mail to the authors. [0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 [1] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald10cases http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald1... [2] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&lang=en http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&#...
randomwalker 15y ago
No, the publishers don't make it availble; you need to look for it on the authors' home pages. Most of the time, if you Google the title with "filetype:pdf", it'll show up. In the last several years there's been maybe half a dozen times that I failed to find a computer science paper online. I'd estimate that less than 1% of papers in the top conferences are unavailable freely online.
- toddh 15y ago
  Sorry, that's not my experience. And I read a lot of papers. Most of the time they'll link to a walled site or have no link at all.
- maaku 15y ago
  Computer science journals are pretty unique in that they let authors get away with that. In any other industry the papers are owned by the publisher, not the author, and putting a link to your own paper on your own website is a copyright violation they will take you to court for (or just blacklist you so you never publish again).
  - lutorm 15y ago
    Not true. In astrophysics, at least, all journals I know of let you keep rights to noncommercial publication like putting the paper on arXiv and on your web page.
igrekel 15y ago
And even if you have ACM digital library membership, sometimes the paper refered to in the ACM DL is hosted over at Springer or the like and you must pay 30$ or more to access the paper.
- toddh 15y ago
  I rejoined ACM specifically to get one particular paper only to realize exactly this. The next two papers I looked for the exact same thing happened.

PaulHoule 15y ago

Paywalls for scientific papers burn me up. The US government pays at least $50,000 in grant money for each paper, but it can't find $5 to make it available for the public in perpetuity, as does the arXiv.org preprint server. (arXiv.org looks, on the surface, to be a success, but always been functioning on operating budgets that are meant for something else... It's existence has hung on a thread more than once It still struggles to find a sustainable funding model, despite the fact that it costs 1/200-1/1000 as much to make papers available on arXiv.org as does a peer reviewed paper) Frankly it seems to be an insult to the taxpayer that we pay for research and can't read it/

randomwalker 15y ago
Completely agree. $50k/paper is about right. I was surprised to find that even my colleagues didn't know this figure. If only more people were aware of it, perhaps they'd take things more seriously. The feeling of powerlessness as an individual trapped in the system is only exacerbated by the apparent callousness of those around you.
crocowhile 15y ago
Things are changing. Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. This does not mean that the actual final version of the paper will be available to everybody though: normally it's the unedited copy, the manuscript as it was submitted to the journal before publication. This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?
- kd0amg 15y ago
  Now all publicly funded research in the USA and UK must lead to open access publications. I think this rule is specific to the funding agency.
- maaku 15y ago
  That may apply where you work, but it is not universal. I work at NASA and almost all the papers we generate are (regrettably) published behind paywalls. And the consequences are far worse than having to fork over a few (thousands of) dollars to read them--our scientists are contractually bound NOT to discuss their research during the blackout period prior to publication. It's stifling to research and the community.

jacques_chester 15y ago

> My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad. This depends very much on the age of the paper. The older it is, the less likely that it is on the web. If anything it reinforces the profound cyclical amnesia of our industry (never mind academia).

allending 15y ago

Good reason to have a couple friends at large universities that have institutional subscriptions to journals and the like who can hook you up when needed. Shhh. :x