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The article doesn't touch on the fact that all this scholarship, usually funded in some way with taxes, is locked up behind pay walls unless you want to pay $10
by flocial 15y ago
The article doesn't touch on the fact that all this scholarship, usually funded in some way with taxes, is locked up behind pay walls unless you want to pay $10-$40 per article (that's probably a bigger obstacle). However, ArXiv works because at least with harder sciences you have proofs and empirical results that are more clearly defined. It would be harder to judge papers in economics, humanities, etc. (there's already a lot of variance in quality of scholarship even in the current published model, I don't see how it would flourish under an open model aside from becoming more like the blogs we read here - no offense).
There have been many experiments where people have passed on jargon-laden papers more fiction than research off to "respected" journals. If you can solve the quality/trust problem and make it acceptable for governments and other funding bodies, then we might move forward.
The thing about the current model is that they distribute pdfs of all things when I think the raw text, bibliography files, and even data should be distributed with the article and available at no cost.
- stcredzero 15y agoI wouldn't mind a two tiered system, with a curated membership and paywalls, and the riffraff/unwashed masses in a lower tier. Exclude the latter from making comments, but give out the knowledge for free.
- starwed 15y agoThe article doesn't touch on the fact that all this scholarship, usually funded in some way with taxes, is locked up behind pay walls unless you want to pay $10-$40 per article (that's probably a bigger obstacle). However, ArXiv works because at least with harder sciences you have proofs and empirical results that are more clearly defined. Most of the stuff on arxiv is also published in peer reviewed journals. That's why they are called preprints.
- flocial 15y agoBut not necessarily. There are some landmark papers like Grigori Perelman's solution of the Poincaré Conjecture that only exist on ArXiv.
- 100ideas 15y agoThe Social Science Research Network (SSRN; http://www.ssrn.com/ http://www.ssrn.com/) is an effective preprint service for the Social Science that seems to have the same professional clout as ArXiv for it's domain. Yet there are no respective preprint services for biotechnology... why? Seems like there should be one just by connecting the dots between ArXiv and SSRN.
- splat 15y agoThere's also the problem of the cost of publishing a paper in the first place. In my field (astronomy), publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal will cost you at least $1000 with an extra $100 for every table in it. You can easily spend $3000 for the privilege of publishing a paper in a peer-reviewed journal and then pay $20 for the privilege of reading it.