5 ms·

Is there a sort of single sign on reasonably priced service that aggregates the many publishers of government funded papers in one place?

jannes 5y ago
No
- amaajemyfren 5y ago
  If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.
  - j-pb 5y ago
    This completely misses the point. Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money. The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice. So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a fair price? So universities pay twice. The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
    - kwyjibo12345 5y ago
      The common life cycle of a paper is as follows: 1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription. For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.
      - petercooper 5y ago
        Somewhere between step 3 and 4, I assume the publisher gets hold of the paper and acquires a license to resell it? How does that part work and why do universities/academics support it if they could just distribute it for free or via an open journal? Is it solely to get the "kudos" of being in particular publications?
        j-pb 5y ago
        Funding is dostributed based on citation counts and the most "prestigious" journals. "Prestigious" is completely arbitrary and heavily lobbied for by the publishers.
        rrmm 5y ago
        The authors give the rights over to journal when they submit the paper. The authors depend on publishing in high impact-factor journals for tenure and continued funding. Not all academics support it and several groups have opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing their own journals and conferences.
        zentiggr 5y ago
        I can see a possible future where only a few holdouts rely on 'prestige' as a decision criteria, while a majority of academic fields/groups have switched to open access... and the former get only more and more vocal about the decline of science, or some screeching point.
        brazzy 5y ago
        It's 100% due to the traditional model of measuring academic performance through the number of published papers weighted (very, very strongly) by the "reputation" of the journal they're published in, justified by the importance of curation and peer review to provide quality control. Historically, this model grew because the journal publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print and distribute copies of the articles.
        5y ago
    - amaajemyfren 5y ago
      You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect there will be some project management (following up on peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers, etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will need to collect some money. My view is it should be small in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in the world.
      - j-pb 5y ago
        This sounds like there is currently a mechanism for winnowing the crap, but we currently don't really have this either. On the contrary, because researchers are driven to publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper over and over again with minor modifications, or just go conference shopping until they get an acceptance. With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up automatically. Watson and Crick published papers only every couple years. This wouldn't work today at all. Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.
  - meibo 5y ago
    Even if there was a "Netflix" of scientific papers, a few years after its prime all of the publishers would notice that it's far more lucrative to make their own Netflix and take all of their content for themselves again, forcing people to go back to Torre- I mean, Sci-Hub.
  - agarsev 5y ago
    I think that what some outside of academia might miss is that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific output by the entities that grant you funding and career prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not the distribution problem.

jannes 5y ago

amaajemyfren 5y ago
If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.
- j-pb 5y ago
  This completely misses the point. Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money. The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice. So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a fair price? So universities pay twice. The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
  - kwyjibo12345 5y ago
    The common life cycle of a paper is as follows: 1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription. For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.
    - petercooper 5y ago
      Somewhere between step 3 and 4, I assume the publisher gets hold of the paper and acquires a license to resell it? How does that part work and why do universities/academics support it if they could just distribute it for free or via an open journal? Is it solely to get the "kudos" of being in particular publications?
      - j-pb 5y ago
        Funding is dostributed based on citation counts and the most "prestigious" journals. "Prestigious" is completely arbitrary and heavily lobbied for by the publishers.
      - rrmm 5y ago
        The authors give the rights over to journal when they submit the paper. The authors depend on publishing in high impact-factor journals for tenure and continued funding. Not all academics support it and several groups have opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing their own journals and conferences.
        zentiggr 5y ago
        I can see a possible future where only a few holdouts rely on 'prestige' as a decision criteria, while a majority of academic fields/groups have switched to open access... and the former get only more and more vocal about the decline of science, or some screeching point.
      - brazzy 5y ago
        It's 100% due to the traditional model of measuring academic performance through the number of published papers weighted (very, very strongly) by the "reputation" of the journal they're published in, justified by the importance of curation and peer review to provide quality control. Historically, this model grew because the journal publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print and distribute copies of the articles.
        5y ago
  - amaajemyfren 5y ago
    You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect there will be some project management (following up on peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers, etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will need to collect some money. My view is it should be small in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in the world.
    - j-pb 5y ago
      This sounds like there is currently a mechanism for winnowing the crap, but we currently don't really have this either. On the contrary, because researchers are driven to publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper over and over again with minor modifications, or just go conference shopping until they get an acceptance. With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up automatically. Watson and Crick published papers only every couple years. This wouldn't work today at all. Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.
- meibo 5y ago
  Even if there was a "Netflix" of scientific papers, a few years after its prime all of the publishers would notice that it's far more lucrative to make their own Netflix and take all of their content for themselves again, forcing people to go back to Torre- I mean, Sci-Hub.
- agarsev 5y ago
  I think that what some outside of academia might miss is that publishing in a journal is not about distribution and access anymore. The renown of the journal where you publish is often used as a proxy for the quality of your scientific output by the entities that grant you funding and career prospects. Hopefully it will improve soon, but it is this prestige and evaluation problem that has to be tackled, not the distribution problem.