11 ms·

Should scientific articles be available free online?

141 points by zoowar 15y ago

czDev 15y ago
I work for PLoS, it's great to see Open Access become such a high profile subject after the aaronsw story
- ak217 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you do for PLoS?
dochtman 15y ago
So what has become of that effort? We're 7 years in now, did they actually go ahead with their plan?
- jessriedel 15y ago
  Yes, although the time delay between publication and public availability was increased to 12 month. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
ChuckFrank 15y ago
Yes. Absolutely. Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you controlled the information. Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours. Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased informational availability and transparency. All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold benefits. So in short. TLDR -- Yes. Absolutely.
- younewman 15y ago
  What an enormous wank.
p4bl0 15y ago
Yes. A thousand times yes. As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can." New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it. We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price. I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!). SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them. « Your failed business model is not my problem. »
- lutorm 15y ago
  Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might be submitted. If we go to publishing everything on the web, someone needs to perform this function or it will be even more difficult to sort through the flood of stuff that is written. That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.
  - Dove 15y ago
    I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age. I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it. There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.
rjurney 15y ago
It is insane for the people to fund research they can't freely view the results of.
PaulHoule 15y ago
No question about it. If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.
- rflrob 15y ago
  Both of your estimates actually seem fairly low. In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount. The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1]. All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it. [1]http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php
  - sorbus 15y ago
    > The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1]. I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving". [1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).
  - _delirium 15y ago
    It's not too clear to me why PLoS journals cost so much to publish in. In computer science, the open-access journals are typically free to publish in, supported by relatively modest funds from a hosting institution. For example, this is probably the top machine-learning journal, and I don't think it even has a budget or employees, just some donated bandwidth: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?
ristretto 15y ago
It's not mostly about the price (you can always find a paper from friends etc if you're determined). It's about the availability of vast amounts of text to analysis and mining. Who knows how many new insights we have already lost (mainly in the life sciences) from this absurd system that everyone seems to hate yet nobody is willing to change. btw, frontiers (http://frontiersin.org/ http://frontiersin.org/) is another great open access set of journals
rheide 15y ago
Off-topic but boo on slate for detecting that I'm browsing on an iPad, after which they redirect me to an 'iPad-optimized' front page, but not to the article I wanted to read..
- rawsyntax 15y ago
  A lot of the time the full website and the mobile site are not the same backend / system. That said I share your frustration
bauchidgw 15y ago
sadly slate.com is not readable on the ipad due to some swipe/touch/die scumware.....
derrickpetzold 15y ago
They should be if they are payed for by public funds the same applies to software. Of course that doesn't apply to defense or otherwise potentially dangerous software but the general rule should be to opensource government contracted development because if they don't have a good reason for not doing so they are probably doing it wrong.
ChristianMarks 15y ago
As a researcher myself, I completely agree that taxpayers should not be subsidizing for-profit publishers. The government is wrong to fund the production of research papers with taxpayer money and allow the owner of some privately owned pay wall to collect a toll for access to them. Great work if you can get it. It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a consumer. Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you? Answer: a taxpayer. That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the copyright, and collects their toll. There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for years, and we're all over the political spectrum.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
RK 15y ago
Article from 2004.
cabalamat 15y ago
Should the results of taxpayer-funded research be available to those who paid for it, without further payment? Of course they should.

141 points by zoowar 15y ago

czDev 15y ago

I work for PLoS, it's great to see Open Access become such a high profile subject after the aaronsw story

ak217 15y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you do for PLoS?

dochtman 15y ago

So what has become of that effort? We're 7 years in now, did they actually go ahead with their plan?

jessriedel 15y ago
Yes, although the time delay between publication and public availability was increased to 12 month. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

ChuckFrank 15y ago

Yes. Absolutely. Once it was about access. If you had the keys to the Library, then you controlled the information. Now it's about distribution. If you want to examine your idea in public, you can compare it anywhere, anytime to work that preceded yours. Appropriate resource allocation can only be improved by increased informational availability and transparency. All these are part of the most basic tenets of Capitalism. Perfect Choice, and Perfect Information. Improve one or the other will continue to have untold benefits. So in short. TLDR -- Yes. Absolutely.

younewman 15y ago
What an enormous wank.

p4bl0 15y ago

Yes. A thousand times yes. As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can." New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it. We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price. I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!). SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them. « Your failed business model is not my problem. »

lutorm 15y ago
Currently, the thing the journals do do is act as stewards for the peer review process, and it is in their interests to not publish whatever kind of crap might be submitted. If we go to publishing everything on the web, someone needs to perform this function or it will be even more difficult to sort through the flood of stuff that is written. That said, this should be pretty cheap since they only need the scientific editor to do this, so a "journal" that only publishes on the web may have a viable (but perhaps not lucrative) business model funding itself purely on page charges.
- Dove 15y ago
  I find it hard to believe the current system -- a secret scientific sanity check by a couple of people -- is the best we can do as far as gatekeeping in this day and age. I would much rather see original research managed OSS style -- published directly to communities of interest, critiqued and discussed openly, with revisions and explanations and discussions and raw data and source code and everything in all its ugly glory right there with it. There is a temptation under the current system to regard the contents of journals as absolute truth on account of their curation behind closed doors. We used to feel that way about newspapers, too. The truth is that credibility comes in degrees, and it's much safer to be able to see the guts of the operation.

rjurney 15y ago

It is insane for the people to fund research they can't freely view the results of.

PaulHoule 15y ago

No question about it. If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.

rflrob 15y ago
Both of your estimates actually seem fairly low. In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount. The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1]. All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it. [1]http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.php
- sorbus 15y ago
  > The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1]. I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving". [1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).
- _delirium 15y ago
  It's not too clear to me why PLoS journals cost so much to publish in. In computer science, the open-access journals are typically free to publish in, supported by relatively modest funds from a hosting institution. For example, this is probably the top machine-learning journal, and I don't think it even has a budget or employees, just some donated bandwidth: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?

ristretto 15y ago

It's not mostly about the price (you can always find a paper from friends etc if you're determined). It's about the availability of vast amounts of text to analysis and mining. Who knows how many new insights we have already lost (mainly in the life sciences) from this absurd system that everyone seems to hate yet nobody is willing to change. btw, frontiers (http://frontiersin.org/ http://frontiersin.org/) is another great open access set of journals

rheide 15y ago

Off-topic but boo on slate for detecting that I'm browsing on an iPad, after which they redirect me to an 'iPad-optimized' front page, but not to the article I wanted to read..

rawsyntax 15y ago
A lot of the time the full website and the mobile site are not the same backend / system. That said I share your frustration

bauchidgw 15y ago

sadly slate.com is not readable on the ipad due to some swipe/touch/die scumware.....

derrickpetzold 15y ago

They should be if they are payed for by public funds the same applies to software. Of course that doesn't apply to defense or otherwise potentially dangerous software but the general rule should be to opensource government contracted development because if they don't have a good reason for not doing so they are probably doing it wrong.

ChristianMarks 15y ago

As a researcher myself, I completely agree that taxpayers should not be subsidizing for-profit publishers. The government is wrong to fund the production of research papers with taxpayer money and allow the owner of some privately owned pay wall to collect a toll for access to them. Great work if you can get it. It is outrageous. Whenever the public invests in something, the public should get a return if there is one. Suppose I made you the following offer. You can invest in my company by purchasing stock. If my company succeeds, your return on your investment will be the opportunity to purchase whatever I produce as a consumer. Question: if you took me up on my offer, what would that make you? Answer: a taxpayer. That's the position of the public with respect to access to scientific research published with for-profit publishers. The publisher is assigned the copyright, and collects their toll. There is no earthly reason the taxpayer should be subsidizing for-profit scientific publishers. I routinely refuse to review articles for publication in for-profit journals. A number of my colleagues have been doing this for years, and we're all over the political spectrum.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

RK 15y ago

Article from 2004.

cabalamat 15y ago

Should the results of taxpayer-funded research be available to those who paid for it, without further payment? Of course they should.