8 ms·

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

by 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.
  - adamjernst 15y ago
    There's a thin line here. On one hand, you're right that openness is a good thing. On the other hand, modern science is incredibly political. When millions of dollars of funding is on the line, tensions run high. Anonymity is one way to shield reviewers. But the only way to have workable anonymous review is a trusted gatekeeper—and those are expensive.
  - lutorm 15y ago
    I absolutely don't think that the current system means that the contents of journals are absolute truth -- I've been a referee and seen what happens to rejected articles (they show up a month later in another journal). The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
  - jackpirate 15y ago
    People propose that plan all the time. Here's why it can't work: While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...) There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
    - forkandwait 15y ago
      It works now in physics: arxiv.org The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process). EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles. One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
- forkandwait 15y ago
  No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free. The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough. Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers. (It's a warped system.)
  - Loic 15y ago
    The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark: http://orbit.dtu.dk/app http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied). Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
    - ez77 15y ago
      Old school networking with groups and circles... You mean Google Circles! Sorry, I've been brainwashed...
- p4bl0 15y ago
  Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).
ma2rten 15y ago
Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  You don't see a problem because you actually have a subscription to these journals -- via your university. During the school year most of the time I have the same experience -- all articles are freely available when I sit in a library or in my room in students' dormitory. Then the summer holidays come, and bam, my head hits the paywall. It annoys me like hell. The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.
- oasisbob 15y ago
  Not being associated with a university anymore, Google Scholar saves me about ~70% of the time too. However, many of those links aren't legitimate (i.e., licensed) you see a lot of links like http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf . Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.
  - RK 15y ago
    These links are often legitimate. Even Elsevier lets authors post their own articles on their own sites. But I agree that this is not a good solution to the bigger problem.
    - bhickey 15y ago
      I'm lowly author four on a paper published in an Elsevier journal (American Journal of Human Genetics). I submitted a request to redistribute it on my personal site. It took less than a week for them to grant it. Easy to do, but I shouldn't have had to ask in the first place.
vacri 15y ago
If "We don't need them anymore", why are you "really pissed of each time I found an article.../internet does that better than they could ever do it"? "Your failed business model is not my problem." <- Yes, people should work effectively for free so I don't have to pay for my professional development tools! Collection, reviewing, editing, and distribution of articles on cutting edge topics, consumed by a tiny audience is not cheap.
- ShirtlessRod 15y ago
  It's a bit disingenuous to include "collection, reviewing, and editing" in that list because it's not these companies that are responsible for the majority of those tasks, especially the reviewing part, which is by far the most time consuming and requires the expertise that is the most in short supply. Distribution in this case amounts to little more than a file server. Nothing tremendously unique there from a technology perspective.
  - vacri 15y ago
    I guess I was railing more against "your failed business model", when both a) clearly it's working for them; and b) that slogan is the mantra of folks who want everything for free or peanuts.
    - ak217 15y ago
      The problem is that many business models in that industry work by impeding access to publicly funded research.
      - Vivtek 15y ago
        And indeed in every industry.
- ak217 15y ago
  It's not cheap, and it's done for free by academic professionals in the corresponding fields. Please understand, the publishing houses like Springer or IEEE provide no added value except for their printing and administrative services. Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.
DennisP 15y ago
What's especially sad: the whole reason Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web was to put scientific articles on it. Hyperlinks were for citations. But now the journals want you to pay $35 every time you follow a hyperlink.

by p4bl0 15y ago

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.
- adamjernst 15y ago
  There's a thin line here. On one hand, you're right that openness is a good thing. On the other hand, modern science is incredibly political. When millions of dollars of funding is on the line, tensions run high. Anonymity is one way to shield reviewers. But the only way to have workable anonymous review is a trusted gatekeeper—and those are expensive.
- lutorm 15y ago
  I absolutely don't think that the current system means that the contents of journals are absolute truth -- I've been a referee and seen what happens to rejected articles (they show up a month later in another journal). The point is not so much about the quality of what does come out, it's about the quality of the crap that currently does not come out. While I agree that it could be useful to have open discussions about papers, I think if that happens at the expense of the ability of everyone who thinks they have an idea to put stuff out there, the result might be a net decrease in signal/noise.
- jackpirate 15y ago
  People propose that plan all the time. Here's why it can't work: While programmers like coding, researchers hate writing (they like doing research!). While there are relatively few OSS projects, there are millions of research papers (yes, millions! http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=research&hl=en&b...) There are wiki style projects out there for each major domain. For example, quantum computing has http://www.quantiki.org http://www.quantiki.org. These sites are great, but they will never replace journal articles because they do not handle history or citations well. Imagine if all we had was wikipedia to tell us about the Church-Turing hypothesis? Papers like that give us an insight into the scientists' mind that nothing else can.
  - forkandwait 15y ago
    It works now in physics: arxiv.org The reason it works is that your peers read your work, and either refute or cite you. Remember -- everybody knows everybody in a subfield, or at least everybody's advisor. It helps when there is math involved which is either correct or not. If somebody random submits something to arxiv, people know they don't know him or his grad school and that is thus probably a crackpot and so don't bother to read it (except sometimes someone from nowhere gets a result, which would NEVER be seen in the closed peer review process). EDIT: Also you attach your name to a finished product, not an unattributed ongoing wiki page. Your reputation is everything, so you win or lose based on the articles. One of the problems in social science academia is that 98% of the articles are completely worthless, and they only serve to get a professor promotion based on an index of citation times journal prestige. The smaller state colleges require their junior faculty to "publish", but they don't have enough to say to get into real journals and the publishing houses fill the need with "Journal of Rural Sociology" etc.
forkandwait 15y ago
No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free. The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough. Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers. (It's a warped system.)
- Loic 15y ago
  The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark: http://orbit.dtu.dk/app http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied). Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
  - ez77 15y ago
    Old school networking with groups and circles... You mean Google Circles! Sorry, I've been brainwashed...
p4bl0 15y ago
Effectively, this doesn't seems to ruin them, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2793224: Elsevier 2010's profit is 724,000,000₤ (and that's only 46% of the group's total adjusted operating profit).

ma2rten 15y ago

Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.

xyzzyz 15y ago
You don't see a problem because you actually have a subscription to these journals -- via your university. During the school year most of the time I have the same experience -- all articles are freely available when I sit in a library or in my room in students' dormitory. Then the summer holidays come, and bam, my head hits the paywall. It annoys me like hell. The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.
oasisbob 15y ago
Not being associated with a university anymore, Google Scholar saves me about ~70% of the time too. However, many of those links aren't legitimate (i.e., licensed) you see a lot of links like http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf . Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.
- RK 15y ago
  These links are often legitimate. Even Elsevier lets authors post their own articles on their own sites. But I agree that this is not a good solution to the bigger problem.
  - bhickey 15y ago
    I'm lowly author four on a paper published in an Elsevier journal (American Journal of Human Genetics). I submitted a request to redistribute it on my personal site. It took less than a week for them to grant it. Easy to do, but I shouldn't have had to ask in the first place.

vacri 15y ago

If "We don't need them anymore", why are you "really pissed of each time I found an article.../internet does that better than they could ever do it"? "Your failed business model is not my problem." <- Yes, people should work effectively for free so I don't have to pay for my professional development tools! Collection, reviewing, editing, and distribution of articles on cutting edge topics, consumed by a tiny audience is not cheap.

ShirtlessRod 15y ago
It's a bit disingenuous to include "collection, reviewing, and editing" in that list because it's not these companies that are responsible for the majority of those tasks, especially the reviewing part, which is by far the most time consuming and requires the expertise that is the most in short supply. Distribution in this case amounts to little more than a file server. Nothing tremendously unique there from a technology perspective.
- vacri 15y ago
  I guess I was railing more against "your failed business model", when both a) clearly it's working for them; and b) that slogan is the mantra of folks who want everything for free or peanuts.
  - ak217 15y ago
    The problem is that many business models in that industry work by impeding access to publicly funded research.
    - Vivtek 15y ago
      And indeed in every industry.
ak217 15y ago
It's not cheap, and it's done for free by academic professionals in the corresponding fields. Please understand, the publishing houses like Springer or IEEE provide no added value except for their printing and administrative services. Closed-access publishers are a relic of the print era. They have been carried this far by momentum of their brand names. They impede access to publicly funded research.

DennisP 15y ago

What's especially sad: the whole reason Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web was to put scientific articles on it. Hyperlinks were for citations. But now the journals want you to pay $35 every time you follow a hyperlink.