7 ms·

Open science: why is it so hard?

61 points by tedlee 15y ago

j45 15y ago
Open is not profitable?
oscilloscope 15y ago
Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. You can get data used by professional astronomers in publicly-accessible databases on the web. Here's a collection of these resources: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to interpret the data. There are excellent tutorials, some many years old, that you can find. Open science is hard because science is hard. It takes knowledge to interpret the data. It takes effort to transform the data into something that can be interpreted. And there's a lot of data.
- andreadallera 15y ago
  > Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say... See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused than what it took to put together that site. Take your average startup as an example - they're seriously dedicated to outreach, their success depends on it - would you give them even a 1% chance of success if their website looked like that?
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    The point is that data is there at all. You won't find that in many sciences. What it looks like is profoundly unimportant.
andreadallera 15y ago
> Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business. Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself. I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the only person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition. Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in expanding their audience (now they're interested in the opposite) then publishing will change accordingly.
roel_v 15y ago
It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford the journal charges? The truth is that only a small (albeit vocal) minority cares about 'open science'. For most researchers, it just doesn't matter, and there is no incentive to pursue it. Actually having time to write papers worth publishing is more of an issue than those that do get published being accessible to people who, in all honesty, have no interested in them (i.e., the general public). (it's quite interesting to note that (in my statistically undoubtedly non-representative experience) the demographic that advocates 'open access' the most is quite homogeneous - mostly PhD students with a new professor here and there. Maybe it's the cynical me, but I've been in the game long enough to see people I meet at conferences convert from being advocates for open access to not caring about it any more once they get some years of experience and realize it doesn't matter that much.)
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?
  - andreadallera 15y ago
    Given the state of the situation, a wiki-style site for information sharing is just not going to happen. Nobody, authors first, has the interest for something like that to happen - researchers are very interested in sharing, with other researchers. The general public doesn't interest them one bit (you can show the number of citations your paper nobody read has received to have your grant renewed or to get a better position, nobody cares if you've built a website that shares your research with the general public and has 10000+ uniques a day)
  - roel_v 15y ago
    Whose success and accomplishments? Why would a researcher be jealous about some website getting many visitors? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.
kitsune_ 15y ago
I find it really aggravating that schools such as the ETHZ get billions in taxes a year yet refuse to publish the majority of their papers online.
- nickik 15y ago
  As somebody who is paying for thoes papers Im really really pissed of about this too.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  To be fair to the university, many journals have legal contracts that forbid you from publishing your manuscript online within X days of publishing in their journal. Basically, they get first publication rights. After a certain period of time most journals let you publish on your own site (although few authors actually do, which is a different issue)
kghose 15y ago
What open access does do is help researchers in smaller institutions and institutions in poorer countries to have easier access to papers. This is HUGE. If you work/study at a place with less resources it becomes annoying to try and get papers for journals your instn doesn't subscribe to. This is a barrier to research that just should not be there.
flashingleds 15y ago
I think it's difficult to refute that if the funding was public, the results should be public. But the scientists have to publish in big journals to win public funding grants, and the big journals aren't motivated to go open access and surrender their cash cow. So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals. Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.
larrydag 15y ago
I am an Engineer and an Operations Research professional. Yet I have mostly worked for companies that do not do engineering or are very small organizations. They do not want to allocate me the resources to research or software. So I've had to rely on what is open. I've used Free Software as a toolset to perform a lot of my work. Yet access to the research behind a lot of those tools is very hard to come by. Places like Penn State's Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index and R-Project http://r-project.org http://r-project.org have been a great haven for open research for my work. I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mkag 15y ago
One of the reasons the status quo is very hard to change is that academia is built on reputation and prestige, and there is really no other measure of success. That means that if we are at some stable steady state going outside the system and doing something like opening up your data to everyone versus trying to publish in a brand name journal will be a disadvantage to you since the number of publications in these types of journals are they way that you are judged. The issue isn't about whether the journals charge for content or not. Journal subscriptions are cheap compared to labor and reagents and, as always with third-party payer systems, the incentives aren't really aligned to skimp on them. The real question are there better ways of giving people credit for their work in a way that enhances their career in a proportional way to their achievement? Are alternative systems better for rewarding the right people faster, and thus moving research faster? The answer may be yes, but there is a significant energy of activation barrier to making any kind of switch from the publishing-as-a-measure-of-achievement model.

61 points by tedlee 15y ago

j45 15y ago

Open is not profitable?

Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. You can get data used by professional astronomers in publicly-accessible databases on the web. Here's a collection of these resources: http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/links.html The challenge is you have to learn a bit about the databases and visualization software to get going. Then you might need to learn some electromagnetism, relativity, and astrophysics to interpret the data. There are excellent tutorials, some many years old, that you can find. Open science is hard because science is hard. It takes knowledge to interpret the data. It takes effort to transform the data into something that can be interpreted. And there's a lot of data.

andreadallera 15y ago
> Astronomers are incredibly dedicated to outreach. I really don't want to sound overly critical - I'm sure that there is good will behind whoever made the site you linked - but that site is what represents astronomers' dedication to outreach then I don't really know what to say... See, if researchers really wanted to let their research known to the public the efforts on their behalf would be much, much more focused than what it took to put together that site. Take your average startup as an example - they're seriously dedicated to outreach, their success depends on it - would you give them even a 1% chance of success if their website looked like that?
- Vivtek 15y ago
  The point is that data is there at all. You won't find that in many sciences. What it looks like is profoundly unimportant.

andreadallera 15y ago

> Repeat after me: scholarship is not a publishing business. Nope - it's much more than that. It's a way for a caste of too-often incompetent and self-absorbed university dwellers to perpetrate itself. I've had the misfortune of working in university for a while. People on department are living in a bubble - they write books and they publish on journals that are read only by other professor "studying" the same "subject". They treat subjects like "the history of mining in scandinavia". Why? Because they're often the only person in the world (or one of the 2-3 people in the world) who is studying that. What does it mean? A grant, and later a position as a full-time professor. Everyone of them has his small little niche in which he's the best specialist in the world... that is used to both justify their research and to avoid real world competition. Publishing rules will never change if the underlying ecosystem doesn't. If professors will ever be interested in expanding their audience (now they're interested in the opposite) then publishing will change accordingly.

roel_v 15y ago

It's not hard, it's that most researchers just don't care. Most researchers have access to all papers they need through their universities, and if they don't, most papers are only an email away. Publishing in those journals for which you need to pay (which is only a minority) is paid for by grands or the university. How many people do you know who couldn't get their papers published only because they couldn't afford the journal charges? The truth is that only a small (albeit vocal) minority cares about 'open science'. For most researchers, it just doesn't matter, and there is no incentive to pursue it. Actually having time to write papers worth publishing is more of an issue than those that do get published being accessible to people who, in all honesty, have no interested in them (i.e., the general public). (it's quite interesting to note that (in my statistically undoubtedly non-representative experience) the demographic that advocates 'open access' the most is quite homogeneous - mostly PhD students with a new professor here and there. Maybe it's the cynical me, but I've been in the game long enough to see people I meet at conferences convert from being advocates for open access to not caring about it any more once they get some years of experience and realize it doesn't matter that much.)

nextparadigms 15y ago
Maybe if there would be some kind of Wikipedia-style science crowdsourcing project, they would care more because they would be jealous on its success and accomplishments?
- andreadallera 15y ago
  Given the state of the situation, a wiki-style site for information sharing is just not going to happen. Nobody, authors first, has the interest for something like that to happen - researchers are very interested in sharing, with other researchers. The general public doesn't interest them one bit (you can show the number of citations your paper nobody read has received to have your grant renewed or to get a better position, nobody cares if you've built a website that shares your research with the general public and has 10000+ uniques a day)
- roel_v 15y ago
  Whose success and accomplishments? Why would a researcher be jealous about some website getting many visitors? Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point.

kitsune_ 15y ago

I find it really aggravating that schools such as the ETHZ get billions in taxes a year yet refuse to publish the majority of their papers online.

nickik 15y ago
As somebody who is paying for thoes papers Im really really pissed of about this too.
polyfractal 15y ago
To be fair to the university, many journals have legal contracts that forbid you from publishing your manuscript online within X days of publishing in their journal. Basically, they get first publication rights. After a certain period of time most journals let you publish on your own site (although few authors actually do, which is a different issue)

kghose 15y ago

What open access does do is help researchers in smaller institutions and institutions in poorer countries to have easier access to papers. This is HUGE. If you work/study at a place with less resources it becomes annoying to try and get papers for journals your instn doesn't subscribe to. This is a barrier to research that just should not be there.

flashingleds 15y ago

I think it's difficult to refute that if the funding was public, the results should be public. But the scientists have to publish in big journals to win public funding grants, and the big journals aren't motivated to go open access and surrender their cash cow. So you're not likely to budge either the scientists or the journals by arguing about what's ethical. It seems to me like the best approach is to change the way public grants are awarded. If grants become conditional on you ONLY publishing in open access journals, well you don't have much choice do you? Ultimately this whole game was only ever about attracting the money you need to do your job. Pretty soon the expensive publishers stop getting submissions because they're all diverted to open-access journals. Of course it would never be so easy in reality. There is a pretty entrenched chicken-and-egg situation with science publications, and it will be unavoidably messy to break it.

larrydag 15y ago

I am an Engineer and an Operations Research professional. Yet I have mostly worked for companies that do not do engineering or are very small organizations. They do not want to allocate me the resources to research or software. So I've had to rely on what is open. I've used Free Software as a toolset to perform a lot of my work. Yet access to the research behind a lot of those tools is very hard to come by. Places like Penn State's Citeseer http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/index and R-Project http://r-project.org http://r-project.org have been a great haven for open research for my work. I do believe science should be open. Yet I also believe that the scientists behind the research should be compensated. But all the while there is great research out there sitting behind a publisher that limits access to us practitioners who do not have the resources to gain access. I think there is definitely an opportunity to find somewhere in-between where the two can meet.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mkag 15y ago

One of the reasons the status quo is very hard to change is that academia is built on reputation and prestige, and there is really no other measure of success. That means that if we are at some stable steady state going outside the system and doing something like opening up your data to everyone versus trying to publish in a brand name journal will be a disadvantage to you since the number of publications in these types of journals are they way that you are judged. The issue isn't about whether the journals charge for content or not. Journal subscriptions are cheap compared to labor and reagents and, as always with third-party payer systems, the incentives aren't really aligned to skimp on them. The real question are there better ways of giving people credit for their work in a way that enhances their career in a proportional way to their achievement? Are alternative systems better for rewarding the right people faster, and thus moving research faster? The answer may be yes, but there is a significant energy of activation barrier to making any kind of switch from the publishing-as-a-measure-of-achievement model.