9 ms·

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, m

by 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.
- oscilloscope 15y ago
  http://www.scholarpedia.org/ http://www.scholarpedia.org/
kitsune_ 15y ago
I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data). The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people? Also, the current system rewards incestuous island thinking. There isn't a giant catalog of knowledge, and it's a shame. Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use.
- andrewfelix 15y ago
  Specifically which subscriptions would be prohibitively expensive to interested parties?
  - jamii 15y ago
    Prices vary wildly. IEEE starts at $5695 per 350 downloads per year [1]. ACM membership + library access is a very reasonable $200 [2]. I can't find an all-access subscription for Springer but individual journals range from 100 EUR to 20000 EUR per year [3]. JSTOR only sells subscriptions to academic institutes and libraries [4] but you can buy 14 days access to a single article for $10+ [5]. [1] http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subscriptions/prod/enterprise_overview.html http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subs... [2] http://www.acm.org/membership/dues http://www.acm.org/membership/dues [3] http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585-0-0-0 http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585... [4] http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp [5] http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales-service http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales...
    - woodson 15y ago
      Just to clarify, individual IEEE membership is much less expensive. Full membership in the U.S. is $181/year and includes online access to all IEEE articles, dues for other parts of the world are even lower (for whatever reasons) [1]. For students it's $32/year. [1] https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/join/join_dues.html https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/j...
tincholio 15y ago
I believe that more than the fact that researchers don't care, is that researchers are evaluated largely by their publications, both on number and on 'impact'. I just so happens, that the journals with most impact are those that have been long established. These have a track record, a respectable editorial board, and thus researchers try to save up their best work for these types of publications. Disrupting this cycle would require new open journals (or conferences with relaxed copyright policies for their proceedings, especially in the CompSci field) with high quality standards and a respected editorial board. The problem is that there is no real incentive for this to happen, and a strong incentive to publish in the well-respected venues. Hence, the status quo persists...
Vivtek 15y ago
There's one point you're missing, and that's that you're only talking about people in America or other rich, large countries. The money is an incredible bar to, say, Hungary.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Unfortunately, I would wager a guess that most of the money is in these large, rich countries. There is little incentive for Elsevier et al to lower prices when they can demand top dollar from American and European universities.
- roel_v 15y ago
  What? I'm not talking about that at all. I'm saying that most papers are already available to everybody who wants them, whether they're from the US, Hungary or Botswana (as long as they have an internet connection and basic research skills).
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    No. No, they're not. Unless the field in question has open archives like arxiv.org, and medicine (to take one at not-so-random) does not - or at least didn't until the NIH started doing the right thing. This has always been perceived - rightly or wrongly, but I suspect there's a lot to it - as one more way America oppresses the little guy. Or in this case, the little country.
zerostar07 15y ago
You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public, while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community, making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest being introductions and hypothetical rambling. You know, most journals (at least in the life sciences) don't even have a comment section (and even when they do, discussion is hampered by the fact that there are so many journals out there)
- polyfractal 15y ago
  But see, researchers just don't care. In biology, you want to publish in Nature, Science or Cell. Barring that, you grab one of the second tiers (Nature Neuroscience, etc). Barring that, you take a third tier like Molec Human Genetics or J Neurosci. If that paper is closed access, the average research does not give two shits. He just wants his paper in a quality journal that will gain him prestige and career advancement. He is not considering how easily data-miners will access the literature, or if researchers in Bulgaria can access it. I'm sorry if this sounds terrible (it is), but it is also the truth. For the record, I'm very pro-open-science. And all "he" can easily be replaced with "she" in this post :)
  - zerostar07 15y ago
    That's the point ; there's a whole system behind (grants, career advancement) that depends on "journal prestige"; that mechanism is based on "prestige factors" that were built decades or centuries ago. It's a self-reinforcing circle, authors-> journals -> author prestige that doesn't even have to do with the quality of review (i believe all well known journals are equally good at reviewing science, what differentiates them is politics, and a careful selection of what subjects they publish). I 'd go as far as to say that this model is an impediment to science since most articles don't publish their research data (or simulation code) along with the articles. [And i must say that biologists and other life scientists seem really attached to that old model, unlike physics or maths]. Taking a step back you have to ask: Why are these publishing companies given such power by governments and universities (the power to determine grants and promotions). Why don't governments and universities instead actively promote open science? I argue that the benefits will be greater if we switch, but it's gonna take a quantum leap that's currently unlikely due to inertial forces. Another thing is that when research article text is as open as a blog post text, you can create aggregators, get scientists to work in online communities. In the past i tried to start maybe something like that, but not having the content to search for is making it almost a non-starter (if interested check out http://pubcentral.net http://pubcentral.net or http://noteplz.com http://noteplz.com)
Karlsfriend 15y ago
In my experience, ALL the people who care about reading papers, also care about open access. Because i am the only person i know, who want to read scientific papers. Which is probably because I have never seen an university from the inside. So i am the guy wo would benefit from this.
- roel_v 15y ago
  How many have you read over, say, the last year?
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Why is it interesting to argue for open publishing, even if one can't necessarily win in one's lifetime? Because it compels the status quo to state its position over and over again, in clearer and clearer terms. If you want to understand science as it is presently organized, read the above summary several times; it's good and it's accurate. Scientists live in a tight community in which everyone shares with everyone else below the radar, via personal networks linked by patronage, mutual favors, and email. This is acceptable, for many within the community, because scientists don't seriously expect anyone who isn't currently a professional scientist to follow anything that they do, and they don't care, so long as the money rolls in. Then they complain that the public can't seem to tell the difference between the scientific establishment and a priesthood. Inexplicable! If nothing else, open publishing is an act of good-faith public relations. The entire point of science is that it has nothing to hide - you have to be able to trace all the interconnections - so when the scientific establishment is seen to be explicitly hiding stuff behind paywalls it sends a jarring message. And, while printed journals available for popular subscription were the gold standard of openness as recently as the 1980s, this is the twenty-first century and that won't cut it anymore.

by roel_v 15y ago

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.
oscilloscope 15y ago
http://www.scholarpedia.org/ http://www.scholarpedia.org/

kitsune_ 15y ago

I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data). The access limitations act as a barrier when it comes to the application of research. Yes, of course, a multi-billion dollar company with huge R&D departments will have all the subscriptions available, but what about the smaller companies and start ups? What about individual people? Also, the current system rewards incestuous island thinking. There isn't a giant catalog of knowledge, and it's a shame. Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use.

andrewfelix 15y ago
Specifically which subscriptions would be prohibitively expensive to interested parties?
- jamii 15y ago
  Prices vary wildly. IEEE starts at $5695 per 350 downloads per year [1]. ACM membership + library access is a very reasonable $200 [2]. I can't find an all-access subscription for Springer but individual journals range from 100 EUR to 20000 EUR per year [3]. JSTOR only sells subscriptions to academic institutes and libraries [4] but you can buy 14 days access to a single article for $10+ [5]. [1] http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subscriptions/prod/enterprise_overview.html http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/subs... [2] http://www.acm.org/membership/dues http://www.acm.org/membership/dues [3] http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585-0-0-0 http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585... [4] http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/archives/access.jsp [5] http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales-service http://about.jstor.org/support-training/help/publisher-sales...
  - woodson 15y ago
    Just to clarify, individual IEEE membership is much less expensive. Full membership in the U.S. is $181/year and includes online access to all IEEE articles, dues for other parts of the world are even lower (for whatever reasons) [1]. For students it's $32/year. [1] https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/join/join_dues.html https://origin.www.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/j...

tincholio 15y ago

I believe that more than the fact that researchers don't care, is that researchers are evaluated largely by their publications, both on number and on 'impact'. I just so happens, that the journals with most impact are those that have been long established. These have a track record, a respectable editorial board, and thus researchers try to save up their best work for these types of publications. Disrupting this cycle would require new open journals (or conferences with relaxed copyright policies for their proceedings, especially in the CompSci field) with high quality standards and a respected editorial board. The problem is that there is no real incentive for this to happen, and a strong incentive to publish in the well-respected venues. Hence, the status quo persists...

Vivtek 15y ago

There's one point you're missing, and that's that you're only talking about people in America or other rich, large countries. The money is an incredible bar to, say, Hungary.

polyfractal 15y ago
Unfortunately, I would wager a guess that most of the money is in these large, rich countries. There is little incentive for Elsevier et al to lower prices when they can demand top dollar from American and European universities.
roel_v 15y ago
What? I'm not talking about that at all. I'm saying that most papers are already available to everybody who wants them, whether they're from the US, Hungary or Botswana (as long as they have an internet connection and basic research skills).
- Vivtek 15y ago
  No. No, they're not. Unless the field in question has open archives like arxiv.org, and medicine (to take one at not-so-random) does not - or at least didn't until the NIH started doing the right thing. This has always been perceived - rightly or wrongly, but I suspect there's a lot to it - as one more way America oppresses the little guy. Or in this case, the little country.

zerostar07 15y ago

You make it sound like open science is about opening up journals to the general public, while it's primarily about making your research more open to scrutiny by the academic community, making your data available so that data miners can work on them and even changing the whole "publish a paper" tradition to something more organized. I mean, most papers can be coded down to a few sentences of substance, with the rest being introductions and hypothetical rambling. You know, most journals (at least in the life sciences) don't even have a comment section (and even when they do, discussion is hampered by the fact that there are so many journals out there)

polyfractal 15y ago
But see, researchers just don't care. In biology, you want to publish in Nature, Science or Cell. Barring that, you grab one of the second tiers (Nature Neuroscience, etc). Barring that, you take a third tier like Molec Human Genetics or J Neurosci. If that paper is closed access, the average research does not give two shits. He just wants his paper in a quality journal that will gain him prestige and career advancement. He is not considering how easily data-miners will access the literature, or if researchers in Bulgaria can access it. I'm sorry if this sounds terrible (it is), but it is also the truth. For the record, I'm very pro-open-science. And all "he" can easily be replaced with "she" in this post :)
- zerostar07 15y ago
  That's the point ; there's a whole system behind (grants, career advancement) that depends on "journal prestige"; that mechanism is based on "prestige factors" that were built decades or centuries ago. It's a self-reinforcing circle, authors-> journals -> author prestige that doesn't even have to do with the quality of review (i believe all well known journals are equally good at reviewing science, what differentiates them is politics, and a careful selection of what subjects they publish). I 'd go as far as to say that this model is an impediment to science since most articles don't publish their research data (or simulation code) along with the articles. [And i must say that biologists and other life scientists seem really attached to that old model, unlike physics or maths]. Taking a step back you have to ask: Why are these publishing companies given such power by governments and universities (the power to determine grants and promotions). Why don't governments and universities instead actively promote open science? I argue that the benefits will be greater if we switch, but it's gonna take a quantum leap that's currently unlikely due to inertial forces. Another thing is that when research article text is as open as a blog post text, you can create aggregators, get scientists to work in online communities. In the past i tried to start maybe something like that, but not having the content to search for is making it almost a non-starter (if interested check out http://pubcentral.net http://pubcentral.net or http://noteplz.com http://noteplz.com)

Karlsfriend 15y ago

In my experience, ALL the people who care about reading papers, also care about open access. Because i am the only person i know, who want to read scientific papers. Which is probably because I have never seen an university from the inside. So i am the guy wo would benefit from this.

roel_v 15y ago
How many have you read over, say, the last year?

mechanical_fish 15y ago

Why is it interesting to argue for open publishing, even if one can't necessarily win in one's lifetime? Because it compels the status quo to state its position over and over again, in clearer and clearer terms. If you want to understand science as it is presently organized, read the above summary several times; it's good and it's accurate. Scientists live in a tight community in which everyone shares with everyone else below the radar, via personal networks linked by patronage, mutual favors, and email. This is acceptable, for many within the community, because scientists don't seriously expect anyone who isn't currently a professional scientist to follow anything that they do, and they don't care, so long as the money rolls in. Then they complain that the public can't seem to tell the difference between the scientific establishment and a priesthood. Inexplicable! If nothing else, open publishing is an act of good-faith public relations. The entire point of science is that it has nothing to hide - you have to be able to trace all the interconnections - so when the scientific establishment is seen to be explicitly hiding stuff behind paywalls it sends a jarring message. And, while printed journals available for popular subscription were the gold standard of openness as recently as the 1980s, this is the twenty-first century and that won't cut it anymore.