7 ms·

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 ap

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...
    - jamii 15y ago
      I may be wrong, but I don't believe that membership provides journal access. It's not mentioned in the membership benefits and there are separate prices listed below for individual societies.
      - woodson 15y ago
        I apologize, you are right. I misinterpreted the information given on the membership benefits page (about the IEEE Member Digital Library). Apparently membership to individual societies (add $9-$53/year, depending on the society) may give you access to several journals via IEEEXplore (IEEE Trans. Image Proc.; Audio Speech Lang. Proc., etc. for Signal Processing Society). As I can't find a reliable source to quote (their page is a mess), I can only speak for myself. I became a student member because of the ridiculously high conference fees they charge, which are heavily reduced if you are a member and/or student (Conference pricing deserves a rant of its own. But I digress.).
woodson 15y ago
While I agree that sharing and opening up data etc. is important (not only to profit from it as start ups, but primarily for science itself), I don't think this 'one library' idea is practically possible. Different fields use different categorizations, and for good reasons. I don't see the need for 'one size fits all'. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make similar data sets more compatible, but often data was collected for different reasons and by using slightly, but crucially different experimental designs. Furthermore, research and knowledge is always changing and today's categorization might have to be broken up tomorrow.
roel_v 15y ago
"I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data)." Probably. Like I said, my impression is based on personal observations only. That said, I don't really have objective reasons (of the cuff) to believe otherwise, nor do I have data (or even an idea of how one would measure it correctly). For example, I don't know anyone except from undergrads who don't know how to use their libraries who have ever been unable to get a certain paper. Likewise, how hard is it really for a small company or individuals to get access? They can do exactly what everybody else can do - shoot the author an email asking for the paper. I've never had anybody not send it to me, once I got a hold of their current contact details, which with the web nowadays is very easy. How many people really do independent real research, completely disconnected from anybody involved with universities? They may exist but they're such corner cases that they certainly don't have the critical mass to make 'open access' a real issue. My point is: while 'open access' is a theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are that it's just not a real problem for the vast majority of people. It's a philosophical objection to certain practices at best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things.
- jamii 15y ago
  A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper). It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
  - Radim 15y ago
    But paper abstracts are always free (even with paid journals). If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-)
    - jamii 15y ago
      > If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-) The disadvantage to being a generalist is that I don't know the terminology of the field I need to research. Take the texsearch example above. Given a LaTeX string I want to find similar strings from a large corpus so I start by googling things like "code search" and "syntax tree search". After scanning a few dozen papers and following links I find that the magic search term is "approximate string matching" which nets me an overview paper. I scan through the links from that paper and dismiss most of the algorithms as unsuitable for my particular problem until I'm left with a few candidates for prototypes. Back then I had access through my university. Today I wouldn't be able to read half of those papers. For recent math/CS papers I can usually find a preprint but anything else is a struggle.
roel_v 15y ago
Also: "Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use." OK, I'm imagining it. Now what? Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. (Most) everybody today whose success in advancing the state of the art depends on having access to libraries already has access to one. This is what I mean by 'philosophical idea' in my post above: yes theoretically it would be nice if everybody had access to the complete body of all research ever done. In practice, however, it wouldn't make more than a tiny shred of difference.
- ericb 15y ago
  Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. Yeah, what a laugh. Can you imagine if Albert the Patent Clerk started writing science papers?
  - roel_v 15y ago
    I wasn't going to use this example because he's such an outlier and not representative, but you're basically making my point for me: if Einstein managed to 'get into research' without having 'open science' or libraries or whatever (I don't know to which extent he had access, but he certainly didn't have the access that everybody with an internet connection nowadays has), then why would not having 'open science' be an issue today? Even if there are for-pay article databases, it's still possible to get access to vastly more information than back then. Additionally, one counterexample doesn't disprove a general concept. The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of people don't give a hoot about having access to research papers.
polyfractal 15y ago
Actually, and this is very surprising, most multi-billion dollar biopharmaceutical companies do not have access to scientific literature. I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract. Scary, but true. Management at big Pharma has effectively gutted R&D because it is too expensive.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  If true - and you'll forgive me if I haven't yet picked my jaw up off the floor - this is the biggest argument for open publishing that I've seen yet. The situation is way worse than I thought.
  - polyfractal 15y ago
    Yeah, I was aghast when I found out about this. Perhaps it is just the departments that my friends work in, but I've seen similar murmurings on the internet. I actually found out because I wanted to build a startup that used biomedical literature and biopharmaceutical companies. I basically axed the idea after talking to my friends. To be fair, the decision to cut R&D in big Pharma is unrelated to the decision to remove literature subscriptions. It is just one of the strings of mismanagement episodes that pharma has performed. If anyone is interested, this thread at SA is pure gold: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... In particular, these are some quality posts to show the absolute inane nature of big Pharma: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post391027870 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post391839338 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post396959465 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post390753214 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post390934169 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...

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...
  - jamii 15y ago
    I may be wrong, but I don't believe that membership provides journal access. It's not mentioned in the membership benefits and there are separate prices listed below for individual societies.
    - woodson 15y ago
      I apologize, you are right. I misinterpreted the information given on the membership benefits page (about the IEEE Member Digital Library). Apparently membership to individual societies (add $9-$53/year, depending on the society) may give you access to several journals via IEEEXplore (IEEE Trans. Image Proc.; Audio Speech Lang. Proc., etc. for Signal Processing Society). As I can't find a reliable source to quote (their page is a mess), I can only speak for myself. I became a student member because of the ridiculously high conference fees they charge, which are heavily reduced if you are a member and/or student (Conference pricing deserves a rant of its own. But I digress.).

woodson 15y ago

While I agree that sharing and opening up data etc. is important (not only to profit from it as start ups, but primarily for science itself), I don't think this 'one library' idea is practically possible. Different fields use different categorizations, and for good reasons. I don't see the need for 'one size fits all'. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make similar data sets more compatible, but often data was collected for different reasons and by using slightly, but crucially different experimental designs. Furthermore, research and knowledge is always changing and today's categorization might have to be broken up tomorrow.

roel_v 15y ago

"I think you underestimate the potential interest in open science (and by extension, open data)." Probably. Like I said, my impression is based on personal observations only. That said, I don't really have objective reasons (of the cuff) to believe otherwise, nor do I have data (or even an idea of how one would measure it correctly). For example, I don't know anyone except from undergrads who don't know how to use their libraries who have ever been unable to get a certain paper. Likewise, how hard is it really for a small company or individuals to get access? They can do exactly what everybody else can do - shoot the author an email asking for the paper. I've never had anybody not send it to me, once I got a hold of their current contact details, which with the web nowadays is very easy. How many people really do independent real research, completely disconnected from anybody involved with universities? They may exist but they're such corner cases that they certainly don't have the critical mass to make 'open access' a real issue. My point is: while 'open access' is a theoretically nice idea, the practical realities are that it's just not a real problem for the vast majority of people. It's a philosophical objection to certain practices at best. Which is not enough to instill enough urgency in those whose support is needed to change things.

jamii 15y ago
A good fraction of the freelance work I have done has required looking up papers (eg the current implementation for https://github.com/jamii/texsearch https://github.com/jamii/texsearch is based on a bioinformatics paper). It's fine when you only want a single specific paper but when I'm often looking for a solution to a problem I don't know the name of which means scanning through a couple of hundred papers an hour to see which ones are relevant.
- Radim 15y ago
  But paper abstracts are always free (even with paid journals). If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-)
  - jamii 15y ago
    > If you have to scan random papers to find a solution to a problem you cannot name, I fear for your well-being :-) The disadvantage to being a generalist is that I don't know the terminology of the field I need to research. Take the texsearch example above. Given a LaTeX string I want to find similar strings from a large corpus so I start by googling things like "code search" and "syntax tree search". After scanning a few dozen papers and following links I find that the magic search term is "approximate string matching" which nets me an overview paper. I scan through the links from that paper and dismiss most of the algorithms as unsuitable for my particular problem until I'm left with a few candidates for prototypes. Back then I had access through my university. Today I wouldn't be able to read half of those papers. For recent math/CS papers I can usually find a preprint but anything else is a struggle.

roel_v 15y ago

Also: "Imagine one library with all the world's research and data, open, categorized, expandable, for everyone to use." OK, I'm imagining it. Now what? Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. (Most) everybody today whose success in advancing the state of the art depends on having access to libraries already has access to one. This is what I mean by 'philosophical idea' in my post above: yes theoretically it would be nice if everybody had access to the complete body of all research ever done. In practice, however, it wouldn't make more than a tiny shred of difference.

ericb 15y ago
Are you suggesting every Joe off the street can now write a groundbreaking paper that advances our understanding of string theory? Of course not. Yeah, what a laugh. Can you imagine if Albert the Patent Clerk started writing science papers?
- roel_v 15y ago
  I wasn't going to use this example because he's such an outlier and not representative, but you're basically making my point for me: if Einstein managed to 'get into research' without having 'open science' or libraries or whatever (I don't know to which extent he had access, but he certainly didn't have the access that everybody with an internet connection nowadays has), then why would not having 'open science' be an issue today? Even if there are for-pay article databases, it's still possible to get access to vastly more information than back then. Additionally, one counterexample doesn't disprove a general concept. The fact remains that the vast, vast majority of people don't give a hoot about having access to research papers.

polyfractal 15y ago

Actually, and this is very surprising, most multi-billion dollar biopharmaceutical companies do not have access to scientific literature. I have several friends that work in big Pharma (Merck, Pfizer, etc). The common scientist working there has zero access to scientific literature. They routinely read abstracts from Pubmed and then guess about the methods/results based on the abstract. Scary, but true. Management at big Pharma has effectively gutted R&D because it is too expensive.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
If true - and you'll forgive me if I haven't yet picked my jaw up off the floor - this is the biggest argument for open publishing that I've seen yet. The situation is way worse than I thought.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  Yeah, I was aghast when I found out about this. Perhaps it is just the departments that my friends work in, but I've seen similar murmurings on the internet. I actually found out because I wanted to build a startup that used biomedical literature and biopharmaceutical companies. I basically axed the idea after talking to my friends. To be fair, the decision to cut R&D in big Pharma is unrelated to the decision to remove literature subscriptions. It is just one of the strings of mismanagement episodes that pharma has performed. If anyone is interested, this thread at SA is pure gold: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... In particular, these are some quality posts to show the absolute inane nature of big Pharma: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post391027870 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303&perpage=40&pagenumber=2#post391839338 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post396959465 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post390753214 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339... http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3392095&userid=88303#post390934169 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=339...