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I found it difficult to glean the high-level points of this article without reading the whole thing. So here it my paraphrasing: This is a highly opinionated a
by nonethewiser 3y ago
I found it difficult to glean the high-level points of this article without reading the whole thing. So here it my paraphrasing:
This is a highly opinionated article against recent ASA opposition to a law that would require them to release taxpayer funded research publications for free immediately. Currently there is a 12 month delay before they need to release which allows them to generate revenue via subscriptions. The ASA says this is bad because it removes the source of funding for peer review so there will be negative effects on academic integrity.
The author frames this as opposing open science and they allude to other integrity problems in academia such as plagiarism and cheating.
My opinion: Kinda seems like it boils down to a conflict between wanting an open and centralized system. I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, but on the other hand maybe the best system doesn't include a central institution responsible for shaping the field. But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally.
- lokar 3y agoIt only applies to research funded by US taxpayers
- TheRealPomax 3y agoWhich is pretty much all academic research, there's almost always some public funding component involved.
- lokar 3y agoSure, but if you want to own something and totally control it, don’t take outside cash.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoHold up now, that's mistaking the people who take the outside cash (namely, the folks who actually do the research) for the people who want to "own" something (namely, the ASA wanting limited term exclusive publication right for papers that people submit to them). It's not the ASA taking the public funding. The folks who do the research should make their research results available for free, irrespective of what the ASA wants to do: the value of an ASA or any other similar association is in "being a peer-reviewed publication platform" that publishes vetted research (well, ideally. We all know the problems here). For that, having a publication publishing right where you are the only periodical that gets to release a product consisting of collections of research results does not interfere with any law that says that if you, as researcher(s), take public funding to do research, your research data and results should be freely available.
- lokar 3y agoThe publisher typically requires the authors to agree to some kind of exclusive distribution when they submit the work.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoSure, but laws around publicly funded research allow for that specifically in the context of peer-reviewed periodical publication (preventing folks from publishing in many different periodicals) while at the same time mandating that the research data and results should be freely available to the public. Because those two contexts are worlds apart.
- s1artibartfast 3y agosimilarly, if you provide outside cash and want something published, then make that part of the funding deal. Dont come back and whine about it later.
- bumby 3y agoWhat is this comment implying? I don't think it was meant as a retro-active implementation. Future research funded by tax dollars would be impacted, not past research. So it seems to align just fine with what you're saying.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoWhich I agree is the appropriate way to move forward. However, I see a lot of retroactive bitterness about research when this was not the case. e.g. posters in this thread calling for journals and scientists to crushed like parasites, ect.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nonethewiser 3y agoI edited to clarify that important detail, thank you.
- legitster 3y agoThe research is funded by tax payers - is the peer review?
- lokar 3y agoThey don’t pay reviewers.
- red_admiral 3y agoThe EU has mandated open access already, at least for projects funded under the Horizon scheme as far as I am aware.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shkkmo 3y agoYou missed one of the key points: > Despite a petition signed by many ASA members, and a resolution from its own Committee on Publications “to express opposition to the decision by the ASA to sign the December 18, 2019 letter” — which the ASA leadership never even publicly acknowledged — ASA has not uttered a word to alter its anachronistic and unpopular position. This isn't a "centralized vs. open", it's "rent extracting journals vs. scientists"
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis isn’t even a good summary The whole crux of the argument is that this is research that is federally funded Whether or not a cartel is “rational” completely misses the point. It’s publicly funded research so it should be public data. Full stop no caveats or attempts to maintain the current system.
- zeroCalories 3y agoThere's no "full stop", that's entirely a negotiated between the researches and the state, as is happening here. You can strong arm researchers into accepting worse terms, but that just means you'll get less research done, unless funding is increased.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoAt what point do researchers benefit from the cartel? Never. Reviewers and paper judges don’t get paid. Arxiv and OR have done more for researchers than the scientific publishing cartel ever has The field of ML moves as quickly as it does because doing closed access ML separates you from the community
- shkkmo 3y ago> You can strong arm researchers into accepting worse terms, but that just means you'll get less research done, unless funding is increased. Many of the researchers are absolutely fine with this rule. It's only the top ASA leadership and the rent extracting journals that have a problem with no longer facilitating journal's rent extraction from publicly funded research.
- lupusreal 3y agoNever negotiate with a parasite. Rip it off and stomp on it.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI agree with Pol Pot here, eradicate the scientists!
- ejb999 3y ago"The author frames this as opposing open science" ...of course they do.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mandibles 3y agoPerhaps sociology researchers should find larger sources of private funding and rely less on state patronage.
- jhbadger 3y agoBasically the ASA (and ACS, and lots of other scientific societies) make money selling journal subscriptions and are against open access in general, because they see (to be fair, probably correctly) that not many institutions would subscribe to a journal if people could get the papers for free without a subscription. But obviously free access is better for science as a whole and will have to happen eventually. Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide.
- everforward 3y ago> Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide. Some of this depends on who you think the readership will be. Those scientific societies provide a sort of floor on the quality of what they publish, which allows non-experts like me to read the papers with some level of trust in the results. Or, a layer of indirection away, it gives science journalists a source of stuff to write about that's at least somewhat validated. I do worry a bit about what happens to science journalism, which is already generally of poor quality, when they start reading random junk on arXiv. Of course, there are alternatives where the papers could still be free. The government could fund the journals, arXiv could implement do their own peer review system with quality indicators. Probably more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.
- InSteady 3y agoBased on what you have written, it kind of sounds like you are conflating the peer review process with scientific societies. Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview? I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations. Which I would not really consider productive, especially in light of the abysmal state of reproducibility and the apparent lack of incentives to tighten things up.
- pdonis 3y ago> The author frames this as opposing open science That's because it is--more precisely, it's opposing open taxpayer-funded science. We the taxpayers already paid for the research once. Then we have to pay again to read the papers sooner than 12 months after publication?
- arthur2e5 3y agoThe delayed access "embargo" scheme is not that bad… if you are not chasing the latest stuff in the field. It works well enough for casual Wikipedia editing and junior researchers. I don’t deal with the ASA much, but I do use the PNAS a lot — their HTML paper layout isn’t bad and they do maintain a nice archive. The National Academy of Science deserves some money for good web work, I just don’t know whether it’s just for them to take it from the embargo. Also, how much marginal utility does "the public" gain when you reduce or remove an embargo?
- godelski 3y ago> I cant fault the ASA on one hand because this does fundamentally weaken them, ... But thats not currently the case, and the ASA exists, so it seems like they're acting rationally. But what is the utility that they provide? They are no longer needed for distribution. They have never been able to validate works (despite the public perception thinking that's what they do). Scale makes them unable to effectively weed out low quality work (process is always noisy, scale increases noise). As far as I can tell, they only provide a metric that can be used by governments and academic institutions to evaluate their employees, but this gets noisier and noiser by the year. It also incentivizes "novel work" but work that isn't too novel because highly novel methods are often not effective at first despite being worth exploration. They also discourage replication studies, which is the cornerstone of science, as well as surveys, opinion papers, and more. I really just do not see what they offer to us as researchers. They don't pay us to review. That time either comes from the academic institutions, gov money, or generally "free time". They don't pay area chairs, metareviewers, or others. They charge $30-$200 for a paper, on a shitty difficult to navigate website, where many open platforms like arxiv, openreview, and various *xiv host these works for free and are quite searchable with open APIs and many tools for easier navigation. So what do they do? Because it looks just like a system that is really good at extracting money from academia and governments.
- dimal 3y agoThis makes sense to me. I feel like we need a lot more creative destruction in American society. The ASA doesn’t want open science because it threatens their business model. So what. We have too many organizations that are basically do nothing more than try to perpetuate their own existence. They’re acting “rationally”, but only from the perspective of a parasite or a tumor.
- godelski 3y ago> The ASA doesn’t want open science because it threatens their business model. > So what. 100% this. There are far too many things we just do because. There are far too many things where we actively create "harm" by not changing. Where that harm is more by continuing than were we to change. Momentum is a hell of a drug and lobbyists only make this more problematic. You're right that they are rationally acting in their own interest. But we have to consider the difference between public interest and business interest. That's the whole fucking point of a government, is to protect public interests from individual interests. Where is our fucking social contract?
- boxed 3y agoScientific journals are a racket anyway. My dad used to explicitly violate the journals rules and put up his articles on his homepage for free. He reasoned, correctly, that they journals would never call his bluff, because that would threaten the entire corrupt system.
- slowmovintarget 3y agoPublicly funded science belongs to (drum roll...) the public.