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Japan's push to make all research open access
- jalapenos 2y agoCan someone explain to me like I'm five, what this "publishing" actually means now in an age where any researcher can upload a PDF containing their research onto the internet for free? Are they say more like "curators"?
- worthless-trash 2y agoThis could be the start of something beautiful.
- koolala 2y agoInternet Noodles of Babel! Let's have every corporation do this too! We can solve every problem that matters by working together like this, the rest is just corpo-gaming.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoAbsolutely! I think the concept of proprietary knowledge for profit was actually a huge mistake, and that humanity can advance much faster and more effectively through open collaboration. This applies to patents too (and arguably copyright).
- jrhey 2y agoThere is no advancement without profit. Advances are a product of market competition. When no company can profit from investing in R&D, there will be no R&D.
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoAmazing that your comment consisted of three sentences, each of which is incorrect. I could say more, but the simplest refutation of what you are saying is that open source exists. It is advancement without profit, it is advances without market competition, and it is an investment people make without expecting profitable returns. It’s not that those things aren’t important in a functional economy, but that your absolute thinking cannot explain open source, and thus your theory is incomplete to explain human activity.
- jrhey 2y agoIt depends how long you’re willing to wait for those advances in open source. For a fair comparison of “advancement” in open source you have to discuss free open source applications where a commercial version of a similar app exists. Photoshop vs Gimp, Illustrator vs Inkscape, Microsoft office vs libre etc etc. objectively speaking the commercial version is going to be better across the board. Open source variants are getting closer these days like Blender and Godot but you’re on a different scale of waiting for those advances to catch up vs the commercial for profit versions.
- __loam 2y agoWhat a sad view of things.
- koolala 2y agoHi, I feel more advanced getting to talk with you so I am grateful for that, didn't cost us anything :)
- anigbrowl 2y agoPfffffft
- immibis 2y agoThe government invented the internet.
- jrhey 2y agoSome life saving pharmaceuticals, automobiles tech, general consumer communications and entertainment tech, all come from capitalists trying to be the first to market to profit. The sheer amount of technological leaps our generation alone has seen was all pretty much for profit. You wouldn’t observe the same rate if it was all purely driven by governments.
- waihtis 2y agowith money that came from ......?
- CatWChainsaw 2y agoDARPA? Which is government??
- immibis 2y agoNonsensical question. You invent things with brainpower, not money.
- waihtis 2y agoTry going without food for a month and see how many novel inventions you can make. See, even thoughts require participation in the capital markets.
- klysm 2y agoThis would be amazing to see in the US. Unfortunately I feel like lobbying is too powerful with the death grip publishers have. If you were to do a popular vote, it would be nearly unanimous I expect.
- karaterobot 2y ago> The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
- pkaye 2y agoIf you read the article it mentions that US implemented an OA mandate in 2022. > The plan follows in the footsteps of the influential Plan S, introduced six years ago by a group of research funders in the United States and Europe known as cOAlition S, to accelerate the move to OA publishing. The United States also implemented an OA mandate in 2022 that requires all research funded by US taxpayers to be freely available from 2026.
- jfkfif 2y agoDOE already mandates this
- karaterobot 2y ago> it also said that it would invest 10 billion yen (around US$63 million) to standardize institutional repositories — websites dedicated to hosting scientific papers, their underlying data and other materials — ensuring that there will be a mechanism for making research in Japan open. The important part isn't necessarily the papers, it's getting access to the data. I'll note that the hurdle for open access is not a lack of support from funders or from the government, it's from researchers. Researchers want everybody's else's data, but they don't want to give their data to anybody else, because they want to be the ones to publish on it. It's IP. It can take years to get access to a dataset, because the owners throw every obstacle in your way, and drag their feet as much as possible—it makes cancelling a gym membership look easy. And I am speaking about projects where open access is written into the funding as a requirement. My point is that I'd be interested to know what data governance processes they're putting in place if all the data is being consolidated into a single system, as the article says it is.
- Staple_Diet 2y agoI recall a paper that sought to explore how willing authors were to release data when they had published open access and stated 'data available on request'. Iirc it was below 50% that responded with data. See related here; https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/ https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jbu9r/ That being said, there are also issues with opening the gates to anyone to get your data and use it to publish; https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02721-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... My data is OA, but I'd appreciate any one wanting to use to first reach out and discuss any nuances that may influence their analysis.
- FredPret 2y agoThere should be some academic reward for just gathering quality data
- tkgally 2y agoLast year, my employer, the University of Tokyo, became the first Japanese university to sign the Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) [1]. Like open access, that initiative is a positive move toward a better research environment, and it would be great if more institutions committed to it. [1] https://sfdora.org/ https://sfdora.org/
- parag0n 2y agoNot to be confused with DORA for financial institutions [1]. https://www.eiopa.europa.eu/digital-operational-resilience-act-dora_en https://www.eiopa.europa.eu/digital-operational-resilience-a...
- staunton 2y agoDid this change anything about how research is conducted?
- tkgally 2y agoGood question. It's probably too early to tell. By signing DORA, the university leadership has stated support for a principle about how hiring and promotion decisions should be made. But it may take a few years before that principle is fully absorbed by the faculty committees who actually evaluate candidates.
- lieblingautor 2y agoSounds great, hope it will inspire its neighboring countries to take a similar initiative.
- swader999 2y agoImagine if this was so advantageous that a large portion of the rest of the world got pulled into it. Interesting times.
- a_bonobo 2y agoAustralia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting). I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences. It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data. And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable. it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems. We've had this system for years now and it feels like it barely made a blip. >Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities. One should note that this isn't too expensive because of associated costs: it's that the for-profit publishers keep ratcheting up the cost. Nature-group journals now take more than ten grand in OA fees per paper, which is not justified by any associated cost. They're typesetting a PDF and hosting it for ten grand a PDF.
- kergonath 2y ago> Australia already has a similar system: if the research is funded by a national funder, then the pre-publisher version has to be deposited at the institute's research repository (basically the Word/PDF file you sent to the publisher, before they add their copyrighted formatting). It’s more or less the same in the UK and France as well. > I'd judge the success so/so: it's barely enforced, librarians will remind you if you didn't upload one paper, but it's not like there's any consequences. IIRC in the UK it does not count in the national performance assessment it if is not in an open repository. > It's also about the text of the paper, not about the associated data. Yeah. Data is a big problem. There are many different types that cannot be handled just like a pdf (tons of files in the same dataset, huge archives and everything in between). It’s a huge lot of storage space, the vast majority of which will never be even accessed, never mind used. I’ve been part of several initiatives and it is not easy to set up. > And these repositories are generally built by for-profit providers and aren't exactly open: I know for a fact that my Google Scholar profile does not link to the institute's repository, papers in there are barely findable. That’s a damn shame. The British government is doing a lot of things right with their open access policy, but a thing that works quite well in France is that there is a single national repository ( https://hal.science https://hal.science : it voild be better indexed but it does show up on Google Scholar) and everyone uses it. This is the sort of things that makes sense at the national level. A myriad of small repositories on obscure university websites is not very helpful. That way it also does not depend on the (possible lack of) willingness of individual institutions to fund it and do it properly. > it also doesn't change how researchers are evaluated, so the eternal rat-race to get into Nature/Science etc. continues, with all the associated problems. If we’re really serious about open access, only articles in a public repository should count. All the legal issues there used to be were cleared up, the infrastructure is there (things like arxiv can be used as a last resort for governments or institutions that won’t get their ducks in a row). The issue is really lack of good will.
- gigatexal 2y agoI support this 100%. All publicly funded research even in the least bit should be public. Shwartz would be proud.
- surfingdino 2y agoPlaying the Devil's advocate for a sec, I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in perpetuity? And to answer my own question, I think we should demand that scientific papers are made available for free by publicly-funded scientific libraries.
- gigatexal 2y agoThe library of Congress could host it. Hell I’d ask for my taxes to be raised if needed to host these publications for everyone.
- jfkfif 2y agoosti.gov
- whimsicalism 2y ago> I'd ask the public if it is prepared to fund hosting on those publications in perpetuity are we pretending pdf hosting is actually costly or what? the devil should hire better advocates
- gumbojuice 2y agoI could imagine a problem here in India, where there is no funding for publishing papers, especially for graduate students.
- thisisjaymehta 2y agoExactly, but government is doing its best to boost R&D, what matters more is private funding for R&D. Big companies like Reliance, TATA and Adani should setup research labs in universities and colleges.
- 2Gkashmiri 2y agowhat do you mean?
- low_tech_love 2y agoThe term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive. If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too. [1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of-academic-publishing-in-3-graphs-5-trends-and-4-thoughts/ https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of...
- WarOnPrivacy 2y agoHeadline: Japan's push to make all research open access > The term "open access" is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed "pay to publish". [1] [1] Seems to be about how OA is done in countries that aren't Japan.
- tmalsburg2 2y agoJapan's initiative is focused on "green open access" which is different from pay-to-publish. I recommend the section titled "Green OA" in the submitted article. Relevant quote: "Japan’s move to greater access to its research is focusing on 'green OA' — in which authors make the author-accepted, but unfinalized, versions of papers available in the digital repositories, says Seiichi. Seiichi says that gold OA — in which the final copyedited and polished version of a paper is made freely available on the journal site — is not feasible on a wide scale. That’s because the cost to make every paper free to read would be too high for universities."
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- tmalsburg2 2y agoSmart, because why would you use billions in tax money to fund research then let publisher parasites take the results hostage.
- rondrabkin 2y agoSo many problems with the existing process but questions could include -is anyone going to take down bad quality or fake research -is there a way to update published papers (like link rot in references ) -will the repositories be SEO optimized so people will find them
- amadeuspagel 2y agoWhy can't academics just publish their stuff on a blog like everyone else?
- rscho 2y agoBecause: poor graduate students would contemplate suicide for having to gather hundreds of papers from just as many obscure blogs.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoif authors all just uploaded a copy of their final PDF to sci-hub this would solve the problem
- ufo 2y agoPapers should be immutable, blogs bit rot, and anonymous peer review is important. The million dollar question is why don't researchers publish on journals that don't charge outrageous open-access fees. Here the main problemis that carreer advancement is predicated on publishing in prestigious venues. Such venues take advantage of that by jacking their price. Fixing this will require cooperation from governments, which have leverage on both sides of the equation: they can help fund alternative paper repositories, and they are ultimately responsible for the rating criteria of what venues are prestigious and how research grants get awarded.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoNice change! I expect people to still use sci-hub, or something like it, to access these for UX reasons.
- EchoReflection 2y ago"Japan plans to make all publicly funded research available to read in institutional repositories. " Oh, are you not a student or teacher or employee here at the University of XYZ? I'm sorry, this research is not 'freely' available to you.