5 ms·

With the exception of old and obscure papers (i.e., 15 years or more and not cited in the last 5 years), I don't really see what the big problem is. I have yet

by roel_v 14y ago

With the exception of old and obscure papers (i.e., 15 years or more and not cited in the last 5 years), I don't really see what the big problem is. I have yet to mail an author and not receive a pdf of the paper, usually within days, sometimes within minutes. When you have a reference and Google, you're seconds away from finding that author's current affiliation & email address. I once emailed the author of a book that retailed for 150$+ on some Elsevier subsidiary to ask for a few pages. Turns out the book was basically her PhD thesis (many, many books are like that) and she send me the pdf of that thesis a few hours after I emailed her. All this brouhaha over access to papers is a storm in a glass water if you ask me, instigated mostly by those who don't even need the papers but rather are looking for a big meany to pick an ideological fight with. Maybe it differs per field, I don't know.

stared 14y ago
Good luck with emailing authors of papers which are 70 years old. In mathematics good results never outdate, so there is no rule of thumb "if it is still relevant, author must be still alive".
- roel_v 14y ago
  But those perennial papers are usually so widely spread that a simple google search will bring them up, or otherwise somebody in the department will have a copy on their hard disk; so finding it is as simple as asking 'hey who has xyz' on the internal mailing list. Maybe it's different in mathematics, I don't know, I'm just stating my experiences. Few fields are as long-lasting as mathematics, too, I think; in most fields, only a hand full of papers is still relevant after 20 years.
  - stared 14y ago
    It isn't as simple, as a perennial paper in mathematics does not have to be even famous. It may have even not cites (yet). And I'm speaking of my experience (theoretical physics). Moreover, then you can hardly expect that one of a bunch of guys at your department has the paper. Sure, for applied (or even - experimental) sciences it is different.
    - roel_v 14y ago
      How would you know about a paper you don't have and doesn't have any cites and is 50 years old? How can a paper be perennial if it doesn't have any cites? A paper being perennial is, I'd argue, defined by getting cites on a regular basis even after many years. Who does theoretical physics / mathematics and doesn't have access to a university library? And don't say Ramanujan, people in those circumstances wouldn't have access to the internet, either.
      - wfn 14y ago
        I know of at least one person who is doing lots of science / scientific projects/experiments for themselves and does not have access via uni libraries etc. but needs to consult scientific literature (as in, academic papers) fairly often. (Granted, the case does not fall within the aforementioned 'theor.phys. / mathematics' field.) They use http://reddit.com/r/scholar http://reddit.com/r/scholar to ask for papers to be uploaded (it's a very nice and useful subreddit for those folk, I try to fill out some requests now and then). Of course, 'knowing one person' is anecdotal / talk about bad representative samples, but I can attest to the fact that those people exist. (I don't know the details why that person in question cannot register under a public library; public libraries may not have subscriptions to their journals of interest perhaps.) In any regard, there are cases where old theories / research were dug up by contemporary researchers who realized that those original models were useful for their modern research etc. [citation needed, could dig something up, but googling is probably more effective than asking in this case.]
        roel_v 14y ago
        But he probably does it because it's just easier than getting a subscription to a university library. Proving my point exactly - how hard is it really to get access to academic papers? Most authors can't even find people that want to read their stuff. This whole 'I can't access research' is really 'there is no website where the 0.1% of people who don't have main stream and side stream access to journals can download them from'. Hardly the big threat to society it is sometimes made out to be. Let me state again that I too would sometimes prefer one huge easily accessible database with all articles ever published, along with cites and H-factors and objective impact factor rankings and a bookmarking/personal library feature and maybe a pony too. Then again, the magnitude of that problem is miniscule compared to other problems I have I'd much rather see solved, or spend my time on. And my experience says most of the people in my work field feel the same.
  - sergiosgc 14y ago
    But, again, those that can ask on the mailing list, also have the university subscription to go through pay walls. People outside investigation groups are left outside the party. You are not making a convincing argument that papers are already "free enough". Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is...
    - roel_v 14y ago
      "Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is.." But seriously, how many people aren't? Yes yes there is always that one guy in his attic or log cabin... Most university libraries offer subscriptions to externals, too (mine does for less than 50 USD a year). So it's really only for people who are interested in academic materials, who are outside of any reach of a university (because really all you have to do is become member of a university library to get access to the electronic materials from the comfort of your own home). How many people fit that criterium? I'm arguing that overall, the problem is mostly in people's minds.
      - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
        I work in the private sector with no academic affiliations. I find I use various IEEE/scientific papers roughly once a month. Some companies are small, and won't pay for things like papers. Some companies are large and have crappy bureaucracies/"cost saving measures" for getting a $15 paper off the internet. I'm not saying I need it all to be free, because I do always end up with the paper I want, I'd just like to add an anecdote that it's not all academia. But you're mostly right, access is not too much of a problem.
      - kanzure 14y ago
        > Most university libraries offer subscriptions to externals, too (mine does for less than 50 USD a year). Can you show me one that does? You're saying as a non-institutionally affiliated individual, I can pay a university library $50/year and get access to papers? Please, which school offers this, or what search terms should I be using? please. times a googleplexamonium.
Toenex 14y ago
I think I'm right in saying that by emailing you a copy of the PDF, many authors are breaking their contract with the publisher. It's a few years since I published an academic paper but I've certain signed over my rights more times that I care to recall. So while you can get a copy of the paper from the author officially that is not allowed. Thankfully most academics are not dickheads about this. The key problem with journals is that much of what they do has been made obsolete over the last couple of decades by the move to electronic document distribution and the wonders of the WWW. Don't forget we are talking about private companies restricting the publication of academic research much of which has been funded out of the public coffers. Even the peer review is done, for free by academics. All that is left is the management of the process and distribution of the publications both of which I'd wager could be handled by the communities themselves as beautifully and repeatedly demonstrated by open source software projects. What the journals still retain is essentially kudos, but in a very real sense as academics are largely measured against their publication performance of which the 'currency' is the impact factor of the Journal. Academics need to publish in those Journals with a high impact factor so that their departments get a good rating and thus get more government funding (at least here in the UK). The key will be for a community lead Journal to attain a decent impact factor. Soon.
- roel_v 14y ago
  Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers. Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.
rmc 14y ago
Presuming you can speak English.
- roel_v 14y ago
  If you don't, how are you going to read a paper in English?
rayiner 14y ago
Indeed, most papers have an electronic copy available from the authors bio page, at least in CS.
Vivtek 14y ago
It certainly doesn't apply to anything medical.
nitrogen 14y ago
One reason to promote more open and universal access to academic materials is to allow journalists and interested laypeople to read the actual papers referenced in news articles and press releases, deciding for themselves whether the press release was accurate. The idea is that more exposure to how research actually works will improve general scientific literacy and put an end to the constant barrage of states wanting to outlaw the teaching of evolution or cosmology. Having a few academics e-mail an author to ask for a copy might be acceptable. Having thousands of educated laypeople constantly e-mailing authors simply doesn't scale. Another reason is to permit anyone and everyone to do wide-scale analytics, instead of having to rely on the analyses that big, well-connected entities decide to run.
ivan_ah 14y ago
Are you serious with your comment or trying to be provocative intentionally? Have you tried to do active research without access to a university journal subscription? I have to ssh into an on-campus box at least two three times per day to get a paper. I won't necessarily read the whole thing, but glancing at it certainly helps me see what it is about much more than a one paragraph summary. If I didn't have that I would be much less productive.

by roel_v 14y ago

stared 14y ago

Good luck with emailing authors of papers which are 70 years old. In mathematics good results never outdate, so there is no rule of thumb "if it is still relevant, author must be still alive".

roel_v 14y ago
But those perennial papers are usually so widely spread that a simple google search will bring them up, or otherwise somebody in the department will have a copy on their hard disk; so finding it is as simple as asking 'hey who has xyz' on the internal mailing list. Maybe it's different in mathematics, I don't know, I'm just stating my experiences. Few fields are as long-lasting as mathematics, too, I think; in most fields, only a hand full of papers is still relevant after 20 years.
- stared 14y ago
  It isn't as simple, as a perennial paper in mathematics does not have to be even famous. It may have even not cites (yet). And I'm speaking of my experience (theoretical physics). Moreover, then you can hardly expect that one of a bunch of guys at your department has the paper. Sure, for applied (or even - experimental) sciences it is different.
  - roel_v 14y ago
    How would you know about a paper you don't have and doesn't have any cites and is 50 years old? How can a paper be perennial if it doesn't have any cites? A paper being perennial is, I'd argue, defined by getting cites on a regular basis even after many years. Who does theoretical physics / mathematics and doesn't have access to a university library? And don't say Ramanujan, people in those circumstances wouldn't have access to the internet, either.
    - wfn 14y ago
      I know of at least one person who is doing lots of science / scientific projects/experiments for themselves and does not have access via uni libraries etc. but needs to consult scientific literature (as in, academic papers) fairly often. (Granted, the case does not fall within the aforementioned 'theor.phys. / mathematics' field.) They use http://reddit.com/r/scholar http://reddit.com/r/scholar to ask for papers to be uploaded (it's a very nice and useful subreddit for those folk, I try to fill out some requests now and then). Of course, 'knowing one person' is anecdotal / talk about bad representative samples, but I can attest to the fact that those people exist. (I don't know the details why that person in question cannot register under a public library; public libraries may not have subscriptions to their journals of interest perhaps.) In any regard, there are cases where old theories / research were dug up by contemporary researchers who realized that those original models were useful for their modern research etc. [citation needed, could dig something up, but googling is probably more effective than asking in this case.]
      - roel_v 14y ago
        But he probably does it because it's just easier than getting a subscription to a university library. Proving my point exactly - how hard is it really to get access to academic papers? Most authors can't even find people that want to read their stuff. This whole 'I can't access research' is really 'there is no website where the 0.1% of people who don't have main stream and side stream access to journals can download them from'. Hardly the big threat to society it is sometimes made out to be. Let me state again that I too would sometimes prefer one huge easily accessible database with all articles ever published, along with cites and H-factors and objective impact factor rankings and a bookmarking/personal library feature and maybe a pony too. Then again, the magnitude of that problem is miniscule compared to other problems I have I'd much rather see solved, or spend my time on. And my experience says most of the people in my work field feel the same.
- sergiosgc 14y ago
  But, again, those that can ask on the mailing list, also have the university subscription to go through pay walls. People outside investigation groups are left outside the party. You are not making a convincing argument that papers are already "free enough". Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is...
  - roel_v 14y ago
    "Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is.." But seriously, how many people aren't? Yes yes there is always that one guy in his attic or log cabin... Most university libraries offer subscriptions to externals, too (mine does for less than 50 USD a year). So it's really only for people who are interested in academic materials, who are outside of any reach of a university (because really all you have to do is become member of a university library to get access to the electronic materials from the comfort of your own home). How many people fit that criterium? I'm arguing that overall, the problem is mostly in people's minds.
    - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
      I work in the private sector with no academic affiliations. I find I use various IEEE/scientific papers roughly once a month. Some companies are small, and won't pay for things like papers. Some companies are large and have crappy bureaucracies/"cost saving measures" for getting a $15 paper off the internet. I'm not saying I need it all to be free, because I do always end up with the paper I want, I'd just like to add an anecdote that it's not all academia. But you're mostly right, access is not too much of a problem.
    - kanzure 14y ago
      > Most university libraries offer subscriptions to externals, too (mine does for less than 50 USD a year). Can you show me one that does? You're saying as a non-institutionally affiliated individual, I can pay a university library $50/year and get access to papers? Please, which school offers this, or what search terms should I be using? please. times a googleplexamonium.

Toenex 14y ago

I think I'm right in saying that by emailing you a copy of the PDF, many authors are breaking their contract with the publisher. It's a few years since I published an academic paper but I've certain signed over my rights more times that I care to recall. So while you can get a copy of the paper from the author officially that is not allowed. Thankfully most academics are not dickheads about this. The key problem with journals is that much of what they do has been made obsolete over the last couple of decades by the move to electronic document distribution and the wonders of the WWW. Don't forget we are talking about private companies restricting the publication of academic research much of which has been funded out of the public coffers. Even the peer review is done, for free by academics. All that is left is the management of the process and distribution of the publications both of which I'd wager could be handled by the communities themselves as beautifully and repeatedly demonstrated by open source software projects. What the journals still retain is essentially kudos, but in a very real sense as academics are largely measured against their publication performance of which the 'currency' is the impact factor of the Journal. Academics need to publish in those Journals with a high impact factor so that their departments get a good rating and thus get more government funding (at least here in the UK). The key will be for a community lead Journal to attain a decent impact factor. Soon.

roel_v 14y ago
Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers. Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.

rmc 14y ago

Presuming you can speak English.

roel_v 14y ago
If you don't, how are you going to read a paper in English?

rayiner 14y ago

Indeed, most papers have an electronic copy available from the authors bio page, at least in CS.

Vivtek 14y ago

It certainly doesn't apply to anything medical.

nitrogen 14y ago

One reason to promote more open and universal access to academic materials is to allow journalists and interested laypeople to read the actual papers referenced in news articles and press releases, deciding for themselves whether the press release was accurate. The idea is that more exposure to how research actually works will improve general scientific literacy and put an end to the constant barrage of states wanting to outlaw the teaching of evolution or cosmology. Having a few academics e-mail an author to ask for a copy might be acceptable. Having thousands of educated laypeople constantly e-mailing authors simply doesn't scale. Another reason is to permit anyone and everyone to do wide-scale analytics, instead of having to rely on the analyses that big, well-connected entities decide to run.

ivan_ah 14y ago

Are you serious with your comment or trying to be provocative intentionally? Have you tried to do active research without access to a university journal subscription? I have to ssh into an on-campus box at least two three times per day to get a paper. I won't necessarily read the whole thing, but glancing at it certainly helps me see what it is about much more than a one paragraph summary. If I didn't have that I would be much less productive.